Mahmoud Darwish's Poetry

Throughout a selection of Mahmoud Darwish’s writing: A Poem Which Is Not Green, from My Country, Diary of a Palestinian Wound, Sirhan Drinks His Coffee in the Cafeteria and Birds Die in Galilee, Darwish conveys a constant theme of ones homeland. Darwish himself lived in an Israeli-controlled area of Palestine where those in power frowned upon his writings, frequently resulting in imprisonment for Darwish. It was through these poems that Darwish conveyed where his homeland was figuratively located; a place immersed in writing, where nothing else held much meaning, a place based off Darwish’s real existence while imagining certain aspects did not exists. Mahmoud Darwish felt the topic of homeland had a great impact on an individual’s life, thus taking the meaningful from his literal life as a Palestinian and merging it with what he truly desired in his figurative life, a life based solely on literature. In Darwish’s, A Poem Which Is Not Green, from My Country, he speaks a great amount about how he views his figurative homeland based off of his literal existence. He writes, “In my country are the graveyards of light and of luminous flowers, the well-spring of grief. The colours of our letter are persecuted. Trussed it cries out. They stifled it. They squeezed its spark from it. They robbed it of the borders of kindness. They crushed it till it began to burn and then burst. Our letter became a wound where dusk is swimming. In silence it is breaking into bud the flower and bunches of basil! And in my country appointments with dawn are calling out to the swallows lost behind the horizons of my country where they cast off neglected their poems when the long night of lovers’ separation lost them” (9-25). Darwish explains his figurative homeland with a great emphasis on his writing, or “letter.” He details how his writing has been attacked, silenced and sewn shut detaining it from reaching anyone’s hands. How those in power have taken all glory away from the author,