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:

I am the land and the land is you,
This is my song,
And this is the emergence of Jesus from the wound,
And the wind is green like grass covering the nails and my chains,
And this is the ascendance of the Arab boy to the dream and Jerusalem...

This verse has been translated by Atef Alshaer.

The print is no. 5 from an edition of 50.