“We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are” writes Mahmoud Darwish in his poem “The Hoopoe .” ¹ This memorable line offers a fascinating insight into his life and work as Palestine’s national poet. Formed by the experience of occupation, imprisonment, and exile, Darwish strove in his poems to shape and foster Palestinian identity and culture. His love for his lost homeland and the desire to preserve its memory in the consciousness of his people motivated much of his writing and yielded a remarkable output of lyrical poetry . In poem after poem, Darwish spoke of his deep attachment to Palestine, its towns, its landscape, its flora and fauna. The pinnacle of his emotional connection to the land found its expression in the poem “Diary of Palestinian Wound ,” in which he said: “Ah my intractable wound! / My country is not a suitcase / I am not a traveler / I am the lover and the land is the beloved.” ² Blending nationalist verse with love poetry, he created a new kind of patriotic poem in Arabic, or a new kind of love poem, in which Palestine is fused with the figure of the beloved and is the object of erotic attention. ³

Erotic love as a metaphor for attachment to the homeland is vividly depicted in “A Lover from Palestine ,” the title poem of Darwish’s third collection (published in 1966), in which the poet-speaker says to his beloved: “Your eyes are a thorn in the heart / It pains me, yet I adore it.” ⁴ In this poem, Palestine is depicted as the idealized beloved with “Palestinian eyes,” “a Palestinian name,” “Palestinian dreams and sorrows,” “Palestinian veil, feet, and body,” “Palestinian words and silence,” “a Palestinian birth and death.” ⁵ Sensual and evocative, the poem expresses the poet’s longing to be united with his homeland in intimate, almost mystical terms. “Take me wherever you are,” he pleads with his beloved. “Restore to me the color of face / And the warmth of body, / The light of heart and eye, / The salt of bread and rhythm, / The taste of earth … the Motherland.” ⁶

“The eroticization of the land provides a metaphor for belonging that approximates the intimacy, passion, and emotional turmoil of romantic relationships,” notes the literary scholar Khaled Mattawa. ⁷ Many of Darwish’s patriotic poems speak of unrequited love and a painful separation from his beloved. At times the land is portrayed as a mysterious, idolized female, visible but inaccessible to her tormented lover. At other times it is depicted as a seductive woman who captivates the poet with her charms but bestows her favors on others: “Your lips are honey, and your hands / glasses of wine / for others.” ⁸ Despite the beloved’s lack of attention, the poet remains loyal and devoted to her, stating unequivocally: “I will love your nectar / even though it is poured into the glasses of others.” ⁹ In the long run, however, having been banished from his beloved and unable to communicate with her, the denied lover becomes dispirited. Acknowledging his bad luck, he says: “I am the unlucky lover / One narcissus is for me and another against me.” ¹⁰ Although Darwish’s poetry has evolved over the years and transcended the limits of patriotic and resistance poems, the role of “a lover from Palestine ” (“‘Ashiq min Filastin”) became his public persona, to the extent that even a personal poem such as “To My Mother ,” which expresses his nostalgia for his mother’s bread and coffee, was interpreted as a poem for the motherland. ¹¹ Set to music by the Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife, it continues to be sung by thousands of Palestinians as a national hymn for their homeland.

Mahmoud Darwish was born on 13 March 1941 into a lower middle-class Muslim family in the village of al-Birwa, east of Acre, in northern Palestine. His family fled to Lebanon during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war , and by the time they returned to their village, about a year later, it had been razed and a kibbutz had been built on its site. Because the family was absent in 1949, when the first census was taken in Israel, and thus not counted in it, they were considered “infiltrators” or illegal residents when they returned, which meant that they could not obtain an ID and could be deported if discovered. They lived in the village of Deir al-Assad (6 mi east of al-Birwa), hiding their presence from the authorities for three years, until they received the necessary papers. In 1963 they moved to the village of al-Jadida, a few miles west of their native village of al-Birwa. ¹²

The displacement, exile, and loss of their property and means of livelihood came as a great blow to the Darwish family, which experienced a profound economic and psychological crisis. The Palestinian scholar Muna Abu Eid notes that Darwish, who was a seven-year-old boy when his family fled to Lebanon, discovered at that time the meaning of “homeland” ( watan ), a concept that later became pivotal in his life and poetry. As she elaborates: “Return became his daily bread: the return to the place, the return to time, the return from the temporary to the permanent, the return from the present to both the past and the future, the return from the unusual to the natural, the return from tin boxes to a house of stone. Thus, Palestine became the opposite of everything else, and became a lost paradise.” ¹³ Darwish depicts the trauma of his family’s flight to Lebanon and their return from there in the poems “The Eternity of Cactus ” and “To My End and to Its End ,” both of which appear in his collection Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, which is regarded as his autobiographical volume. ¹⁴

As a young boy, Darwish showed interest in painting, music, and poetry. It has been suggested that he became a poet rather than a painter because his family lacked the financial means to buy him the supplies needed for drawing and painting. The father, a farmer who became a quarry worker, had difficulties providing for his family. Mahmoud was the second of his eight children, five boys and three girls. There was no tradition of writing poems in Darwish’s family, although his older brother Ahmad, and his grandfather, who was a dominant figure in his childhood, encouraged him to write.

After completing elementary school in Deir al-Assad, Darwish attended the Arab high school in Kafr Yasif (1956–1960), then a center of Arab national and political activity and a stronghold of the Israeli Communist Party. In addition to his studies in Arabic, he was also taught the Hebrew language , Hebrew literature, and the Bible. Darwish acknowledged the influence of these subjects on his development as a poet. He was exposed not only to works of poetry and prose in Hebrew but also to works of world literature translated into Hebrew. “I am grateful,” he said, “to Hebrew that opened for me a window into foreign literatures.” ¹⁵ Alongside the inspiration he drew from both classical and modern Arabic poetry, he read and appreciated the poems of Israel’s national poet Hayim Nahman Bialik (1873–1934) and Israel’s greatest modern poet Yehuda Amichai (1924–2000).

Darwish did not pursue higher education after graduating from high school; instead, he spent two years in Acre, where he worked at an Arabic printing press. In 1962 he moved to Haifa and started working for the Israeli Communist Party’s Arabic newspapers, al-Jadid and al-Ittihad , where he published his poems. Like many Palestinian intellectuals at the time, he joined the party not for ideological reasons but because it was the only political framework that gave legitimacy to the expression of Palestinian national sentiments. There he met the Palestinian leaders of the party, the author Emile Habibi (1922–1996), Emile Touma (1919–1985), and Tawfiq Toubi (1922–2011), all of whom had a great influence on his developme...