his return was lacking, as Ramallah was not Darwish’s home. Haifa, the city of his youth, and the remains of his village in the Galilee were both within Israel where he was only allowed a few short visits and only after requesting special permission. The complexity of Darwish’s sentiments and his perplexed position are illustrated in two sentences he later wrote about this return: “I came, but did not arrive. I came, but did not return!”5 The boundaries between exile and home and the meanings of both terms were blurred.
After his second heart surgery and encounter with death in Paris in 1998 Darwish wrote Jidariyya (Mural) 2000, an epic poem celebrating the triumph of creativity over mortality. Darwish lived through another Israeli siege in Ramallah in 2002 during the second Intifada and wrote one of his most memorable works: Halat Hisar (State of Siege) (2002). It was a journal of a poet living under military occupation and resisting it through the search for beauty and the celebration of life. Darwish’s last years were his most productive, giving us La Ta’tadhir ‘Amma Fa’alta (Do Not Apologize for What You Have Done) (2004), Kazahr al-Lawz Aw Ab ‘ad (Like Almond Blossom or Beyond) (2005), Athar al-Farasha (The Butterfly’s Trace) (2008), and the posthumous La Uridu li-Hadhi al-Qasidati an Tantahi (I Don’t Want this Poem to End) (2012).
These later works reinforced and further confirmed Darwish’s status as a great world poet, a fact already established many years earlier. Both critical attention and global readership have been growing thanks to excellent translations that are now readily available in various languages. This new edition of Ibrahim Muhawi’s superb translation offers new readers the opportunity to enter Darwish’s world through one of its many spectacular gates.
It might be tempting for many to read this book in its immediate context as a historical document and/or a memoire of war. But the text encapsulates much more and has transcended its primary context (without ceasing to point to 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,
