Memory for Forgetfulness. Mahmoud Darwish

its way into an unknown and inscribing its course in its own wake. Since memory refers among other things both to Palestine (“And the sung beauty, the object of worship, has moved away to a memory now joining battle against the fangs of a forgetfulness made of steel”) and to the Palestinian people (“Memory doesn’t remember but receives the history raining down on it”), this reading carries fearful implications, suggesting perhaps the author’s dread that the dream of the return will not be realized, that the Palestinians may remain in exile, falling victim to history and joining the long caravans of oblivion: “I don’t see a shore. I don’t see a dove.”

      Meditation on the relationship of writing to history has engaged many writers. The monumental aspect of writing also engages Eliot in Four Quartets : “Every phrase and every sentence is an end and a beginning, / Every poem an epitaph” (“Little Gidding”). Every segment in Darwish’s text is both an end and a beginning. In the monumental dimension of the book, which can be seen as a memorial to the resistance of the Lebanese and Palestinian people, the poet also puts his signature on the landscape of history: “I want a language that I can lean on and that can lean on me, that asks me to bear witness and that I can ask to bear witness.” The Arabic root meaning “bearing witness,” shahida, also produces “gravestone” or “epitaph,” sha:hid, and “martyr,” shahi:d—words that echo throughout the work. Here, writing is history’s witness, its epitaph: both sha:hid.

      When the act of writing is conscripted as metaphor, the text loses its stability. In conversation Darwish has described his text as mutawattir (nervous, tense, taut, on edge). It was an attempt to get the Lebanese phase of Palestinian history, the madness that was Beirut (junu:n Beirut, also meaning “possession by Beirut”), and his attachment to the city out of his system. Once he had finished, he sent it to the publisher. He has not read it since. In “Burnt Norton,” T. S. Eliot says:

      Words strain

      Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

      Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

      Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

      Will not stay still.

      These lines suggest what Darwish meant by mutawattir and describe his technique in the text.

      The contingency of all life under bombardment is embodied in the words that crack and break in Darwish’s nervous text, what Vattimo calls “the shattering of the poetic word in the originary saying of poetry.” “The anticipation of death, upon which the possibility of authentic existence depends,” Vattimo explains, “is the experience of the connection between language and mortality.”⁷ In the midst of the overwhelming actuality of death, Darwish sets down, in his poetic prose, moments of authentic existence. We may thus conceive of the text as a relation between poetic language and mortality; death, in the aesthetic transformation of reality into art, becomes a metaphor intrinsic to the work.

      By restricting the frame of reference to a geographical area and a historical event, the original title, however paradoxical its equation of time and place, could lead to a misreading of the book solely in terms of the geography and the event. The present, more general, title discloses Darwish’s method of composition and articulates the work’s complex existence as a text, or memory, in relation to the world. The poet uses irony and paradox to render Palestinian historical experience in an immediate and dramatic manner: “For the first time in our history, our absence is conditional upon our total presence. Present to make oneself absent,” This is reminiscent of the bitterly ironic “present-absent,” Israel’s label for internal refugees, away from their villages at the time the state was established, whose lands it wanted to confiscate. Palestinians, present in their absence, are themselves a memory preserved against forgetfulness. Like Palestinian existence, the book itself may be described as an extended oxymoron.

      During the shelling the extent of the entire Arab homeland shrinks—to Lebanon, to the city of Beirut, to a quarter in that city, to a street, to a building which has just been hit, to a room within that building (say, the author’s study), and finally by implication to the printed page where these events are taking place in the reader’s imagination: “What am I searching for? I open the door several times, but find no newspaper. Why am I looking for the paper when buildings are falling in all directions? Is that not writing enough?” In this ironic exchange of roles, the text becomes the world, and the world, the text. The page is here equated with the landscape and becomes the mimetic space where negation is negated and forgetfulness is to be forgotten by means of writing. Thus the print medium also acts as a metaphor, the printed page as an icon of the action, as if the exploding shell burst into fragments of discourse on the page, just as the actual shell reconfigures the city’s landscape.

      Considering the paucity of material resources available to the defenders of Beirut, the ironic mode is the only available answer to the overstatement of the bombs falling on the city during the siege, a response that pits one kind of power against another. By an exercise of the imagination the poet equates the unequatable, words and ordnance: “I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the spirit—a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets.” This aspect of the work is carried in the title preposition’s suggestion of an exchange, as in blow for blow—as if the author were saying, “You give me bombs, I give you a text” “You give me forgetfulness, I give you memory” or “You give me history, I give you writing.”⁸

      Appropriately, metaphors of explosion and fusion recur in the text: memory fusing into forgetfulness, which in turn forgets itself and bursts into memory: “If only one of us would forget the other so that forgetfulness itself might be stricken with memory!” In time, fusion is one thing and explosion, another, but at the moment of creation fusion and explosion unite, giving birth to the text and the present. The threat of imminent death collapses time to the interval between two shells, which is shorter than the instant “between breathing in and breathing out.” These “moments/spasms,” instants of creation when time and space collapse into each other, are also moments for the maximum release of energy.

      The erotic element in the book, which metaphorically equates love and death, is a necessary counterpart to mortality that, as we have seen, also generates metaphors for the activities of writing and reading: “The obscure heaps up on the obscure, rubs against itself, and ignites into clarity.” To spark this clarity, the text characteristically places the reader at a meeting point, a point of reversal, a juxtaposition, whether of two segments of the text or two (or more) perspectives. For example, in the first two sentences of the book the discourse shifts from direct statement to dialogue (I have indicated these shifts with italics). Immediately thereafter comes a reversal of ordinary assumptions about birth, love, life, and death: “Because you woke me up when you stirred in my belly. I knew then I was your coffin.” To be born is to die. Memory is for forgetfulness; it exists to be forgotten.

      The rhythm of reversal that weaves the text together is rooted in historical experience, reflecting the departure of the Palestinian leadership from Lebanon in 1982, and the earlier exit from Palestine in 1948. With that exit, which turned a settled population into refugees, reality itself was reversed and the words became hollow shells without meaning in the Arab wasteland (the “desert” and “wilderness” in the text), forcing the Palestinians to reverse the process of intellectual, political, and spiritual degeneration that has taken hold of the Arabs: “From now on we have nothing to lose, so long as Beirut is here and we’re here in Beirut as names for a different homeland, where meanings will find their words again in the midst of this sea and on the edge of this desert.” In the text this rhythm of reversal emerges in a whole lexicon of words born from other words (nouns, verbs, verbal nouns), all meaning “exit” (e.g., kharaja and its variants). The departure from Beirut; the exit from Palestine; the birth of the dream from the dream, of the text from the dream, of the words from each other, and of the textual segments from each other are all united in this rhythm. A subsidiary rhythm based on the use of symbol also emerges as words like rain, wave, sea, island, desert, birth, death, graveyard, knight, horse, poem, white are repeated to give a mythic dimension to events. The wave that propels the Palestinian ship in its journey to the unknown, for example, also joins Beirut and Haifa—two jewels on the sea—for which the