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An Arab poet that touched this Jew
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Mahmoud Darwish, 1942-2008
Mahmoud Darwish, a kind of poet laureate of the Palestinian people, died late this summer—a fact probably not known to many in my community. We have our own wrenching, uncompromising, liturgical relationship with the land of Israel and the region historically known as Palestine. We have our own poets and prophets and bards and our own precious burdens that make us cleave to the land, especially in the categories of language and memory.
These are perhaps the very reasons that the lyrics of this brilliant poet, whose life was so vividly intertwined with the Israel-Palestine drama, almost to the very years (he was 67; the UN attempted to partition the British mandate of Palestine in 1947 and Israel survived the combined Arab invasion to become a state in 1948), might touch the soul of a Jew. It must be added that I happen to be a native of Israel whose parents both participated in Israel’s bitter War of Independence.
The Jews who created and/or came to Israel in the aftermath of the genocide of European Jewry unquestionably remain the quintessential ingathering of outcasts and refugees since the end of World War II. Therefore, we would resonate with the idiom of exile. Without even delving into the political history of the Jewish state (which I’d be prepared to defend in another setting), I nonetheless ask: What Jew would not hear something in this fragment:?
One day I shall become a bird
And wrest my being from my non-being
The longer my wings will burn,
The closer I am to the truth,
Risen from the ashes.
So ironic: I recall as a 4th-grader in Israel, reading the poetry of Chaim Nachman Bialik, the
renowned Hebrew versifier, who described his jealousy, as a little boy in Europe, of a little bird—because he, Bialik, was in exile, and the bird could wing free to Israel.
Mahmoud Darwish, though he was the conscience of the Palestinian people, nonetheless derided the corruption of the Palestinian Authority and he was repulsed by the tyranny of the late Palestinian leader, Yasir Arafat (according to a sympathetic obituary published in the UK’s The Economist).
No, it not about politics or supremacy that Darwish intoned in his heart. Consider this, imagined about a Palestinian and a Jew both trapped in a hole, which he penned near the end of his life:
…Time has passed us by,
Our fate is an exception to the rule
Here lie a killer and the killed, asleep in one hole
And it remains for another poet to write the end of the script.
God Almighty, at this holiday season, with too many graves and too many ashes, won’t You at last become the poet?
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