Poets and the Exile

Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine’s Poet of Exile

Nathalie Handal

“Absent, I come to the home of the absent,” the leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, writes. No other poet captures the Palestinian consciousness and collective memory the way he does. At sixty-one, whether he is giving a reading in Paris or Palestine, he draws crowds of thousands, from government officials to schoolteachers, taxi drivers to students.

Darwish has published twenty books of poetry, five books of prose, and his books have been translated into more than twenty-two languages. He has won numerous awards, including the Lotus Prize (1969); the Lenin Peace Prize (1983); France’s highest medal, the Knight of Arts and Letters (1993); and this April he will be honored with the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural freedom

The Progressive - May 2002

on he rejects. “I do not like the label; it is a burden,” he says to me.

In 1981, he founded and became editor of the pioneering literary journal Al Karmel. But the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon led the poet on yet another migration, this time to Tunis and Cairo, and he eventually settled in Paris. In 1993, he resigned from the P.L.O. Executive Committee and protested the Oslo accord, saying that he wanted peace but a fair one. Darwish says that real peace means being equal with the Israeli society, and that the Palestinian people should have the right to return, that the question of the refugees, of Jerusalem, of the settlements should be resolved, and of course, Palestinians must have the right to self-determination. 

After thirteen years in Paris, Darwish immigrated to Jordan in 1995, and in 1996 started living between Amman and Ramallah, where he continues to edit Al Karmel. During a brief visit in 1995 to Galilee and Jerusalem (Israel granted him permission to return for the funeral of his friend the writer Emile Habibi, and an unlimited stay in Palestinian self-rule areas of the West Bank), he said that he “felt like a child.” Thousands waited for him, welcomed him, told him he was loved, and asked him to stay. He was deeply moved, cried, and said he would never leave. But he was not given permission to stay in his hometown for more than a few days. He still longs to go home, “although I might realize that the harshest exile is in my homeland,” he says. Thus, Darwish remains a stranger passing through. 

When he lived in Israel, the government harassed him and several times put him in prison or placed him under house arrest for reading his poetry.

In 1988, one of his poems, “Passing Between the Passing Words,” was even discussed in the Knesset. He wrote:

So leave our land
Our shore, our sea
Our wheat, our salt, our wound.

Israelis claimed he was demanding that the Jews leave Israel. Darwish disputed that, saying he meant they should leave the West Bank and Gaza.

Yossi Sarid, who was Israel’s education minister, suggested in March 2000 that some of Darwish’s poems should be included in the Israeli high school curriculum. But Prime Minister Ehud Barak declared, “Israel is not ready.”

Darwish insists that terror is not a means to justice. “Nothing, nothing justifies terrorism,” he wrote, condemning the September 11 attack on the United States in the Palestinian daily Al Ayyam. Concerning the current situation, he tells me: “We should not justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombers, but we must understand what drives these young people to such actions. They want to liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is despair.”

I ask him how he sees the future. The Israelis cannot “give us back our house but live in our garden, in our living room,” he says, his voice rising. I ask whether a Palestinian state will exist. In a firm voice he tells me, “A Palestinian state already exists.” He adds, “The Palestinian people feel that they are living the hours before dawn. Their national will is stronger in reaction to the challenge. They do not have another option but to continue to carry the hope that they are going to have a normal life.”

He says there is a simple solution that only seems complicated and that the two sides can resolve the questions of the borders and all the other issues under negotiation. He repeats a number of times, “There is hope.” 

After a lifetime of longing, perhaps Darwish is too optimistic, too wishful. A few days after our conversation, Israel sends tanks into Ramallah. I call Darwish back, finding him this time in Amman, Jordan. His voice, far and fading, tells me that it is all “so barbaric, so cynical.”

But I get the impression that he still feels there is a place to go “after the last frontiers . . . after the last sky.”

It can be the language of the sky when we remember the humain s silent sounds!

Mary
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Nathalie Handal is a poet and writer living in New York and London. She is the author of a poetry book, “The Neverfield” (Post Apollo Press, 1999), and is the editor of an anthology called “The Poetry of Arab Women” (Interlink 2001).