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'He is the son of all of you'
Mahmoud Darwish, who died a week ago today, was one of the great Arab poets of modern times, writes Mourid Barghouti. Here he remembers his friend and fellow poet at his graveside in Ramallah. Included is an excerpt from a previously unpublished poem written shortly before his deathA hot midday on a hillside overlooking Ramallah, a blue sky with some bashful, short-lived clouds and Palestinian flags everywhere, side by side with his photo - and the voice of Mahmoud Darwish reciting his own poetry came pure and powerful through the huge loudspeakers and covered the whole landscape. In the middle of the courtyard of Ramallah's Cultural Palace, where he'd given his last poetry reading a few weeks ago (at which he read "The Dice Player"), the empty grave was waiting for the body of the poet. The roads up the hill carried wave after wave of people of all ages and affiliations, all trying hard to get as close as possible to the grave to say goodbye to their poet. As the coffin was lowered into the ground, a small regiment of Palestinian security officers had to restrain a crowd struggling to look at the grave, and another fired 21 shots in salute. We circled around the grave, and I found myself next to his mother, Houria, aged 92 - who was brought from Galilee in an ambulance and brought on a wheelchair to have a last glance at her boy, whose most famous line is "I yearn for my mother's bread and my mother's coffee" - and his two brothers, Ahmad and Zaki. I saw his sisters only after the ceremony was over. The family was almost apologetic for their presence among those thousands of mourners; his mother, in her feeble, broken voice, said: "He is the son of all of you." This was the first time I had seen his mother. She does not travel, and I am not allowed to go to Galilee. Earlier in the day, just before 10am, Darwish's body arrived on a flight from the United States in Amman, Jordan. After a short ceremony the casket was loaded on to a Jordanian military helicopter, which flew to Ramallah, landing at noon. Far from Ramallah, a procession left the Ahihud junction, east of Acre, heading towards the former village of Al-Birweh, where Darwish was born. A symbolic funeral was held there, as youths recited Darwish's poems. What an embarrassment to those who accuse the Palestinians of all sorts of evil. Now you have thousands and thousands of Palestinians with poems and roses in their hands, going out to honour a poet whose lines are full of butterflies, doves, bees, ancient mythology and biblical allusions. They are out for beautiful verse, and that's it. This is praise for them and also for their poet, who proved to them only through his aesthetic experiments the value of art and its charms. Those are the same people who filled halls and theatres and auditoriums to listen to him. Many more people like them in most of the Arab countries were no less enthusiastic. In 2002, an audience of 25,000 Lebanese and Palestinians living in the refugee camps of Lebanon filled a football stadium in Beirut to listen for three hours to his fascinating words. Occupation and dictatorship do everything possible to suppress their victims' desire for any kind of self-expression. But the victims do express themselves: they do it politically, through acts of resistance, and culturally, through songs, folk dances, handicrafts, memoirs and poems. By self-expression they achieve self-assertion, and this makes them stronger and guards them against self-pity and sentimentality. This explains the precious unwritten contract between Palestinian and Arab writers, as masters of expression, and their audience. Darwish gave them this without sacrificing his self-imposed aesthetic ambitions and rules. I think it is safe to say that this is what distinguished him among Arab poets. But Darwish did not come out of nowhere, and his absence will not be the end of excellent Palestinian poetry. This land needs its poets and will always have them. Long ago Darwish had walked out of professional politics, out of his literary quarterly Al Karmil, out of two very brief, almost unpublicised, childless marriages. From August 9 2008, Mahmoud, as we used to call him, will live among us as pure poetry, exactly as he'd always wished. I phoned him from Cairo just before what turned out to be his final trip, and he told me he knew the risks of failed surgery in his case: paralysis or death. "I can accept death," he said. Now his famous shyness will not prevent him from accepting our invitation to stay with us a bit longer; he will walk freely in our reading hours and our bedrooms. The story of the Palestinian people since their nakba is a story of unfulfilled desires: the desire for normal life, for justice, for national independence and freedom, but even Mahmoud had to come to this cheerless conclusion: "I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanise, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe. But now I think that poetry changes only the poet." This time he was wrong. This man's poetry has changed the language of Arabic writing and shifted readers' conceptions of resistance poetry. The drums receded to give way to the harp and the flute. Single-coloured khaki poems full of slogans gave way to rainbow-intertwined shades. Even the physical image of the victimised and the oppressed had to give way to Mahmoud's unmatched elegance in dress and in daily conversation alike. As a poet, he had that overwhelming presence of an elderly figure, while as a person he was like the beloved youngest son in the family, a polite and vulnerable grandson, for whom you are tempted to do anything to protect him from harm. In this world of polluted international political language, where the word "freedom" is abused in every manner, referring to everything from capitalism to the occupation of Iraq, Mahmoud's poetry and life were an attempt to give it back its meaning. This was his destiny because he was a poet, and also because he was an Arab and a Palestinian. Born in Al-Birweh, a Palestinian village in northern Galilee that was completely destroyed by the Zionist militias that built the state of Israel in 1948, he fled the country with his family, only to return in secret to live in an adjacent Arab village that had escaped destruction. Like those Arab Palestinians who stayed in the state of Israel, he lived under military rule, confiscation of lands and constraints on movement until 1966. He therefore joined the only non-Zionist political party in Israel, the Israeli Communist party. For many Arabs, their class and national identities were congruent; they were poor and oppressed, because they were Arabs. Belonging to a political party, however, brings its own constraints. The choice offered to Mahmoud, like that historically offered to many of his people, is a choice between shackles and shackles: a choice between the shackles of occupation and the shackles of resisting it. In the early 1970s he decided to leave. He went to Egypt and then to Lebanon. In a press conference in Cairo, he said: "I changed my place, but not my position." He left Palestine, to join the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Here is another paradox that Mahmoud shares with his people: in the Arab world, Palestinians are in exile, but they are not strangers. Mahmoud's life in Egypt, and later in Lebanon, was not a disconnection from Palestine - rather, it made him more of a pan-Arab poet, which in turn made him more of a Palestinian one. Mahmoud was at the centre of Arab culture in the 20th century because he was a poet, and a Palestinian. Poetry lies at the centre of all Arab arts, and Palestine at the centre of Arab collective consciousness. A poem about Palestine was therefore a poem to all Arabs. Among the many arts that the Arabs have produced without interruption over 15 centuries of their history, poetry is still the most celebrated. Arab cultural identity revolves around language. The eloquence of the Qur'an was the proof of its divinity. The beauty of a line of poetry turned it into a proverb with all the moral authority of law or tradition. The role of poetry in creating collective identity among Arabs is well known. It is no coincidence that the prophet of the Arabs was called by some a poet, and that three centuries later Al-Mutanabbi, the greatest poet in medieval Arab history, called himself a prophet. Among the Palestinians this passion for poetry is heightened, because their collective identity is negated by their enemies and the rulers of the world. Poetry becomes a means of collective self-expression and hence of collective self-assertion. As such, it is safe to say that Mahmoud's poetry was never dissociated from Palestine and the Palestinian struggle for freedom. However, being an Arab Palestinian poet made him a spokesman for the Palestinian and Arab struggles for freedom, and that in itself was a heavier constraint on his freedom of writing and style. Mahmoud's later poetry was a continuous attempt to break free from the shackle-like crown bestowed on him by his people. Nonetheless, in his writing, these intentional attempts to make the struggle absent only made it all the more present, for one cannot intend to forget without remembering the very thing that one wants to forget. The paradoxical tension between freedom and its shackles was reflected in Mahmoud's relations with his friends, foes and political authority. He was close to the Palestinian leadership, whether in the phase of the PLO or the Palestinian Authority after Oslo. Nonetheless, he maintained a distance. Palestine had chosen his comrades for him, and he did not always like the choice. He once told me that, were it not for "the struggle", "I would not have returned a good morning to many of those who now say they are my friends". Like a kind of scientist, Mahmoud spent his life concocting Palestinian national identity, though its links to the land, and to the Arabic language and culture, were established long before him. In his poetry he tried to link that identity to a humanist global culture, to pre-Arab and pre-Islamic cultures of the Middle East, and to those details of human life that are beautiful in any culture or place. In doing so, he was not only asserting the humanity of the Palestinians, so often denied by Zionist discourse, but he was also humanising humanism to his people. To them and to Arabs, humanism was the discourse of a colonial invader who spoke about freedom and human rights, but gave them the state of Israel and military occupation and the prison at Abu Ghraib. In his poetry Mahmoud was trying to strengthen the ever-thinning thread between the Arabs and western culture, of which they have had very bad experiences. Already entrenched in his Arab culture and language, he started visiting other traditions in writing, style and content. It was certainly a sad moment on the hillside overlooking the city of Ramallah, just 16km from the prohibited Jerusalem, suffocated by the apartheid wall and military checkpoints. It was even a tragic moment for Mahmoud Darwish to die, leaving his people in this unprecedented vulnerability caused by the mistakes of their political leadership and the bloody and absurd fratricidal divisions that have emerged between the leading Palestinian factions over an illusory and ridiculous power. The nationwide grief for the loss of Mahmoud is partly a grass-roots protest against those worthless politicians on both sides of the divide. Darwish's complex legacy cannot be understood without reference to the political role he played, or was persuaded to play, however short or interrupted that was, but it would always be wise to place it in the context of the wider Palestinian question, which only becomes more complicated as time goes by, instead of reaching a just solution. On the hillside overlooking Ramallah, the Palestinian leadership intended to stage a funeral for a member of the PLO, while the people, who came out in their thousands with lines of his poems in their hands and on their shirts, and who were continuing a line of verse before he'd finished reading it, made it a poet's funeral. Mahmoud Darwish had once been a member of the PLO executive committee, but he resigned a very long time ago, and he finally emerged as one of the great Arab poets of modern times. The PLO wanted to celebrate his past. People celebrated his future. They were sure, and I am sure, that a real poet is one who never takes his future with him when he is laid to rest.
from The Dice Player
. . . When the sky
appears ashen
And at the entrance of
night I say
I don't say: Life over
there is real
And by chance the
field's slope in a land became
And by chance, some
narrators survived and said:
O land "I love you
green", green. An apple
and this poem has more
than one poet
Who am I to say to you
The plane could have
crashed
I could have not seen
Damascus or Cairo
And had I been a slow
walker
And had I been a fast
walker
And had I been an
excessive dreamer
It's my good fortune
that I sleep alone
Who am I to disappoint
the void · Translation © Fady Joudah guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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