Mahmoud Darwish: Two Years Gone, Forever Present

Two years ago this August the great poet and freedom fighter Mahmoud Darwish died.  I had heard of Darwish, but it was watching his funeral and the days surrounding his death live on Al Jazeera as well as the reaction from the best of the solidarity movement that I was grabbed by the voice and saddened and angry that my Western ears had never heard his words before.  Watching the Palestinians bury Darwish and the obvious, genuine, heart-broken grief expressed by the multitude at his funeral belied the whole Western and Zionist narrative on Palestine.  What other people would bury a poet as a national leader?  In Darwish the Palestinian people may have had their most effective, particularly universal, voice, but it was that particular universality of the Palestinian experience that Darwish expressed.  No wonder the flowing tears in Palestine at his death.  Darwish was a Palestinian and an activist; one who lived the long Palestinian reality of war and exile and betrayal and solidarity and resilience.   His words spoke of the Palestinian plight (though certainly not only this), but in doing so he spoke of a world of Palestinians, a world of dispossessed and despised, the homeless and the human.

Now, every new encounter with his words leaves me wanting more and am wondering if readers might point me to definitive translations and/or particularly good volumes available in English, though I have been tempted to learn Arabic for the sole purpose of understanding Darwish as he reads aloud his poems with his melodic, almost mesmerizing (in the best possible sense of the term) cadence.  I find myself listening to him speak, especially in front of large, enraptured audiences (what crowds, what respect for this poet!), though I can’t make out at all the words he says.  The conveyance of those words with certain eloquence and an elegant rage requires no wordly translation, it simply exudes life and is impossible to retreat in the face of it.  Even in a language I don’t understand, the sound of Darwish’s voice demands that I listen, and I can say that I have felt, at least, that I might have understood.

With the passing of Darwish, humanity lost one of its finest, most intimate voices.  His words and his life are the verification that we humans might have a say in our own human nature, despite the inhuman and unnatural treatment meted out to humanity and the natural world by the ‘fallen angels of our nature’.  Long may we hear it, in a thousand languages, read aloud in a million places or silently at home or in prison or both.  Three from Darwish then, all in different forms with English translations and one with Darwish reciting in Arabic.  Mahmoud Darwish, Presenté!

I Am Yusuf spoken by Darwish with English subtitles, a hint of his remarkable delivery

Don’t Write History As Poetry: Translated from Arabic by Fady Joudah

Don’t write history as poetry, because the weapon is
The historian. And the historian doesn’t get fever
Chills when he names his victims and doesn’t listen
To the guitar’s rendition. And history is the dailiness
Of weapons prescribed upon our bodies. “The
Intelligent genius is the mighty one.” And history
Has no compassion so that we can long for our
Beginning, and no intention so that we can know what’s ahead
And what’s behind . . . and it has no rest stops by
The railroad tracks for us to bury the dead, for us to look
Toward what time has done to us over there, and what
We’ve done to time. As if we were of it and outside it.
History is neither logical nor intuitive that we can break
What is left of our myth about happy times,
Nor is it a myth that we can accept our dwelling at the doors
Of judgment day. It is in us and outside us . . . and a mad
Repetition, from the catapult to the nuclear thunder.
Aimlessly we make it and it makes us . . . Perhaps
History wasn’t born as we desired, because
The Human Being never existed?
Philosophers and artists passed through there . . .
And the poets wrote down the dailiness of their purple flowers
Then passed through there . . . and the poor believed
In sayings about paradise and waited there . . .
And gods came to rescue nature from our divinity
And passed through there. And history has no
Time for contemplation, history has no mirror
And no bare face. It is unreal reality
Or unfanciful fancy, so don’t write it.
Don’t write it, don’t write it as poetry!

I Long For My Mother’s Bread, sung (exquisitely) and played by Marcel Khalife with English subtitles.  I shared this with my mother last year after the passing of her mother, my grandmother.  From the Levant to the lower American Midwest, common tears.

And finally, without subtitles, Darwish reciting Praise of Shadows in Algeria, 1983 after the siege of Beirut, flight of the PLO from Lebanon and the massacres at Sabra and Shatilla. Written on the deck of a boat leaving Lebanon for Tunisia.  Try first watching and listening and then reading the excerpts.

‘In Praise of the High Shadow
It is for you to be, or not to be,
It is for you to create, or not to create.
All existential questions, behind your shadow, are a farce,
And the universe is your small notebook, and you are its creator.
So write in it the paradise of genesis,
Or do not write it,
You, you are the question.
What do you want?
As you march from a legend, to a legend?
A flag?
What good have flags ever done?
Have they ever protected a city from the shrapnel of a bomb?
What do you want?
A newspaper?
Would the papers ever hatch a bird, or weave a grain?
What do you want?
Police?
Do the police know where the small earth will get impregnated from the
coming winds?
What do you want?
Sovereignty over ashes?
While you are the master of our soul; the master of our ever-changing
existence?
So leave,
For the place is not yours, nor are the garbage thrones.
You are the freedom of creation,
You are the creator of the roads,
And you are the anti-thesis of this era.
And leave,
Poor, like a prayer,
Barefoot, like a river in the path of rocks,
And delayed, like a clove.
You, you are the question.
So leave to yourself,
For you are larger than people’s countries,
Larger than the space of the guillotine.
So leave to yourself,

Resigned to the wisdom of your heart,
Shrugging off the big cities, and the drawn sky,
And building an earth under your hand’s palm – a tent, an idea, or a grain.
So head to Golgotha,
And climb with me,
To return to the homeless soul its beginning.
What do you want?
For you are the master of our soul,
The master of our ever-changing existence.
You are the master of the ember,
The master of the flame.
How large the revolution,
How narrow the journey,
How grand the idea,
How small the state!’ (excerpt)