Mahmoud Darwish

When you prepare your breakfast, think upon others
Do not forget to feed the pigeons
When you engage in your wars, think upon others
Do not forget those who demand peace

Mahmoud Darwish (13 March 1941 – 9 August 2008) was a Palestinian poet and author who was widely regarded as Palestine's national poet.

Quotes

وَنَحْنُ نُحِبُّ الحَيَاةَ إذَا مَا اسْتَطَعْنَا إِلَيْهَا سَبِيلاَ
وَنَرْقُصُ بَيْنَ شَهِيدْينِ نَرْفَعُ مِئْذَنَةً لِلْبَنَفْسَجِ بَيْنَهُمَا أَوْ نَخِيلاَ
نُحِبُّ الحَيَاةَ إِذَا مَا اسْتَطَعْنَا إِلَيْهَا سَبِيلاَ
- And we love life if we find a way to it.
  We dance in between martyrs and raise a minaret for violet or palm trees.
  We love life if we find a way to it.
  - English translation of Fady Joudah found in Joy: 100 Poems (2017)
    Arabic text: [1] Recording of Darwish reciting in Arabic: [2]

لو يذكرُ الزيتون غارسَهُ
لصار الزيت دمعا
- If the olive trees knew the hands that planted them, their oils would become tears.
  - English translation from In Gaza, The Olive Trees Resist, 16 Dec 2024, Hend Salama Abo Helow, Institute for Palestine Studies. Arabic text from [3]

I have the wisdom of one condemned to death:
I own nothing for anything to own me
- English translation from Fady Joudah's The Butterfly's Burden (2007)
  Arabic text of the poem: حكمة المحكوم بالإعدام

My poems do not deliver mere images and metaphors; but deliver landscapes, villages and fields, deliver a place. It makes that which is absent from geography present in its form, that is, able to reside in the poetic text, as if residing on his land. I don’t think that a poet is entitled to a greater happiness than that some people seek refuge in his lines of poetry, as if they were real houses. Indeed, in Arabic, there is a nice and unusual homonymy. Both the poetic verse and the house are said “bayt.” As if a man can reside there.
- Mahmoud Darwish: Writing as an Artistic Sanctuary, Sazzad, R. (2015), Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17(1), 1-18. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/575879.

The sea is the obsession of the poet, because the first poetic rhythm, or the first sense of poetic rhythm, was born of the motion of the waves.
- In this quotation Darwish "reveals that he learned to write by imitating the rhythm of the sea’s waves." -Mahmoud Darwish: Writing as an Artistic Sanctuary, Sazzad, R. (2015), Interdisciplinary Literary Studies 17(1), 1-18. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/575879.

Exile Is So Strong Within Me

"Exile Is So Strong Within Me, I May Bring It to the Land": A Landmark 1996 Interview with Mahmoud Darwish, (2012) Helit Yeshurun. Journal of Palestine Studies, 42(1), 46–70. https://doi.org/10.1525/jps.2012.xlii.1.46

I don't know what I want. Exile is so strong within me I may bring it to the land.

In my last book I said: “I have one dream: to find a dream.” A dream is a piece of the sky found in everyone. We can’t be boundlessly realistic or pragmatic. We are in need of the sky.

Only culture is a guarantee of true peace.

I encouraged the leadership in its time of weakness. Now that they are strong, I'm allowed not to applaud. If a Palestinian state is established, I will be in the opposition. That's my natural place.

What is a homeland? It is a place that enables people to blossom, and not a place in which people serve the flag. In my poem, Cease-fire with the Mongolians, I say that I am going to make socks out of the flag. My life's work is not on behalf of a flag.
- This wording found in Mahmoud Darwish: Literature and the Politics of Palestinian Identity (2016) by Muna Abu Eid

Interviewer: I know that the comparison between the Jewish fate and the Palestinian fate bothers you, because it hints at a kind of “contest” over who is the greater victim.
Darwish: First of all, this comparison doesn’t bother me as long as we are speaking from a place of literary concern. In this domain, nationalism doesn’t exist. I think that this neurosis about whether or not one should accept the comparison will be resolved along with peace. The Jew won’t be ashamed to find the Arab element within him, and the Arab won’t be ashamed to acknowledge that he is also composed of Jewish elements. Especially when speaking about “Eretz Israel” in Hebrew and "Palestine" in Arabic. I am a son of all the cultures that have passed through the land—the Greek, the Roman, the Persian, the Jewish, the Ottoman. A presence that exists at the very core of my language. Every powerful culture passed through and left something. I am the son of all these fathers, but I belong to one mother. Does that mean that my mother is a prostitute? My mother is this earth; she received all of them. She was both a witness and a victim. I am also the son of the Jewish culture that was in Palestine. That’s why I don’t recoil from the comparison.
But because of the political tension—which says that if Israel is here the Palestinians must be absent, and that if the Palestinians are here then Israel must be absent—we haven’t accepted the fact that we are the products of similar conditions and have competed with each other over who is the greater victim.

If we want to

Translated by Catherine Cobham in A River Dies of Thirst (2009)
Arabic text: [4]

We will become a people, if we want to, when we learn that we are not angels, and that evil is not the prerogative of others
We will become a people when we stop reciting a prayer of thanksgiving to the sacred nation every time a poor man finds something to eat for his dinner
We will become a people when we can sniff out the sultan’s gatekeeper and the sultan without a trial
We will become a people when a poet writes an erotic description of a dancer’s belly
We will become a people when we forget what the tribe tells us, when the individual recognises the importance of small details
We will become a people when a writer can look up at the stars without saying: ‘Our country is loftier and more beautiful!’
We will become a people when the morality police protect a prostitute
from being beaten up in the streets
We will become a people when the Palestinian only remembers his flag on the football pitch, at camel races, and on the day of the Nakba
We will become a people, if we want to, when the singer is allowed to chant a verse of Surat al-Rahman at a mixed wedding reception
We will become a people when we respect the right, and the wrong.

Think upon others

Translated by Hamish Kinnear [5]
Arabic text: [6]

When you prepare your breakfast, think upon others
Do not forget to feed the pigeons
When you engage in your wars, think upon others
Do not forget those who demand peace

As you pay your water bill, think upon others
Who seek sustenance from the clouds, not a tap
And when you return home – to your house – think upon others
Such as those who live in tents
When you fall asleep counting planets, think upon others
Who cannot find a place to sleep
And as you search for meaning with fancy metaphors, think upon others
Who have lost their right to speak

And when you think of others, far away, think of yourself
And say: I am a candle in the darkness

Quotes about Mahmoud Darwish

My father would read Darwish to me when I was a child and translate it because, in those days, there were not many translations of him. My father would read other poetry and translate it for me, and I just loved it. I loved everything about it: the metaphors, the passion, the care, the tenderness, the flowing quality of the lines. I eventually met Darwish, and he would ask me to read his poems in English; he didn’t like to read his poems in English at all. He read in Arabic, and just getting to be with him was such a landmark in my lifetime’s experience...I felt them [poets] as a wellspring of the spirit of Palestine, and the love and the care for Palestine—that is something that the media often finds easy to overlook. It’s just so insulting—versus the poetry which is so respectful, passionate, loving, and nostalgic.
- Naomi Shihab Nye, from a 2024 interview

External links

Wikipedia

Wikipedia has an article about:

Mahmoud Darwish