In the presence of absence is the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish autobiography (1941-2008).
Back ... where? You wonder while hanging pictures on the walls of your new address. Go where? What you have ahead is provisional. What you leave behind, transfixed tentativeness, is dispersed. Eternity coming up with light from the garden bursts into laughter. Would you kidding saying you're also an exile. And you wonder: How many points you've nailed to the walls of many houses? How many paintings have hung, how many beds have left to sleep others, how many drafts and first verses have forgotten how many boxes, how many pictures of women have lost between the pages of books you have not read? How many times have you asked yourself: How many times I have gone away, I party, I have left? And all without having ever clear the difference between traveling, leave, leave or leave, the point is powerful chimera synonyms, and is prone metaphor to become "my homeland is not a suitcase" in "my country is a suitcase."

Mahmoud Darwish was born on March 13, 1941 in Birwa, village near Acre, in British Mandate Palestine. Birwa in 1948 was destroyed by Zionist militias, and his family took refuge in Lebanon. After a few months they returned clandestinely to Galilee. Darwish studied at Deir al-Asad and Kafr Yasif, and then marched to Acre and Haifa, where he worked as a journalist and started in the communist militancy. His struggle for Palestine he confronted the Israeli authorities: from 1960 to 1970 he suffered jail on several occasions, and confinement in Haifa. In 1971marchó into exile: he lived in Cairo, Beirut, Tunis and Paris. He was a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO, which resigned in 1993 following the Oslo Accords. Since 1996 he divided his time between Amman and Ramallah. He died in Houston (USA) on August 9, 2008.
Mahmoud Darwish is considered a fundamental reference of Arabic poetry of the twentieth century; It is the most widely read and translated Arabic poet. He is the author of a wide poetry and several books in prose. He founded and directed the magazine Al-Karmel, a radical importance in contemporary Arabic literature.