The Harry Potter author quoted Mahmoud Darwish as she explained her opposition to a cultural boycott. But does his life and work fit with her message?

JK Rowling has long possessed the mythical philosopher’s knack of turning every stone she touches to gold, so when she cited the work of a Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish as a political inspiration, you know he’s a made man.

Except that, in the Arab world, Darwish, who died at the age of 67 in 2008, needs no magic boost: long regarded as Palestine’s national poet, he has given voice to suffering with poems such as Identity Card (Write down! / I am an Arab / And my identity card number is fifty thousand / I have eight children / And the ninth will come after a summer / Will you be angry?) and Under Seige (Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time / Close to the gardens of broken shadows, / We do what prisoners do, / And what the jobless do: / We cultivate hope).

Rowling named the poet in an extended tweet explaining why, despite being among 150 signatories who called for a dialogue with Israel in an open letter to the Guardian last week, she would not be joining a cultural boycott. “The true human cost of the Palestinian conflict was seared upon my consciousness, as upon many others’, by the heart-splitting poetry of Mahmoud Darwish,” she wrote.

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“In its highest incarnation, as exemplified by Darwish, art civilises, challenges and reminds us of our common humanity,” she continued. “At a time when the stigmatisation of religions and ethnicities seems to be on the rise, I believe strongly that cultural dialogue and collaboration is more important than ever before and that cultural boycotts are divisive, discriminatory and counter-productive.”

The problem with this reading of Darwish and his work, however, is that his life was a catalogue of dialogue denied. Burnt out of his home village of Birwa as a small child, he fell in and out of love with the PLO, spent much of his life in exile and ended it in a Texas hospital.

Four years before his death, he was awarded a major prize in Holland, giving a speech that gestured at the “charming illusion” of art: “A person can only be born in one place. However, he may die several times elsewhere: in the exiles and prisons, and in a homeland transformed by the occupation and oppression into a nightmare,” he said. “Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life.”