Memory for Forgetfulness. Mahmoud Darwish

the voiced pharyngeal fricative, with a question mark; the voiceless, with H; the glottal stop, with an apostrophe; the voiced dental fricative with “dh” the voiceless palatal fricative, with “sh” the voiced uvular fricative, with “gh” the voiceless, with a “kh” and long vowels, by means of a following colon.

      2. Al-Qods Al-Arabi, 17 November 1993.

      3. Cf. David Gilmour, Dispossessed: The Ordeal of the Palestinians (London: Sphere Books, 1982), pp. 223–24:

      The bombardment of Beirut was one of the most horrific events of recent history. Day after day Israeli gunners sat outside the city lobbing thousands of shells into the densely packed apartment blocks. From the sea the Israeli navy pounded the coastal districts while F16 aeroplanes screeched overhead terrorizing the population and levelling whole buildings. According to the Sunday Times [8 August 1982) among the targets hit by the Israelis in the two months following their arrival in Beirut were “five UN buildings, a hundred and thirty-four embassies or diplomatic residences, six hospitals or clinics, one mental institute, the Central Bank, five hotels, the Red Cross, Lebanese and foreign media outlets and innumerable private homes.” Apart from the six thousand PLO guerillas in the besieged city, there were some half million Lebanese and Palestinian civilians, and every day of the bombardment about two hundred or three hundred of them were killed. Many of them were burned to death by phosphorus bombs. The Canadian ambassador, Theodore Arcand, said [Sunday Times, 8 August 1982] that the destruction was so comprehensive it “would make Berlin of 1945 look like a tea party.”

      4. Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), p. 49.

      5. Quoted in Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Cambridge, England: Polity Press, 1988), p. 66.

      6. Ibid., p. 66.

      7. Ibid., p. 70.

      8. The ironic view of Palestinian history is not limited to Mahmoud Darwish. Emile Habiby, the major Palestinian novelist, is also ironic in his vision, as is clearly illustrated by the title of his most important work, “The Strange Events Concerning the Disappearance of Said (’The Happy One’) Son of Misfortune, the Optipessimist.” This work is available in English as The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-Fated Pessoptimist: A Palestinian Who Became a Citizen of Israel, trans. Salma Jayyusi and Trevor Le Gassick (New York: Vantage Press, 1982).

      Edward Said reflects on Palestinian history from the same perspective. In a recent article he says, “What to many Palestinians is either an incomprehensible cruelty of fate or a measure of how appalling are the prospects for settling their claim can be clarified by seeing irony as a constitutive factor in their lives.” To speak of recent Palestinian history in the aesthetic terms of irony, he affirms, “is by no means to reduce or trivialize its force.” More specifically, Palestinian history is characterized by “irony and paradox” in its relation to the Arab states—an aspect of Palestinian existence to which Darwish devotes some of his most trenchant comments in this work. And, most significantly in terms of Darwish’s project in Memory, Palestinian history is also characterized by irony in the encounter with Israel: “Here, then, is another complex irony: how the classic victims of years of anti-semitic persecution and Holocaust have in their nation become the victimizers of another people, who have become therefore the victims of the victims.” See Said’s “Reflections on Twenty Years of Palestinian History,” Journal of Palestine Studies, no. 80 (Summer 1991): 5, 15.

      9. Al Karmel, no. 47 (1993): 140; Al-Qods Al-Arabi, 12 February 1993.

      Memory for Forgetfulness

      August, Beirut, 1982

      | | | | | | | | | |

      Out of one dream, another dream is born:

      —Are you well? I mean, are you alive?

      —How did you know I was just this moment laying my head on your knee to sleep?

      —Because you woke me up when you stirred in my belly. I knew then I was your coffin. Are you alive? Can you hear me?

      —Does it happen much, that you are awakened from one dream by another, itself the interpretation of the dream?

      —Here it is, happening to you and to me. Are you alive?

      —Almost.

      —And have the devils cast their spell on you?

      —I don’t know, but in time there’s room for death.

      —Don’t die completely.

      —I’ll try not to.

      —Don’t die at all.

      —I’ll try not to.

      —Tell me, when did it happen? I mean, when did we meet? When did we part?

      —Thirteen years ago.

      —Did we meet often?

      —Twice: once in the rain, and again in the rain. The third time, we didn’t meet at all. I went away and forgot you. A while ago I remembered. I remembered I’d forgotten you. I was dreaming.

      —That also happens to me. I too was dreaming. I had your phone number from a Swedish friend who’d met you in Beirut. I wish you good night! Don’t forget not to die. I still want you. And when you come back to life, I want you to call me. How the time flies! Thirteen years! No. It all happened last night. Good night!

      | | | | | | |

      Three o’clock. Daybreak riding on fire. A nightmare coming from the sea. Roosters made of metal. Smoke. Metal preparing a feast for metal the master, and a dawn that flares up in all the senses before it breaks. A roaring that chases me out of bed and throws me into this narrow hallway. I want nothing, and I hope for nothing. I can’t direct my limbs in this pandemonium. No time for caution, and no time for time. If I only knew—if I knew how to organize the crush of this death that keeps pouring forth. If only I knew how to liberate the screams held back in a body that no longer feels like mine from the sheer effort spent to save itself in this uninterrupted chaos of shells. “Enough!” “Enough!” I whisper, to find out if I can still do anything that will guide me to myself and point to the abyss opening in six directions. I can’t surrender to this fate, and I can’t resist it. Steel that howls, only to have other steel bark back. The fever of metal is the song of this dawn.

      What if this inferno were to take a five-minute break, and then come what may? Just five minutes! I almost say, “Five minutes only, during which I could make my one and only preparation and then ready myself for life or death.” Will five minutes be enough? Yes. Enough for me to sneak out of this narrow hallway, open to bedroom, study, and bathroom with no water, open to the kitchen, into which for the last hour I’ve been ready to spring but unable to move. I’m not able to move at all.

      Two hours ago I went to sleep. I plugged my ears with cotton and went to sleep after hearing the last newscast. It didn’t report I was dead. That means I’m still alive. I examine the parts of my body and find them all there. Two eyes, two ears, a long nose, ten toes below, ten fingers above, a finger in the middle. As for the heart, it can’t be seen, and I find nothing that points to it except my extraordinary ability to count my limbs and take note of a pistol lying on a bookshelf in the study. An elegant handgun—clean, sparkling, small, and empty. Along with it they also presented me with a box of bullets, which I hid I don’t know where two years ago, fearing folly, fearing a stray outburst of anger, fearing a stray bullet. The conclusion is, I’m alive; or, more accurately, I exist.

      No one pays heed to the wish I send up with the rising smoke: I need five minutes to place this dawn, or my share of it, on its feet and prepare to launch into this day born of howling. Are we in August? Yes. We are in August. The war has turned into a siege.¹ I search for news of the hour on the radio, now become a third hand, but find nobody there and no news. The radio, it seems, is asleep.

      I no longer wonder when the steely howling of the sea will stop. I live on the eighth floor