Palestinian national poet: Mahmoud Darwish
Born: March 13 1942 ; Birweh in Galilee , Palestine .
Influences: These include Rimbaud and Ginsberg.
Career: 1961-70 editor Al-Ittihad and Al-Jadid; 1971 journalist Al-Ahram, Cairo; '73 editor Palestinian Affairs, Beirut; '75 director PLO Research Centre; '81- founding editor Al-Karmel; '87-93 PLO executive committee
Some books: Leaves of Olive 1964; Birds are Dying in Galilee '69; Journal of an Ordinary Grief '73; Fewer Roses '86; Eleven Planets '92; Why Have You Left the Horse Alone? '95; A Bed for the Stranger '99; Mural, 2000. Selected poetry in English: Victims of a Map '84; Sand '86; Psalms '94; The Adam of Two Edens , 2001; Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, Autumn 2002
Darwish…
on resistance: At 22 his poem, "Identity Card" addressed to an Israeli policeman , "Write down,/I am an Arab,/Identity card number fifty thousand" (became a rallying cry and led to his house arrest.)
on poetry: "…I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory." "Poetry and beauty are always making peace. When you read something beautiful you find coexistence; it breaks walls down…I always humanise the other." Something he's done in poems such as, "A Soldier Who Dreams of White Lillies".
on Israel : "…they can't break or occupy my words."
on suicide bombing: "We have to understand -not justify-what gives rise to this tragedy. It's not because they're looking for beautiful virgins in heaven, as Orientalists portray it. Palestinians are in love with life. If we give them hope - a political solution - they'll stop killing themselves."
on love: " If I write love poems, I resist the conditions that don't allow me to write love poems."
on home: He's roamed but since 1996 has settled in Ramallah, "I'll stay till Palestine is free."
State of Siege was written in Ramallah during the Israeli incursions in January 2002
from [ STATE OF SIEGE ]
By Mahmoud Darwish
Here, on the hillsides, facing the sunset and the cannon of time
Near the gardens with broken shadows
We do what prisoners do
What the jobless do
We cultivate hope
***
A country preparing for dawn. We become less intelligent
For we glimpse the hour of victory:
There is no night in our night lit up by bombardments
Our enemies keep watch and our enemies light the lights for us
In the obscurity of our caves
***
Here, there is no "I"
Here, Adam remembers the dust of his natal clay
***
On the brink of death, he says:
I can no longer lose my way
Free I am close to my freedom. My future is in my hands
Soon I will penetrate my own life,
I will be born free, without parents,
And for my name I'll choose letters of azure
***
You who rise up on our thresholds, enter,
Drink Arab coffee with us
You will feel that you are m! en like us
You who rise up on the thresholds of our houses
Get out of our mornings
We will be reassured that we are
Men like you
***
When the airplanes disappear, the doves fly up
White, white, they wash the cheeks of the sky
With free wings, they take back their brightness, their claim
To the ether, to play. Higher, higher, fly
The doves, white white. Ah, if the sky
Were real, [a man said to me, passing between two bombs]
***
Cypresses, behind the soldiers, are minarets protecting
The sky from collapsing. Behind the barbed-wire fence
Soldiers are pissing -- protected by a tank -
And the autumn day ends its golden stroll in
A street vast as a church after Sunday mass...
***
[To a killer} If you had considered the face of your victim
And thought about it, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have freed yourself from the rifle's logic
And you would have changed your mind: this is ! not how
One reclaims an identity
***
The siege is a wait
W ait on a ladder leaning on the storm-center
***
Alone, we are alone down to the dregs
If it weren't for the visits of the rainbow
***
We have brothers beyond this stretch of land.
Good brothers. They love us. They look at us and weep.
Then they say to each other in secret:
"Ah, if this siege were official...." They don't finish the sentence:
"Don't leave us alone, don't leave us."
***
Our losses: between two and eight martyrs a day.
And ten wounded
And twenty houses
And fifty olive-trees...
To that you can add the flaw that mars
The poem, the play, and the unfinished canvas.
***
A woman said to a cloud: cover my beloved
Because my clothing is soaked with his blood.
***
If you are not rain, my love
Be a tree
Green in its growing season, be a tree
Be a stone
Drenched with the dew, be a stone
If you are not a stone, my love
Be a moon
In your beloved's dream, be a moon
[A woman said this
to! her son at his burial]
***
Oh sentries! Aren't you weary
Of keeping watch over the light in our salt
And the rose's incandescence in our wounds
Aren't you weary, oh sentries ?
***
A bit of this infinite blue
Would be enough
To lighten the load of these times
And to clean the filth of this place
***
Let the soul come down from its jewelled frame
And walk beside me on its
Silken feet, hand in hand, like two
Old friends, who share old bread
And the time-honored glass of wine
Let us cross that street together
Later our days will go off in different directions
Mine, beyond all nature, as for the soul
It will choose to squat on a high rock
***
The shadows grow green on my ruins
And the wolf slumbers on my goat's skin
He dreams as I do, as the angel does
That life is here... not down there
***
Under siege, time becomes space
Petrified in its eternity
Under siege, space becomes time
That ! missed its yesterday and its tomorrow
***
The martyr makes thing s clear to me: I wasn't seeking, beyond this place
The virgins of immortality, because I love life
On earth, among the pines and the fig-trees
But I can't reach it, so I took aim
With the last thing that belonged to me: the blood in the blue sky's body
***
The martyr warns me: Don't believe their ululations
Believe my father when he looks at my photograph weeping
How did you reverse our roles, my son, and precede me?
I should have gone first, I should have gone first!
***
The martyr surrounds me: I've merely changed my place and my rude furniture
I've placed a gazelle on my bed
And a crescent moon on my finger
To ease my pain
***
The siege goes on in order to convince us to choose an enslavement which
will not
Harm us, in total freedom!
***
To resist means: to check the well-being of
Your heart and your testicles, and of your persistent illness:
The sickness of hope.
***
Hail to whoever who shar! es my perception
Of the light's drunkenness, the butterfly's light in
This tunnel's darkness.
***
Hail to whoever shares my glass with me
In the thickness of a night overflowing our two places
Hail to my own ghost.
***
My friends are always preparing a feast
Of farewell for me, a peaceful tomb in the shade of oak-trees
An epitaph in enduring marble
And I always get to the funeral ahead of them:
Who is dead... who?
***
Writing, a puppy gnawing on nothingness
Writing wounds without a drop of blood.
***
Our cups of coffee. The birds the green trees
In the blue shadow, the sun bounds from one wall
To the other like a gazelle
Water in the clouds with unbounded forms in what's left
To us of the sky. And other things with postponed memories
Reveal that this morning is potent, splendid
And that we are the guests of eternity.
Written in Ramallah, January 2002
Translated by Marilyn Hacker from the French version of
Saloua Ben Abda & Hassan Chami