Mahmoud Darwish (Arabic: مَحمُود دَرْوِيْش, romanized: Maḥmūd Darwīsh; 13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008) was a Palestinian author and poet. He wrote the Palestinian Declaration of Independence, which formally established the State of Palestine in November 1988, and is widely regarded as the country's national poet. His poetry and other literature, for which he won numerous awards internationally, was published in Arabic, while he also spoke English, French, and Hebrew.
In his poetic works, Darwish explored Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. He has been described as incarnating and reflecting "the tradition of the political poet in Islam, the man of action whose action is poetry." He served as an editor for several literary magazines in both Israel and the Palestinian territories.
Darwish was born to a family of land-owning Arab Palestinians in al-Birwa, which was situated in the Western Galilee, on 13 March 1941. He was the second child of Salim Darwish and Houreyyah. While his mother was illiterate, Darwish was educated and taught how to read by his grandfather. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, al-Birwa was captured and subsequently razed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), prompting Darwish's family to flee to Lebanon, where they settled first in Jezzine and then in Damour.
A year later, Darwish's family returned to Israel and settled in Deir al-Asad. Darwish attended high school in Kafr Yasif before eventually moving to Haifa. Although Israel's Citizenship Law of 1952 was conferred upon Arab Palestinians who remained within Israel's borders after the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Darwish and his family were only granted residency status.
In 1970, Darwish left Israel to study in the Soviet Union, where he attended Moscow State University for one year. In 1971, he moved to Cairo, Egypt, where he worked for the daily newspaper al-Ahram.
Darwish was twice married and divorced. His first wife was the writer Rana Kabbani. After they divorced, in the mid-1980s, he married an Egyptian translator, Hayat Heeni. He had no children. The "Rita" of Darwish's poems was a Jewish woman whom he loved when he was living in Haifa; he revealed in an interview with French journalist Laure Adler that her name is Tamar Ben-Ami. The relationship was the subject of the film Write Down, I Am an Arab by filmmaker Ibtisam Mara'ana.
Darwish had a history of heart disease, suffering a heart attack in 1984. He had two heart operations, in 1984 and 1998.
He published his first book of poetry, Asafir bila ajniha, or "Wingless Birds," at the age of 19. He initially published his poems in Al Jadid, the literary periodical of the Israeli Communist Party, eventually becoming its editor. Later, he was assistant editor of Al Fajr, a literary periodical published by the Israeli Workers' Party (Mapam).
Over his lifetime of 67 years Darwish published more than 30 volumes of poetry and eight books of prose. At one time or another, he was editor of the periodicals Al Jadid, Al Fajr, Shu'un Filastiniyya, and Al Karmel. He was also one of the contributors of Lotus, a literary magazine financed by Egypt and the Soviet Union.
By the age of 17, Darwish was writing poetry about the suffering of Palestinian refugees in the Nakba and the inevitability of their return, and had begun reciting his poems at poetry festivals. Seven years later, on 1 May 1965, when Darwish read his poem "Bitaqat huwiyya" ["Identity Card"] to a crowd in a Nazareth movie house, there was a tumultuous reaction. Within days the poem had spread throughout the country and the Arab world. Published in his second volume "Leaves of Olives" (Haifa, 1964), the six stanzas of the poem repeat the cry "Write down: I am an Arab." His 1966 "To My Mother" became an unofficial Palestinian anthem, and his 1967 poem "A Soldier Dreams Of White Lilies" about a conversation with a young Shlomo Sand as an Israeli soldier stirred debate due to its portrayal of the Israeli soldier. Darwish's poems were translated into Danish and published in various publications, including Politisk Revy.
Darwish's early writings are in the classical Arabic style. He wrote monorhymed poems adhering to the metrics of traditional Arabic poetry. In the 1970s, he began to stray from these precepts and adopted a "free-verse" technique that did not abide strictly by classical poetic norms. The quasi-Romantic diction of his early works gave way to a more personal, flexible language, and the slogans and declarative language that characterized his early poetry were replaced by indirect and ostensibly apolitical statements, although politics was never far away.
In the 1970s, "Darwish, as a Palestinian poet of the Resistance committed himself to the ... objective of nurturing the vision of defeat and disaster (after the June War of 1967), so much so that it would 'gnaw at the hearts' of the forthcoming generations." Darwish addressed the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon in Ward aqall [Fewer Roses] (1986) and "Sa-ya'ti barabira akharun" ("Other Barbarians Will Come").
According to the Israeli author Haim Gouri, who knew him personally, Darwish's Hebrew was excellent. Four volumes of his poetry were translated into Hebrew by Muhammad Hamza Ghaneim: Bed of a Stranger (2000), Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? (2000), State of Siege (2003), and Mural (2006). Israeli poet Salman Masalha, who wrote in both Arabic and Hebrew, translated Darwish's poem Memory for Forgetfulness into Hebrew.
Darwish was impressed by the Iraqi poets Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. He cited French poet Arthur Rimbaud and American poet Allen Ginsberg as literary influences. Darwish admired the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, but described his poetry as a "challenge to me, because we write about the same place. He wants to use the landscape and history for his own benefit, based on my destroyed identity. So we have a competition: who is the owner of the language of this land? Who loves it more? Who writes it better?"
In 1973, Darwish joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and was consequently banned from entering Israel. In Beirut, Lebanon, in 1973, he edited the monthly Shu'un Filistiniyya (Palestinian Affairs) and worked as a director in the Palestinian Research Centre of the PLO. In the wake of the 1982 Lebanon War, Darwish wrote the political poems Qasidat Beirut (1982) and Madih al-zill al'ali (1983). Darwish was elected to the PLO Executive Committee in 1987.
In 1993, Darwish resigned from the PLO Executive Committee due to his opposition to the Oslo Accords. He later recounted: "All I saw in the agreement was an Israeli solution to Israeli problems and that the PLO had to perform its role in solving Israel’s security problems."
In 1996, he returned to Israel to attend the funeral of his colleague Emile Habibi, having received a permit to remain in Haifa for four days. Due to leaving the PLO, he was allowed to live in the West Bank and moved to Ramallah.
His final visit to Israel was on 15 July 2007, to attend a poetry recital at Mt. Carmel Auditorium in Haifa. There, he criticized the factional violence between Fatah and Hamas as a "suicide attempt in the streets."