By Fernando Rendón Director International Poetry Festival of Medellin
No, the Poetry Festival of Medellín, Alternative Nobel Prize of 2006, does not sympathize with FARC, weapons nor war.
Nor are the poets who come to Medellín “large masks of prow for international terrorism”. The Poetry Festival of Medellín
does not sympathize with kidnapping, nor with gas pipettes thrown like a death lottery over the civil population. The
Festival doesnt sympathize with the state's terrorism either, nor with paramilitary brutality, nor with the unavoidable
massacres, disappearances, political genocide or the systematic elimination or stigmatisation of leaders or militants of the
opposition.
The Poetry Festival of Medellín is not under surveillance of the CPI like others, sympathizing with the horizon of the
realization of the dream of poetic justice in this country and the world, that is to say, with the achievement of peace,
beauty, truth, dignity of existence, and with something not promoted by the media, religious institutions, or the leading
class: fulfilled social justice.
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Ramallah, West Bank. Mahmoud Darwish, whose prose gave voice to the Palestinian experience of exile, occupation and infighting, died Saturday in Houston. He was 67.
The preeminent Palestinian poet, whose work has been translated into more than 20 languages and has won numerous international awards, died from complications after open heart surgery at a Houston hospital, said Nabil Abu Rdeneh, a spokesman for the Palestinian presidency.
Born to a large Muslim family in what is now Israel, he emerged as a Palestinian cultural icon eloquently describing his people's struggle for independence while criticizing both the Israeli occupation and the Palestinian leadership. He gave voice to the Palestinian dreams of statehood, crafted their declaration of independence and helped forge a Palestinian national identity.
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Chers amis, dear friends (vous me permettrez de continuer en anglais,
pour que ceux qui n'utilisent pas le français puissent suivre? Merci):
I just heard the terrible news that Mahmoud Darwich passed away. As
for many of you, I'm sure, the anguish and pain brought about by this
loss is nearly unbearable.
Some of us had the privilege, only a few weeks ago, of listening to
him reading his poems in an arena in Arles. The sun was setting,
there was a soundless wind in the trees and from the neighbouring
streets we could hear the voices of children playing.
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Paris - In the Arab imagination, Palestine is not simply a plot of land any more than Israel is a plot of land in the Jewish imagination. As the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has observed, Palestine is also a metaphor - for the loss of Eden, for the sorrows of dispossession and exile, for the declining power of the Arab world in its dealings with the West.
Mr. Darwish, 59, who is widely considered the Palestinian national poet has developed this metaphor to richly lyrical effect. Born in a village destroyed by Israeli soldier s in the 1948 Arab- Israeli war, he has evoked the loss of his homeland in more tha n two dozen books of poetry and prose, which have sold millions of copies and mad e him the most celebrated writer of verse in the Arab world."Many people in the Ara b world feel their language is in crisis", the Syrian poetry critic Subhi Hadidi said. "And it is no exaggeration to say that Mahmou d is considered a savior of the Arab language."
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Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish spoke in the name of the Palestinian people on the fiftieth memorial of the Palestinian Nakba, through Radio Palestine and by broadcast over the loudspeakers of mosques and churches, to mark the commencement of Palestinian marches in PNA controlled areas.
Darwish began his rallying call by saying, “We who are born here on this divine land, we who are dedicated to the message of peace and freedom and the defense of human values, and of the strength of the olive tree, we who are yoked to the night of fifty years of occupation and dispersal, who are wounded from the heart’s vein to the artery, we declare our presence as a wound crying in the depths of time and space in spite of the tempests which try to rend our roots from the very earth to which we gave our name.
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Mahmoud Darwish is considered to be the most important contemporary Arab poet working today. He was born in 1942 in the village of Barweh in the Galilee, which was razed to the ground by the Israelis in 1948. As a result of his political activism he faced house arrest and imprisonment. Darwish was the editor of Ittihad Newspaper before leaving in 1971 to study for a year in the USSR. Then he went to Egypt where he worked in Cairo for Al-Ahram Newspaper and in Beirut, Lebanon as an editor of the Journal “Palestinian Issues”. He was also the director of the Palestinian Research Center. Darwish was a member of the Executive Committee of the PLO and lived in exile between Beirut and Paris until his return in 1996 to Palestine. His poems are known throughout the Arab world, and several of them have been put to music. His poetry has gained great sophistication over the years, and has enjoyed international fame for a long time. He has published around 30 poetry and prose collections, which have been translated into 35 languages.
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The XVIII International Poetry Festival of Medellín is not over although the closing ceremony has already taken place. During eight days Medellín and several other cities in Colombia lived something unthinkable in any other corner of the world: the gathering around poetry of thousands of persons, who as if they were in a concert ask the poets for one more, one more poem!
In spite of the successive attempts of a local newspaper to block the way of this feast of culture, and of the telling silence of most of the media about the impact of a festival of this magnitude, the strong affinity of the people of Medellín with poetry cannot be undone. The massive and warm attendance to the more than 120 venues to listen to poetry, confirms the urgent need of poetry in our times.
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Two provokers, Harold Alvarado Tenorio y Eduardo Escobar, have recently published in the local newspapers, “El Mundo” and “El Colombiano”, a series of cowardly and slanderous attacks against the International Poetry Festival of Medellín. The messages of solidarity with the Festival of poets from many countries, from directors of other international festivals of poetry and from many friends, prove that these two deserters from poetry have at last clearly carved their names in the universal history of infamy for all to see. For if poetry makes the system nervous, it will be impossible for them to make poetry a crime.
You can see here some of the messages that have arrived, to which we will add others as they arrive and are translated. READ MORE
The idea that poetry can save a city and change the image of the country, can only be the product of those who believe in dreams within dreams but who are also quite awake, as Rilke reflected, or as Borges could have thought.
Nothing else comes to my mind when I consider what the International Poetry Festival of Medellín has been and will go on being: this wholehearted undertaking of poets who understood that if the word controlled by the forces of power was the destructive weapon against Colombian society, that same word, wrapped in poetry, could be constructive no only of a dream reality but of life.
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Can one be a “political opportunist” when far from choosing the party that has the power, one gives oneself to the most repressed tendency of the opposition? This is, however, the accusation formulated by a certain Alvarado Tenorio against Fernando Rendón, oblivious to the fact that in this way his argument is ridiculed.
This Tenorio seems to ignore the fact that the International Poetry Festival of Medellin has the slogan this year: “For a peace more active than all wars”, which is a strange choice for a director considered suspicious of being harmful to his country.
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Let me address this letter to you, not only as a writer and a poet, but as a mother who carries the burden of death, who is trying to reconstruct and to be a small light in life.
I address you as a mother who died forever in the Tutsi genocide of 1994 in Rwanda. There, I not only lost my husband and all my children, but I also lost all hope in what a mother can expect of life.
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Cogressmen and congresswomen present, dear poets Yolande Mukasagana, Nguyen Bao Chan, Juri Talvet and Álvaro Miranda, dear audience in this poetry reading of the XVIII International Poetry Festival of Medellín, kind and welcome viewers:
Today we shall talk about beauty. And we shall do it with the highest of its expressions: Poetry. We well know that these words —beauty and poetry— are the ones less said in this building throughout our history; however, there is no other building in the country where they should be more invoked. What first comes to our mind is the question of whether a country can be beautiful that is not just. And we answer that it is not so, that if our highest ambition as men and poets is beauty, we shall say then that to find it, while we put a lot of effort in keeping words pure and worthy, we should first find justice.
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Before the ancient times, we were one, the earth and us, when there were no frontiers or differences, when it was unthinkable that someone owned anything since we all descended from a generous and warm sun.
Nomads or farmers, obsessed by the inebriation of abundance, our sweet unity was one day broken by the sword and we discovered we were prisoners of an oiled machinery of hecatombs. READ MORE
Before the ancient times, we were one, the earth and us, when there were no frontiers or differences, when it was unthinkable that someone owned anything since we all descended from a generous and warm sun.
Nomads or farmers, obsessed by the inebriation of abundance, our sweet unity was one day broken by the sword and we discovered we were prisoners of an oiled machinery of hecatombs. READ MORE
Our work group has made
possible the filming and digitizing of many of the poetry readings in the history
of the Festival, and has been making an audivisual Memories of the Festival,
which from now on we will include in the multimedia section of our Web site.
In this first issue you will be able to see and
hear 311 poems by 308 poets from 133 countries of five continents. Videos
Corporation of Art and Poetry Prometeo:
Address: Transversal 39 A No 72-52,
Medellin, Colombia, South America.
Phones: + 057 4 4129080 - 4127133 - 4113445 / Fax: +057 4 4128822
P.O. Box: 7392, Medellin, Colombia.
The International Poetry Festival of Medellín actively
spreads Colombian poetry in the world. Since 2002,
Prometeo
has developed the Colombian section of Poetry
International of The Netherlands, with information and
poems in Spanish (translated into English) of more
than 40 Colombian poets, including three new poets
every quarter.
Last April 25, the Fourth Committee of the Chamber of Representatives
of our country approved in first debate the bill 155, presented in
October, 2006, by the representative from the PDA (Alternative Democratic Pole), Germán Reyes, together with other
representatives from Antioquia, by which the International Poetry
Festival of Medellín is declared a Cultural and Artistic Patrimony
of the nation.
With this bill, the representative Germán Reyes seeks the allocation
by the nation to the Festival of funds for its execution and development,
with the aim of contributing to the encouragement, promotion, protection
and spread of cultural values generated by this event, and to broaden
the reach to all the national territory as an event of peace that
has helped Colombian society to survive the fear and the violence
that still rage in our territory.
