The AP reports that Palestinian national poet, Mahmoud Darwish, is dead. More after the jump....
According to the story, he died today at 67 in Houston from complications following heart surgery.
Darwish's work isn't well-known to many Americans, but he was an absolutely stunning poet, full of vibrant, concrete, often surprising imagery. Add to that a pervasive sense of loss, an overpowering elegiac worldview forged in the fires of the Nakba and the Palestinian Diaspora.
I don't have much to say: the loss to international poetry and progressivism, as well as to the Palestinian people, is huge, and I'm not a scholar of his work. I'll leave you with a few poems of his. The first is famous, "Identity Card":
Identity Card
Record!
I am an Arab
And my identity card is number fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the nineth is coming after a summer
Will you be angry?
Record!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books
from the rocks...
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself
at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?
Record !
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew.
My father...
descends from the family of the plow
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather...was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house
is like a watchman's hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title!
Record!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards
of my ancestors
And the land
which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks...
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!
Therefore!
Record on the top of the first page:
I do not hate people
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper's flesh will be my food
Beware...
Beware...
Of my hunger
And my anger!
Here's a link to Darwish's Wikipedia page.
Despite the controversy I/P diaries get, I ask that this great poet receive the respect his life and work deserve. His loss transcends, if only for a moment, politics, so please be respectful.