The voice of Palestinians through its most celebrated poet

“Journal of an Ordinary Grief” by Mahmoud Darwish

This is a poetic book about life as a Palestinian, in an autobiographical prose written by its most celebrated poet, Mahmoud Darwish.

In the book, Darwish tells a story about being a citizen without a country after the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, the loss of a family land in al-Birwa in 1949 after it was confiscated by the settlers, and what it is like to be a refugee in his own land and to be a second class Arab Israeli living among the occupiers.

It is a very vivid description of what had happened from an ordinary person’s vantage point, struggles that are as relevant today as in 1949 or when the book was written in 1973.

Through this book and his many other writings Darwish’s story then becomes the Palestinians’ story, a representative of the many voices that are often silenced. His stuggles reflect their struggles. His pain is their pain. And in this autobiographical book he poured it all out. The “Journal of an ordinary grief” chapter in particular shows how the harsh daily lives look like for Arab Israeli living in the apartheid state.

Here are some insights from the book, in Darwish’s own words:

• We do not long for a wasteland, but for a paradise. We long to practice our humanity in a place of our own.
• The difference between a lost paradise in its absolute sense and the lost paradise in its Palestinian meaning is that the former understanding would keep the condition of longing, and psychological and rightful belonging, out of the sphere of the conflict.
• As long as the struggle continues, the paradise is not lost but remains occupied and subject to being regained.
• Some years later, I searched for my sweetheart but she was getting married to another man. I searched for work but poverty was my lot. And I searched for my people but found a prison cell and a rude officer. Acre was the last border to the world, and the beginning of effort and failure. Its wall was eroding with time.
• You weren’t able to hold back your anger in exile when your classmates reminded you that you were Palestinian and had no right to excel. Those insults were the first clues to an awareness that would take hold of you in a few years, when you realized that your situation was not simply a matter of asking for equal rights, or a question of getting hold of more bread in a crisis.
• Twenty years later after many Arab cities had fallen, the thoughts I was sharing in Hebrew with a friend at a restaurant did not please a man sitting there, and he set to defending Israeli oppression with what he considered an irrefutable argument. He said you don’t know these Arabs, and if you knew them, you wouldn’t speak about justice in this manner. I asked him to tell me more. He knit his brow and said, “Have you heard of a village called al-Birwa?” “No,” I answered. “Where is it?” “You won’t find it on this earth,” he said. “We blew it up, raked the stones out of its earth, then plowed it until it disappeared under the trees.” “To cover up the crime?” I asked. He corrected me, protesting, “No, it was to cover up its crime, that damned place.” “And what was its crime?” I asked. “It resisted us,” he answered. “They fought back, costing us many casualties, and we had to occupy it twice. The first time we were eating dinner, and the tea was hot. The villagers surprised us and took it back. How could we accept such an insult? You don’t know the Arabs, and now I’m telling you.” I told him I was Arab, and that it was my village.
• This is the way they are. They commit the crime, deny it, and when the victim confronts them they sidestep the question by talking of peace.
• I gave you a land on which you had not labored, and cities which you had not built, and you have lived in them; you are eating of vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant.
• They called us “present-absentees” so we would have no legal right to anything. At the same time we found out that thousands of these returnees were shoved into trucks as soon they were arrested and immediately dumped on the border like damaged merchandise. We knew that hundreds were shot dead so that others would stop thinking of returning. We also knew that my aunt’s husband, who tried to steal in from Lebanon, had not yet arrived.
• Villages were closed off by a set of military regulations whose violation would cost you a prison sentence and a fine. Scores of villages were destroyed because of their fertile land, or as punishment for their resistance to the sword emerging from the Torah. Their inhabitants were forbidden to go near them, no matter what changes may have occurred in the security fence of Israel. Because of this, it was impossible to visit our village.
• On the road from Deir el-Asad to Acre stands al-Birwa still on the same rise. I did not find it by means of the government list that gave it another name. What led me to it was the huge carob tree where, many years ago, I started the search for my mother and the pieces of my heart that were saturated with rain and longing.
• A place is not only a geographical area; it’s also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood.
• On searching for his childhood home: I continued on the path of stones and longing, searching for the boy I had left here. I didn’t find the mulberry tree he climbed or the courtyard where he used to lose himself. Nothing!
• In why the Darwish family exiled themselves to Lebanon during the Nakba: My father said they didn’t fully grasp what was happening. It was going to be a quick battle with guaranteed results, they had imagined. The departure from the villages was a way of saving the body from death, with no corresponding awareness of what leaving the land meant.
• The prevailing impression – or ruse if you wish – was that the exit would be temporary, for a few days only. So, why should children, women, and old people die for nothing if the departure was going to be temporary, with victory and return guaranteed? The Israelis used the exit as an excuse to claim we had no attachment to our homeland and were therefore not worthy of one if we could so easily leave it behind. But they deceive only themselves when they believe their own claims, for they supplemented the prevailing rumor that the exit was temporary with guns and daggers that gave the Arabs a strong incentive to leave.
• Emptying Palestine of its Arab inhabitants was not an emergency measure imposed by circumstances, but part of an ongoing Zionist strategy before the establishment of the state, during the [1948] War, and after. They carried out this strategy violently with their weapons, and justified it on religious grounds from the example of Joshua Son of Nun and the text “The Day of the Lord is a day of terror.”
• And in all the villages they occupied afterward they gathered the inhabitants in the main square and made them stand in the sun for several hours. Then they chose the handsomest young men and shot them dead in front of the other villagers in order to force them to leave, in order to let news of the massacre spread to villages not yet occupied, and to purge their repressed historical resentment.
• They also found legal justification in the claim that the Arabs sold their land. Sadly, it is possible to find certain Arab groups that have believed this Israeli lie while making no effort to learn that until 1948 the Jews owned no more than six percent of the total land of Palestine.
• He who left for Lebanon and returned in a year or two is not a citizen, but he who came from Warsaw after two thousand years does have rights and a homeland.
• Late one night a police captain struck the door of our adobe brick house with his truncheon. He woke up the family – grandfather, grandmother, my parents, and four children – all crowded into a single room that served as sitting room, bedroom, and kitchen. The captain directed a question at my grandfather, “Did your children return from Lebanon?” Grandfather confessed to the “crime,” and the captain hauled the father and uncle away under arrest on the charge of stealing back into their own country.
• The guns attacked her home, and she grabbed something she thought was her baby and rushed into the nearest boat in terror. While on the sea to Acre she discovered that the baby was only a pillow, and from that day she lost her mind. How many infants became pillows? And how many pillows were taken for infants? So, what is a homeland? The homeland of a mother is her child, and the homeland of a child is the mother.
• It would not be an exaggeration to say that Israeli Zionist behavior toward the original inhabitants of Palestine is similar to the practices applied by the Nazis against the Jews themselves.
• You ask for a passport, but you discover you are not a citizen because your father or one of your relatives had fled with you during the Palestine War. You were a child, and you discover that any Arab who had left his country during that period and had stolen back in had lost his right to citizenship.
• You obtain a certificate that proves you exist, and you do eventually obtain a laissez-passer, but the question is, “How are you going to pass?” You are in Haifa, and the airport is near Tel Aviv. You ask the police for a permit to pass from Haifa to Tel Aviv and they refuse. The lawyer intervenes, and some members of the Knesset, but the police still refuse. You think you will be more clever and devious than they are, and decide to leave by way of the sea at the Port of Haifa on the understanding that you have the right to pass to the port. You rejoice at your cleverness. You buy a ticket, and you pass through passport control, the health department, and customs without any hindrance. Then, when you are close to the ship, they arrest you and take you to court. This time, you insist that the law is on your side. But in court you discover that the Port of Haifa is part of the State of Israel, and not part of the city, and they remind you that you are forbidden to be in any part of Israel outside Haifa, and the port according to the law is outside the city. You are found guilty.
• Israel makes a great show of sensitivity to any practice that it sees as oppressive to Jews anywhere in the world, but such practices quickly become legitimate and humane when practiced against the Arabs. And what was considered savagery when directed against Jews quickly changes into a Jewish national duty when undertaken with the “pure” Jewish arms against the Arabs.
• The days have taught you not to trust happiness because it hurts when it deceives.
• You tell them that the mere sight of water does not satisfy the thirsty man but bloodies him.
• The homeland is at its most beautiful when it is on the other side of the barbed wire.
• And Gaza is not the most polished of cities, or the largest. But she is equivalent to the history of a nation, because she is the most repulsive among us in the eyes of the enemy – the poorest, the most desperate, and the most ferocious. Because she is a nightmare. Because she is oranges that explode, children without a childhood, aged men without an old age, and women without desire. Because she is all that, she is the most beautiful among us, the purest, the richest, and most worthy of love.
• I did not say goodbye to anyone or anything. The butt of a rifle rolled me down from Mount Carmel to the port of Haifa. I was clinging to God’s waste and crying at the top of my voice until I lost my voice and my mind. But the world promised me some alms in exchange for signing a truce with myself (because a truce with the killer cannot be accomplished without a truce with oneself first). And the world did give alms: it gave flour, clothes, and many tents for me and my children, who were not born in exchange for homeland and peace. When I felt cold in my exile, newspapers of world public opinion protected me from the rains and from shivering with cold.
• History is not a judge. History is a functionary. What would the Red Indians have said if they had defeated their conquerors? Those who boast of being cultured and civilized are most often the killers.
• Consider this threesome. The first annihilated a people in the past. They have detonated the great sign of their civilization – the atom bomb – in the streets of the world, and are now annihilating a people and a land in Southeast Asia. They are demanding that I exit from the human race and the globe because I am a terrorist. As for the second, it is best not to remind them of their past. They have burned tens of millions of people in the name of culture and civilization. And now, the killer and the victim embrace and give birth to a new offspring, who is the third. What can come out of the marriage of terrorist with terrorist except terrorism? The third, armed to the hilt with the Hebrew Bible and the sword, came and uprooted me from my hills and valleys and rolled me out of civilization down into the depths. This threesome is now demanding I exit from the earth because I am a terrorist.
• This is how the world goes to sleep, and in the same way it wakes up. It is armed with weapons to the hilt, and we are armed to the hilt with shackles. The powerful are civilized, and the weak are savage.
• In saving yourself from being a displaced refugee, you forced the other side to the point in the circle from which you started. Seen this way the equation no longer holds. When you find yourself canceling me out of my being, and when I insist on keeping it, the relationship between you and me becomes one of conflict. Not because I object to your being or to the possibility of a shared existence, but because I object to the negation of my being that arises from the way you carry on with yours.

Now, I cannot begin to imagine what it feels like to be a Palestinian. But as an ethnic cleansing is currently taking place in Gaza I too feel heart broken, feel defeated by the rigged international system, and if I’m doing anything normal or happy in my life I feel guilty considering people in Gaza are immensely suffering. But reading this book has somehow mend the feeling of powerless and the frustration from the inability to help.

Darwish has this aura in his writing that gives hope to the otherwise awful occupation. It does not make it acceptable, but bearable. It does not solve any problem, but put things in their right perspectives that show what we’re really facing. It provides a clear line between right and wrong despite all the propaganda and brainwashing that are trying to justify the crimes.

And his glittering words send a sense of strength and calmness that I’ve never encountered before, words that come from contained deep emotions that take a new form in weighted poetry. Something that we will immediately feel once we read it.

Now I get it why he is considered as one of the biggest voices of the Palestinians.