On 9th August 2008, died one of best contemporary poets: Mahmoud Darwish.
He was a Palestinian poet who wrote about his land, occupied by the Zionist army of Israel, about his exile and the anguish of dispossession. He was born in a small village in Western Galilee, but with the Israeli occupation of Palestine his family moved to Lebanon. Then they come back in Palestine where he attended high school and he published his first book of poetry, Asafir bila ajniha, or Wingless Birds, at the age of nineteen. In 1970 he moved to the USSR where he studied at Moscow University. Then he moved to Egypt and Lebanon. When he joined the PLO he was banned from reentering Israel and spent most part of his life as exile.
Darwish’ poetic is influenced by classic Arab poetry as well as European: he cited Rimbaud and Ginsberg as literary influences. He wrote a lot of beautiful poems which we remember – for example “Ana Yusuf ya abi” (Oh father, I’m Yusuf) or “Jawaz safar” (Passport). On YouTube you can find a lot of video with his poems, read by him or sung by Marcel Khalife, a Lebanese composer named UNESCO Artist for Peace in 2005.
Darwish was accused to be anti-Semitic (very funny because Arabs are a Semitic population them too…) but he rejected antisemitism: “The accusation is that I hate Jews. It’s not comfortable that they show me as a devil and an enemy of Israel. I am not a lover of Israel, of course. I have no reason to be. But I don’t hate Jews”.
Is also very interesting what he said about suicide bombers: “We should not justify suicide bombers. We are against the suicide bombers, but we must understand what drives these young people to such actions. They want to liberate themselves from such a dark life. It is not ideological, it is despair.” Simple sentences that express despair of a people that can’t live free in his land.