A poetry evening by the poet Mahmoud Darwish |
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Collection title
Evenings
First broadcast date
07/01/2008
Abstract
On the centenary occasion of Ramallah’s municipality, an evening of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was organized in the Palace of culture in 2008.
He presented his last collection of poems accompanied by the musical band “Jabran” which used to accompany him during his evenings of poetry.
It was his last evening of poetry because he died a month later while he was undergoing an operation.
It is said that during that evening he predicted his death through the poem “The Dice Player”.
Production companies
-
Ramallah Municipality - Own production
Broadcaster
PBC - Palestine T.V.
Personalities
- Derwish Mahmoud
- Trio Jebran - Musicians
Primary theme
Live performances
Secondary themes
- Art, Culture and Knowledge / Languages and literatures
- Art, Culture and Knowledge / Music and songs
Credits / Cast
- Team Palestinian Television - Director
Map locations
- Palestine - West bank - Ramallah
Media running time
103m44
Additional information
Mahmoud Darwish's last poetry evening, a month before his death.
Context
An evening of poetry with the poet Mahmoud Darwich
Richard Jacquemond
The evening of poetry shown in this film was probably the last given by Mahmoud Darwish to a Palestinian audience: we are in Ramallah on July 1st 2008, just five weeks before the poet died in a Houston hospital (Texas) where he had gone to have heart surgery. Born in 1941 in a village in Galilee, arrested several times by Israeli authorities in the 1960s, Darwish lived as a Palestinian exile from 1970 until 1995, when he moved to Ramallah, a town without history but which, thanks to the Oslo agreements, became the political capital of the embryonic Palestinian state (this archive footage was filmed during the centenary celebrations of Ramallah’s founding, a paradox in a land that houses some of the oldest cities in the world). This is also where he was buried on August 15th, 2008, after three days of national mourning and an official funeral followed by tens of thousands of his countrymen.
The large audience had, like the viewer of this archive material, to wait half an hour for all the official speeches before finally seeing the poet come up on to the stage, accompanied by the excellent trio Joubran (see their website: http://www.letriojoubran.com /). The very official setting for this evening (at the beginning of the film, during the national anthem, we see Darwish flanked by Yasser Abd Rabbo, former Minister of Culture, and Salam Fayyad, then head of the Palestinian Authority’s government) is misleading: the public were there to listen Darwish. Modern Arabic poetry may have broken with the traditional formal framework, but it has not lost none of its lyrical dimension: when it is declaimed on stage (or when it is set to music and sung) it is at its best, showing its true virtues – and is most appreciated by the public. This is particularly true of Darwish: over four decades his public appearances across the Arab world, in France and elsewhere, have moved hundreds of thousands of listeners.
Darwish's immense popularity began as a "poet of Palestinian resistance" (see context of the archive "The Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish" - SNR00353), but he was first and foremost a poet. Although he himself was politically committed all his life, his poetry transcends this commitment and should be read first in that spirit. This is especially true of his later poems: in a fairly common evolution, the work becomes more austere, meditative as the poet grows older, but also (and this perhaps is less common) freer, denser, shorter and more powerful than ever. The poems he read on this particular evening in July 2008 in Ramallah, among the last he ever wrote, are in this style: "In the station of a train dropped from the cards", "Scenario ready to be performed", "The dice thrower "(translated into French in his 2010 collection “The dice thrower”). Extract from this latter:
Who am I to tell you
what I tell you
(...)
I have the luck to sleep alone,
to listen to my heart as well,
to believe in my talent to detect pain
and call the doctor
ten minutes before dying,
ten minutes are enough to revive
by chance and disappoint the void.
But who am I to disappoint the void?
Bibliography
Mahmoud Darwich, Le lanceur de dés et autres poèmes, trad. Elias Sanbar, photographies d’Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Arles, Actes Sud, 2010
In English: "Unfortunately, It was Paradise" (2003) and The Butterfly's Burden (2007), both available from Amazon UK
