The experience of the late poet Mahmoud Darwish is a major experience in the context of the development of all Arab poetry (Getty)
The anniversary of the birth of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) falls on March 13 every year, while the deceased continues to be present in absence since his passing on August 9, 2008, as he is present every now and then through his immortal poetry that never ceases to exist. It is still read and cited to express the life of the Palestinian people and people, and their tragic suffering that arose due to the Israeli occupation’s control over the land and people.
Darwish linked his birth and his life to the Palestinian existence, and in many of his poems he stopped at March, the month of birth and the month of the land. In his famous poem (The Land), he combined his biography with the biography of Palestine since it fell under the British Mandate, and then what followed that in 1948, which falls under the name of the Nakba in history. Modern Palestinian:
In the month of March, thirty years and five wars ago,
I was born on a pile of luminous gravestones.
My father was in the grip of the English.
And my mother pats her braid
and mine on the grass.
I used to love “the
beloved’s wounds” and collect them in my pockets, and they would wither at noon.
The bullets passed over my lilac moon and it did not break,
but time passed by my lilac moon and it fell accidentally... And
in the month of March we spread out on the earth .
In the month of March, the earth spreads among us
mysterious dates
and simple celebrations
, and we discover The sea under the windows
and the lilac moon on the cypress.
In the month of March, we enter the first prison, we enter the first love
, and the memories pour into a village in the fence
. We were born there, and we have not crossed the shadows of the quince.
How can you escape from my paths, oh shadows of the quince?
In the month of March, we enter our first love,
our first prison,
and memories come to life as a dinner of the Arabic language.
From a poetic standpoint, the experience of the late poet Mahmoud Darwish is considered a major experience in the context of the development of Arab poetry as a whole. His poetry spanned nearly half a century, because he began early and published his first collection, “Birds Without Wings,” in a hurry to announce himself in 1960 before this had matured. experience, and therefore the poet deleted this collection from his biography for artistic reasons.
However, it is a collection that indicates the strong orientation towards poetry and belief in its value, and its early poems reveal, without pun, his early readings and resources.
In his introduction, the young poet said: “These poems sanctify freedom, kiss the martyrs, sing at the window of my beloved, and cry with a lost homeless person...”
He writes about the title sentence: “And birds without wings were created to fly and soar... and the moments dizzy in their flight... Fate willed for them to clip their wings and bleed their blood on the thorns of pain and deprivation in vain and without end... For these birds I sing, I suffer, and I rage, and for their sake I scream in the face of the sun so that it may revive me.” From the threads of its rays, its feathers, to start again tomorrow. And for the tomorrow of these birds, my oldest poems.”
(Mahmoud Darwish, Haifa, 1960).
When we read Darwish and examine his career, we feel that he was born to be a poet, with an innate, limitless talent, and our appreciation for his talent increases when we realize that he does not belong to a literary family, nor to a family environment in which there are poets and writers. His parents are simple farmers, refugees in their homeland, from the common people. Palestinians, they did not belong to the Palestinian elite before the Nakba.
His formal education stopped at the secondary stage, after which he devoted himself to poetry and early work in journalism and politics, but he achieved, through his diligence and self-sufficiency, what schools and universities could not give him, which is represented in his poetry in the first place, and in all of his writings and cultural contributions in general.
This means that he taught himself, relying on a kind of special aesthetic and political education, free to study and read during his long career.
He linked all of this to the development of his poetry and the stages that he passed with superior talent, refined by culture and conscious craftsmanship, respect for poetry and awareness of its stimuli, and its artistic, rhythmic and linguistic demands, within a framework of accurate knowledge of the history of Arab and international poetry, ancient and modern.
Darwish belonged to poetry and to Palestine together, an authentic affiliation that knew no stuttering or hesitation, and he reached a high level of culture and knowledge at various levels, which he also knew how to employ in his poetry and prose.
Although Darwish was immersed in the Palestinian national and political movement throughout his life, inside the occupied country, and during the stage of exit and exile, he maintained the originality and renewal of his poetry, and was aware of the siege of political concern and the danger of the national function that was placed on his poetry, so he made a not-so-hidden effort to achieve a balance between the function Aestheticism and the requirements of the political and national moment. His poetry deeply expressed the concerns and problems of the Palestinian identity, in light of the threat to which it was exposed, and it became a tool of resistance against erasure and against aggression against human existence and language.
The aesthetics of poetry and struggle
Darwish accepted the challenge and sometimes struggled under its weight. How can you be a poet distinguished by the standards of beauty, poetry and language, and at the same time meet the requirements of your national cause?
In its various stages, starting from the occupied territories, this question occupied the center of his consciousness, and his early article or cry published in Al-Jadeed magazine (Haifa, 1969) entitled “Save us from this cruel love” is the best evidence of this, as it condemned the excessive praise with which resistance poetry was received, and demanded Arab criticism must be freed from the illusion of glorification, flattery, and sympathy, and not hesitate to criticize artistic mediocrity.
His career was characterized by transformations, transitions, and developments. It was not of one color, in terms of its poetic manifestations, and certainly the poet continued to develop and change during it, and this is the natural thing, and what is unnatural is for him to remain in one rigid, repetitive form, thus entering into stereotyping and habituation.
He is aware of these transformations and sees them as renewed births of his extended experience: “Few poets are born poetically all at once, but I was born gradually and in separate batches, and I am still learning to walk the difficult, long road to my poem that I have not yet written.”
In another context, he refers to his keenness to review and revise his poem as if he were one of the poets of the craft or the annals: “I am one of those who write the text twice. The first time, my poetic style and my unconsciousness lead me, and the second time they are led by my awareness of the requirements for constructing the poem, and often the writing does not resemble The second is an image of the first writing, nothing like it.”
He is a great poet with his art and artistry, and his keenness to develop and not stop at one stage or poem, and perhaps for this reason he did not want the public to imprison him in his first poems, the most famous of which is “Identity Card” with which he first became famous: “People recognized me, but that does not mean That I remain, or that my hair remains, her prisoner.”
Darwish is a conscious poet and theorist who possesses a mature awareness of the poem and the poetic experience. You find this awareness in his dialogues and in his prose writings, which brings us to an important fact that links poetry with critical awareness, and that a capable and good poet must have a theory or quasi-theory that links the aesthetic with the intellectual and political.
Among his theoretical glimpses that explain some of his awareness is his saying: “I, who is called a Palestinian poet or the poet of Palestine, are required of me and my historical policeman to establish the place in the language, to protect my reality from myth, and to possess both of them in order to be a part of history and a witness to what history did to me at the same time. Therefore, my right requires Tomorrow is a rebellion against the present, and a defense of the legitimacy of my existence in the past that was thrown into the debate, where the poem becomes evidence of existence or non-existence, and as for the inhabitants of the poem, poetry historians do not care about them.”
Darwish adapted poetry with rare skill, using a wide range of tools, methods, and skills in dealing with language, rhythm, and image, in a contemporary poetic spirit that merges the lyric with the epic and the narrative, connects poetry with prose, links abstract meanings to the details of life and reality, and links Arab heritage to global culture, in order to express the subtleties of The personal and general experience, that is, the poet’s experience and the experience of the Palestinian community to which he belongs.
Despite his wide popularity, he did not surrender to the public and its demands, but rather he was led by what was required by aesthetic awareness and the measures of poetry and poetics.
His creative career resulted in about 25 poetry collections, 10 prose works, and a large number of literary, intellectual and political dialogues.
It is open to reading, interpretation, interpretation, and enjoyment, meaning that every reader who loves poetry may find in it something that will benefit him or entertain him.
In this brief context, it is sufficient for us to point out some of the things that would be better to advance in the service of this great experience:
First: Not all of his poetry was published in collections or books. This is because he was very reviewing and meticulous in constructing his collections and collections. Therefore, he had poetry published in newspapers and periodicals inside and outside Palestine, and his published poetic works did not include it, for various reasons and circumstances.
Today, it is necessary to collect all of his poetry as part of the poet’s precious “legacy,” and classify, preserve, and publish it in a manner befitting his status and poetics.
Second: There is also a prose “legacy” of Mahmoud Darwish, only a few of which were published in books, meaning that his written “legacy” is much broader than what he published in books that people know to this day. He continued to write prose because of his direct work in journalism, culture, and politics, and he has Hundreds of articles, writings, and dialogues that were not collected in a book.
Living peoples are concerned with all the heritage of their poets, including what the poet himself does not consider important. This heritage is a kind of “history” and it is important in all its details. He leaves determining its matter and benefiting from it after collecting and classifying it to scholars, those interested, and readers, which requires collecting his articles from their scattered resources and contexts. And compare it with what was collected in books and published with what was not published, dated and classified accurately and clearly.
Third: Darwish’s poetry is in need not only of critical studies, but also of expanding Darwish studies to include various types of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and explanatory books that clarify it, place it in its historical context, and explain some of its mysteries in terms of spatial references (the Dictionary of Darwish Places). Likewise, in his poetry there are hundreds of real-life figures. The historical and symbolic aspects that need clarification shed light on his poetry. We need a “Dictionary of Darwish Characters,” for example, similar to what was done by an appalling Palestinian scholar, Dr. Hussein Hamza, when he wrote “A Dictionary of Central Motifs in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish.” It was a major work. It shows the reader some of the recurring elements and the places they appear in his works so that they can be compared and approached in studies or even close readings of this rich poetry.
I will mention one example of the benefit that such definitions might add: The poem “A Soldier Dreams of White Lilies” is an important and problematic poem in March, related to his view of the other, and it hosts an Israeli soldier who is not named in the poem, but after several decades the former soldier reveals himself, and... Historian Shlomo Sand, one of the new historians, is the author of the well-known book “The Invention of the Jewish People.” He fully explains the poem’s connection to him and his knowledge of Darwish in the introduction to his book translated into Arabic.
Fourth: Darwish did not write his poetic biography, but rather replaced it with poems and prose writings of a biographical nature. His complete, detailed biography is still unwritten, and writing it is not an easy matter, but it is not difficult in light of the development of methods for writing heterosexual biography and the existence of sufficient sources for it.
Creating such a reference biography is a qualitative addition to what serves this experience, as all living peoples create biographies, not just one biography, for their creators.
Fifth: Encouraging specialists in comparative literature and foreign literature to conduct comparative studies that place Darwish in the context of international poetry, especially in light of the experiences of some poets whose poetry he admired, from Eliot, Lorca, Nazim Hikmet, Cavafy, and Ritsos, all the way to Octavio Bath, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Ginsberg, and others.
Sixth: Darwish’s last collection, “I Don’t Want This Poem to End,” which was published in 2009, arouses anger and pain. At the very least, it is in need of scientific investigation and new publication on sound foundations. The published work contains errors that cannot be ignored and kept silent about. Darwish belongs to a people, but rather For an entire nation, he does not accept to publish his poetry collections with its prosodic, spelling, grammatical, or typographical errors. He is known for striving for accuracy and correctness before beauty and eloquence.
Bibliography Mahmoud Darwish
Poetry collections:
"Birds Without Wings" (1960), Haifa.
"Olive Leaves" (1964), Haifa.
“A Lover from Palestine”, (1966), Nazareth.
"Late Night" (1967), Acre.
“Birds Die in Galilee,” (1969), Beirut.
“My Beloved Awakens from Her Sleep,” (1970), Beirut.
"I Love You or I Don't Love You" (1972), Beirut.
“Attempt No. 7,” (1973), Beirut. “That is her picture, and this is the lover’s suicide,” (1975), Beirut. “Weddings,” (1977), Beirut. “Praise of the High Shadow,” (1983), Beirut. “Siege In Praise of the Sea" (1984), Beirut. "It is a song... it is a song" (1986), Beirut. "Less Roses" (1986), Beirut. "I See What I Want" (1990), Beirut. "One Ten Planets", (1992), Beirut. "Why did you leave the horse alone?", (1995), Beirut. "The Stranger's Bed", (1999), Beirut. "Mural", (2000), Beirut. "State of Siege" (2002), Beirut. “Don’t apologize for what you did,” (2004), Beirut. “Like an almond blossom or beyond,” (2005), Beirut. “The Butterfly Effect,” (2008), Beirut. “I don’t want this poem to end ", (2009). "The Dictator's Balanced Speeches", (2013), Haifa. (Published in Youm 7 magazine and in the Egyptian Sha'ar magazine. Darwish did not publish it in a book during his lifetime.)
Prose works:
"Something About Home" (1971).
"The Diary of Ordinary Sadness" (1973).
"Goodbye War, Goodbye Peace" (1974).
"Memory to Forget" (1987).
“In describing our condition” (1987).
"Waiting for the Barbarians" (1987).
“The Messages (Mahmoud Darwish and Samih Al-Qasim)” (1999).
“In the Presence of Absence” (2006).
“The Confusion of the Return,” (2007).
Source: Al Jazeera