News at Eleven: Three decades before the War on Terror

became a global dogma, [Mahmoud] Darwish's incisive critique still holds true. "Such is the world, always: most admiring of collective killing and most critical of individual killing. The state has a right to kill its own people and those belonging to other nations, but the individual does not have a right to fight for the sake of freedom."

Journal of Ordinary Grief is not an ordinary autobiographical work. It revisits seminal moments in the trajectory of Palestinian consciousness: shock, trauma, the struggle to gain equality and national rights, armed resistance, and Arab betrayals. Darwish brilliantly crystallises the hollowness of official Arab discourse about Palestine and the complicity of Arab regimes with the practices of Israel: "The condition of undeclared peace in Arab practice, and the condition of declared war in the Arabic sentence."

from The National: Mahmoud Darwish peers into himself for 'In the Presence of Absence'

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