Marcel Khalife Revisits Darwish’s Poetry After Half a Century, Seeking Hope Amid War

Lebanese musician Marcel Khalife is returning to the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, drawing on half a century of exile and artistic memory to give the verses renewed expression amid war.

From Paris, Khalife revisits his musical relationship with the Palestinian poet through the spare accompaniment of a lone oud. The approach places poetry and melody at the centre of a work shaped by both remembrance and present grief.

His return is more than an exercise in nostalgia. By reworking Darwish’s poems, Khalife seeks to draw hope from loss and affirm the dignity of those killed in Palestine and Lebanon.

The weight of war gives this encounter with familiar verses a renewed urgency. Poetry that has long been part of Khalife’s artistic life becomes a means of confronting suffering without surrendering to it.

Across the distance of exile, the oud and Darwish’s words offer a form of resistance: an insistence that memory, hope and the lives of the dead cannot be erased by violence.