Eulogizing the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, Richard Silverstein points out that Darwish was born in Palestine in 1941, spent his early life chiefly in Israel:
Darwish was born in the upper Galilee village of Birweh in 1941. In
1948, Israel occupied (and eventually razed) his village and his former
landowning family was forced to flee to Lebanon. It was the first of
many such exiles for this poet of dislocation and uprootedness. His
family eventually returned to Israel and settled once again in a
village near Acre called Deir al-Asad. After graduating from high
school, he moved to Haifa.
Darwish then became involved in political activities, was imprisoned, and later moved to Egypt.
One of the supreme ironies of Darwish’s career is that he should be considered a product of Israel, since he was born and raised there. Were Israel a country of all its
citizens, Darwish would be a national poet not only of the
Palestinians, but of Israelis as well. When Yossi Sarid suggested the
poet’s work be included in the national education curriculum, prime
minister Barak said it was “too soon.” This exemplifies how far Israel
has to go before it encompasses all its ethnic communities.
Related posts:
- Avnery: Darwish Didn’t Want to be a National Poet, But His People Needed That of Him
- ‘Here Lie a Murderer and the Murdered, Sleeping in One Hole’ (Mahmoud Darwish, Remembered by Two Arabic-Speakers)
- Mahmoud Darwish: ‘The invader fears his memories…’
- Celebration of Darwish at Harvard
- Two ‘Times’ Employees ‘Loved and Cared Deeply About’ Darwish’s Work. Neither Was Assigned His Obit
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One phrase in your post that suprised me was the Darwish's family returned to Israel.
Is that accurate?
Richard,
It is true. Many Palestinian refugees from 1948 tried to return home after their ethnic cleansing. Any that were spotted by Zionist militias were killed, imprisoned, or re-ethnically cleansed. Some managed to get away and successfully "Escaped home".
If Darwish had been publicly presented as an Israeli poet, would you have found that pleasing, or disrespectful?
In 2001, Darwish received the Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. It is a pity that he now has no opportunity to win the Nobel Prize he deserved.
Last year, he returned to Israel for what turned out to be the last time and gave a reading of his poetry. AFP describes the event:
In July 2007, Darwish decried the Islamist Hamas movement’s bloody takeover of the Gaza Strip a month earlier in his first poetry recital in Israel since quitting the Jewish state in 1970.
“We woke up from a coma to see a monocolored flag (of Hamas) do away with the four-color flag (of Palestine),” Darwish said before some 2,000 people who attended the reading in the northern port city of Haifa.
“We have triumphed,” he said with thick irony. “Gaza won its independence from the West Bank. One people now have two states, two prisons who don’t greet each other. We are victims dressed in executioners’ clothing.”
“We have triumphed knowing that it is the occupier who really won.”
On the day you kill me
you'll find in my pocket
travel tickets
to peace,
to the fields and the rain,
to people's conscience.
Don't waste the tickets.
by Samih al-Qasim
In point of fact until 1971 Darwish was an Israeli "citizen." While studying abroad the Israeli authorities revoked his citizenship.
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