Darwish’s work remains controversial in Israel. In 2016, Israel’s Army Radio broadcast a Hebrew recitation of Darwish’s “Identity Card.” The poem, written in 1964, is Darwish’s most famous and most requested. “Identity Card” accuses Israel of stealing Palestine’s orchards and farmland, leaving “nothing for us / Except for these rocks.” The poem includes the notorious lines:
Write down on the top of the first page:
I do not hate people
And I do not steal from anyone
But if I starve
I will eat my oppressor’s flesh
Beware, beware of my starving
And my rage.
Defense minister Avigdor Leiberman accused Darwish of calling “in his poetry for the expulsion of the Jewish people from the State of Israel,” and compared his work to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Evidently, no one told Leiberman that one of Darwish’s poems, “Think of the Other Person,” is taught in Arab high schools in Israel as part of a unit on the Holocaust.
Not all Palestinians adored Darwish, either. “One shouldn’t forget that there are many who detest me,” he told a journalist in 2007, “both poets and those who consider themselves poets.” Some Palestinians felt he was too close to Arafat and Fatah, the political party he led. Others labeled his participation with Israeli institutions “normalization”: activities hardliners equate with treason. Darwish’s reluctance to praise the martyrs of the Second Intifada also angered many Palestinians, especially conservative Islamic leaders. But Darwish never saw heroism in those who killed themselves to kill others. He believed a martyr, or shahid, acts out of misery and desperation, not out of a desire for paradise. A martyr’s death was a tragedy to mourn rather than a sacrifice to celebrate. Darwish wrote:
The martyr explains: I have not searched beyond the distance
For eternity’s virgins, I love life
On Earth, among the pines and figs,
But I had no access to it.
I’ve searched for it, using every last thing I own:
Blood in a body of azure.
Kanafani perished in a car-bomb blast, but Darwish died from another sort of detonation. “I am carrying a small explosive charge in my heart, which could go off at any moment,” he once told a friend. Darwish suffered a heart attack in Vienna in 1984 and another in Belgium in 1998. He quit smoking and drank less of his beloved coffee. Then, in 2008, he traveled to Houston for a third surgery. He felt anxious about the complicated operation, and his mother pleaded with him not to go. Darwish didn’t survive. He offered no eloquent farewell to befit a poet of his stature. Instead, he died as he lived: quiet, modest, and private.
Years earlier, while he brewed coffee beneath the rockets in Beirut, Darwish imagined his own funeral. He wrote that he wanted a “well-organized” memorial, wreaths of red and yellow roses, and “a radio announcer who’s not a chatterer, whose voice is not too throaty, and who can put on a convincing show of sadness.” Darwish wanted an elegant coffin from which he could eavesdrop on the mourners as they gossiped about his womanizing, his dandy’s taste in clothes, his Swiss bank account, and the rugs in his house that are “so plush you sink into them up to your knees.” He wrote: “I’ll smile in my coffin and try to say, ‘Enough!’ I’ll try to come back to life, but I won’t be able.”
I wonder what Darwish would have thought of his actual funeral. The ruler of the United Arab Emirates arranged for Darwish’s body to be flown from the United States to Jordan, where bereaved readers gathered for a ceremony at the Marika military airport. There, the PLO representative in the Arab League called him “the moon of the Arabs.” Then a Jordanian helicopter carried Darwish to Ramallah. Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning followed by a state funeral, an honor only ever before bestowed on Yasser Arafat—and not bestowed since. Abbas also delivered the first eulogy. Tens of thousands gathered beneath an August sun to line the streets of Darwish’s funeral procession. Left-wing members of the Israeli Knesset also attended. Darwish’s elder brother and their mother, eighty-five years old and wheelchair-bound, arrived at the ceremony in an Israeli ambulance hired by the family. The two lived in Upper Galilee, and as Arabs with Israeli citizenship they needed special documents to attend. Mourners circulated a petition demanding permission to bury Darwish in the Galilee, close to al-Birwa. His family, however, wanted him to be buried in a place where all Palestinians could visit him. “I realize, of course, that he is no longer just my son,” his mother said, “but the son of the entire Palestinian people.”
They buried Darwish on a hilltop in Ramallah. I visited his tomb each time I traveled there. Darwish’s wide white gravestone resembles the blank pages of an open notebook. A recording of Darwish reciting his poems plays in a repeating loop inside the adjacent museum, which holds a collection of his personal effects: his desk, his pens and eyeglasses, his car keys and cigarette lighter, and white coffee cups. “Dark-colored cups spoil the freedom of the coffee,” he once wrote.
Mahmoud Darwish is as close to a saint as the Palestinians have ever had. Each time I climbed the hill to his tomb felt like an act of pilgrimage. Still, I felt Darwish was out of place here. He always considered Ramallah just another place of exile. The city was not his home. I wanted to see what he had left behind in 1948. So I asked Abu Ahmed to take me to al-Birwa, or at least to what remains.
Abu Ahmed drives like a proper octogenarian: erratic and a bit too slow. Once we stepped out at al-Birwa, though, he showed a stubborn sure-footedness that belied his age. The houses and cattle barns of an Israeli kibbutz and moshav now stand on much of al-Birwa’s land, but Abu Ahmed showed me a stretch of nearly buried cobblestone road and a hedge of unruly cactus that testify to the Palestinians who lived here. He led me to an old and overgrown Muslim cemetery where his grandfathers are buried. Not, however, his father, who was so shattered by the destruction of al-Birwa that his health started to fail. When he died, Abu Ahmed could not bury him in al-Birwa. He lies in a Nazareth cemetery now.
Abu Ahmed pointed to a hilltop. “There were houses there, and from them you could see Haifa, Acre, Nahariya, and the sea,” he said. “But they destroyed the houses and bulldozed the land. The hills were higher before.” Gone are al-Birwa’s beehives and sunflowers. The jasmine and carob and orange trees, the basil his ancestors grew, the strawberries: These survive only in Darwish’s verses now—and in the fading memories of old men.
Afterward, I followed Abu Ahmed through a patch of tall grass to a one-room stone schoolhouse—al-Birwa’s last standing building. A locked steel door and bars across the window frames prevented us from entering, but we could see through the windows into the classroom. Two cracked blackboards, still dusty with chalk, remain fixed to one wall. Plaster had fallen off the ceiling to expose a skeleton of rusting rebar. Abu Ahmed pointed to the place where his desk used to be and to where his favorite classmates sat. “Mohammed used to sit there. He is in Jordan now. And there was Abdullah Aishan, who died a few years ago.”
Darwish studied here, too. “White letters on a blackboard inspire the awe of dawn in the countryside,” he once wrote. Darwish couldn’t have spent more than a year in this classroom. He was only seven years old when he fled the village with Abu Ahmed, but I knew he was already writing poetry by then. As I peered into the dilapidated stone schoolhouse, I wanted to believe that Darwish first learned to love language here. I imagined his eyes widening as his teacher read poetry to the class. I imagined young Mahmoud penning his first lines of verse—marked by simple end rhymes, no doubt—in front of those old blackboards. I wanted to believe that Darwish was thinking about this schoolhouse when he later wrote:
What a game! What magic! The world is gradually born out of words. In this way, school becomes a playground for the imagination . . . and you run to it with the joy of one who is promised the gift of a discovery. Not only to memorize the lesson, but also to rely on the skill of naming things. Whatever is distant becomes near. Whatever
is sealed opens up. If you do not misspell “river,” the river will flow through your notebook. The sky, too, becomes one of your personal belongings if you do not misspell it.
I wanted to believe that I stood where Darwish, the poet, began.
I glanced over at Abu Ahmed as he stared into the classroom. His eyes were shining. He’d told me earlier that he visits the village often, sometimes to tend to his grandfathers’ graves or just to walk among the roads he once knew. He used to come alone, but he doesn’t feel safe here anymore. The sons and grandsons of the moshavim are “radical and provocative,” he said. “Their fathers were less violent.” Now he comes with visitors like me to show them where the olive trees used to grow and point out the stables that stand where his father’s house stood. He likes to tell al-Birwa’s story. But in those silent moments at the schoolhouse window, I felt that Abu Ahmed had forgotten I was there at all. He’d disappeared into his schoolboy memories. He’d lost himself in all that he’d lost.
After a few moments, though, I interrupted him. I needed to know something else. “When did you realize that you would never live here again?” I asked.
Abu Ahmed looked at the ground. “I still hope to return.”
2
Whenever My Sore Heart Gets Hungry
Palestinians wish each other a sabah al-khair, or “morning of goodness,” and respond with sabah al-noor, or “morning of light.” The greeting bears a warmth and poetry my cold English “good morning” lacks. In Palestine, this morning light shifts the olive leaves to green from silver, and dyes Ramallah’s limestone buildings the color of cream. The morning also sharpens the fragrance of orange blossoms and of the jasmine growing in the courtyard of the library near my guesthouse. Though I could not see them over the garden wall, I could smell the flowers as I passed by.
During my days in Ramallah, I’d buy breakfast provisions from the shops a little up the road from my guesthouse. Plastic tubs of hummus and labneh, and tiny bags of za’atar—a salty blend of thyme, sumac, and sesame I ate with pita warmed over my stove’s gas burners. Sometimes I’d walk to the center of town for morning falafel or to stock up on Arabic coffee so freshly roasted the bag was nearly too hot to hold. Men gathered in the barbershops, mobile phone stores, or on the plastic chairs lining the sidewalks in front of cafés while their wives, sisters, and daughters shopped in the main market. Vendors hawked watermelon, muskmelon, and pale pumpkins. They splashed water on mounds of mint and declared the virtues of tiny eggplants and blooming zucchini. I bought cucumbers and tomatoes and tiny bulbs of baby fennel here. Green chickpeas encased in stubborn pods. Apricots. Ramallah is not the most beautiful of cities, but for all of this.
Barghouti found beauty here, too. He wrote of the “swinging slopes” of Ramallah’s hills and “the green that speaks in twenty languages of beauty.” He thought Ramallah an odd place, never masculine or solemn, and always “first to catch on to some new craze.” Barghouti watched the traditional Palestinian dabke dances in Ramallah, but he also danced the tango. He played snooker and grew to love movies. Barghouti’s cinemas are all gone now, but boys still crowd the downtown billiards halls. And Ramallah remains on trend. Now that tango is passé, a Mexican restaurant offers rooftop salsa dancing on Tuesday nights. Women wearing Western fashions drink mojitos at slick cocktail bars, their hair loose on their shoulders. Twice a week, Vintage Café serves fresh sushi—spicy tuna rolls, California maki, and something called Finding Nemo Soup. A youth center houses Palestine’s first skateboard park. Yoga classes abound.
Ramallah’s gravitational pull on Palestine’s literary class has also endured. In the years following Oslo, the city was where exiled writers like Darwish and Barghouti came to reassemble their fragmented identities into poems, stories, and songs. Ramallah granted them desks to write at, stages to read from, and cafés to gather in. A quarter-century later, Ramallah remains the center of Palestinian artistic expression and home to a new generation of authors. Many of the writers I wanted to meet live, or have lived, in Ramallah. So I found a place to stay, hung around Ramallah’s cafés, and made a few friends.
The A. M. Qattan Foundation, a Palestinian cultural center housed in a beautiful old stone mansion, occupies one of Ramallah’s hilltops. Qattan’s managers allowed me to stay in the simple one-room guesthouse they reserve for visiting artists. I once returned to the guesthouse after three days away to find my bathroom crawling with hundreds of fat winged ants. Mahmoud Abu Hashhash, Qattan’s director of culture and arts programming, told me, “It is because of the hot dry wind from the south. It is called khamsin.” Mahmoud was less able to explain the sudden appearance of a tiny black-headed kukri snake next to my toilet a few days earlier. But I didn’t meet with Mahmoud to talk about my bathroom menagerie. I wanted to talk about the poetry scene in Palestine, and in Ramallah in particular, following the death of Darwish.
“The passing of Mahmoud Darwish changed the scene dramatically,” Mahmoud told me. “He used to have a big shadow on the literary scene in Palestine, especially the poetry scene. Writers used to struggle to get out of his shadow.” The entire literary community, in Palestine and throughout the Arab world, focused on every new collection Darwish published, while other writers starved for attention. “Now it is different,” Mahmoud said. “I don’t want to sound as if Darwish’s passing was an advantage, but I try to track how things have changed. It is really great to rediscover the importance of other poets. This gives us a sense of diversity that we could not see before because whenever we talked about the poetry scene, we talked about Darwish, Darwish, Darwish.”
The local poetry community experienced a different shift a decade earlier, in the wake of the Oslo Accords. Poets like Darwish who had been living in exile returned to Palestine and worked with the new cultural institutions. The newly formed House of Poetry committed to seeking out Palestine’s young poets, Mahmoud among them, and introducing them to the world. It was the first such manifesto since Ghassan Kanafani decided to present his “writers of resistance” back in the 1960s. “But we were not resistance writers,” Mahmoud said. “We were, in a sense, calling for the normal presentation of the Palestinian. Not the hero. Not the victim. We’d had enough of these labels. Khalas.”
Until Oslo, most Palestinian writers engaged in a collective national project. They considered writing a political act, part of the effort toward achieving dreams of independence and justice. Their work traded in blunt patriotic symbols like tricolor Palestinian flags, keffiyehs, Kalashnikovs, and the keys to village houses lost in the Nakba. The writing during the First Intifada, in particular, presented Palestine and the resistance as proud, unified, and strong. The literature glorified casualties of war. Every young man was fearless, every child pure, and every poem a stone hurled at the enemy.
But Oslo betrayed the poets’ resistance. Palestinian writers, and artists in general, realized committing their art to the political cause had achieved nothing. They had wasted their time and talents waving the flag, only to have politicians sign away their country. So Mahmoud and his poet friends scrapped the clichés and began to use their work to express their personal lives rather than national aspirations. “The political discourse changed, and in a sense, people’s tastes changed,” Mahmoud said. Any art that traded in old nationalist symbols, whether on the page or canvas, “was not valued under the reality of Oslo.”
I’ve heard people say that this was a new style of Palestinian writing that emerged only in the 1990s, but Mahmoud disagrees. Diaspora Palestinians started writing about their internal lives more than a decade earlier. Darwish, after all, devoted pages and pages of verse to the brewing of coffee in Beirut in 1982. But the poets who remained in Palestine had no idea. Before Oslo and the return of writers like Darwish—and before the internet changed everything—Palestine’s poets had little access to this poetry. They didn’t know what their exiled icons were writing about.
The Palestinian poetry scene blossomed when these writers returned,
especially in Ramallah. Mahmoud and his fellow poets used to take pages to the Ministry of Culture, Birzeit University, or the House of Poetry to be critiqued by poets like Ghassan Zaqtan, Zakaria Mohammed, and Hussein Barghouti. This was the first time emerging poets could interact with the well-established exiles whose work, and lives, they so admired. “It was a very exciting time,” Mahmoud said. “They were really our mentors. We were very close to them. Sometimes they would invite Darwish to come and speak to us.”
Mahmoud was especially grateful for the tutelage of Hussein Barghouti, an intellectual and writer who studied abroad in Hungary and the United States before returning to Ramallah. Al-Barghouti wrote poems, novels, and essays—and translated Romeo and Juliet into Arabic—but Mahmoud knows him best for his mentoring of the new generation of poets. Al-Barghouti used to hold court for hours with young writers at Birzeit University. Mahmoud remembers bringing him a stack of fifteen poems to read. Mahmoud sat in his office as al-Barghouti read each of them. Occasionally al-Barghouti would look up from the text and comment, “I will remember you from this poem” or “This is something really new.” “He was the most generous cultural figure,” Mahmoud said. “He would give you whatever knowledge he had and spend as much time with us as he could. He would stay talking for ten hours. He was great.” Al-Barghouti’s death in 2002 dealt a serious blow to the local literary scene.
The cultural supplement in Al-Ayyam newspaper also served as a boon to Ramallah’s young poets. “It was very important for us to find a space to be published in Al-Ayyam because it was one of the only chances to be published locally, the only chance to be able to write a poem or a text and have it be read by people,” Mahmoud said. “Now it is less significant. You can just write on your Facebook page.”
Pay No Heed to the Rockets Page 4