Mahmoud Darwish In memoriam

Randa Abd Elwahed

Mahmoud Darwish is a Palestinian poet who was born in Palestine in a small village in Al-Galilee called Berweh, in 1941, during the time of the British mandate. He was the most nationalist poet who was mobilized his readers to follow his way of resistance against the Zionist settlement in Palestine.
Through his childhood ,he suffered from the expulsion of his family from his hometown in 1948, which affected most Palestinians, so his family fled to Lebanon where he lived most of his life.
From that date he carried a burden of being an intellectual who would fight for peace through his literary work, and strive for national freedom through his poetry.
Mahmoud Darwish wrote several divans, which in their core was the theme of resistance, and in the heart of that resistance was his love of Palestine.
He is frankly writing about the political crisis in Palestine, which was becoming more dangerous during his life because of the Zionist takeover of the land of Palestine.
One of his most famous quotations that clarifies his resistance is his political opinions about the idea of colonization in which he said :"Why are we always told that we cannot solve our problem without solving the existential anxiety of the Israelis and their supporters who have ignored our very existence for decades in our own homeland?"
All of his works, such as "Wingless Birds", "A Lover from Palestine" and "Leaves of Olives", and the rest of his thirty volumes were reclaiming the land of Palestine, the identity of Palestine and the geography of Palestine through his nostalgic feeling and his faith that Palestine is one entity and one unity, a unity that must not be shattered by the two state solution, or to accept that solution as a kind of subservience.So, through the journey of his political life we find that he was arrested several times.

At the end of the wheel of his life, his heart affected by his nostalgia for the reconstruction of Palestine, he died after heart surgery in Houston, Texas, USA. Darwish was the national poet of Palestine and the poet of Exile in Lebanon. Darwish revives our memory of forgetfulness in which we must not forget what we are fighting for.

In 9 August 2008 this nationalist slogan passed away. At that time, the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of mourning to honor Darwish, and he was accorded an equivalent funeral for his prestigious social and cultural position. He was buried in Ramallah and his tomb was decorated to look like an open book, as a testimonial for his passion for writing and reading of Palestine.