International Journal of Advanced Research in Engineering and Technology (IJARET)

Volume 11, Issue 8, August 2020, pp. 989-991, Article ID: IJARET_11_08_097
Available online at https://iaeme.com/Home/issue/IJARET?Volume=11&Issue=8
ISSN Print: 0976-6480 and ISSN Online: 0976-6499
DOI: https://doi.org/10.34218/IJARET.11.8.2020.097

© IAEME Publication Scopus Indexed

A STUDY ON MAHMUD DARWISH: THE VOICE

OF THE OPPRESSED HUMANITY
Shahida Khatun
Ph.D., Research Scholar, Gauhati University,
Guwahati, Assam, India

ABSTRACT
This paper aims to explore the Mahmud Darwish is the voice of the oppressed
humanity and the living legend of Palestine is the angel of history. Mahmud Darwish
generally is known as Palestine's most famous nationalistic poet. He was born on March
13, 1941, in Birweh. When the poet two years old than their home village was razed and
destroyed by the Israeli Army and they fled to Lebanon. A year later Darwish family
returned to their occupied homeland but they did not get citizenship. From the age of
eight years, he started the poem recitation. Darwish’s poems aimed to empower
Palestinian and freedom from oppression. Noteworthy, although most of the time in his
life he exiled but mentally every moment he used to roam and thought about the peoples
of his motherland and their miseries, dream, desire and especially in his motherland.
Indeed we have a clear notion that Darwish was not only the liberation voice of
liberated people of Palestine but he was the voice of the lives of the underprivileged
people all over the world, beyond the limits of the country.
Key words: Mahmud Darwish, Oppressed humanity, Palestine, Homeland.
Cite this Article: Shahida Khatun, A Study on Mahmud Darwish: The Voice of the
Oppressed Humanity, International Journal of Advanced Research in Engineering and
Technology, 11(8), 2020, pp. 989-991.
https://iaeme.com/Home/issue/IJARET?Volume=11&Issue=8

1. INTRODUCTION
When a country is attacked or defeated, the poet and artists of that country suffer the most,
because poets and artistes endanger their lives as the leading warriors of a country or a nation,
they became strong against wrongdoing. For which comes a deep crisis in their lives. They were
being sometimes exiled, sometimes imprisoned and sometimes exploited by injustice and
oppression. Even most of the time they sacrificed their soul. Looking back on the history of
world literature their many examples to see like that. The most affectionate poet Federico
Garcia Lorca was shot dead during the Spanis civil war. Turkey's Nazim Hikmat was tortured
in prison. African poet Benjamin Miles had to be sacrificed to the gallows. There were
numerous poets, artists, novelists, and dramatists, leveled as anti-national because they protest
against the autocratic rule of the government. Even today, life stories and sacrifices of them an

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 A Study on Mahmud Darwish: The Voice of the Oppressed Humanity

endless inspiration, courage, and strength to the liberal people around the world. Palestinian
poet Mahmoud Darwish also an endless inspiration for us.

2. OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study is to explore the Mahmud Darwish is the voice of the oppressed
humanity and the living legend of Palestine is the angel of history.

3. DISCUSSION
Mahmoud Darwish is a rare talent in recent international poetry literature. One of the best poets
in Arabic literature, this poet in one of the most popular voices in Palestine. In Palestine, since
today his poetry sung by the students as a song in various meetings at various times. Mahmoud
Darwish is the living legend of Palestine. A very few poets have become the wealth of people's
soul in own country. Very few poets suffer from deportation, loneliness and suffering all their
lives, thus they can record in the book of history a deep love for the nation, homeland and
unlimited motivation. In these senses, Darwish was not only the liberation voice of liberated
people of Palestine but he was the voice of the lives of the underprivileged people all over the
world, beyond the limits of the country.
Mahmoud Darwish was born in 1941 into a land-owning Palestinian family in a small
village called Birwe, in the north of what was called, just half a century ago, Palestine. Now it
is called Israel. This was a village in a part of Palestine called Galilee. At the time when he was
born, Israel had not yet been created. In 1948, the British announced the end of their mandate
on Palestine and a new state was created on a major part of historic Palestine, including Galilee.
Immediately after that, the first Arab-Israeli war broke out. The Israeli army occupied
Darwish’s village and the whole family joined the exodus of Palestinian refugees – estimated
to be around one million at that time. Now there are more than six million refugees. They joined
the exodus of the Palestinian refugees who fled the Israeli massacres to neighboring Arab
countries, like Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. The Darwish family spent a year in a United Nations
refugee camp in Lebanon, and in 1949, the family returned to their occupied homeland to find
that the Israeli Army had already destroyed and depopulated their village in addition to more
than 400 other villages and towns. They could not travel within their homeland without
permission, nor, could the eight-year-old Darwish recite a poem of lamentation at the school
celebration of the second anniversary of Israel without subsequently incurring the wrath of the
Israeli military governor. Thereafter he was obliged to hide whenever an Israeli officer
appeared. During his school years, and until he left the country in 1970. Darwish would be
imprisoned several times and frequently harassed, always for the crimes of reciting his poetry
and traveling without a permit from village to village.
Birwe was removed from land and map, but remained intact in memory, the mirage of a lost
paradise. In 1997, the Israeli-French filmmaker, Simone Bitton went to what had been Birwe
to film Darwish’s childhood landscape but found nothing but ruins and a desolate, weed-choked
cemetery. On April 16, 2001, Israeli bulldozers began paving a new road through the graves,
unearthing human remains throughout the site. The vanished Palestinian village became, for
the displaced poet, a bundle of belongings carried on the back of the refugee. Denied the
recognition of citizenship in the new state. Darwish settled on language as his identity.
In 1996, after twenty-six years of exile, Darwish was granted a permit to visit his family
and was warmly embraced by his compatriots, the: internal refugees". Thousands of cheering
Palestinians festively greeted him, chanting his popular poems. Darwish later reflected on the
pain and longing he felt for his homeland: “As long as my soul is alive no one can smother my
feeling of nostalgia for my country which I still consider as Palestine”.

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 Shahida Khatun

Darwish’s poetic fraternity includes Federico Garcia Lorca’s canto Hondo (deep song),
Pablo Neruda’s bardic epic, Osip Mandelstam’s elegiac poignancy and Yahuda Amichais
sensitive lyric responsiveness to the contemporary history of the region. As a poet of exile
being, he resembles C.P Cavafy, and share with other poet-exiles of the past century a certain
understanding of the exile condition of literary art. Although his later collections became more
universal in outlook, they are also a powerful outcry and statement of anguish – both of the
topography of the soul and the calamity of his people. They lament the degeneration of the
human condition and strive to stimulate latent forces to create a new destiny. If any particular
obsession is sustained throughout his oeuvre, it would be the question of subjectivity itself, not
only the mutability of identity but its otherness. It is the spiritual dimension of what was,
unfortunately, paradise, that he has most sustained in his life and work.

"I have found that the land is fragile," he said in Palestine as Metaphor:
and the sea, light; I have learned that language and metaphor are not enough to restore place
to a place. Not having been able to find my place on earth, I have attempted to find it in History,
and History cannot be reduced to compensate for lost geography. It is also a vantage point for
shadows, for the self and the other, apprehended in a more complex human journey. . . . Is this
a simple, artistic ruse, a simple borrowing?
Or is it despair taking shape? The answer has no importance. The essential thing for me is
that I have found a greater lyrical capacity, a passage from the relative to the absolute, an
opening for me to inscribe the national within the universal, for Palestine not to be limited to
Palestine, but to establish its aesthetic legitimacy in a greater human sphere.

4. CONCLUSION
Palestinian poet Mahoud Darwish was imprisoned for reciting poetry and traveling between
villages without a permit. Considered a "resistance poet" he was placed under house arrest when
his poem "Identity card" was turned into a protest song. Most of the time in his life he exiled
but mentally every moment he used to roam and thought about the peoples of his motherland
and their miseries, dream, desire and especially in his motherland. Indeed we have a clear notion
that Darwish was not only the liberation voice of liberated people of Palestine but he was the
voice of the lives of the underprivileged people all over the world, beyond the limits of the
country. Finally, the poem became a special terrain of the sky, air-water, soil and perfume of
trees, a free sky and the poet became the angel of history. The poet's rhythm is transformed into
a linguistic meditation, and towards the memory and the agony of forgetfulness. Nevertheless,
poetry still exists today in the lives of individuals and civilizations to talk about the liberation
of the motherland and indigenous.

REFERENCES
[1] Mahmod Darwish; https://www.poetryfoundation.org

[2] Akand M and Monir C; Mahmoud Darwish: Unfortunately It was Paradise,

https://books.google.co.in

[3] Ghanam M and El-zein A; Reflecting on the Life Work of Mahmoud Darwish

[4] Sazzad, Rehnuma; The voice of a Country of Called : Forgetfulness”: Mahmoud Darwish as
Sadi’s Amateur

[5] Mahmoud Darwish’s Biography; mahmouddarwish.ps/en/article

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