Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish dies - The National Newspaper

Palestinian television interrupted programmes to show film of Darwish, the "national poet", reading from his work. AP

RAMALLAH // Mahmoud Darwish, a poet whose work his fellow Palestinians embraced as the voice of their suffering, died yesterday after heart surgery in Texas.

President Mahmoud Abbas declared three days of national mourning to honour the writer who was 67-years-old.

"The passing of our great poet, Mahmoud Darwish, the lover of Palestine, the pioneer of the modern Palestinian cultural project, and the brilliant national leader, will leave a great gap in our political, cultural and national lives," Mr Abbas said.

Mr Darwish's life and poetry were tightly bound up in a struggle for a Palestinian national rebirth that seems little closer now than when his first work was published in 1960.

As news of his death emerged, people gathered around candles in the darkened streets of Ramallah, where the poet had lived since returning in the 1990s from a long exile.

Palestinian television interrupted programmes to show film of Darwish, the "national poet", reading from his work. Officials said his body would be flown back for burial in Ramallah.

He won new generations of admirers with work that evoked the pain of Palestinians displaced, as he was as a child, by the establishment of Israel 60 years ago, but also did not shrink from criticism.

An intensely private man who largely lived alone, he enjoyed a mass following across the Arab world. His poetry has been translated into more than 20 languages.

Palestinians at home and abroad spoke of intense, personal feelings of bereavement. "His death is a loss to the Palestinian people, to the Palestinian cause and to freedom-loving people around the world," said Ahmad Ibrahim, a banker in Ramallah.

Abdel-Rahim al Sheikh, a philosophy professor, was choked with emotion: "I cannot speak now. My soul is not helping me."

Last month Mr Darwish gave a reading in Ramallah, which millions watched on television, to mark the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian "Nakba", or catastrophe.

In 1948, Mr Darwish was among that half of the Arab population of Palestine driven from their homes, in his family's case near the port of Haifa. They later returned to live in the area.

Jailed several times, Mr Darwish left in 1971 for the Soviet Union. Exile in Cairo, Beirut, Tunis and Paris followed.

In 1988, Israel's parliament debated one work which incensed Israelis who saw an attack on the existence of the Jewish state — though Darwish said he wanted an end only to their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: "So leave our land. Our shore, our sea. Our wheat, our salt, our wound," he had written.

"Take your portion from our blood and go away".

In 2000, an Israeli minister proposed adding the poet to the school curriculum, but the proposal went no further.

Mr Darwish served on the executive committee of the PLO but broke with Yasser Arafat when the two disagreed over the 1993 Oslo accords on establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel.

Fifteen years on, negotiations appear to most observers to be going nowhere. Violence, a split between President Abbas and his rivals in Gaza and continued Israeli settlement in the West Bank leave few Palestinians hopeful of a viable state.