The first commemoration of the passing of Mahmoud Darwish is not just a cultural event, in the sense that interest in it would be restricted to its impact on poetry and literature in the Arab World. In fact, one could claim that it is a first-rate political event. What gives it such status exceeds the role of the poet in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) or the fact that he occupied a number of positions in its executive committee and such, to the importance of the role mentioned, which has made culture a real concern in Palestinian national activity. In fact, perhaps the most important role played by Darwish lies in his giving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict a human dimension, to the benefit of Palestinian people and Arabs in general, a dimension that is exposed to siege and marginalization in the current seasons of apostasy. There is nothing new in such talk except in it falling under the rediscovery of the discovered, in terms of the value Darwish at a time when the Palestinian Cause seems as if at its last gasp, alongside marking the known rift between intellectuals and politicians with the erosion of the cause in which intellectuals have engaged themselves. Indeed, those whom the poet addressed in his first poems continued for a long span of time to reside in the same political-cultural sphere, before collapsing by virtue of the inability to comprehend and to contain the modern Zionist scheme, before defending against it with worn-out epistemological means, which are only good for prolonging and feeding inherited social divisions. The blame that some have laid on Darwish in his final years, because of what they consider to be abandoning the cause and refraining from assuming the task of speaking in its name, it must be laid on those who have brought the cause to the dead-end in which it has been entangled for nearly two decades. Despite the fact that “the word is a great deed”, as Russian author Dostoevsky used to say, in the sense of having the ability to grant new dimensions and colors to plain reality – in fact, it laying open the doors of imagination could lead to material change, i.e. the so-called “poetic solution” – it, on the other hand, cannot replace reality and truth, else it would fall into the trap of fraud and fabrication which the priests of ideological and political purity call for today. Mahmoud Darwish gave the cause perspective and a dream about the past of the Palestinian people before and during the Nakba (Catastrophe), and he was not required to go further than that. Indeed, he went far enough in his poetic project, and when he “described our condition” in political writings that were almost direct, he was sincere in his bias. The fact is that Darwish, in his presence as in his absence, represents a reason to reflect on the relationship between culture and politics in the Arab World, on their constant struggle ever since there was politics and ever since culture appeared in this part of the world, and on their dwindling together before the wave of that mix of the illusions of locally fabricated history and of tribal and sectarian “cultures”. Our condition, which does not appeal to reflection of this kind, drives us despite its dreariness not to surrender to oblivion and to eternally return to the starting point, as have insisted Mahmoud Darwish's enemies, who know of life only the moments of their sad beginnings. We have to work on resisting utter despair, or turn to distracting ourselves with Mohammed Dahlan's interventions or yet another analysis of Walid Jumblatt's statements.
