Remembering Mahmud Darwish (19412008)

Author(s): Rashid Khalidi

Reviewed work(s):
Source: Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Autumn 2008), pp. 74-77
Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the Institute for Palestine Studies
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REMEMBERING MAHMUD DARWISH
(19412008)
RASHID KHALIDI
AN AURA OF INFINITE SADNESS seemed to attach to Mahmud Darwish over the nearly
four decades I knew him. In spite of his rapier wit, jovial affect, and sociable
nature, he always carried himself with a reserve that seemed to bespeak an
inner sorrow, as if he perceived wrenching tragedies deeper than the rest of
us could fathom. His poetry, especially when he recited it, conveyed the same
sense of seeing the entire course of the inexorable fate of his people, even as
his words gave voice to the indomitable spirit of ordinary Palestinians. This
deep wisdom was not derived from his close brushes with death at the time
of his two previous heart operations, in 1984 and 1998; the same knowing,
worldly awareness of human mortality and frailty was there much earlier, even
in the deant, engaged poems he recited to rapturous crowds when he rst
achieved fame and renown throughout the Arab world in the 1970s and early
1980s. But Darwish knew that death pursued him, and often wrote about it
in his poetry. In the last poem he ever recited publicly, at Arles in July 2008,
A Prepared Scenario, he described how he and his enemy were trapped in
a hole, and matter-of-factly concluded, It is up to another poet to follow this
scenario to its end.

Mahmud Darwish was one of the nest poets of his entire generation
in Palestine certainly, possibly in the Arab world, and perhaps even beyond.
In part this was because he incarnated in his personal itinerary all the many
dimensions of the Palestinian experience, to which he gave such eloquent
voice. Born in Mandate Palestine, Darwish experienced expulsion, ight, and
the loss of his home as a small child. He grew up in Galilee as an internal
refugee living in a village next door to his destroyed natal village of al-Birwa,
under the harshmilitary rule imposedfor nearly twodecades onthe Palestinians
inside Israel. His education included a spell in an Israeli prisonthat training
ground of Palestinian militants and intellectualswhere he wrote one of his
most famous poems, Sajjil ana arabi (Record! I Am an Arab; published in
English under the title Identity Card). He then experienced exile, notably for
over ten years in Beirut when the PLO was located there.
RASHID KHALIDI is the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.

Senario jahiz, al-Quds al-Arabi, 22 July 2008.

Journal of Palestine Studies Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1 (Autumn 2008), pp. 7477 ISSN: 0377-919X; electronic ISSN: 1533-8614.
C
2008 by the Institute for Palestine Studies. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission
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Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: jps.2008.XXXVIII.1.74.
REMEMBERING MAHMUD DARWISH 75
Darwish was perhaps the most important single gure during the seminal
period of the reconstruction of the Palestinian national imagination, contribut-
ing not only with his poetry but also by editing the PLO Research Centers
review, Shuun Filastiniyya (Palestinian Affairs). With the expulsion of the
PLO from Beirut in 1982, Darwish went into an even more extended exile. He
eventually was allowed by Israel to reside in Ramallah, where he experienced
both occupation and ambivalence about the governance of the Palestinian Au-
thority, whose creation drove him permanently to eschew direct involvement
in politics. Darwish resigned from the PLO Executive Committee in 1993.
Never truly at home anywherewhether in Beirut before 1982, or in Ra-
mallah, Amman, or Paris after thatand never bound by material or personal
ties, Darwish led a peripatetic existence until death nally found him in, of all
places, Houston, Texas, where his overburdened heart nally gave out after a
third major heart operation. In this unexpected end, in this incongruous place,
Darwish further incarnated the peculiar and surreal ongoing odyssey of the
Palestinian people.
While unique in many respects, Mahmud Darwish was only one of sev-
eral major intellectual and cultural leaders fromthe insidePalestinians who
grew up in the Arab communities incorporated against their will into Israel
in 1948who connected with their countrymen and women of the diaspora
to forge a new mode of Palestinian identity within the framework of the PLO
at a crucial period in Palestinian cultural and intellectual life. These included
gures like Sabri Jiryis, Elias Shoufani, and Habib Qahwaji, who wrote, built
institutions, served in politics, and brought a unique perspective drawn from
their intimate personal experience of Israeli society to intellectual circles in
the Palestinian diaspora and the larger Arab world. Others who remained in-
side Israel, like Emile Habibi, Tawq Zayyad, and Samih al-Qasim, played an
analogous role.
Despite similarities with others who had grown up under Israeli rule, Dar-
wish held a unique place on the cultural and political levels. Because he was
not only a respected intellectual but also a major cultural and artistic gure,
Darwish retained the universal admiration of ordinary Palestinians, who related
to his simple, unadorned style. He was loved and revered for his poetry, which
touched a profound chord in the hearts of people in Palestine and much farther
aeld. Many of his poems were set to music by Marcel Khalife and others. At
the same time, by virtue of his intelligence, his eloquence, and the vast popular
audience he commanded, Mahmud Darwish was able to speak directly and as
an equal to the Palestinian political leadership (not that they always had the
good sense to listen to him, or to others from outside their ranks who tried to
reason with them).
This unique situation explains Darwishs central role, together with Edward
Said and several others, in the drafting of the Palestinian Declaration of In-
dependence in 1988. This document presented a framework for the historic
compromise between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples rst publicly enunci-
ated by Walid Khalidi a decade earlier in his Foreign Affairs article, Thinking
76 JOURNAL OF PALESTINE STUDIES
the Unthinkable.

The declaration deserves greater attention than it has re-

ceived. It documents signicant political evolution inasmuch as this call on
behalf of the highest Palestinian representative body for a two-state solution
which would have given Israel the lions share of Palestinewas produced only
four decades after the earthquake that shattered the countrys Arab society and
turned the majority of Palestinians into penniless refugees. While intellectual
and political leaders who earlier elaborated the broad principles that this doc-
ument incarnates received most of the credit for it, its form, a large part of its
content, and its vision owed from the pen of Mahmud Darwish. For this feat
alone, he will deserve to be remembered as one of the fathers of his country,
if and when Palestine ever sees the light of day as an independent state.
The passing of Mahmud Darwish, however, may mark the end of an era
during which Palestinian aspirations evolved fromthe narrowfocus on survival
and steadfastness in the bitter new post-Nakba world after 1948, and from
nostalgia for a return to an imagined idyllic existence before that traumatic
rupture, and toward an increasingly broad-minded and tolerant humanistic
approach to a resolution of the conict, and toward the Israelis. The high point
of that era was the Algiers Palestinian National Council meeting of 1988, at
which the Declaration of Independence that Darwish played such a large role
in drafting was adopted. This document represented a Palestinian consensus on
offering a generous (many Palestinians felt overly generous) compromise that
granted the historic foe most of the land of Palestine and many of its gains at
the expense of the Palestinian people in return for a modicum of recognition,
reciprocity, and equity in burdens and rights.
In the two decades since the Algiers meeting, this offer has been callously
ignored, dismissed, and belittled in turn by an Israeli political and security elite
that was ever surer of its ability to get whatever it wanted from the Palestinians
through the unremitting application of force, given the unstinting and con-
stantly growing support of the worlds sole superpower. Even as successive
Israeli governments spurned the historic compromise he played a part in fash-
ioning, Mahmud Darwish continued to view the Israeli people as fully human
and as fully entitled to consideration and sympathy as his own people. His
perspective, like that of his friend Edward Said, always remained broad and
humanistic. Theirs was a vision of inclusiveness, and a ne sense of the possi-
bility of a transformation for the better of the abnormal situation in which both
peoples have been living for six decades (with the Palestinians far worse off
than the Israelis). This humane and tolerant vision fashioned by a broad cohort
of intellectuals and artists who reshaped the Palestinian national imagination
touched an entire generation of younger Palestinians, informed and broadened
their outlook, and even affected the calculations of the adept politicians who
had emerged in the 1960s to lead the PLO.

Thinking the Unthinkable: A Sovereign Palestinian State, Foreign Affairs 56, no. 4
(July 1978), pp. 695713.
REMEMBERING MAHMUD DARWISH 77
Today, the ablest of those political leaders have passed on: Yasir Arafat,
George Habash, Salah Khalaf, Khalil al-Wazir, Haydar Abd al-Sha, Mamdouh
Nofal, and others. At the same time, several members of an inuential gen-
eration of Palestinian intellectuals and cultural gures have also disappeared.
With them may have disappeared the possibility of this form of historic com-
promise with the Israelis over Palestine, based on a partition of the land both
peoples consider their own, however unjust any such Solomonic judgment
would necessarily be.
Perhaps Mahmud Darwishs sadness derived from his intuitive understand-
ing that the vision for the future that he and others did so much to elaborate and
to establish as the shared vision of the Palestinian people would not truly be ac-
cepted by those to whom it was so generously offered. Perhaps he understood
that an entirely new vision of how to share one land between two peoples, to
be elaborated by a new generation, was needed. Perhaps he knew this from
the beginning, with his acute sense of the meaning of political words, which
was at the core of so much of his poetry, and with his sharp understanding of
Israeli domestic politics. And perhaps he only realized it toward the end.
If the latter is the case, Mahmud Darwish may have died not only from
complications after heart surgery, but also from a broken heart. For surely this
visionary poet understood how much suffering the rejection of this vision and
the consequent fashioning and implementation of a newone would necessarily
entail for all concerned, and how long and complex that process might be,
notwithstanding the glib assurances of all of thoseon all sideswho have
spurned it. Two enemies stuck together in a hole, victim and victimizer, with
no idea of the scenario necessary to get them out of it: His last poem provided
the perfect metaphor for the situation he saw so clearly.