Post by Sukhanwar on Sept 2, 2008 23:55:13 GMT 5
mehmood darwaish ki tadfeen ki khabar agarchay puraani hy magar phir bhi yeh tafseel parhnay sy taaluk rakhti hy
thanx
razi
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By Hossam Ezzedine
Tens of thousands of Palestinians have gathered for the equivalent of a state funeral for Mahmoud Darwish, the towering Arab poet who gave voice to their bitter decades-old struggle.
Darwish, considered the national poet of the Palestinians and the author of their 1988 declaration of independence, won a number of international prizes and is widely considered one of the Arab world's greatest writers.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas presided over a midday ceremony on Wednesday attended by senior officials, Arab-Israeli parliamentarians and dozens of foreign dignitaries at the Muqataa, his headquarters in the West Bank town of Ramallah.
"The story of our people is your story, Mahmoud, and by our meeting it was made more complete and more beautiful," Abbas said in a eulogy.
"You remain with us, Mahmoud, because you represent everything that unites us."
He went on to express the hope that "the flag he raised so high with his poems will one day fly high over the minarets of Jerusalem, its churches and walls, the eternal capital of our inevitable Palestinian state".
Organisers had earlier unfurled some 5 000 flags printed with pictures of Darwish, who came to Ramallah in 1995 after a quarter-century abroad.
Darwish, who died on Saturday at the age of 67 in a hospital in the United States from complications after open-heart surgery, was first flown to Jordan, where Palestinian and Jordanian officials attended a two-hour ceremony in his honour.
Darwish was laid to rest in a grave in the outskirts of Jerusalem, the hoped-for capital of a Palestinian state which he had yearned for in poems imbued with the agony of exile and loss.
Darwish penned more than two-dozen books of poetry and prose in a career spanning nearly a half-century, writing searing verses that captured the Palestinian experience of war, exile and the unfinished struggle for a lost homeland.
Born in 1941 in an Arab village in what is now northern Israel, Darwish and his family fled during the 1948 war that followed the creation of the Jewish state, though they soon returned to Israel.
Darwish was critical of Israel over the years and was detained several times in the 1960s before going into self-imposed exile in 1970. During the next 25 years he lived in Paris, Moscow and several Arab capitals.
A sequence of poetic prose about his experience in Beirut during the Israeli invasion in 1982 was translated into English under the title Memory for Forgetfulness.
Darwish served on the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation until 1993, when he resigned in protest at the Oslo autonomy accords.
This article was originally published on page 4 of The Star on August 14, 2008