Three days of official mourning for Mahmoud Darwish

The Associated Press has reported, in a brief story picked up and published in the Jerusalem Post, that “Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has called for three days of mourning for Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Darwish died Saturday at the age of 67, following open heart surgery at a Houston hospital … After the announcement of his death late Saturday, dozens of Palestinians gathered in downtown Ramallah and lit memorial candles”. The full report can be read here.

Haaretz is reporting that he may be buried in Israel or in Palestine: “According to the sources, Palestinians intend for Darwish to be buried either in his home town in the western Galilee, that had since been demolished with the Jewish Moshav Ahihud erected in its stead in 1950, or in the neighboring village Jadaida, where Darwish’s family still resides. However, it is also possible that his body be laid to rest in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Arab press reports on Sunday said that Darwish asked in his will to be buried in Palestine”. The full Haaretz article can be read here .

My guess is that he will be buried in Ramallah — and maybe even in the Muqata’a, near the Yasser Arafat mausuleum. Or maybe in the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center, where he apparently lived in Ramallah.

Mahmoud Darwish lived almost all the possible states and statuses that are Palestinian. He was born in a small village near Acre (Akka). His family went into exile — apparently briefly to Lebanon — as refugees. Somehow — it is not entirely clear to me yet how, as return was usually prevented on threat of death — his family returned to what had by then become the north of Israel, though their original village had been destroyed. They became “internally displaced persons”, a category used everywhere in the world, except in Israel.

Darwish grew up in Israel, joined the Communist Party, became a journalist for a Communist Party newspapers, and as I recall caused great controversy when he marched with the Israeli Olympic team at one of the opening ceremonies somewhere, sometime. Then, in the 1970’s, he turned in his Israeli passport, and joined the PLO in exile. He went to Beirut. He travelled. He left Beirut after Ariel Sharon’s war against the PLO in Lebanon in 1982, and went to Tunisia. He split from the PLO in protest against the Oslo Accords which were publicly revealed in late 1993.

One of the books of poems he wrote about Palestine was called: Unfortunately, it was paradise¢2006).

Obitiuary articles today remind me that Mahmoud Darwish was one of the authors of the Declaration of a Palestinian State — a document that was deliberately and consciously written as a kind of parallel or mirror to Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence — that was proclaimed by Yasser Arafat at a meeting of the Palestinian National Council in Algiers in November 1988.

Here is a poem Mahmoud Darwish wrote in 2006, after already having faced death more than once – it is, unusually, almost entirely personal:

What Remains of life
If you were told: you’re going to die here this evening
What would you do in the remaining time?
Look at my watch
Drink a glass of juice
Munch an apple
Watch an ant who has found what to eat
Then look at my watch
There’s still time to shave have a bath
I say to myself: One needs one’s finery when about to write
So I’ll wear the blue shirt
I sit til noon alive at my desk
I do not see the effect of color on words
Whiteness whiteness whiteness
I prepare my last lunch
I pour out wine into two glasses
For me and for the one who will come
Unannounced
Then I take a siesta in between two dreams
Yet the noise of my snoring will wake me
I look at my watch
There is still time for reading
I read a chapter of Dante and a section of al Mualaqa and I realize how my life
Is about to leave me to stay with the living here
And I do not question what will fill the gap
Like this?
Like this like this.
Then what?
I comb my hair and throw away the poem, this poem, in the wastepaper basket
I am wearing the most chic Italian shirt.
And in the company of Spanish violins
I say farewell to myself and walk toward the cemetery.

Here is another poem on the same site — about the 1982 Israeli siege and bombardment of Beirut:

Enemy
I was there a month ago
I was there a year ago
I was there always, as if I had never been anywhere else
In the year ’82 of the last century something happened to us, somewhat like
what is happening to us now. We were besieged, we were killed and we held out against our share of hell’s offerings.
Those of us who were killed do not look alike. Each martyr has his own features, his own way of standing, his own eyes, name and age.
It is the killers who look alike, because hidden in the machines they are like a single performer who presses the electronic buttons of mechanical devices. He kills and disappears. He sees us; we do not see him. Not because he’s a ghost, but because he has a mask of lead without features, eyes, age or name. He is he.
And he has chosen to have only one name: Enemy.

This and a few other of his poems can be found here

For me, one of the saddest parts of Mahmoud Darwish’s life was his love and marriage to — then separation and divorce from — the beautiful Syrian-Palestinian poet, Rana Kabbani. I once spotted her working at a desk in a room in the Syrian Embassy in Washington (where I went to get a visa), when her father was posted there. They were married — and divorced — twice. I am told that she is now married to Patrick Seale, and living in Paris.

Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Rita (Her name is Rita), which was just one of his works later put to to music by Marcel Khalife, was about this. It was included in Khalife’s debut album Promises of the Storm, released in 1976, which a Palestinian radio station was playing Saturday evening, as I was listening on my car radio, trying to get more news about the reports of Mahmoud Darwish’s increasingly critical condition. Here is a clip from Marcel Khalife’s website of the song Rita from the poem by Mahmoud Darwish as set to music and sung by Marcel Khalife.

Another Mahmoud Darwish poem sung by Marcel Khalife is Passport, a short clip of which can be heard here (Passport from the poem by Mahmoud Darwish as set to music and sung by Marcel Khalife.

For more, also see my post on UN-Truth, here .