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Palestinian poet and
journalist. Darwish's major theme in his poems is the plight of the
Palestinian people. He
uses simple vocabulary and plain, recurrent images: an open
wound ('wound that
fights'), blood (we will write our names in crimson vapor), mirrors
(shape of the soul in a
mirror), stones (my words were stones), and weddings.
"Sister, there are tears in my
throat
and there is fire in my
eyes:
I am
free.
No more shall I protest at the
Sultan's Gate.
All who have died, all who shall die at
the Gate of Day
Have embraced me, have made of me a
weapon."
(From
Diary of Palestinian wound)
Mahmoud Darwish was born
into a landowning Sunni Muslim family in Berweh, a village
east of Acre. After the
war of 1948, the family settled to another Arab village, where
Darwish grew up. After
he graduated from a secondary school Darwish moved to Haifa.
He worked in journalism
and in 1961 he joined the Israeli Communist Party, Rakah, and
edited for some time Rakah's newspaper, al Ittihad. During these years he experienced
imprisonment and house
arrest. In 1970, Darwish studied at a university in Moscow, USSR.
Darwish started to write
poems while still at school. His first collection appeared in 1960
when he was only
nineteen. With the second collection, Awraq al-Zaytun (1964), he
gained
a reputation as one of
the leading poets of the resistance. The work dealt with two general
topics: love and
politics. Gradually the love for a woman transformed in subsequent
works
into an unbreakable
union between the poet and his homeland.
Darwish has received
several awards for his work, including the 1969 Lotus Prize by the
Union of Afro-Asian
Writers and the Lenin Peace Prize in 1983.
Darwish has described
the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis as "a struggle
between two memories."
In 1988 his doubtful poem 'Those Who Pass Fleeting Words'
upset his Israeli
readers, who considered it a call for the destruction of Jews.
Since 1970s Darwish has
led somewhat nomadic life. He has lived in Lebanon, Cyprus,
Tunisia, Jordan, and
France. In 1996, after 26 years of exile, Darwish returned to Israel
and
visited his hometown.
In March 2000 Ehud Barak's government faced a political crisis
following a proposal by
the education minister to include Darwish's works in the school
curriculum.
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