At twelve, the young writer was warned by a military governor of the dangers of subversive poetry when he recited a poem on the anniversary of Israel’s founding about Palestinian dispossession. But Darwish, afflicted with what he would later call “an incurable malady called hope,” never stopped writing, despite being jailed five times for his poetry. And as he wrote he became a voice for a people whose very existence was consistently denied, perhaps most famously by former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir who asserted that “there is no such thing as Palestinians.” One of his earliest published poems, “Identity Card,” begins with the declaration: “Record, I am an Arab!”

In 1971 as Darwish left the Galilee to study in Moscow, he was stripped of his citizenship by Israel. For the next quarter century he became the pre-eminent poet of exile, writing about resistance, memory, history, language, love, borders, homelands, and homelessness. He was only allowed to return to the West Bank in 1996, after the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. Until then Darwish was permanently on the move, living in and out of suitcases, airports, and hotel rooms in Beirut, Cairo, Amman, Tunis, Cyprus, and Paris. In Beirut Darwish wrote some of his most powerful verses about the Israeli siege of the city and massacres of Palestinians in Lebanon. Continuing his earlier political activism — he had been involved with the Israeli Communist Party and edited their newspaper — he joined the executive committee of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO) in the early 1970s. His commitment to the Palestinian national struggle remained but his investment in organised politics did not last forever. Like his close friend Edward Said, Darwish also became deeply disillusioned with Yasser Arafat over the signing of the Oslo peace accords and resigned from the PLO in 1993.

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