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 here is not personal and private, but a fact of history, an infinite horizon of blue nothingness, and writing is like the ship with the Palestinians aboard, making 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
