Mohmoud Darwish's Final Journey

Dear me, I have never read his works but from the reception he received at his funeral, he is definitely worth gold in the hearts of the Palestinian.

The following article was published in BBC NEWS on August 13, 2008:

From a formal honour guard in the presidential compound to a jostling crowd around a hillside gravesite, Mahmoud Darwish's final journey reflected his place in the emotions of Palestinians.His poetry on the Palestinian identity earned him a Palestinian Authority-sponsored funeral with a fanfare second only to late leader Yasser Arafat's.But with youths in jeans and sunglasses and security guards sharing emotional hugs, among the thousands who turned out to pay their respects, the massive popular following of his simple, evocative writing was evident."I have cried four times - after my father died, after Arafat died, after the fall of Baghdad, and when Darwish died," said Assad Salim Kayyal, 50, a construction worker from near Acre (Akko in Arabic) in northern Israel.He and his family had travelled from Jdeideh, the Israeli-Arab village where Darwish lived as a child, a few kilometres away from his birthplace Birweh, which was razed in the wake of the 1948 Israeli-Arab war.Refugee poetMany mourners from the area expressed sadness that Darwish was buried in the West Bank city of Ramallah, rather than the home area he had been exiled from for much of his life.Stripped of his Israeli-Arab citizenship after being active in the Israeli Communist Party and then joining the Palestine Liberation Organisation, he moved to Cairo and then Beirut in the early 1970s.Assad Salim Kayyal says he wept at Darwish's funeralHe later moved on to Paris and the US, returning to his Palestinian roots when Israel gave him permission in the late 1990s - but even then only to the occupied West Bank and Gaza.Exile was a major theme in his life and his poetry, as Leila Jammal - also from the Acre area originally but long resident in the US - recalled as she walked behind the coffin clutching a single white lily.After two high-profile speaking engagements in American universities, the man who once wrote "my homeland is not a suitcase" had asked to go with her to "eat fish and remember Akko"."We are refugees. Wherever we go, deep inside, we feel like refugees," she said.Some also shared the sadness Darwish expressed in his later years over the fighting between Palestinian political factions and the decline of a unified Palestinian voice."Now we have lost everyone. There are very few to speak for us now," said one mourner who preferred not to be named.Israeli reactionSince the poet's death after open-heart surgery in Texas on Saturday, candle-lit vigils have been held in Ramallah, while radio stations have broadcast Darwish's recitals and the widely-loved songs written from his best-known poems.Arab writers and commentators described him as "an epoch-making poet", a "symbolic figure" whose death had left Palestinians "orphaned", and as the "essential breath" of the Palestinian people.Leila Jammal also originally came from Acre, like DarwishBut in Israel there has been mixed feeling. Many respected his abilities as a writer, but others saw some of his writing as anti-Semitic and even racist - in one poem he urged Israelis to "leave our land / Our shore, our sea / Our wheat, our salt, our wound" and "take with you your dead".However, acclaimed Israeli writer Avraham B Yehoshua said he was deeply saddened by Darwish's death."Of course there were poems that were very much aggressive," he said, "but it's important that we know what they are thinking - you have to know your enemy because your enemy is your neighbour and future friend."Haunting soundWaiting at the Palestinian Authority's presidential compound to meet the helicopter from Jordan bearing Darwish's wreath-topped coffin were some of the PA's biggest names, clad in dark suits and ties.Peace negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo wept as the poet's body was carried along a red carpet stretched across the tarmac, and long-time legislator and academic Hanan Ashrawi gave an interview in soft, emotional tones.Darwish won many international prizes for his workAfter a private ceremony for dignitaries and family members, including Darwish's octogenarian mother, mourners from across the West Bank and Arab-populated areas of Israel lined the coffin's route to the burial site at the Cultural Palace.Mona al-Zuhairi, 24, stood tearfully near the graveside after failing to push her way through the tight scrum that formed around the coffin.But she felt Darwish would have liked the emotional, jostling crowd, where bystanders squeezed up against sobbing relatives and only a cordon of a few security officers holding hands kept the mourners back from the coffin itself."He loved life, and all the contradictions between death and living," she said.Wreath after wreath was passed over the heads of the crowd and placed on the coffin.But even those struggling for photos were momentarily stilled as the haunting sound of Lebanese singer Marcel Khalifa, singing Darwish's words, echoed over the Palestinian hillside where the late poet was laid to rest - in the soil of his homeland, if not the village of his birth.On the author's website---------------------------Mahmoud Darwish has quietly left us on Saturday 9 August 2008 after 67 years of a life jumping from one peak to another, rising higher every time, transcending his own successes. He was a beautiful human being, able to see what no one else can see: in life, politics, and even people, expressing his visions in a language that seems to be made only for him to write with. When he decided to take on this difficult surgery we thought that he can beat death, like he did several times before… but he, it seems, with his prophetic insight, could clearly see his “ghost coming from afar”. He wanted to surprise death rather than wait for the “time bomb” that was his artery to explode unannounced… he went prepared, as he always is, leaving us behind to “nurture hope”.

Darvish's Biography

Darwish is considered to be the most important contemporary Arab poet working today. He was born in 1942 in the village of Barweh in the Galilee, which was razed to the ground by the Israelis in 1948. As a result of his politi-cal activism he faced house arrest and imprisonment. Darwish was the editor of Ittihad Newspaper before leaving in 1971 to study for a year in the USSR. Then he went to Egypt where he worked in Cairo for Al-Ahram Newspaper and in Beirut, Lebanon as an editor of the Journal “Palestinian Issues”. He was also the director of the Palestinian Research Center. Darwish was a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO and lived in exile between Beirut and Paris until his return in 1996 to Palestine. His poems are known throughout the Arab world, and several of them have been put to music. His poetry has gained great sophistication over the years, and has enjoyed international fame for a long time. He has published around 30 poetry and prose collections, which have been translated into 35 languages. He is the editor in chief and founder of the prestigious literary review Al Karmel, which has resumed publication in January 1997 out of the Sakakini Centre offices. He published in 1998 the poetry collection: Sareer el Ghariba (Bed of the Stranger), his first collection of love poems. In 2000 he published Jidariyya (Mural) a book consisting of one poem about his near death experience in 1997. In 1997 a documentary was produced about him by French TV directed by noted French-Israeli director Simone Bitton. He is a commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Muhamoud Darwish is the winner of 2001 Lannan Prize for Cultural Freedom. The prize recognizes people whose extraordinary and courageous work celebrates the human right to freedom of imagination, inquiry, and expression. As defined by the foundation, cultural freedom is the right of individuals and communities to define and protect valued and diverse ways of life currently threatened by globalization.In the words of poet Naomi Shihab Nye. Mr. Darwish is “the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging, exquisitely tuned singer of images that invoke, link, and shine a brilliant light into the world’s whole heart. What he speaks has been embraced by readers around the world – his in an utterly necessary voice, unforgettable once discovered.”Mr. Darwish published his first book of poetry, Leaves of Olives, in 1964, at the age of 22. Since then, he has published more than twenty poetry books, including The Adam of Two Edens, Mural, Why Have you Left the Horse Alone, and Eleven Planets. The University of California Press has published his prose work, Memory For Forgetfulness. In 2000, Gallimard published the latest French anthology of his work and, in 2002, a new English translation of Mr. Darwish’s Selected Poems will be published in the United States.Among his accomplishments is the 1969 Lotus Prize and 30 compilations of poetry and prose.