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The Star-Ledger · Newark, New Jersey · 10 August 2008

CP-2008-005

Mahmoud Darwish, voice of Palestine

Diaa Hadid, Associated Press, Gaza City

Mahmoud Darwish, voice of Palestine — The Star-Ledger, 10 August 2008
The Star-Ledger · Newark, New Jersey · 10 August 2008

Transcribed from the clipping

“GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip — Mahmoud Darwish, whose prose gave voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting, died yesterday in Houston. He was 67. The predominant Palestinian poet, whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages and won numerous international awards, died following open heart surgery at a Houston hospital… Born to a large Muslim family in historical Palestine — now modern-day Israel — he emerged as a Palestinian cultural icon eloquently describing his people’s struggle for independence while also criticizing both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian leadership… ‘He felt the pulse of Palestinians in beautiful poetry. He was a mirror of the Palestinian society,’ said Ali Qleibo, a Palestinian anthropologist and lecturer in cultural studies at Al Quds University in Jerusalem. Darwish first gained prominence in the 1960s with the publication of his first poetry collection, ‘Bird without Wings.’ It included the poem ‘Identity Card’ that defiantly spoke in the first person of an Arab man giving his identity number — a common practice among Palestinians when dealing with Israeli authorities and Arab governments — and vowing to return to his land. Many of his poems have been put into music — most notably ‘Rita,’ ‘Birds of Galilee’ and ‘I yearn for my mother’s bread’ — and have become anthems for at least two generations of Arabs. He wrote another 21 collections, the last, ‘The Impression of Butterflies,’ in 2008. Qleibo described Darwish’s poetry as ‘the easy impossible’… ‘He started out as a poet of resistance and then he became a poet of conscience,’ said Palestinian lawmaker Hanan Ashrawi. ‘He embodied the best in Palestinians… even though he became iconic he never lost his sense of humanity. We have lost part of our essence, the essence of the Palestinian being.’… Darwish was born in the Palestinian village of Birweh near Haifa, which was destroyed in the 1948 Mideast war that led to Israel’s independence. He joined the Israeli Communist Party after high school and began writing poems for leftist newspapers… In 2000, Israel’s education minister, Yossi Sarid, suggested including some of Darwish’s poems in the Israeli high school curriculum. But Prime Minister Ehud Barak overruled him, saying Israel was not ready yet for his ideas in the school system. In 1988, a Darwish poem, ‘Passing in Passing Words,’ was read by then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir inside Israel’s parliament as an example of the Palestinians’ unwillingness to live alongside Jews… Adel Usta, a specialist on Darwish’s poetry, said the poem was misunderstood and mistranslated. ‘He created a national Palestinian identity that no other poet could achieve,’ Usta said. Darwish married and divorced twice. He does not have any children. Siham Daoud, a fellow poet and longtime friend of Darwish, said he traveled to a hospital in Houston 10 days ago for the surgery and asked not to be resuscitated if it did not succeed.”

Photograph caption

“Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian poet, during an interview in 2000 in his West Bank office.” · Jacqueline Larma / Associated Press

Context added by this archive

This archive holds the same paper’s front-page treatment of another dead Palestinian writer thirty-six years earlier. In July 1972 the Star-Ledger headline was “Explosion kills leader of Arab terrorist group.” Here it is “voice of Palestine.” One of them was assassinated and one of them died after heart surgery in Texas, and this collection does not claim that is the only difference between the two headlines. It simply holds both.

Cite this item

"Mahmoud Darwish, voice of Palestine," The Star-Ledger, 10 August 2008. Covering Palestine archive, CP-2008-005. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-2008-005

Elsewhere in the archive

This record is part of Covering Palestine, an archive of American and Anglophone newspaper clippings about Palestinians, 1812 to 2022. Researched and assembled by Maria Robles.

The clipping belongs to the newspaper that printed it, or to the wire service that supplied the copy. It is reproduced here for research, criticism and commentary. The city is derived from the masthead, not read off the clipping.

Something wrong here, or something you know about this clipping? The archive is still being built and corrections are wanted: maria@rozumstudio.com, quoting CP-2008-005.

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