Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine's poet of exile.

• Author: Handal, Nathalie

"Absent, I come to the home of the absent," the leading Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish, writes. No other poet captures the Palestinian consciousness and collective memory the way he does. At sixty-one, whether he is giving a reading in Paris or Palestine, he draws crowds of thousands, from government officials to schoolteachers, taxi drivers to students.

In his latest collection, Judarieh (Mural), the poet finds himself in between love and death, wondering which of the two will conquer. "After the stranger's night, who am I?" Darwish writes. So, when I speak to him by phone on March 22, I ask him who he is. He rapidly responds, "I still do not know."

On many occasions he has expressed the notion that only poetry can bring harmony to a world devastated by war: "Against barbarity, poetry can resist only by confirming its attachment to human fragility like a blade of grass growing on a wall while armies march by," he has written. I ask him if he still believes that.

"I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe," he responds, "but now I think that poetry changes only the poet."

Darwish has published twenty books of poetry, five books of prose, and his books have been translated into more than twenty-two languages. He has won numerous awards, including the Lotus Prize (1969); the Lenin Peace Prize (1983); France's highest medal, the Knight of Arts and Letters (1993); and this April he will be honored with the Lannan Foundation Prize for Cultural Freedom.

"I am still not a poet, and sometimes I regret I chose this way," he tells me. Still, he is finishing his forthcoming book of poetry, State of Siege.

His work speaks of his internal exile and uprootedness, his meditations on his historical, collective, and personal past. Many of his poems mirror the loss of homeland, the frustrations of being under siege, of being occupied. Here is a couplet from "The Earth Is Closing on Us":

Where should we go after the last frontiers, where should the birds fly after the last sky? Other poems allude to myths, draw parallels between the Native American and the Palestinian experiences, speak of his mother, or address a Jewish lover. In "Rita and the Rifle," he writes:

Between Rita and my eyes There is a rifle.... Ah, Rita! What before this rifle could have turned my eyes from yours. In "A Soldier Dreaming of White Lilies," he...