Mahmoud Darwish Lauded as 'Symbol'

RAMALLAH, Aug. 13 -- Seventeen-year-old Irjwan Assi never met Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, but she was in mourning all the same Wednesday as she craned her neck to watch his flag-draped coffin pass through the center of this West Bank city.

"We lost a very important symbol of our nationalism and our cultural heritage," she said. "We will never have more poets like Mahmoud Darwish."

Assi then recited a few lines from one of Darwish's most famous poems, written 40 years ago when he was serving time in an Israeli jail.

I long for my mother's bread,

And my mother's coffee,

And her touch.

The poem represents the yearning for a homeland that all Palestinians feel, Assi said, adding that she believes Darwish was even more important to Palestinians than former leader Yasser Arafat, who died in 2004. Darwish, 67, died in a Houston hospital Saturday from complications of open-heart surgery.

Like Arafat's, Darwish's funeral was organized by the Palestinian Authority and attended by thousands of people. The coffin was driven through the streets of Ramallah to a hill on the outskirts of the city near the Cultural Palace, where Darwish had read some of his poems just last month.

As the coffin was laid in the ground, the crowd chanted, "O Mahmoud, O Darwish, in our hearts you will live."

Adel Manna, an Arab citizen of Israel and a historian, grew up near Darwish's boyhood village in what is now northern Israel and knew the poet well. Darwish "liberated the old Arabic poetry from its constraints and made it accessible to a big audience," Manna said.

Many of Darwish's poems have been set to music. Dib Abdul Gafur, a water resources engineer, had a popular recording of one of them by the Lebanese singer Marcel Khalife as a ring tone on his cellphone.

"His poetry talks about the suffering of the Palestinian people caused by the Israeli occupation," Gafur said. "When you read his poetry, you feel something touches you inside and helps you fight the occupation and work toward independence."

Darwish was born in the upper Galilee village of al-Birweh in 1941. When Israel was created in 1948, his family fled to Lebanon, later returning to Israel. He graduated high school in Israel and moved to the mixed Arab-Jewish city of Haifa.

Darwish spent most of his adult life abroad -- in Cairo, Tunis, Paris and Moscow -- before settling in Ramallah in 1995. He crafted the 1988 Declaration of Independence that was adopted by the Palestine Liberation Organization. In recent months, he had denounced factional fighting among Palestinians, especially between Hamas, which controls Gaza, and Abbas's Fatah, which dominates the West Bank.

In Ramallah on Wednesday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was among dozens of dignitaries on hand to receive Darwish's body at the authority's headquarters.

"He was the master of the word and wisdom, the symbol who expressed our national feeling, our human condition, our declaration of independence," Abbas said.

Mohammed Batrawi, an author and a friend of Darwish's, said the poet had tried, through his verses, to give Palestinians wings to fly to a better reality.

"His poems were not the wings of a butterfly, but of a bee," he said. "Like a bee, the poems go to the flower to make honey. But he also knew how to sting when he was attacked. He wrote resistance poetry, but with a very human approach."

Special correspondent Samuel Sockol contributed to this report.

© 2008 The Washington Post Company