By Farid Farid

Mahmoud DarwishOne of Mahmoud Darwish's most memorable lines is "there is on this earth, what makes life worth living." The illocutionary profundity and sentimental beatitude captured in this line by the national poet of Palestine rings truer today more than ever in a world afflicted with moral bankruptcy and ethical corruption. The now finite fragrant poetry and prose of Darwish, who sadly passed away two years ago on 9th August, was one of the epicurean pleasures to be savoured as a reader. The carefully constructed stanzas and meandering rhythms were at once intellectually gratifying and spiritually nourishing. In his posthumous collection, The Butterfly's Burden, Darwish's elegant poems are prophetic as ever but also heart wrenching in their evocative descriptions of his beloved occupied homeland of Palestine.

Darwish was born in 1941 in al Birwah-a village that had fallen to Zionist forces in their establishment of a newly independent state in 1948. His complex picturing of human nature was not tainted by his experiences as an unwanted refugee in Israel. Darwish maintained a critical sense of justice without losing perspective of the innate humanity of those whom he shared the land with albeit in unequal arrangements. He once commented "I will continue to humanize even the enemy... The first teacher who taught me Hebrew was a Jew. The first love affair in my life was with a Jewish girl. The first judge who sent me to prison was a Jewish woman. So from the beginning, I didn't see Jews as devils or angels but as human beings." And it is precisely this humanistic philosophy that elevated him as a deified cultural figure within the rich literary annals of the Middle Eastern world. His quiet charisma and sonorous intonations galvanized populations to his secular theology of peace predicated on an unflinchingly poetic disposition. From his landmark first poem "Record I am An Arab" to his hauntingly last presence on screen for a production on Ibsen called "Identity of the Soul," Darwish enunciates a celestial monologue that shatters borders, that conflagrates an confirms common sense, that delicately speaks and appeals to all those who shriek when suffering and to those ears that are comforted by a talismanic historian of life narrating his displaced identity.

Tony JudtOn the same pantheon of public intellectuals also stood Tony Judt, whose sobering voice crying form the obfuscating wilderness of political machinations and spin will be deeply missed. Judt died on 6th August, 2010 from ALS/Lou Gehrig's disease. In the ensuing days, there have been generous obituaries from leading transatlantic luminaries gracing major newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian. It seems ironic yet almost prophetic that Judt was born in such a momentous historic year in 1948 in the southside of London to Lithuanian Jewish émigré parents.

Judt's lucid prose was informed by an acute awareness of the inner reverberations of political events such as the revolutionary spirit sweeping across Paris and Prague in 1968. His analytical acumen and elegance as an essayist were on full display in his long affiliation writing for the New York Review of Books for nearly two decades on every conceivable topic from girls to the United Nations and everything between Marxism and George W. Bush.

But his greatest contribution to historical scholarship was his wide ranging analysis of Europe post World War II. His magnum opus, Postwar, stands at 900 pages as a collated testament to his previous works that were concerned with the nexus of knowledge and power in the formation of political ideologies in Eastern and Western Europe. He excoriated the lackadaisical political engagement of the French Left without losing sight of the mendacity of the right-wing ideologies that mobilized vulnerable masses.

He embodied the public intellectual whose lion-hearted stance on the question of Israel & Palestine earned him rebuke and much heartache from Zionist apologists where he was shunned because of his principles.

"I'm struck when I observe the Jewish community in the United States, especially in New York," said Tony Judt last [October], sitting cross-legged in his Washington Square Park apartment, "that it's a community which is the most successful, the wealthiest, the most well-integrated, the most influential, the most safe Jewish community in the history of Judaism, period-anywhere, anytime-since the Roman Empire. And yet it's driven by an enormous self-induced insecurity." —The New York Observer

In his elegiac last book published before he died, Ill Fares The Land, Judt agitates for and ponders a future that is beyond "the materialistic and selfish quality of contemporary life." He constantly challenged the status quo of apathetic citizenship in western democracies and in his final posthumous essay he implores toward a alternative political theology of listening. In recounting his undergraduate days at Kings' College and his meaningful encounters with a generation of critical intellectuals he nostalgically riffs "the simple device of listening very intently to everything I said, taking it with extraordinary seriousness on its own terms, and then picking it gently and firmly apart in a way that I could both accept and respect, that is teaching...the kind that engages in good faith with dissenting opinions across a broad political spectrum."

For these two towering figures fused by a shared history of oppression, a corporeal relation to a scarred land and an unflinching sense of intellectual and moral integrity, their words will certainly be heard and debated by many apologists and detractors for many years to come because they were ultimately worth something.

Farid Farid is a final year doctoral candidate at the Centre for Cultural Research - University of Western Sydney. His thesis looks at the cultural politics of trauma and loss amongst exiled Iraqi artists in Sydney. This is his second article for the Levantine Review.