Mahmoud Darwish died in Houston. The Palestinian poet, as monumental to his nation’s literature as Gabriel García Márquez is to Colombia or Anna Akhmatova to Russia, had flown to the city to have open heart surgery for the third time in his life. The procedure took place on August 6, 2008; three days later, he passed away from complications at the age of 67.
When I think that Darwish’s life ended in Texas, I find myself wondering how he spent his final days. Did he see a cactus blooming, this poet who gave voice to the emotional landscape of exile perhaps more clearly than any other, and think of al-Birwa, the now-razed village where he was born? Feeling the torrid August humidity, did he think instead of the dry winds of Ramallah, where he lived for many years in later life? I daydream that he visited the Rothko Chapel, continuing the conversation with death that he began in his famous long poem, “Mural,” as he sat before the enormous, obsidian-colored canvases: “Death, have a seat and enmesh yourself / with the crystal of my days.”
Though Darwish lived in Palestine in the years leading up to his death, there is a devastating symmetry to his passing thousands of miles away, in a country not his own. Exile was, for him, a state of being, the liminal reality of Palestinian dispossession: “I am from here, I am from there, yet am neither here nor there,” he writes in “Another Road in the Road.” Yet I also find myself profoundly moved to think that Darwish shared, for however brief and tragic a period, some of the geography of his life with those of us in Texas. As the Israeli military has unleashed unutterable violence in the Gaza Strip, the 140-square-mile slice of Palestinian territory abutting Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea, the coda to Darwish’s life seems a reminder of the relationship between our daily Texan lives and the lives of Palestine and its diaspora. About 9 percent of the United States’ entire Palestinian population lives in Texas; at statewide rallies, tens of thousands of community members and allies have shown up in recent months to pressure government officials to end the ongoing horror in Gaza.
