Death of a Poet: Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish, 67, died in Texas on Saturday August 9, 2008 and buried in Ramallah on 13, gave lyrical expression to the aspiration as well as desperation of his fellow Palestinians. Many have always wept in forced exile as well as expulsions, targeted assassination, collateral damage, retaliatory strikes, wars, open and civil, slow and poignant degradation of life in overcrowded refugee camps.

The only thing that any refugee carries as a badge of his status is his bag, whatever he could save of his past till the tragedy struck and he became homeless within his homeland or banished. But the memory in his mind is much deeper a bag than the physical entity. Mahmoud Darwish caught it so well when he said with tongue in cheek, "my homeland is not a suitcase". The journey of his life ended when his mortal remains were interred in a hill side grave of Ramallah—but till then it was wandering of an exile from birth place Birweh which was razed in the 1948 by Israelis to Jdeideh to Cairo, Beirut, Paris, US cities, USSR, occupied west bank, and Gaza.
As a mourner from Israeli city of Haifa said that the poetry of Darwish had helped the Palestinians of Israel keep their identity. What better tribute to a poet who kept spirit alive in otherwise stuffy and snuffing atmosphere in conditions of degrading slavish existence! So did he keep the conscience of his people as Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi called him “a poet of conscience."

In 1960s when he published his first collection “Bird with Wings” there was a poem called “Identity Card”. It captured so early what became a standard practice of occupation and subjugation, reduction of humans to just a photo card signed by authorities with just name and number.

World Zionism planted a fierce and ferocious entity in what were halcyon orchards of olive and dates, peace and harmony. Only regrets would be there in the face of awesome reality of near impossibility of undoing what has changed and destroyed what was theirs. This is how his words translate this reality:

leave our land
our shore, our sea
our wheat, our salt, our wound
take with you your dead.

The lines are from “Passing in Passing Words” (1988). Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir read the poem in the parliament to show that the Palestinians and Israelis could not live together. Once the Israeli education minister wanted to include some of his poems in the syllabus but Prime Minister Ehud Barak said that the time was not ripe.

The last collection of his poems appeared in 2008 called “The Impression of Butterflies.” Last year the Palestinians fought among themselves and this must have pained Darwish who called it "a public attempt at suicide in the streets."

As has truly been felt that he was the poet of dispossession and exile of the Palestinians, he spent a part of his life in Israeli jail like most of his people. In one celebrated poem he gives a contrast of life in and out of jail. Coming from the bottom of his heart he says:
I long for my mother's bread,
And my mother's coffee,
And her touch.
As the Jefferson of his people he wrote the Declaration of Freedom for the proposed state of Palestine but could not live to see establishment of it.