Mahmoud Darwish Details

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Mahmoud Darwish

13-Mar-1941

Palestinian Territory, Occupied

Author

Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1942 in Barwa, Palestine (now Israel), to a worldwide Sunni family. After the Israeli occupation of Israel in 1948 her family fled to their homeland. He studied at the University of Moscow, USSR, for one year in 1970, and then moved to Cairo, Egypt. When a young Darwish faced house arrest and imprisoned his political activist and read his poems in public. His collections of poems include Stage of Siege (2002), The Adam of Two Edens (2001), Mural (2000), Bed of the Stranger (1999), Psalms (1995), and The Music of Human Flesh (1980). Darwish's awards and honors include the Ibn Sina Award, the Lenin Peace Award, the Lotus Award from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers, France's Knight of the Arts and Belles Lettres medal, the Prize for Cultural Freedom from the Lannan Foundation, and Stalin's USSR Award Peaceful. He was the editor of the Palestine Liberation Organization's monthly journal and director of the group's research center. In 1987 he was appointed to the PLO's executive committee, and resigned in 1993 in opposition to the Oslo agreement. In 1996 Darwish returned to Israel after twenty-six years of exile to visit his birthplace and settled in Ramallah in the West Bank. He is currently editor-in-chief and founder of book reviews Al Karmel, which has been published at the Sakakini Center since 1997.

QUOTES BY Mahmoud Darwish

"Have I had two roads, I would have chosen their third."

"I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in."

"If the Olive Trees knew the hands that planted them, Their Oil would become Tears."

"My love, I fear the silence of your hands."

"We are captives, even if our wheat grows over the fences/ and swallows rise from our broken chains./ We are captives of what we love, what we desire, and what we are."

"The stars had only one task: they taught me how to read. They taught me I had a language in heaven and another language on earth."

"Where can I free myself of the homeland in my body?"

"And if happiness should surprise you again, do not mention its previous betrayal. Enter into the happiness, and burst."

"I learnt all the words worthy of the court of blood So that I could break the rule I learnt all the words and broke them up To make a single word: Homeland.."