Mahmoud Darwish, the Poet of Resistance
Writers and poets have played through out ages a vital role in embodying the civilization and history of every nation. The creative Arab poets can really drive forward the Arab world movement.
Mahmoud is one of the most important Palestinian and Arab poets who have their names associated with the poetry of revolution and homeland.
Mahmoud’s called the poet of Palestine’ was born on March 13, 1941, at a Palestinian village located in Al-Jalil.
Darwish is one of the most important poets who could mix the love for beloved with the love for homeland. He wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence that has been declared in Algeria. He contributed to the development of modern Arabic poetry.
He was Arrested by the Israeli occupation authorities many times starting from 1961 on charges related to his declarations, comments and his political activity until the year 1972, when he went to the Soviet Union to study, and then moved to Cairo as a refugee in the same year, where he joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and then to Lebanon where he worked in institutions affiliated to PLO, but he resigned from the Executive Committee of the PLO in protest against Oslo Agreement. He also founded the cultural magazine, the Al- Caramel .
The poet and philosopher, Robert Ghanem contributes in making Mahmoud Darwish’s reputation, when he published Darwish’s poems on the pages of the Educational Supplement of El-Anwar paper.
His poem “My Brother, the Hebrew” in 1958 is a contrast between the living conditions of Arab children and Jews. He was summoned to the office of Israeli occupation governor. But he never stopped writing poetry and released his first poetry book, “Birds without Wings” when he was 19. He is really the poet of Palestinian Resistance.
Some of his works are:
- Birds Without Wings -Poetry- 1960
- Olive leafs -poetry- 1964
- A Lover from Palestine -poetry- 1966
- Soft rain in the fall of a remote -poetry-
- Diary of the normal sadness -ideas and short stories-
- Diary of a Palestinian wound -poetry-
- I love you or do not love you -poetry-1972
- something about home -poetry-
- Memory for forgotten.
- Good bye, for war and peace -Articles-
- In the presence of absence -text – 2006
- Why did you leave the horse alone, 1995
- Identity card -poetry-
- The butterfly effect -Poetry- 2008
- You are now someone else -June 17-(2008), in which he criticized internal
Palestinian fighting.
But the last of Mahmoud Darwish’s work was «I do not want this poem to end» which was released after his death in March 2009.
He died on Saturday, August 9, 2008 in a Texas Medical Center in Houston, USA.His body was buried on August 13 in the city of Ramallah.
The poems of Darwish have been sung by many singers including those by Marcel Khalifa, Bashar Zarkan and Majeda al-Romi.
Raghda Sawas