Memory for Forgetfulness. Mahmoud Darwish

it of course). It crystallizes the dynamics of death and destruction unleashed by military might and the human will to resist and to live: “To be, or to be” as Darwish writes.⁶ This is an old plot, to be sure, but one performed with exceptional barbarism in the last few decades. Beirut itself and its Arab sisters have been besieged and bombarded time and again by Israel or the U.S. (Baghdad in 1991 and again in 2003, Beirut in 2006, Gaza in 2008–9 and 2012). Occupation and siege continue to be the language of death Israel uses against Palestinians, especially in Gaza where “this very sky is a cage.”⁷

      Discursive destruction and erasure work in tandem with material destruction. Thus, even “the right of the victim to narrate its own defeat” is at stake.⁸ We are reminded of how “Palestine has been transformed from a homeland into a slogan.”⁹ Darwish reserves his most scathing critique for Arab regimes whose “capitals have already prepared our funeral orations,”¹⁰ yet “some of them won’t even accept our corpses.”¹¹ The Palestinian Joseph is betrayed by his brethren time and again.

      Darwish’s prophetic critical vision is striking as we read his early warnings against the destructive effects of “petro-culture” and the increasing influence of oil-rich Arab states over cultural production and politics, which had started in the late 1970s. “The destruction of culture and the cultured is the only clear outcome of the phenomenon of the petrol ‘patronage’ of culture,” he writes.¹² He was also clear in his rejection of the politicization of religion, a trend supported materially and discursively by these regimes: “I don’t expect Arab renewal to come except from the Arabs themselves. And I don’t see that the model set up to tempt those who have despaired of this age with a return to faith has anything to offer. . . .”¹³

      Darwish’s demand bespoke what millions of Arabs would later chant in the revolts of the last few years: “We want to liberate ourselves, our countries, and our minds and live in the modern age with competence and pride.”¹⁴ It is no surprise then that those demanding and dreaming of a better life from Tunisia to Bahrain wrote Darwish’s words on walls as well as on placards and signs they carried, especially:

      “We love life”

      And simply put, war is the negation of life.

      Drones hover, so does the ghost of the poet and of the dead demanding recognition and attention. In an era where the aestheticization of violence and the valorization of war is at its apex, reading Darwish is an antidote to both heart and mind.

      Even where there appears to be neither shore nor dove, there is a language that speaks for and of life and celebrates it whenever possible. So we begin again “afflicted with hope.”

      Sinan Antoon

      New York, December 2012

      1. ‘Abdu Wazin, Mahmud Darwish: al-Gharib yaqa’ ‘ala nafsih (Mahmoud Darwish: The Stranger Finds Himself) (Beirut: Riyad El-Rayyes, 2006), p. 141.

      2. Memory for Forgetfulness, pp. 134–135.

      3. Ibid., p. 60.

      4. Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence, trans. Sinan Antoon (New York: Archipelago, 2010) p. 125.

      5. Ibid., p. 130. Darwish also entitled a selection of essays he wrote after his return “Hayrat al-‘A’id,” (The Perplexity of the Returnee). See Mahmod Darwish, Hayrat al-‘A’id (Beirut: Riyad El-Rayyes, 2007).

      6. Memory for Forgetfulness, p. 118.

      7. Ibid., p. 97.

      8. Ibid., p. 110.

      9. Ibid., p. 49.

      10. Ibid., p. 159.

      11. Ibid., p. 132.

      12. Ibid., p. 140.

      13. Ibid., p. 156.

      14. Ibid., p. 140–141.

      Introduction

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      In the Arab world Mahmoud Darwish is acknowledged as one of the greatest living poets. He has been awarded a number of international literary prizes, and has read his poetry to audiences in many countries around the world. When he gives a reading in any Arab country today, his audience runs into the thousands, with many people turned away for lack of space. He has so far published fourteen volumes of poetry, the first of which, Olive Leaves, appeared in 1964, and the latest, Eleven Planets, in 1993. His Diwan, or collected poems, comprising the first nine volumes, has been reprinted numerous times. He also has seven prose works to his name, including this one. Many poems and articles published in various magazines, as well as a number of television and newspaper interviews, have not yet been collected. Selections from his poetry have appeared in translation in at least twenty languages, but, considering his stature, he is not as well known in the English-speaking world as he should be.

      This work, Memory for Forgetfulness (Dha:kira li-l-nisya:n), which grew out of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon that began on 6 June 1982, originally appeared in 1986, under the title The Time: Beirut / The Place: August, in Al Karmel, the prestigious literary quarterly Darwish has edited since 1981.¹ It was later published under its present title in Beirut and Rabat, the Beirut edition using the original title as subtitle. Aside from the addition of a few breaks, the text translated here is the one that appeared in Al Karmel; I have followed the Arabic as closely as I could without sacrificing fluency.

      Mahmoud Darwish was born in the village of Birwe, district of Acre, in Upper Galilee on 13 March 1942. In 1948, after its inhabitants, including the child and his family, had fled to Lebanon, the newly formed Israel destroyed the village. Darwish’s family, as he tells us in the book, stole back into the homeland, but too late to be included in the census of the Palestinian Arabs who had remained in the country. Until 1966 the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel were under military rule and subject to a complex set of emergency regulations, including one that required them to secure a permit for travel inside the country. Lacking identity papers, the poet was vulnerable and was kept under constant watch by the Israeli military. Between 1961 and 1969 he was imprisoned and put under house arrest several times. He had not committed any crimes other than writing poetry and traveling without a permit inside the country: “For the first time they’d given us permission to leave Haifa, but we had to be back at night to report to the police station. . . . ‘Put this in your record: I’m present!’” The rhythmic return to the poet’s life in the homeland, including the periods of restricted movement, forms the pole of memory in the text, while the events surrounding the invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut form the pole of forgetfulness.

      Nearly ten years earlier, in Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Yawmiyya:t al-Huzn al-?a:di: [1973], p. 94), Darwish had described Palestinian existence under Israeli rule as a paradox:

      You want to travel to Greece? You ask for a passport, but you discover you’re not a citizen because your father or one of your relatives had fled with you during the Palestine war. You were a child. And you discover that any Arab who had left his country during that period and had stolen back in had lost his right to citizenship.

      You despair of the passport and ask for a laissez-passer. You find out you’re not a resident of Israel because you have no certificate of residence. You think it’s a joke and rush to tell it to your lawyer friend: “Here, I’m not a citizen, and I’m not a resident. Then where and who am I?” You’re surprised to find the law is on their side, and you must prove you exist. You ask the Ministry of the Interior, “Am I here, or am I absent? Give me an expert in philosophy, so that I can prove to him I exist.”

      Then you realize that philosophically you exist but legally you do not.

      In 1971 Darwish left Israel for Cairo, where he worked for the leading Egyptian daily, Al Ahram. In 1973 he joined the Palestine Liberation Organization as assistant to the director of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, and helped edit its scholarly journal, Shu’u:n FilasTi:niya (Palestinian Affairs). Soon after, he became the director of the center and chief editor of the journal. In 1984, while still recuperating from the heart attack he alludes to in this work, he was unanimously elected president of the Union