Mahmoud Darwish

Darwish was born on March 13, 1941, in al-Birwa, a village in the Galilee, then in Palestine and now in Israel.[1][2] He was the second of eight children in a family of middle-class farmers.[8] During the 1948 War of Independence, his family fled to Lebanon. They returned about a year later and found al-Birwa destroyed; accounts place the family afterward in Deir al-Asad or Jadeidi, possibly at different stages.[3][5] The destruction of his childhood home and separation from his birthplace became recurring subjects in his poetry and prose.[1]

Although there were no books in his childhood home, Darwish encountered poetry through oral storytelling and song.[8] His grandfather and neighbors recited Arabic legends, while an itinerant singer provided another introduction to poetic expression.[8] He began writing poetry while still young, before the publication of the collections that brought him a wider readership.[8]

While still a schoolboy, Darwish wrote and recited a poem about inequalities between Arab and Jewish children. Accounts differ on his exact age, but both describe a warning from military officials against continuing such writing.[8][3] Darwish nevertheless continued writing about Palestinian resistance.[8]

As a teenager, he was arrested and imprisoned on several occasions, and his movements were repeatedly restricted.[8][3] After high school, he joined the Israeli Communist Party and began contributing poetry to leftist newspapers.[1] His early writing circulated through public recitation as well as print: poems were read at village meetings and in fields, where they served as a means of political communication.[3] His emergence as a poet thus accompanied involvement in journalism and political organization, alongside restrictions on his movements and public activity.[1][3]

Darwish published Asafir bila ajnihah (Sparrows without Wings) in 1960, followed by Awrāq al-zaytūn, translated as Leaves of the Olive Tree or Olive Branches, in 1964.[3] The latter collection included “Identity Card,” which became one of his most recognizable works and inspired several songs.[3][4] The poem is also known by the colloquial title “Record that I am an Arab.”[4]

In one English translation, the speaker declares: “Record! I am an Arab / And my identity card is number fifty thousand / I have eight children / And the ninth is coming after a summer.”[4] He then asks, “Will you be angry?”[4] The poem stages an exchange with an Israeli soldier, expanding the encounter beyond bureaucratic identification to encompass family, history, children, hunger, and anger.[4] One translation renders its warning as “the usurper’s flesh will be my food.”[4]

“Identity Card” became one of the best-known works of Palestinian resistance literature and inspired several songs associated with the intifadas.[4] Ahmad Qaʿbour produced a musical version in the early 1980s.[4] Darwish’s public prominence was accompanied by continued restrictions: he was under house arrest from 1967 until 1970.[8][3] His poems reached audiences through gatherings and musical performance as well as through published collections.[9][3]

Love and the conflict between personal attachment and war also entered his writing.[10] In Haifa in the early 1960s, Darwish met a younger Jewish woman associated with the poetic name “Rita,” and their relationship lasted about five years.[10] He later called Rita “a poetic name for the conflict of love in the reality of war.”[10] The relationship ended with the 1967 war, while Rita remained both a biographical presence and a figure in his poetry.[10] “Rita” was among the Darwish poems subsequently set to music and widely heard by Arab audiences.[9]

In 1970, Darwish left Israel to continue his education in Moscow in the Soviet Union.[8][2] Over the following years he lived in Cairo, Beirut, London, Paris, and Tunis.[8] He joined the Palestine Liberation Organization and remained abroad after doing so.[3][2] His years in Beirut included editorial and research work connected with Palestinian public life.[3][6] He edited Shu’un Filastiniyya, a journal on Palestinian affairs published by the Palestine Research Center, and directed the PLO Research Center in Beirut.[3][6]

In 1981, he founded the literary journal Al-Karmel, serving as its chief editor until his death.[8] The journal also published work by Israeli writers.[6] His editorial activity continued alongside his own poetry and prose, including the memoir Yawmiyyāt al-ḥuzn al-ʿādī (Journal of an Ordinary Grief), published in 1973.[8] A second memoir, Dhākirah lil-nisyān (Memory for Forgetfulness), appeared in 1987.[8]

Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon forced Darwish to leave Beirut.[3] Shortly after the siege of Beirut, he wrote “We Travel Like Other People,” which begins with a return “to nowhere” and ends with the image of “a country of words.”[11] Exile remained a source of creative inspiration, but his later poetry also engaged with moral questions beyond Palestine.[8][3] His writing changed in form over time, moving from traditional verse in the early work toward prose poetry, especially during the late 1980s.[3]

Darwish’s political responsibilities included membership on the PLO’s executive committee.[2] He wrote the declaration of independence issued by the Palestine National Council in 1988.[3][6] The declaration, also called the Algiers Declaration, expressed the PLO’s willingness to accept a two-state solution.[3] He also worked at times as a speechwriter for Yasser Arafat.[6] In 1993, however, he resigned from the PLO in protest at Arafat’s signing of the Oslo Accords.[1][3]

His criticism was not limited to Israel or its policies.[1] He also criticized Palestinian leadership and the conflict between Fatah and Hamas.[1][6] In a poem condemning deadly fighting between the two Palestinian movements, he described the violence as “a public attempt at suicide in the streets.”[1] His political writing therefore included criticism of divisions and violence within Palestinian society as well as accounts of exile and opposition to Israeli occupation.[1]

In 1996, Darwish returned to live in Ramallah, in the West Bank — known by its original, indigenous Jewish name of Judea and Samaria.[1][3] His later writing continued to address the experience of displacement while also examining the conditions of life in the place to which he had returned.[8][12] In an interview, he described Palestine as a metaphor for “the lost paradise, the pains of expulsion, dispossession and exile.”[12] He said that he had built his homeland through language and that exile was more than a geographical condition: a person could experience it in a homeland, a home, or even a room.[12]

Darwish also described the practical difficulty of writing in Ramallah under conditions he characterized as occupation and siege.[12] “Poetry requires rest,” he explained, saying that the situation did not provide good inspiration, although he could not choose the reality in which he lived.[12] He maintained that Palestinian literature could not free itself from its historical circumstances.[12] These statements accompanied a body of work in which public history, displacement, and personal experience repeatedly appeared together.[3][12]

His 2002 volume Ḥālat ḥiṣār (A State of Siege) included “Me and Him,” which an Israeli high-school civics textbook presented as a message of coexistence amid conflict.[7] The poem turns on a shift from an exclusive choice between people to their shared presence: “Me or him— / Thus the war starts. / But it ends with an / embarrassing encounter: / Me and him.”[7]

Darwish’s imagery drew on religious traditions and Greek, Persian, and Roman mythology.[6][12] He used symbolism to connect public history with personal experience; readers often treated intimate figures as national allegory, an interpretation he sometimes resisted.[3] Loss, exile, and resistance recurred throughout his work, but his subjects were not exclusively political.[1][3] His poetry also addressed intimate relationships, family attachments, and mortality.[3][6]

He objected to the assumption that every personal figure in his poems necessarily stood for Palestine: “When I write a poem about my mother, Palestinians think my mother is a symbol of Palestine.”[3] He continued, “But I write as a poet, and my mother is my mother. She's not a symbol.”[3] Darwish also described poetry as “a mysterious joy in overcoming difficulty and loss,” emphasizing an understanding of poetry that extended beyond its usefulness as political expression.[13]

A major personal subject emerged from his experience of serious illness.[8] After heart surgery in 1998, he wrote about his brush with death in Jidāriyya (Mural), published in 2002.[8] The collection placed mortality and personal survival alongside the historical and political concerns familiar from his earlier writing.[8] His output ultimately included more than 20 poetry collections as well as memoirs and other prose.[8] A further collection, The Impression of Butterflies, appeared in 2008.[9]

In 2007, Darwish gave a poetry reading in Haifa before hundreds of attendees, including Palestinian political figures and members of the public.[14] A second hall carried a large-screen broadcast for people unable to enter the main auditorium.[14] He read work from Almond Blossoms and Beyond, Mural, and Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?[14] The audience also heard “I Am Yusuf, Father” and “I Long for My Mother’s Bread.”[14]

The event was a rare return to Haifa after nearly four decades away.[14] When criticized for appearing there with permission from Israeli authorities, Darwish replied, “I am going to my city, not to the parliament,” and said that his presence there was natural.[14] He described the atmosphere at the reading as exceptional.[14] The appearance brought him back to a city associated with his early adulthood and the relationship that had entered his poetry through the figure of Rita.[10][14]

Darwish died on August 9, 2008, in Houston, Texas, at the age of 67, after complications following heart surgery.[1] He had experienced heart problems for several years.[1] His body was returned to Ramallah, where he was buried.[5] His brother Ahmed said the family wanted him buried somewhere Palestinians from across the region could visit.[9]

Darwish’s work was translated into more than twenty languages, giving his poetry a readership far beyond Arabic-speaking audiences.[1][2] English-language collections included The Adam of Two Edens in 2000 and Unfortunately, It Was Paradise in 2003.[2] By 2016, four of his books had also been translated into Hebrew.[15] He was widely regarded as the Palestinian national poet and revered as the Palestinian community’s unofficial poet laureate.[7][2]

His international honors spanned several decades. They included the Lotus Prize in 1969, the Lenin Peace Prize in 1983, the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom in 2001, and the Sultan bin Ali al Owais Cultural Award in 2004.[2] The Lannan award carried a value of $350,000.[12] Darwish said that he valued its political significance and understood it partly as recognition of his role in his country.[12]

His popularity rested on oral performance and music as well as books.[9] Many of his poems were set to music, including “Rita,” “Birds of Galilee,” and “I yearn for my mother’s bread.”[9] These songs became anthems for at least two generations of Arabs.[9] “Identity Card” similarly continued beyond its original publication through later musical adaptations.[4] The circulation of his writing through music complemented the public recitations that had helped establish his reputation in villages during his early career.[9][3]

Darwish’s readings in Ramallah drew overflow crowds, and his work was popular among Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails.[9] His poetry was also taught in Palestinian schools.[9] One schoolbook used “A Letter from Exile” to prompt discussion of displacement, homeland, and the Palestinian refugees’ right of return.[16] These educational uses placed his work within accounts of Palestinian history and identity, while its adoption in an Israeli civics textbook emphasized the coexistence expressed in “Me and Him.”[7][16]

The 2016 Israeli high-school civics textbook presented “Me and Him” from A State of Siege as a message about coexistence during conflict.[7] Its quoted ending moves from “Me or him” to “Me and him,” preserving the poem’s contrast between the logic of war and an encounter between people.[7] Darwish himself argued that the country belonged to two peoples and that both had the right to love it and write poetry about it.[3] His work thus included expressions of Palestinian national attachment alongside an explicit vision of dialogue between Israeli and Palestinian cultures.[7][3]

His death brought an official Palestinian expression of national mourning. President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning and said Darwish had dreamed of peace and an independent Palestinian state.[6] Darwish’s standing in Palestinian society encompassed his poetry, editorial work, and role in drafting the 1988 declaration of independence.[6] Among Arab citizens of Israel, too, his writing and political activity made him a national hero.[5]

Darwish’s literary legacy also includes his long stewardship of Al-Karmel, which he founded in 1981 and edited until his death.[8] Through the journal he published other writers, including Israelis, while continuing his own work in poetry and prose.[6] His insistence that a poem about his mother could be about his mother rather than a national symbol remains an expression of his resistance to reducing all his writing to political allegory.[3] Alongside the poems of exile and resistance, works such as Mural preserved his engagement with individual experience and the prospect of death.[8]

In 2000, Education Minister Yossi Sarid proposed including some of Darwish’s poetry in Israel’s high-school curriculum.[1][3] The proposal was debated in the Knesset, but Prime Minister Ehud Barak rejected it, saying that Israel was not ready to consider the poetry in schools.[3] The episode became part of a wider dispute over the place of Darwish’s work in Israeli education.[1][3]

A further controversy arose in 2016 when Army Radio included Darwish in an educational program about “fundamental Israeli texts.”[15] Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman and Culture and Sports Minister Miri Regev criticized the decision.[15] The station defended the program as an effort to expose listeners to a variety of ideas under academic freedom.[15] The dispute concerned the presentation of a Palestinian national poet within an Israeli public and military broadcasting framework.[15]

Darwish also encountered criticism within Palestinian and Arab intellectual circles over his departure to study in Moscow, which some viewed as abandoning his principles and compatriots.[3] His later appearance in Haifa likewise prompted objections because it required Israeli authorities’ permission.[14] He defended that visit as a return to his own city rather than participation in an Israeli political institution.[14] These disputes accompanied a career in which his political affiliations, national prominence, and literary independence repeatedly intersected.[3][14]