M
Muhammad
Guest
You might want to read this.. I translated it awhile back.. Arab readers can find the original here..
------------------------
Mahmoud Darwish
February 4 2007
Ladies and Gentlemen, Brothers and Sisters
My sadness for him came a little late, because I like others expected from the master of survival to come back to us this time too with a new start, but the new time is stronger than the romanticism of the legend and than the charm of the phoenix, and for eulogy there is a permanent rite, which begins by using the past tense. Yasser Arafat was the longest chapter in our lives, and his name was one of the new names of Palestine, rising from the ashes of catastrophe to the fire of resistance to the concept of the state to the reality of its troubled establishment.
But for the tragic heroes there is a fate that quarrels with them, and lurks their last step towards the gate of arrival, to deprive them from the celebration of the happy ending of a life time of suffering and sacrifice, because the sower in the rugged fields is not always the harvester.
It consoles us in this respect, that the deeds of this immortal leader, who reached the limit of complete unity between the personal and the public, brought the bloody Palestinian journey to the darkest hour of the night, the hour before dawn, the bitter dawn of independence, no matter how this dawn lagged, and no matter the high walls built by the dark ones.
It also consoles us that the hero of this long journey, who was born on this lofty land, returned to her to put the cornerstone for the future, and to find in her his eternal peace, to become the land of shrines enriched by a new shrine.
Symbols quarrel too, like history quarrels with superstition, and reality with fable.
That’s why Yasser Arafat, the realistic to the extreme limits, needed to graft his speech sometimes with a little of the unseen dimension, because the others added to the struggle on the present a struggle on the past, by erasing the limits between what is historical and what is superstitious, to dispossess the Palestinian of the legitimacy of his national existence on this land.
But the search for the present is the chief concern for people, and is the work field of politics, and the work of the leader who is looking at tomorrow.
And Yasser Arafat, who is looking at tomorrow, and who has deep faith in God and his prophets, also has deep faith in religious and cultural multiplicity, which gives this land it’s specialty, the multiplicity which is the opposite of the exclusive Israeli concept, and he was in his dynamic search for tomorrow in the present looking for the points of conjunction and creating a barrier against fundamentalisms, his religiousness was not a barrier against his secularity, and his secularity was not a burden on his religiousness, because religion is for God and the homeland is for everybody.
Who of us did not stand mystified in front of the strength of his faith in the near return? His sight was like his insight penetrating the black fog.
I was a witness when he was getting ready to ride the sea from Beirut to what we don’t know, to a distant unknown.
Uri Avenry asked him: where are you going? He instantly responded: to Palestine, no one of us believed this response escaping from poetry, and Palestine did not seem as far before as it did from this sea, he was out of Sharon’s siege, he survived the chasing planes, and the sniper’s glass, and continued in an Odysseyan journey, carrying the end of a stage, to say: I’m going to Palestine.
He rebuilt the story and the journey, survived a raid in a bedroom in Tunis, and survived another time from the falling of his plane in the Libyan desert, and survived the effects of the first gulf war, and survived the image of the terrorist and replaced it by the image of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and fulfilled his prophecy which lived in him all his life, he returned to the land of Palestine, returned to his promised land.
If that was the end then the Greek tragedy would have turned against its conditions, but Sharon, who is returning from the suburbs of Beirut regretting what he still did not do, will stalk his great foe in Ramallah, will siege him for three years, will turn his headquarter into ruins, and will poison his life with siege and isolation, and will deprive him from dying like he wished a martyr in his headquarter, because Sharon not only fights the person and his national message, but fights the shining symbol in the time, and fights the effect of the legend in the collective memory.
But Yasser Arafat, who is deeply aware of the place he set for himself in modern history, supervised by himself the ensuring of a necessary pain for the last chapter of his living legend, so he flew to the exile to greet it with a farewell gave with it his spirit.
Because the tragic hero does not die except in exile.
And on the way of his metaphorical return, the one with the Egyptian love passed by Egypt, and in his final return, the one with no more exile after it, he took his long last look at the Palestinian coast which is plunged like a sword into the waist of the sea, then he slept, the light body wrapped itself by the land of the heavy dream and slept, not to rise as an idol or icon, but as a living thought provoking us to worship the homeland and the freedom, and to insist on the birth of the dawn by brave and smart hands.
The industry of illusion is flourishing in another place, on global and regional levels the early celebration of seeing a fake dawn is taking place, a fake dawn rising from the departure of Arafat who is described that he was the main obstacle for the advancement of the peace process, so be it, so what is the new vision? The international law and the international referentiality will test, since the obstacle has gone will the occupation be gone? The world will not wait long to realize that Sharon’s four Nos which were adopted by the American president, not only form the largest obstacle for peace, but make peace impossible, because they make the possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state impossible, because peace and the continuation of occupation and enslavement of the Palestinian people are not equal, just like the temporary and the eternal are not equal, so who after Arafat will accept a temporary semi-state forever?!
We will always miss him in crises, and in negotiations, and in every part of our life, because he is an organic part of it, and because he is unique and without school, because Arafatism does not rest except on its owner, because it’s a unique dynamic talent, and intimacy and super activity, and uninhiritable personal attributes, and anarchy and order combined, and intimate relationships with people, the Arafatic charisma has shined.
After Arafat we will not find new Arafatism, he closed the door on a complete stage of the stages of our internal lives, but the door will not open in his absence, on accepting the impossible Israeli conditions for a settlement in which there is nothing left for the Palestinians to give up.
Here the Arafatism continues its deed, and here Arafat does not be one individual, but an expression of the soul of alive people.
In everyone of us a personal thought from him and a hug and a kiss, and in every one of us the awareness of an identity that does not suffer the worry about definition, we will not be Palestinians except if we were Arabs, and we will not be Arabs except if we were Palestinians, this identity is hard on revision and negotiating either if the new middle east took place or not. And we will not be what we want to be unless we knew how to end the process of leaving our history and the human history, and how to return to them with all we got of capacities, experiences, and talents.
And that was Yasser Arafat’s persistent endeavor, to move from the role played by the victim in history to the participation in the making of history, so to him the glory and the immortality.
------------------------
Mahmoud Darwish
February 4 2007
Ladies and Gentlemen, Brothers and Sisters
My sadness for him came a little late, because I like others expected from the master of survival to come back to us this time too with a new start, but the new time is stronger than the romanticism of the legend and than the charm of the phoenix, and for eulogy there is a permanent rite, which begins by using the past tense. Yasser Arafat was the longest chapter in our lives, and his name was one of the new names of Palestine, rising from the ashes of catastrophe to the fire of resistance to the concept of the state to the reality of its troubled establishment.
But for the tragic heroes there is a fate that quarrels with them, and lurks their last step towards the gate of arrival, to deprive them from the celebration of the happy ending of a life time of suffering and sacrifice, because the sower in the rugged fields is not always the harvester.
It consoles us in this respect, that the deeds of this immortal leader, who reached the limit of complete unity between the personal and the public, brought the bloody Palestinian journey to the darkest hour of the night, the hour before dawn, the bitter dawn of independence, no matter how this dawn lagged, and no matter the high walls built by the dark ones.
It also consoles us that the hero of this long journey, who was born on this lofty land, returned to her to put the cornerstone for the future, and to find in her his eternal peace, to become the land of shrines enriched by a new shrine.
Symbols quarrel too, like history quarrels with superstition, and reality with fable.
That’s why Yasser Arafat, the realistic to the extreme limits, needed to graft his speech sometimes with a little of the unseen dimension, because the others added to the struggle on the present a struggle on the past, by erasing the limits between what is historical and what is superstitious, to dispossess the Palestinian of the legitimacy of his national existence on this land.
But the search for the present is the chief concern for people, and is the work field of politics, and the work of the leader who is looking at tomorrow.
And Yasser Arafat, who is looking at tomorrow, and who has deep faith in God and his prophets, also has deep faith in religious and cultural multiplicity, which gives this land it’s specialty, the multiplicity which is the opposite of the exclusive Israeli concept, and he was in his dynamic search for tomorrow in the present looking for the points of conjunction and creating a barrier against fundamentalisms, his religiousness was not a barrier against his secularity, and his secularity was not a burden on his religiousness, because religion is for God and the homeland is for everybody.
Who of us did not stand mystified in front of the strength of his faith in the near return? His sight was like his insight penetrating the black fog.
I was a witness when he was getting ready to ride the sea from Beirut to what we don’t know, to a distant unknown.
Uri Avenry asked him: where are you going? He instantly responded: to Palestine, no one of us believed this response escaping from poetry, and Palestine did not seem as far before as it did from this sea, he was out of Sharon’s siege, he survived the chasing planes, and the sniper’s glass, and continued in an Odysseyan journey, carrying the end of a stage, to say: I’m going to Palestine.
He rebuilt the story and the journey, survived a raid in a bedroom in Tunis, and survived another time from the falling of his plane in the Libyan desert, and survived the effects of the first gulf war, and survived the image of the terrorist and replaced it by the image of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, and fulfilled his prophecy which lived in him all his life, he returned to the land of Palestine, returned to his promised land.
If that was the end then the Greek tragedy would have turned against its conditions, but Sharon, who is returning from the suburbs of Beirut regretting what he still did not do, will stalk his great foe in Ramallah, will siege him for three years, will turn his headquarter into ruins, and will poison his life with siege and isolation, and will deprive him from dying like he wished a martyr in his headquarter, because Sharon not only fights the person and his national message, but fights the shining symbol in the time, and fights the effect of the legend in the collective memory.
But Yasser Arafat, who is deeply aware of the place he set for himself in modern history, supervised by himself the ensuring of a necessary pain for the last chapter of his living legend, so he flew to the exile to greet it with a farewell gave with it his spirit.
Because the tragic hero does not die except in exile.
And on the way of his metaphorical return, the one with the Egyptian love passed by Egypt, and in his final return, the one with no more exile after it, he took his long last look at the Palestinian coast which is plunged like a sword into the waist of the sea, then he slept, the light body wrapped itself by the land of the heavy dream and slept, not to rise as an idol or icon, but as a living thought provoking us to worship the homeland and the freedom, and to insist on the birth of the dawn by brave and smart hands.
The industry of illusion is flourishing in another place, on global and regional levels the early celebration of seeing a fake dawn is taking place, a fake dawn rising from the departure of Arafat who is described that he was the main obstacle for the advancement of the peace process, so be it, so what is the new vision? The international law and the international referentiality will test, since the obstacle has gone will the occupation be gone? The world will not wait long to realize that Sharon’s four Nos which were adopted by the American president, not only form the largest obstacle for peace, but make peace impossible, because they make the possibility of establishing an independent Palestinian state impossible, because peace and the continuation of occupation and enslavement of the Palestinian people are not equal, just like the temporary and the eternal are not equal, so who after Arafat will accept a temporary semi-state forever?!
We will always miss him in crises, and in negotiations, and in every part of our life, because he is an organic part of it, and because he is unique and without school, because Arafatism does not rest except on its owner, because it’s a unique dynamic talent, and intimacy and super activity, and uninhiritable personal attributes, and anarchy and order combined, and intimate relationships with people, the Arafatic charisma has shined.
After Arafat we will not find new Arafatism, he closed the door on a complete stage of the stages of our internal lives, but the door will not open in his absence, on accepting the impossible Israeli conditions for a settlement in which there is nothing left for the Palestinians to give up.
Here the Arafatism continues its deed, and here Arafat does not be one individual, but an expression of the soul of alive people.
In everyone of us a personal thought from him and a hug and a kiss, and in every one of us the awareness of an identity that does not suffer the worry about definition, we will not be Palestinians except if we were Arabs, and we will not be Arabs except if we were Palestinians, this identity is hard on revision and negotiating either if the new middle east took place or not. And we will not be what we want to be unless we knew how to end the process of leaving our history and the human history, and how to return to them with all we got of capacities, experiences, and talents.
And that was Yasser Arafat’s persistent endeavor, to move from the role played by the victim in history to the participation in the making of history, so to him the glory and the immortality.
