Mahmoud Darwish, the voice of Palestine, died on August 9th, aged 67

Aug 21st 2008
From The Economist print edition

Exile was certainly personal to Mahmoud Darwish. His first forced flight came in 1948, when he was seven. Fearing the advance of Israeli forces, his family abandoned their ancestral wheatfields in Western Galilee and walked, destitute, to the apple orchards of Lebanon. Sneaking back across the border later, they found their village razed to make way for Jewish settlement. His father became a labourer; his family, having missed a census, were classed as “present-absent aliens”.

But exile was also an experience that Mr Darwish shared with his entire people, the Palestinians. Sixty years after the creation of Israel, more than half of them remain in physical exile from their homeland, while the rest, partitioned into enclaves under various forms of Israeli control, remain exiled from each other and from the wider Arab world. Mr Darwish was their voice and their consciousness.

It was a role that often bothered him. Rightly, he felt it belittled his devotion to the poetic craft and made him over-solemn. He sometimes berated his huge audiences when they clamoured for nationalist odes rather than the subtler, metaphysical verse of his later years. He fretted that some would recall only lines such as “Go! You will not be buried among us,” and forget those praising a Jewish lover or commiserating with an enemy soldier.

Yet it was inescapable that he should be lauded as Palestine’s poet laureate, and not merely because his words were made into popular songs and splashed as headlines to sell newspapers. His own life was entwined with the tragic Palestinian national narrative. When he was barely in his teens, the village schoolmaster tasked him with writing a speech to mark Israel’s independence day. He wrote it as a letter to a Jewish boy, explaining that he could not be happy on this day until he was given the same things that the Jewish boy enjoyed. This earned him a summons before the Israeli military governor, who warned him that such behaviour could get his father’s pass revoked, making him unable to work.

A few years later Mr Darwish took the bus to a poetry festival in Nazareth, the largest Arab town in Israel. He read one long poem, and was asked to recite more. All he had was a crumpled paper on which he had jotted some rough verse inspired by a visit to the Israeli police, to renew his travel pass. The poem included these lines:

The result was electric. The crowd demanded three encores, and Mr Darwish’s fame was born. By the mid-1980s, his 20 volumes of verse had sold well over a million copies.

For all that time he had no country of his own. Though a citizen of Israel, he was too often jailed there for his activism, and eventually had his citizenship revoked. He tried living in Moscow, then Cairo, then Beirut, where Yasser Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Organisation had been allowed to build a proto-state in exile. When Israel invaded in 1982, Mr Darwish sailed for Tunis and later lived in Paris. Not until 1996, after the Oslo peace agreement made it possible, did he return to Palestine.

But Palestine was a shambles. Arafat’s dictatorial style repulsed him; the drift towards the second intifada of 2000, and the vicious schisms that followed, reduced him to despair. Much of his later verse avoided overtly political themes. After a heart attack in 1998, he wrote:

Yet he could never fully escape the duty to help his people sustain their sense of destiny. In his last poem, Mr Darwish described Palestinians and Israelis as two men trapped in a hole: