Homage to Mahmoud Darwish

Mona Saudi, born in Amman, Jordan in 1945, is a leading sculptor who often uses stone native to Lebanon or Jordan in her work. Her drawings are strongly linked to her sculptures, and this series is inspired by the poems of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941–2008). It was intended to be a gift for his birthday in March 2009.

Darwish is one of the best-known poets of the Arab world. He was born in 1941 in the village of al-Birweh in Galilee, from where his family were displaced following the creation of Israel in 1948. He lived for some years in Haifa working for the newspaper Al-Ittihad and began writing poetry. As a political activist, he was regularly detained by the Israeli authorities until he finally left, first for Moscow, then Cairo. It was here that he found his literary place with prominent Egyptian writers, such as Naguib Mahfouz. Between 1973 and 1982 he was in Beirut, and he considered his poem 'That's Her Image and This is the Lover's Suicide' the best of all his writing at this time. He left Lebanon at the height of the civil war in 1982 for Tunisia, and from there eventually returned to Ramallah in Palestine where he was to spend much of the rest of his life. Upon his death in 2008 he received a state funeral, attended by thousands of Palestinians. He is buried in Ramallah.

Darwish was an iconic figure who inspired many artists to create paintings and artists’ books. Lines from Darwish's poem 'The Poem of the Land' are inscribed in Arabic in Saudi's own hand around the drawing:

In the month of March, the land told us its secrets,
In the month of March, the horses wake up, my lady is the land,
This is the greenness of the horizon, and this is my song,
I call the sand an extension to my soul,
I call pebbles wings, I call my ribs trees,
This sand is my sand, and this cloud is my cloud,
I am the eternal lover, I am the land,
O you who are going to the grain of wheat, plough my body…

These verses have been translated by Atef Alshaer.

This print is no. 2 from an edition of 50.