Memory for Forgetfulness. Mahmoud Darwish

body, the PLO Executive Committee, from which he resigned on 13 September 1993, when the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed a “Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements” (otherwise known as “Gaza-Jericho First”)—not necessarily because he opposed it, but because he did not want to be held responsible “for this risky accord.” “My role on the Executive Committee,” he said, “was that of a symbol. I was there to provide a moderating influence on the tension and to help reconcile differences. I have never been a man of politics. I am a poet with a particular perspective on reality.”²

      The historical background to Memory for Forgetfulness is the siege of Beirut (“the small island of the spirit”) in 1982. For more than two months, from 14 June to 23 August, the Israelis and their Phalangist supporters surrounded and besieged the Palestinian resistance and their nationalist Lebanese allies. In 1985, three years after the Palestinian leadership were driven out and the Israeli army entered the city, Darwish isolated himself in his Paris apartment for ninety days or so, and wrote with a passionate commitment this masterpiece of Arabic literature. Its form is that of a memoir, the record of a single day on the streets of Beirut when bombardment from land, sea, and air was one of the most intensive a city had ever known. The Sunday Times of London for 8 August 1982 quoted a cable sent to the State Department by then U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Robert S. Dillon: “Simply put, tonight’s saturation shelling was as intense as anything we have seen. There was no ‘pinpoint accuracy’ against targets in ‘open spaces.’ It was not a response to Palestinian fire. This was a blitz against West Beirut.”

      Extraordinary conditions foreground the ordinary, and the heroic consists in living every moment to the full. With shells exploding everywhere, the effort to maintain the primacy of the quotidian becomes a challenge to the bombs, and an ordinary task like making coffee turns into a meditation on the aesthetics of hand movement and the art of combining different ingredients to create something new. In a conversation with me in Tunis in April 1993, Darwish said that although Palestinian writing had not dared admit to fear, his own text was an attempt to confront the fact of fear, the violence and the destruction. By calmly carrying on with daily routines, one could defy the onslaught and take hold of oneself. Sheer survival during a blitz assumes heroic proportions, and a walk on the streets of the city that apocalyptic day, 6 August 1982, Hiroshima Day, becomes an odyssey.

      The book opens with the author waking at dawn from a dream and closes with him going to sleep at the end of the day. To describe his state of being in the paradise collapsing all around him, he identifies himself with Adam, the original epic hero of human history: “I didn’t know my name, or the name of this place. . . . What is my name? Who gave me my name? Who is going to call me Adam?” An accomplished poet could not treat an event of this magnitude as an ordinary event, as did the news announcers on the BBC and Radio Monte Carlo whom Darwish mocks: “‘Intensive bombardment of Beirut.’ Intensive bombardment of Beirut! Is this aired as an ordinary news item about an ordinary day in an ordinary war in an ordinary newscast?” Understandably, he wanted to write about it in an extraordinary way that reflected the existential situation of a people whose history since 1948 has been a nightmare from which there has been no waking.

      To convey the magnitude of the invasion and the siege, the pole of forgetfulness, the poet puts the act of writing itself under siege, lest the magic power of words seduce readers into a comfortable relationship with the text, just as the Palestinian Movement itself misread Lebanon and was seduced into an easy relation with it in which the basic assumption was false: “We write the script and the dialogue; we design the scenario; we pick the actors, the cameraman, the director, and the producer; and we distribute the roles without realizing we’re the ones cast in them.” Even death is not real unless it is borne witness to in writing: “The one looking for a paper in the midst of this hell is running from a solitary, to a collective death. . . . He’s looking for some kind of participation in this death, for a witness [sha:hid] who can give evidence, for a gravestone over a corpse.” Existence itself in the Arab and Islamic view, as the segment from Ibn Athir confirms, is understood through the metaphor of writing: “Then God . . . created the Pen and commanded it, so that it wrote into being everything that will exist till the Day of Judgment.”

      What Darwish attempts is a pure gesture in which writing itself becomes the dominant metaphor. He offers us a multivocal text that resembles a broken mirror, reassembled to present the viewer with vying possibilities of clarity and fracture. On the page different kinds of writing converge: the poem, both verse and prose; dialogue; Scripture; history; myth; myth in the guise of history; narrative fiction; literary criticism; and dream visions. Each segment can stand on its own, yet each acquires a relational or a dialectical meaning, a history, that is contingent upon the context provided for it by all the other segments of the work. As we move forward in the text, we are at the same time moving vertically through all these different kinds of writing, and back and forth in time. Thus the segment on Hiroshima creates a context for an apocalyptic interpretation of Beirut during the siege.³ Although this inclusiveness reflects breakdown, it also embodies a synthesis. Suspended between wholeness and fracture, the text, like Palestine, is a crossroads of competing meanings.

      Homeland is to keep alive the memory, Darwish says in Journal of an Ordinary Grief, and to the extent that this book accomplishes that, it too is a kind of homeland and the experience of reading it represents a return. Engaging readers directly in the creation of this meaning, the text remains, in the terms proposed by Umberto Eco, an “open work,” in which every reception is “both an interpretation and a performance [emphasis in original].”⁴

      Meaning has no closure here, just as the historical experience of the Palestinian people in its present phase has no closure. For example, although the dream that opens the book is mysterious at first, its relevance unfolds at strategic intervals until its significance to the structure of the work as a whole is revealed. This way reading becomes a constant unfolding of meaning, and both belief and disbelief must remain suspended and open to the resolution of the various narratives woven together in the text, with a return to the homeland, the originary text and source of meaning, remaining a possibility. “In its essence,” Darwish says in the opening words to Journal of an Ordinary Grief, “writing remains the other shape of the homeland.”

      To the extent that Darwish combines the private voice with the public, his personal experience reflects the collective experience of the Palestinian people. Our first encounter with the Palestinian paradox in this work is in the title, Memory for Forgetfulness. The deceptively simple preposition obscures as much as it reveals. His initial intention when he first set himself to the task, Darwish said, was to write down the recurring dream that opens and closes the work, and haunts it throughout. But to his surprise, he produced a long text about the Beirut phase of the Palestinian experience, tajribat Beirut. Thus writing the book was for him a recollection in tranquillity, a use of memory for the purpose of forgetfulness, for purging the violent emotions attached to the events described. The poet wanted to forget. But for the reader the poet’s recollection is transformed into a text and his purgation becomes an act of memory, a monument, against forgetfulness and the ravages of history.

      Seeing the invasion and the siege, which meant the departure of the Palestinian idea from Beirut, as a final attempt to ensure a collective amnesia about Palestine, the poet chose to join battle against oblivion. This choice recalls Hölderlin’s line: “Was bleibet aber / Stiften die Dichter” (But that which remains / Is established by the poets).⁵ It is no surprise that Darwish, as an artist, should translate the Palestinian experience of war and siege into universal terms, that he should link history and art, for as the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo explains, the work of art, in opening a historical horizon, is an enactment (a setting-into-work) of the truth: there is no truth without history. The work of art “is the act by which a certain historical and cultural world is instituted, in which a specific historical ‘humanity’ sees the characteristic traits of its own experience of the world defined in an originary way.”⁶

      The relationship of the book to Palestinian history is not so clear-cut, however, for the title raises the question of destiny, or historical inevitability. The title’s preposition reifies the abstract nouns on either side of it and unites them in a relationship of part to whole. Forgetfulness