JERUSALEM: Palestinians on Sunday mourned the death of Mahmoud Darwish, who gave voice to their decades-old struggle and is widely considered one of the Arab world s greatest modern poets.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of official mourning in a televised address after Darwish died on Saturday in a US hospital from complications following open-heart surgery.
How much does it pain my heart and my soul to announce to the Palestinian people, the Arab and Islamic world, and to everyone who loves peace and freedom, the passing of the star of Palestine, Abbas said.
The absence of our great poet Mahmoud Darwish, the love of Palestine and the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project… will leave a great void in our cultural, political, and national life, he said.
The 67-year-old penned over two dozen books of poetry and prose in a career spanning nearly five decades that captured the Palestinian experience of war, exile, and the struggle for national self-determination.
He was the winner of numerous international literary prizes, and is widely considered one of the Arab world s greatest writers.
Darwish is the essential breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging, the poet Naomi Shihab Nye once said of him.
Born in 1941 in an Arab village in what is now northern Israel, Darwish and his family fled during the 1948 war that followed the creation of the Jewish state, though they returned to Israel a few years later.
Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua eulogized Darwish as his friend and rival.
Before anything, Mahmoud Darwish was a great poet who possessed real poetic power, the internationally-acclaimed leftwing Israeli writer told AFP. He quickly became the national Palestinian poet, the poet of the exile and of the refugees.
The 22-member Cairo-based Arab League hailed Darwish as the voice of Palestine and said his death deprives the Palestinians and all the Arabs of one of their most noted representatives for contemporary poetry and culture.
With his poetry Darwish transcended all the frontiers and broke the chains of narrow patriotism in order to become the voice of Palestine, said Arab League secretary general Amr Moussa.
Darwish had been harshly critical of Israel over the years and was detained several times in the 1960s before going into self-imposed exile in 1970. Over the next 25 years he lived briefly in Paris, Moscow, and several Arab capitals.
A sequence of poetic prose written about his experience of life in Beirut during the Israeli invasion and bombardment of Lebanon in 1982 was translated into English in 1995 under the title Memory for Forgetfulness.
In 1988 he wrote the official Palestinian declaration of independence and served on the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) until 1993, when he resigned in protest at the Oslo autonomy accords.
He had been living in the West Bank town of Ramallah since 1995.Following news of Darwish s death, the Palestinian ambassador to Jordan said Abbas would send a plane to repatriate the body.
Atallah Kheiry also told AFP in Amman that Abbas had asked Palestinian officials to contact the Israeli authorities to press them to allow for the burial of Darwish in his native Galilee in northern Israel. -AFP
