The beauty of Gaza is that our voices don't reach there.
Nothing distracts him; nothing removes the fist from the face of the enemy.
Gaza is given over to rejection…
Hunger and rejection, thirst and rejection, displacement and rejection, torture and rejection, siege and rejection, death and rejection…”
Excerpts from Silence for Gaza, Mahmoud Darwish (1973)
These are the words of celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, written 50 years ago and perhaps more poignant now than ever as Gaza is devastated by more than five months of an Israeli attack that has killed more than 31,000 people and destroyed vast areas of its infrastructure. .
Born on March 13, 1941, Darwish is hailed as the national poet of Palestine for his words expressing the longing of Palestinians deprived of their homeland, which was taken by Zionist militias to make way for modern-day Israel.
His poetry gave voice to the pain of Palestinians living as refugees and under Israeli occupation for almost a century.
Today, Al Jazeera remembers Darwish, whose words are relevant today as hopes for a free Palestinian struggle against growing Israeli control of the occupied West Bank and Gaza.
Darwish died in 2008 after open heart surgery, leaving behind more than 30 collections of Arabic lyrical poetry.
Translated into 39 languages, Darwish's laments of loss, longing, and exile spoke to people fighting the occupation around the world.
The power of poetry
For Palestinians, words are often the only weapon available to fight back, finding the power to shape perception.
Atef Alshaer, senior lecturer in Arabic language and culture at the University of Westminster in London, says Palestinian poetry “moves people to action, to protest, to commemorate, to remember and to bear witness.”
“In the absence of a just response to Palestinian political protests, poetry has helped give form and voice to what they have lost,” he tells Al Jazeera.
Darwish did just that: became the voice of the Palestinian people.
On this Earth there is what makes life worth living:
On this earth is the Lady of the Earth, the mother of all beginnings, the mother of all endings.
His name was Palestine.
Its name became Palestine.
My Lady, because you are my Lady, I deserve life.
On this Earth (year unknown)
Who was Mahmoud Darwish?
Darwish, the second of eight children, was born into a modest farming family in the village of Barweh, Akka (Acre), an Arab city destroyed by Zionist militias in 1948 and its remains absorbed into Israel.
At the age of six, Darwish saw his village devastated along with hundreds of others during the Nakba of 1948, during the founding of Israel.
His family joined 750,000 other Palestinians forced into exile, fleeing violent attacks by Zionist militias and the newly formed Israeli army, in search of a safe home elsewhere.
Settlement camps in neighboring Lebanon hosted 110,000 Palestinian refugees, including the Darwish family.
A year later, Darwish and his family returned to their village house to find it burned to the ground.
They moved to Deir al-Asad, a Palestinian village about 15 kilometers (nine miles) away, where they attempted to rebuild their lives as internally displaced persons (IDPs), unable to return home.
Thousands of Palestinians who remained in Israel after 1948 were nicknamed “present-absent foreigners”: physically present, but returning to their properties because they were absent when Israel took over them, having fled for fear of violence.
Also among the exiles was the renowned Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani, also from Akka, who was 12 years old in 1948.
They would join the wave of revolutionary Palestinian writers such as Samih al-Qasim (How I Became an Article), Fadwa Tuqan (The Night and the Horsemen) and Tawfiq Zayyad (Here We Will Stay), who would continue to unravel themes of exile. Identity and resistance. Darwish would later say, “Every beautiful poem is an act of resistance.”
Becoming the national poet of Palestine
A 14-year-old Darwish read a poem he had written in class at his school in Kafr Yasif (11 kilometers from Akka). The poem described a Palestinian boy complaining to a Jewish boy:
You can play in the sun as you want and have your toys, but I can't.
You have a house and I don't have one.
You have celebrations, but I don't have any.
Why can't we play together?
Israel's military officers decided to answer the question the poem posed by threatening Darwish that if he continued with the poem, his father might lose his job at the local quarry.
Undeterred, Darwish continued writing his poems and his early works, shortly after finishing high school, appeared in left-wing newspapers.
His poetry spread and became “sung by field workers and schoolchildren,” write Munir Akash and Carolyn Forche in the introduction to the English translation of his works: Sadly, it was paradise.
His writings were read by Palestinian children. His poems were turned into songs, painted on the walls of buildings in refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, the occupied West Bank and beyond: camps that were built to be temporary.
In March 2000, Yossi Sarid, Israel's Minister of Education, suggested including Darwish's poems in the Israeli high school curriculum, but Israel's Prime Minister Ehud Barak rejected it.
At that point, Darwish responded: “Israelis don't want to teach students that there is a love story between an Arab poet and this land… I just wish they had read me to enjoy my poetry, not as a representative of the enemy.” . .”
The Palestinian poet was part of Mustafa Abu Sneineh's cultural movement while growing up in Jerusalem.
“His voice is in the head of every young Palestinian poet,” Abu Sneineh, a poet and writer now living in London, tells Al Jazeera.
“I know this because I had to work hard to get it out of my head and learn to protect my voice.”
Abu Sneineh believes that Darwish's 50 years of writings documenting the history of Palestine from 1948 onwards were what made him the national poet.
“At every moment of Palestine's modern history, Darwish was there… chronicling the Palestinian experience in exile, in refugee camps and under Israeli occupation.
“He captured all of that with a personal touch, with stories of love and friendship.”
Write to resist
Darwish's status as an “absent alien” meant he could not travel without the correct permit. Doing so would lead to his imprisonment, which occurred at least five times between 1961 and 1967.
His poem Identity Card – part of his poetry collection Olive Leaves in 1964 – led to his house arrest, while Palestinians turned it into a protest anthem.
Make a note of
I'm arabic
And my ID number is fifty thousand
And I have eight children
And the ninth arrives in summer.
That bothers you?
Identity card (1964)
In 1970, Darwish left Israel for the USSR, then moved to Cairo in 1971 to work for the Al Ahram newspaper and then to Beirut, where he joined the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1973.
A year later, he wrote PLO leader Yasser Arafat's speech to the United Nations General Assembly, which included the now famous line: “Today I have come with an olive branch and the weapon of a freedom fighter.” . “Do not let the olive branch fall from my hand.”
But first, independence.
While in exile, Darwish worked with fellow Palestinian intellectual Edward Said on the 1988 Palestinian Declaration of Independence in which the PLO announced its support for a two-state solution.
Declared at a summit in Algiers, it paved the way for the recognition of Palestine as a state and effectively made Yasser Arafat its president.
But Said and Darwish became the leading critics of the 1993 Oslo Accords, believing that the Palestinians had gotten the worst of it. The poet resigned from the executive committee of the PLO.
The status of Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, Israeli settlements, security arrangements and borders were left unresolved under the agreements, which disappointed Darwish, who felt it was a “cloak and dagger” move by Israel that he did not plan to honor the agreement, according to Abu Sneineh.
But it was the Oslo Accords that allowed Darwish to return to Palestine and settle in Ramallah in 1996.
No longer politically aligned, he criticized political factionalism between Fatah and Hamas, the two main Palestinian parties, in 2007, saying that infighting between them made the establishment of a Palestinian state even more unlikely.
“A town now has two states, two prisons that do not greet each other. We are victims dressed in executioners' clothes.”
Are his words still relevant today?
Darwish's poetry is being rediscovered by a new generation, as the hashtag #mahmouddarwishpoetry has garnered nearly 18 million views on TikTok and social media is awash with his poems.
“His eloquence and originality are unparalleled and always relevant to the conditions of Palestinians, particularly now in Gaza, where Palestinians are suffering the consequences of a US-backed Israeli genocide against them,” says Alshaer.
“People find in his poetry representations of their most intimate feelings in the midst of the carnage and sadness that surrounds them.”
As Darwish wrote:
The war will end
Leaders will shake hands.
The old woman will continue waiting for her martyr son
That girl will wait for her beloved husband.
And those children will wait for their heroic father.
I don't know who sold our country.
But I saw who paid the price.
The war will end
