Al Birweh
by Alfred Corn
[ people - january 09 ]
It was a little Galilean village near Acre, able to provide all the experience necessary to make a good poet. The lapidary blue sky dotted by fleeting clouds, the dry landscapes, the occasional rain, the olive trees, goats, chickens, the Cubist houses, the varied characters of family members and others who made their lives there. To this basic and timeless material, history added one more ingredient. In 1948, at an early age Darwish was exiled with his family from Al Birweh, and in the course of things the village was reduced to rubble and erased from the map. An outside observer cannot estimate the full impact of this disaster, amplified by knowledge of other even worse disasters visited on an entire people during the Nakba. But we are forced to conclude that because of the calamity a man who might have been simply a good poet, a glad singer of the pleasures of existence, instead became a great one.
Which does not make Darwish's personal tragedy acceptable or justifiable. We cannot avoid this paradox: the price paid for Darwish's greatness was personal suffering and the suffering of the Palestinian people. It's possible of course to imagine an outcome still worse, in which the young man who experienced inexpressible losses also lost the desire to write, producing nothing, and leaving us without the alleviating gift of his poetry. That was not what happened. We have the body of work that we have, we read his poems and we are assuaged. Let there be no mistake: Poetry is the opposite of war, and Darwish was not a military man. He did not wish for the death of any human being. He didn't allow himself to hate. To do so would be to yield absolutely everything to tanks and machine-guns, letting them occupy not only the land but also take possession of the soul. Darwish did not ever allow anyone to settle within the borders of his mental universe, unless that person happened to be invited there by love and friendship. He was also aware that many individuals on the other side of the wall were forced by conscience and a sense of justice to accept prison sentences because of their refusal to serve in an unjust conflict.
Darwish experienced loss and pain, but he was also by temperament someone fully accessible to beauty and happiness; and he was never silenced. Like the olive harvest, his life was poured under the massive crushing wheels of the press and, having undergone the ordeal, he gave us the translucent, green-golden oil of his poems. He died much too young, and yet during his life he was the author of a poetry that has both the joy of youth and the circumspect wisdom of age. Suffering, exile, uncomfortable circumstances, public accusation or indifference: How is it possible that a life can pass through such things and not be silenced? Darwish provides the answer in his books. They are an achievement in art and an achievement in endurance as well - a practical guide to holding fast and the refusal to be silenced or destroyed. When I reflect on his life, I am saddened, and yet when I read the poems that sprang from that life I am reassured and made joyful. It's a mystery not readily explained. It is the mystery he left us with, and it has a name: Al Birweh.
