Darwish and the Meaning of Palestine

It was a year ago that I was in Palestine attending a poetry recital of Mahmoud Darwish. It was the first that I ever heard him recite his poetry live. I did not know that it was the last, for him as well as for me, as he died 3 weeks afterwards, in Texas, 6000 miles away from Ramallah. The concert/recital was in July, in the beautifully constructed cultural palace of the hilly Palestinian city-dubbed future capital, built with the money of the international donor community to prove its commitment to the Palestinian cause. It was a contribution to enable Palestinian art to flourish in the midst of the confines of over 145 Israeli checkpoints, in the Bantustans that they were actually living in. Darwish was austere and the audience ecstatic. He stood on the stage with a certain shyness and started to recite his poetry as a lover flirting with his beloved, a lover that has aged and was wondering what was the meaning of it all, all this life of his, all this struggle of his, all this trajectory that he and his country have gone through and which his poetry so intimately weaved together. "I am from there" he recalled, and "the earth is closing onto us" he reminded us just as "there is fog over the bridge" the bridge of exile as much as of return, only to ask in the end to just "let me down here," for while I am tired of the journey. He said more and more, recited old and new poems, and read them with such a sensual voice that made you desire as much as cry, want to hold him, touch him, delay the recital's ending only to accept that you cannot; his poetry is too deep a part of you and of Palestine to be contained in a word, symbol or act. The death of Darwish came as shock to me and, I would add, to all my generation of Palestinians and Arabs, all those who grew up learning his poems, hearing them sung by famous Arab singers, such as Marcel Khaleefeh, repeated in demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinian people. I felt bereaved, deeply bereaved, for his death represented not simply the loss of a great poet, but also the closing of a very important chapter of the life of Palestine. It forced on me, and I suppose many other Palestinians, to re-question the meaning of Palestine, which Darwish has often done and struggled with. Darwish's poetry was as a central part of who I am, of what it is to be a Palestinian, of what it is to struggle for your humanity globally as much as locally, of what it is to become a cosmopolitan cause, a cosmopolitan citizen. I was born in 1967, few months after the 1967 war, the Naska, or debacle as it is called in Arabic. I was born in exile and my family became de facto refugees. Darwish was just 25 years old, he had started already to write poetry, had already lived the Nakba, the catastrophe, when his native village Al-Birwa was wiped out with Israel's creation, and was already in prison in 1962 for opposing Israel's military rule over the Palestinians. He had already written his poem, "I long for the bread of my mother, the coffee of my mother and the touch of my mother ... and I desire my life because if I die I would be ashamed of the tears of my mother." This is the first poem I learned in school when I was six year old, it is the one we sang on mother's day ever since. For a little girl just trying to come to term with her separation from her mother, it made perfect sense. For all Palestinians trying to come to term with the loss of Palestine, with exile, it could not be more poignant. I grew up in exile in many Arab countries. In all of these places, Darwish accompanied me in my Arabic classes as he did my relatives and friends going to school in Jordan, Lebanon, Kuwait, Yemen and Dubai, among other places. "write down I am an Arab, and my ID card number is ... I have 8 children and the 9th is about to come," wrote Darwish in a poem that came to represent Palestinian assertion of their Arab identity, of their right to self determination. Growing up in the US or France, it resonates with every Arab ostracized and oppressed by a colonial power. …