Palestinian poetry



 Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish

 First impression

Mahmoud Darwish

(Palestine, 1941–2008) 

Mahmoud Darwish has published over two dozen collections of poetry as well as several prose works. He is both a popular and a controversial voice in Palestinian poetry. His early material was generally in a classical Arabic form, while in the 1970s he adopted free verse and moved into a more personal style. His country, and its politics, have always been major themes in Darwish’s poetry. When reviewing his recent collection The Butterfly’s Burden, Fiona Simpson suggested that “the extraordinary plasticity of Darwish’s imagery allows him to create a continual interplay between the figures of home and beloved, presence and absence”. 

This sense of presence and absence is tied to his personal relationship with Israel. Born in Galilee, Darwish fled the country after 1948 only to return a few years later. He left the country for several decades in the early 1970s, having had his Israeli citizenship revoked. He edited various magazines throughout his career, and was labelled a ´resistance poet´ for some of his more provocative writing. A number of his pieces have been set to music, or even film, and he was closely involved with both the Rakah (Israel’s socialist party) and later the Palestine Liberation Organisation. In fact, he even wrote a manifesto intended as a form of independence declaration for the PLO, although he resigned after the 1993 Oslo Accord.
Widely recognised as a major figure in Palestinian poetry, Darwish has received numerous international accolades. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1983, and the Lannan Foundation awarded him the Lannan cultural Freedom Prize in 2001. Three years later he was the principal laureate of the Prince Claus Fund. In 1993 he was given the medal of a  Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres in France.

Darwish passed away in 2008.

Listen 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjnZgWUe__c

I Come From There

I come from there and I have memories
Born as mortals are, I have a mother
And a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends,
And a prison cell with a cold window.
Mine is the wave, snatched by sea-gulls,
I have my own view,
And an extra blade of grass.
Mine is the moon at the far edge of the words,
And the bounty of birds,
And the immortal olive tree.
I walked this land before the swords
Turned its living body into a laden table.
I come from there. I render the sky unto her mother
When the sky weeps for her mother.
And I weep to make myself known
To a returning cloud.
I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood
So that I could break the rule.
I learnt all the words and broke them up
To make a single word: Homeland.....