Mahmoud Darwish: 1942-2008.

• Position: In memoriam

IDENTITY CARD Write down! I am an Arab And my identity card number is fifty thousand I have eight children And the ninth will come after a summer Will you be angry? Write down! 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? Write down! 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! Write down! 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! Write down 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! Yasser Arafat was fond of saying that the art of the novel never rose to the heights of Palestinian poetry. He said that the Palestinian experience produced several giant poets, but failed to match this with novelists. One can only confirm this by reference to the Palestinian poetical greats, beginning with Ibrahim Touqan, followed by Fadwa Touqan, Mahmoud Abd al-Raheem, Samih al-Qassem and Tawfiq Zayyad and several others. Each one of these represented a certain phase of the long and unfulfilled Palestinian saga, with the last two sharing an important aspect of Palestinian tragi-history with Darwish, namely the experience of the 1948 Arabs. Perhaps Darwish's remarkable poetic achievement stemmed from the fact that he experienced several phases of Palestinian dispossession in his own life-time: growing up in the Galilee under Israeli rule, experiencing years of restless wandering in various parts of the Arab homeland, and finally returning to Ramallah to live under a pseudo-government called the Palestinian National Authority. This...