Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine’s Poet and the Other as the Beloved

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Mahmoud Darwish: Palestine’s Poet and the Other as the Beloved focuses on Palestinian national poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), whose poetry has helped to shape Palestinian identity and foster Palestinian culture through many decades of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Dalya Cohen-Mor explores the poet’s romantic relationship with Rita, an Israeli Jewish woman whom he had met in Haifa in his early twenties and to whom he had dedicated a series of love poems and prose passages, among them the iconic poem Rita and the Gun. Interwoven with biographical details and diverse documentary materials, this exploration reveals a fascinating facet in the poet’s personality, his self-definition, and his attitude toward the Israeli other. Comprising a close reading of Darwish’s love poems, coupled with many examples of novels and short stories from both Arabic and Hebrew fiction that deal with Arab-Jewish love stories, this book delves into the complexity of Arab-Jewish relations and shows how romance can blossom across ethno-religious lines and how politics all too often destroys it.