A Lover From Palestine
by Mahmoud Darwish
Her eyes are Palestinian
Her name is Palestinian
Her dress and sorrow Palestinian
Her kerchief, her feet and body Palestinian
Her words and silence Palestinian
Her voice Palestinian
Her birth and her death Palestinian
~~~
P
alestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has died after surgery at the age of 67, hospital and Palestinian officials say.He suffered complications after undergoing open-heart surgery in Houston, Texas, said a spokesman for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.Mr Darwish was the most recognised Palestinian poet in the world, using his words to try to draw attention to the Palestinian cause.He also delivered harsh criticism of the infighting by Palestinian factions. (
Full Story...)
~~~
I am from There
by Mahmoud Darwish
I come from there and remember,
I was born like everyone is borne, I have a mother
and a house with many windows,
I have brothers, friends and a prison.
I have a wave that sea-gulls snatched away.
I have a view of my own and an extra blade of grass.
I have a moon past the peak of words.
I have the godsent food of birds and olive tree beyond the ken of time.
I have traversed the land before swords turned bodies into banquets.
I come from there. I return the sky to its mother when for its mother the
sky cries, and I weep for a returning cloud to know me.
I have learned the words of blood-stained courts in order to break the rules.
I have learned and dismantled all the words to construct a single one:
Home~~~
Mahmoud Darwish is considered to be the most important contemporary Arab poet working today. He was born in 1942 in the village of Barweh in the Galilee, which was razed to the ground by the Israelis in 1948. As a result of his political activism he faced house arrest and imprisonment.Darwish was the editor of Ittihad Newspaper before leaving in 1971 to study for a year in the USSR. Then he went to Egypt where he worked in Cairo for Al-Ahram Newspaper and in Beirut, Lebanon as an editor of the Journal “Palestinian Issues”. He was also the director of the Palestinian Research Center. Darwish was a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO and lived in exile between Beirut and Paris until his return in 1996 to Palestine. His poems are known throughout the Arab world, and several of them have been put to music. His poetry has gained great sophistication over the years, and has enjoyed international fame for a long time. He has published around 30 poetry and prose collections, which have been translated into 35 languages. He is the editor in chief and founder of the prestigious literary review Al Karmel, which has resumed publication in January 1997 out of the Sakakini Centre offices. He published in 1998 the poetry collection: Sareer el Ghariba (Bed of the Stranger), his first collection of love poems.In 2000 he published Jidariyya (Mural) a book consisting of one poem about his near death experience in 1997. He published his book of poetry "Stage of Siege" in 2002. In 1997 a documentary was produced about him by French TV directed by noted French-Israeli director Simone Bitton. He is a commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters. Mahmound Darwish is an honorary member of the Sakakini Centre.~~~
Without exile, who am I?
by Mahmoud Darwish
Stranger on the bank, like the river . . . tied up to your
name by water. Nothing will bring me back from my free
distance to my palm tree: not peace, nor war. Nothing
will inscribe me in the Book of Testaments. Nothing,
nothing glints off the shore of ebb and flow, between
the Tigris and the Nile. Nothing
gets me off the chariots of Pharaoh. Nothing
carries me for a while, or makes me carry an idea: not
promises, nor nostalgia. What am I to do, then? What
am I to do without exile, without a long night
staring at the water?
Tied up
to your name
by water . . .
Nothing takes me away from the butterfly of my dreams
back into my present: not earth, nor fire. What
am I to do, then, without the roses of Samarkand? What
am I to do in a square that burnishes the chanters with
moon-shaped stones? Lighter we both have
become, like our homes in the distant winds. We have
both become friends with the clouds'
strange creatures; outside the reach of the gravity
of the Land of Identity. What are we to do, then . . . What
are we to do without exile, without a long night
staring at the water?
Tied up
to your name
by water . . .
Nothing's left of me except for you; nothing's left of you
except for me -- a stranger caressing his lover's thigh: O
my stranger! What are we to do with what's left for us
of the stillness, of the siesta that separates legend from legend?
Nothing will carry us: not the road, nor home.
Was this road the same from the start,
or did our dreams find a mare among the horses
of the Mongols on the hill, and trade us off?
And what are we to do, then?
What
are we to do
without
exile?
The perpetrators of these horrors and their court stenographers are not satisfied with merely committing crimes; they insist on debasing the meanings of words and attempting to control our memories of events so that we will not remember that although we lost - in these and too many other instances - we fought against injustice, war, and inhumanity. Because keeping alive the memory of our past fights and connecting them to those ongoing today is a wellspring of hope that we can continue to fight, and perhaps next time, or the time after that, win.
A particularly ugly and cold-blooded recent effort at thought control is the campaign to suppress "My Name is Rachel Corrie, a play composed from Rachel's journals and e-mails from Gaza. The play opened at the prestigious the Royal Court Theatre in London and won the Theatregoers' Choice Awards for Best Director (Alan Rickman), Best New Play, and Best Solo Performance (Megan Dodds). It was scheduled to open at the New York Theater Workshop in March 2006. But the theater managers were subjected to pressure from groups purporting to speak for the Jewish community, and it was postponed indefinitely. The English producers denounced the postponement as censorship and cancelled the show. It finally opened at the Off-Broadway Minetta Lane Theater on October 15, 2006 for an initial run of 48 performances with Megan Dodds once again playing the solo leading role.
Efforts to suppress the play have continued, notably at CanStage, Canada's largest non-profit theater. But, it was revived in London and has been successfully staged in Edinburgh, Scotland, Dublin, Ireland and at venues across Canada and the U.S., including Edmonton, Alberta, Seattle, WA, Ashland OR, Silver Springs, MD, and Shepherdstown, WV. On March 16 an Arabic translation of the play, translated and adapted by the director Riyad Masarwi and the actress Lana Zureik, opened in Haifa. The show is now touring throughout Israel and the occupied West Bank.
The play has also been published as a book; and on the occasion of the fifth anniversary of Rachel's death, her diaries Let Me Stand Alone: The Journals of Rachel Corrie, have also been published. It would be an act of struggle and solidarity if everyone reading these words bought a copy of the book as a repudiation of those who think that attempting to repress the memories of our struggles and heroines will allow them to win. And for those in the vicinity of Portland, OR (my wannabe home), Powell's Books on Hawthorne Ave. in Portland will be sponsoring a book event on Thursday, April 10th at 7:30 pm with Rachel's mother, father, and sister: Cindy, Craig, and Sarah Corrie.
Only three days after Rachel Corrie's death, on Mar. 19, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. This colossal foreign policy failure was born in lies playing on the post-9/11 fears of a nation that had forgotten, one hopes temporarily, how to think. It is now the second longest war the United States has fought in the last 200 hundred years, with the exception of Vietnam. Hardly anyone takes President George W, Bush seriously any more. But, as anti-war actions unfolded all over the country he had the audacity to address the Department of Defense and the American people with an unabashed defense of his war policies. As we have come to expect, the President was utterly detached from the reality of the enormous economic, social and political costs of his war, which will continue to mount long after the Bush administration and its occupation of the United States is a bad memory.
The country of Iraq has been destroyed and its people traumatized. It will take generations to repair the carnage, and it is unclear if a unified Iraqi state can ever be rebuilt. At least 90,000 Iraqi civilians have died along with nearly 4,000 American soldiers. Many more have been severely wounded and will suffer severe and permanent debilitation. Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard public finance expert Linda Bilmes estimate that the eventual cost of the war to the U.S. economy will be $3 trillion. The United States has destroyed its credibility in the Arab and Muslim world for the foreseeable future.
Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, has been conducting public opinion surveys of six Arab countries since 2003 - Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. The results of the latest survey, conducted in 2006, (2008 results will be available soon) indicated that 38% of the respondents disliked George W. Bush more than any other political leader outside their own countries - over three times more than chose Ariel Sharon; 69% had no confidence in the United States. If there were just one super power in the world 19% thought that it should be France; only 8% the U.S. The largest number of respondents also considered France the country with the most freedom and democracy for its own people, the most desirable country to live in, and the most desirable country to study in. Israel and the United States were considered by far the greatest threats to the Arab countries.
According to Telhami's respondents, the single most effective thing the U.S. could do to improve its image in the Arab world would be to broker a comprehensive Palestinian-Israeli peace with Israel withdrawing to its 1967 borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state with its capitol in Jerusalem. The next most important thing the U.S. could do is to withdraw its forces from Iraq. These are precisely the things which the Bush administration refuses to do. This is, in brief, why the much ballyhooed Annapolis conference of last November quickly became a charade. And, to recall another grim anniversary, it is also why the Road Map President Bush endorsed on March 14, 2003, as one of the preliminaries to the invasion of Iraq, led nowhere.
Telhami, along with William Quandt and Steven Spiegel recently participated in a study group chaired by former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Daniel Kurtzer that evaluated U.S. diplomacy in the Arab-Israeli conflict since the end of the Cold War. Last month their results were published in Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East. They have produced some sensible recommendations which they hope will guide the administration which takes office on January 20, 2009. Don't count on it.
Joel Beinin
Cairo
March 22, 2008