The 9th of August marks the 9th anniversary of the passing of the Palestinian national poet and literary figure, Mahmoud Darwish.
His journey and significant body of work embodied the Palestinian people's dignity and desire to be free.
Darwish was born on the 13th of March 1941, in Al Birweh, Palestine, into a land-owning Sunni Muslim family. During the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, El-Birweh was destroyed and his family was forced to flee to Lebanon. They returned the following year, secretly reentering their homeland.
As a young man, Darwish faced house arrest and imprisonment for his political activism and for publicly reading his poetry. He joined the official Communist Party of Israel, the Rakah, in the 1960s. In 1970, he left for Russia, where he attended the University of Moscow for one year, and then moved to Cairo. He lived in exile for twenty-six years, between Beirut and Paris, until his return in 1996, when he settled in Ramallah in the West Bank.
Considered Palestine’s most eminent poet, Darwish published his first collection of poems, Leaves of Olives, in 1964, when he was 22, ultimately penning approximately 30poetry and prose collections that have been translated into more than 22 languages.
Some of his later works include The Butterfly’s Burden (2006);Unfortunately, It Was Paradise: Selected Poems (2003); Stage of Siege (2002), The Adam of Two Edens (2001); Mural (2000); Bed of the Stranger(1999); Psalms (1995); Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (1994); and The Music of Human Flesh (1980).
Darwish was an editor of a Palestine Liberation Organization monthly journal and the director of the PLO’s research center. He was appointed to the PLO Executive Committee in 1987, but resigned in 1993 in protest of the Oslo Agreement. He served as the editor-in-chief and founder of the literary review Al-Karmel, which has been published by the Sakakini Center since 1997.
Palestinian-American poet Naomi Shihab Nye observed that “Mahmoud 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.”
Among Darwish’s awards and honors are the Ibn Sina Prize, the Lenin Peace Prize, the 1969 Union of Afro-Asian Writers Lotus Prize, France’s Knight of Arts and Belles Lettres Medal in 1997, the 2001 Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom, the Moroccan Wissam of Intellectual Merit awarded by King Mohammad VI of Morocco, and the USSR’s Stalin Peace Prize.
Darwish died on August 9, 2008, in Houston, Texas, from complications after heart surgery.
