Mahmoud Darwish

A village taken off the map

Darwish was born on 13 March 1941 in al-Birwa, a village in Galilee — the hilly northern region of what was then Palestine, governed by Britain under a League of Nations mandate — in the district of the port city of Acre; he was the second of the eight children of Salim Darwish and Huriyya al-Biqa'i. At the end of 1947, as fighting spread between the Arab inhabitants of Galilee and Zionist forces — the armed organisations of the Jewish community in Palestine, which was working for a Jewish state — the family fled north into southern Lebanon. He was six. The state of Israel was declared in May 1948, and the war that followed left some seven hundred thousand Arab inhabitants displaced from their homes, an exodus Palestinians call the Nakba, Arabic for the catastrophe. "The first Lebanese village I remember was Rmeish," Darwish said later. "Then we lived in Jezzine until the snow fell."

In 1949 he and his grandfather slipped back across the new border and found that al-Birwa no longer existed: it had been razed, and an Israeli moshav — a village of family smallholdings farmed cooperatively — called Ahihud, and a kibbutz, a collective farming settlement, called Yas'ur, had been built on its land. The family settled nearby, at Deir al-Asad and then al-Jadida, without papers. Because they had been absent when the new state registered its Arab population, Israeli property law classified them as "present absentees", physically there but legally unaccounted for, and their land was gone. Darwish went through elementary school in hiding and finished his secondary education at Kfar Yasif.

In 1960 he moved to Haifa and joined the Israeli Communist Party, one of the few parties of the period open to Arab citizens of Israel, which published newspapers in Arabic; he went to work on them — the daily al-Ittihad, meaning The Union, and the magazine al-Jadid, The New, which he later edited. His first collection, Birds without Wings, appeared the same year. From 1961 he was repeatedly arrested for his writing and his politics, was imprisoned for the last time in 1969, and lived under enforced residence in Haifa, a police order confining him to the city: "I was forbidden from leaving Haifa for 10 years. From 1967 until 1970, I was not allowed to leave my house. The police had the right to come at night and make sure I was still at home."

Moscow, Cairo, Beirut

In early 1970 he left to study at the Institute of Social Sciences in Moscow, dropped out after a year, and in February 1971 moved to Cairo, having decided not to go back. There he worked at al-Ahram, Egypt's leading daily newspaper, and met the writers he had grown up reading — the novelist Naguib Mahfouz, who in 1988 became the first Arabic-language winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, the short-story writer Yusuf Idris and the playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim — sharing an office with them on the paper's sixth floor. He called Cairo one of the most important stops of his life, and the place where his poetry began to change: until then, he said, Arab readers had treated anything written by a Palestinian as sacred and had therefore not really criticised it.

In 1973 he moved to Beirut to work at the Research Centre of the Palestine Liberation Organization, becoming its director and editing its monthly journal of Palestinian affairs; in 1981 he founded the cultural review Al-Karmel there. Beirut was the headquarters of the PLO — the umbrella body of Palestinian political factions, chaired by Yasser Arafat, which had moved to Lebanon after being driven out of Jordan in 1970 — and it was also, until the Lebanese civil war that began in 1975 closed in, a genuine literary capital. "I have a beautiful disease called nostalgia for Beirut," he said long afterwards.

In June 1982 the Israeli army invaded Lebanon, with the stated aim of driving the PLO out of the country, and besieged the western half of Beirut, where the organisation was based; the siege lasted about ten weeks. Darwish stayed on after the PLO's fighters were evacuated by sea at the end of August under an agreement brokered by the United States. He left only after Israeli troops entered the city in September and Lebanese Christian militiamen allied with Israel killed hundreds of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps — an Israeli commission of inquiry later found Israel's own commanders indirectly responsible for failing to prevent it — which made staying, in his words, absurd and reckless. Arab diplomats got him out to Damascus, the Syrian capital, by way of Tripoli in northern Lebanon, and from there he went to Tunis, the capital of Tunisia, where the PLO had moved its headquarters. The book that came out of those weeks, Memory for Forgetfulness — published in Arabic in 1986, and in English in Ibrahim Muhawi's translation — is a single August day in a bombarded city, and its most famous pages are about trying to make a cup of coffee while shells land on the kitchen.

Paris: "my complete birth as a poet"

Arafat told him to keep Al-Karmel going and to do it wherever he liked — London, Paris, Cyprus. Darwish registered the magazine's licence in Cyprus, had it printed in the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, and edited it from Paris, where he then lived, off and on, for about ten years from the mid-1980s. His assistant was the Kurdish-Syrian poet Salim Barakat. It was, on paper, the least settled arrangement of his life, and it produced the work he valued most.

Paris was a stop rather than a residence or a living place. But I know that in Paris my complete birth as a poet happened. If I were to classify my poetry, I cherish most the poetry that I wrote in Paris during the eighties and beyond. There, I had the opportunity to reflect and look at the homeland and the world and things from a distance — the distance of light.

The list of what he wrote in the city is most of the mature work, known in English by these translated titles: Fewer Roses, It's a Song, Eleven Planets, I See What I Want and Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, half of the collection Bed of a Stranger, and the prose of Memory for Forgetfulness. He gave two reasons for the change, and could not choose between them: distance, which let him see the whole scene at once, and the city itself. "Paris is also the city of exiled writers who come from all over the world," he said. "You find the world summarized in this city." He had wanted to come much earlier — in 1968 the French authorities turned him back at the airport, because he travelled on an Israeli laissez-passer, a document issued in place of a passport, which left the space for nationality blank, and no official was inclined to work out what that meant.

The declaration written at a Paris desk

In November 1988 the Palestine National Council — the PLO's parliament-in-exile — met in Algiers, the capital of Algeria, and proclaimed the establishment of a State of Palestine. The text it adopted was drafted by Darwish, at his desk in Paris; he was elected to the PLO's Executive Committee, its governing body, at the same session. "In Paris, I wrote the text of the declaration of the Palestinian state," he said, adding that in Paris he could still write as he pleased, despite the official position he now held.

The politics did not hold him for long. In 1993 the PLO and Israel signed the Oslo accords in Washington, the agreement that set up limited Palestinian self-government in parts of the West Bank and Gaza — the territories Israel had occupied since the war of 1967 — while leaving the largest questions of borders, refugees and Jerusalem for later negotiation. Darwish resigned from the Executive Committee in protest, saying that he wanted peace but that it had to be a just one. He never held political office again, and afterwards he pointed readers away from the posts and towards the poems: what matters about his biography, he said, is in them.

Going back, and dying abroad

In 1995 he returned to Palestine. He had hesitated for years, and the reason he gave for finally going was social as much as moral: people would say he preferred Paris to Ramallah, the West Bank town that had become the seat of the Palestinian Authority, the self-government body created by the Oslo accords. He settled first in Amman, the Jordanian capital, because it was quiet and close, and then divided his time between Amman and Ramallah, where he went on editing Al-Karmel. Travel between the West Bank and Israel required Israeli permits, and permits let him visit his mother and the site of the village he had left as a child.

The late books were written in that back-and-forth: Mural (2000), State of Siege (2002), Do Not Apologize for What You Did (2004), Almond Blossoms and Beyond (2005), In the Presence of Absence (2006) and The Trace of the Butterfly (2007). He lived alone, worked at a desk in his best clothes as though going to an official meeting, made his own coffee for visitors and refused to let anyone else do it, and played backgammon with a passion that made him shout. He was married twice, and both marriages ended by mutual consent.

He had already survived two heart operations when he flew from Amman to Houston, Texas, in July 2008 for a third. Before leaving he paid his housekeeper in advance and gave his guard his bank details, telling them he probably would not come back. He died on 9 August 2008, after open-heart surgery at the Texas Medical Center, without leaving a will. The Palestinian Authority declared three days of official mourning; his body was flown to Amman and then to Ramallah, where on 13 August tens of thousands of people attended a state funeral led by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. He is buried in the grounds beside the Ramallah Cultural Palace, where the Mahmoud Darwish Museum and a garden named al-Birwa, after the village, now stand.

The Paris afterlife

France has kept him. His French translator, Elias Sanbar, brought him into French for the publisher Actes Sud from the early 1990s — Au dernier soir sur cette terre, On the Last Evening on This Earth, in 1994, and Pourquoi as-tu laissé le cheval à sa solitude, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, in 1996 — and the publisher still carries eight of his titles, from Une mémoire pour l'oubli, Memory for Forgetfulness, to Présente absence, In the Presence of Absence. France decorated him in 1997, one of dozens of honours that also included the Soviet Union's Lenin Prize, awarded for work said to strengthen peace, in 1983; the Dutch Prince Claus Award for culture and development in 2004; and the Cairo Prize for Arab Poetic Innovation in 2007.

On 29 March 2010 the city of Paris named a small esplanade after him, and by a municipal decision of 16–17 May 2011 it became the place Mahmoud Darwich: a raised triangle on the quai Malaquais, opposite numbers 3 to 7, in the sixth arrondissement, in the quarter of Saint-Germain-des-Prés — the Left Bank district of publishing houses and literary cafés, a few steps from the Seine and the École des Beaux-Arts, the French state art school. The city's official register describes him in one line as a committed poet and a representative of Palestinian identity throughout the world. In September 2018, on the tenth anniversary of his death, the Institut du monde arabe — the Arab World Institute, the museum and cultural centre a mile upstream along the same bank — gave him a five-day festival called Les exils de Mahmoud Darwich, the exiles of Mahmoud Darwish, plural, which was the right number.