Mahmoud Darwish, who was born in 1941, is considered the national poet of the Palestinian people. His family and he were driven from their village of al-Barwa during the Nakba in 1948. The family snuck back in after the armistice in 1949, but Israel had razed their village. Thereafter, they were considered “present-absent aliens.” Later, he spent many years in exile. He was a member of the National Council of the Palestine Liberation Organization and helped draft their Declaration of Independence, but resigned from the PLO to protest the Oslo Accords in the 1990s. He died in 2008 during open-heart surgery in Houston. Tens of thousands attended his funeral in Ramallah, Palestine.
Indlieb Farazi Saber wrote in Al Jazeera that
Atef Alshaer, a senior lecturer in Arabic language and culture at London’s University of Westminster, says Palestinian poetry “moves people to action, protest, commemorate, to remember, and bear witness.”
“In the absence of a fair response to Palestinian political outcries, poetry has helped to give shape and voice to what they have lost.”
Saber stated that Darwish’s poem, “Identity Card,” which he published in 1964, “led to his house arrest, while Palestinians turned it into an anthem for protest.”
In July 2016, Israeli Army Radio broadcast “Identity Card.” It seems someone didn’t get the memo. Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman turned purple and fumed that “Darwish’s poems could not ‘be part of the Israeli narrative program… By the same logic we can also add to the Israeli narrative Mufti al-Husseini, or broadcast a glorification of the literary merits of ‘Mein Kampf.’” Cultural Minister Miri Regev added that Army Radio “cannot allow itself to glorify the anti-Israel historical tale, as Mahmoud Darwish is not an Israeli, his poems are not Israeli, and they go against the main values of Israeli society.”
Let’s look at the main values in Darwish’s poem.
Writing in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Salman Hilmy explained that
In this free-verse poem, Darwish assumes the symbolic persona of an ordinary Palestinian victim of Zionist oppression being interrogated by an Israeli official. The verses empower the peaceful, dispossessed Palestinian with an assertive identity and a confident voice that defy continuous humiliations at the hand of the occupier. Although the poet was fluent in Hebrew, he ignores the official’s language by omitting his questions from the poem and replies only in Arabic to underscore his own and Palestine’s cultural and national identity. The poem’s power lies partially in its stark language, uplifting tone and simple, direct images, which endow the speaker with a kind of primal nobility.
Between 1948 and 1966, Israel subjected Palestinians within its borders to military occupation and an apartheid system of control. During the 1967 war, Israel captured Gaza, the West Bank, and Jerusalem and expanded the apartheid system to the occupied territories. The Israeli Ministry of Interior maintains a population registry of Palestinians between the river and the sea and assigns identity cards to them based on their location. This graphic from Visualizing Palestine summarizes that ID system.
“Identity Card” relates a confrontation between a Palestinian and an Israeli official (soldier, bureaucrat, police officer) demanding the Palestinian’s identity card — a confrontation that could happen at any time and that does happen countless times a day in the occupied territories. The Palestinian rejects the official’s attempt to frame the confrontation as between occupier and occupied and instead tells the official to record who they, the Palestinian, says they are. “I am not who you say I am,” the Palestinian says, “This is who I am: These are my children. I transform the rocks in your quarry into food and clothing for them. This is my ancestors’ land, which you have stolen from us. I am peaceful, but I will not beg for what is mine. Beware of my anger and my hunger!”
I urge you to watch this moving video of a young Palestinian woman reading the poem in Arabic and in English.
Identity Card
By Mahmoud Darwish
Write down!
I am an Arab
And my identity card number is fifty thousand
I have eight children
And the ninth will come after a summer
Will you be angry?
Write down!
I am an Arab
Employed with fellow workers at a quarry
I have eight children
I get them bread
Garments and books from the rocks...
I do not supplicate charity at your doors
Nor do I belittle myself at the footsteps of your chamber
So will you be angry?
Write down!
I am an Arab
I have a name without a title
Patient in a country
Where people are enraged
My roots
Were entrenched before the birth of time
And before the opening of the eras
Before the pines, and the olive trees
And before the grass grew
My father ... descends from the family of the plough
Not from a privileged class
And my grandfather ... was a farmer
Neither well-bred, nor well-born!
Teaches me the pride of the sun
Before teaching me how to read
And my house is like a watchman's hut
Made of branches and cane
Are you satisfied with my status?
I have a name without a title!
Write down!
I am an Arab
You have stolen the orchards of my ancestors
And the land which I cultivated
Along with my children
And you left nothing for us
Except for these rocks ...
So will the State take them
As it has been said?!
Therefore!
Write down on the top of the first page:
I do not hate people
Nor do I encroach
But if I become hungry
The usurper’s flesh will be my food
Beware ...
Beware ...
Of my hunger
And my anger!