Darwish: Our beautiful story

When we knew him thirty years ago, our innocence was hidden in the book of reading and fruitless texts, a green dove that landed on our hearts, threatening us, teaching us, and guiding us with “certainty”.

Mahmoud Darwish was our aspiration and our role model, our eternal dream of the idea, how small the state is, how wonderful the idea, the idea of owning the universe from time immemorial. We... the beginning, the end and the details.

When he reached out and patted my shoulder, encouraging what I had begun as a “research” thirty years ago, and what he began as poetry fifty years ago, I did not sleep that night. I flew with joy. Here, our little dove, our eternal dream, our hourglass, our savior from the boredom of tampering in the book of dead Arabic texts comes slowly and pats my shoulder. I am the sad one, the sad one, the extent of an orphan.

With Elias Nakhleh, I wondered, "The hero of the story of the trees and Marzouk's assassination of the present late Abdul Rahman Munif, did Darwish really leave? Or is the dream fading little by little?” And I saw Elias screaming: This is your will, Lord... Darwish, no, my heart is on my heart, but I say now: No. We were young then, when a beautiful sadness engulfed our soul, with the lines of his early days in Ahmed El-Zaatar and the praise of the high shadow. Ahmed Al-Arabi, who is also a Darwish. We were young when we crushed him in poetry and prose, then we stopped writing.

When I met him the last time, a few months before his departure, I said to him, “Do you know that I gave up writing poetry after reading you?” And when he asked me the reason, I said, “Because I knew that I would not be a Darwish.” He said to me, “Be you wherever you are and smile.”

Those first inscriptions engraved on the edges of our soul were his. We had bid farewell to our old dreams with Amal Donqol, Ahmed Abdel-Moaty Hegazy and Salah Abdel Sabour when Darwish opened new horizons for us to dream about the idea, not dream of the state. That was his phrase: “How great is the idea, how small is the state!” What a great spirit, and Darwish our beautiful story, we used to mix it with Tayeb Salih, Abdul Rahman Munif, Hanna Mina, Tahar Ouettar, Rachid Boudjedra, Haidar Haidar, Yusuf Idris, and Uncle Naguib Mahfouz. The novel with poetry, and poetry in the novel, until our sticks hardened, and we succeeded in traversing the other side of the ordeal of alienation in the homeland.

Thus, Darwish was a dream that envelops the soul from its edges, a legend of beautiful sadness, a form of the direction of the wind in the weak body, a distance between my heart and innocence.

Do I stop writing about him? He who grieved me and made me happy and demanded the impossible, when he told me to complete it. Only you will complete your battle. Was that a tone of sadness, or is it the most wonderful sense of it?

I do not love him. How much I love him. Ayoub is dead, and the phoenix is dead. And the companions left, and here he is leaving. A year has passed, so what is left in the cup after him? All the bars were closed and you were running away. You ran away in the streets of Beirut. You wanted it for you alone, and they tried to stop you. Were you the one who woke her up then? Or was she the one who killed you, when you bore a thug from your enemy?

Between Rita and your eyes there is still the gun, and you bragged about kissing Rita when she was little, so can you now reveal Rita's fate, and your only kiss, and the day, and the curl of the arm... or is it your last trip?

Peace be upon our cypress in the highest, peace be upon our people there. Peace be upon you, stranger. Peace be upon you, stranger.