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Mahmoud Darwish

Palestinian author and poet (1941–2008)

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Through Palestine, Islam and Soviet Union

In his poetic works, Darwish explored Palestine as a metaphor for the loss of Eden, birth and resurrection, and the anguish of dispossession and exile. He has been described as incarnating and reflecting "the tradition of the political poet in Islam, the man of action whose action is poetry." He served as an editor for several literary magazines in both Israel and the Palestinian territories.

Early and personal life

Darwish was born to a family of land-owning Arab Palestinians in al-Birwa, which was situated in the Western Galilee, on 13 March 1941. He was the second child of Salim Darwish and Houreyyah. While his mother was illiterate, Darwish was educated and taught how to read by his grandfather. During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, al-Birwa was captured and subsequently razed by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), prompting Darwish's family to flee to Lebanon, where they settled first in Jezzine and then in Damour.

A year later, Darwish's family returned to Israel and settled in Deir al-Asad. Darwish attended high school in Kafr Yasif before eventually moving to Haifa. Although Israel's Citizenship Law of 1952 was conferred upon Arab Palestinians who remained within Israel's borders after the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Darwish and his family were only granted residency status.

In 1970, Darwish left Israel to study in the Soviet Union, where he attended Moscow State University for one year. In 1971, he moved to Cairo, Egypt, where he worked for the daily newspaper al-Ahram.

Darwish was twice married and divorced. His first wife was the writer Rana Kabbani. After they divorced, in the mid-1980s, he married an Egyptian translator, Hayat Heeni. He had no children. The "Rita" of Darwish's poems was a Jewish woman whom he loved when he was living in Haifa; he revealed in an interview with French journalist Laure Adler that her name is Tamar Ben-Ami. The relationship was the subject of the film Write Down, I Am an Arab by filmmaker Ibtisam Mara'ana.

Darwish had a history of heart disease, suffering a heart attack in 1984. He had two heart operations, in 1984 and 1998.

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