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 author harbors an inordinate love, and Palestine and Andalusia, two “lost paradises,” or loci of meaning.
As we have seen, Darwish’s artistic purpose in this work is in part to revitalize language by bringing meaning back to the words, or by endowing them with new meanings. The invasion ultimately will mean yet another journey for the Palestinian people, a journey across the sea—al-baHr. But al-baHr is also the word used for the meter, or poetic measure, of Arabic prosody. When a fighter wants to know the difference between the sea in poetry and the actual sea, the poet answers, “The sea is the sea.” The sea is itself; it is also poetic measure. Poetic measure is itself; it is also the sea. Further, there is no difference between them. Language, like Palestine, unites what can’t be united, and meaning cuts across the boundaries separating world and text.
The man of politics, or the poet? In the shift from the original to the present title the poet signaled that the book is to be read as a work of literature, a “setting-into-work of truth,” that opens out a horizon on the history of the Palestinian people through the optic of an invasion meant to negate their identity and the facts of their history. To the extent that it does this successfully—that is, to the extent that it succeeds as a work of art—it is a supremely political document, and not the other way around, as many of his readers would have it. That he had long been acclaimed as a leading writer and the national poet of Palestine he himself acknowledges in passages of this book: “And if we complain of the general inability to perfect a language of the people in creative expression, that should not prevent us from insisting on speaking for them until the moment arrives when literature can celebrate its great wedding, when the private voice and the public voice become one.”
Darwish insists on his identity as a poet, albeit one who has espoused the Palestinian national cause. His early poem “Identity Card” was his way of saying, “I exist,” despite his lack of papers. The poem shot him to prominence among the Palestinians in Israel and in the larger Arab world as well and, along with other early poems, earned him the simplistic label of resistance poet. As he is about to go to sleep at the end of that endless day of bombing, in the moments of reverie that bring the book to a close, he recalls that poem: “. . . an old rhythm I recognize! . . . I recognize this voice, whose age was twenty five . . . ‘Put this in your record: I’m Arab!’” Here, past and present melt into each other: “This outcry then became my poetic identity, which has not been satisfied with pointing to my father but chases me even now.”
Clearly, the question of this identity—that is, how he is read—has haunted Darwish. For many years now he has made it his task to kill this “father,” to combat the critical straight-jacket into which he has been forced by Arab as well as Western critics who have consistently (mis)read him politically as a resistance poet, or as a poet of the (Palestinian) Resistance, rather than a poet whose major concerns are national. In an interview first published in Al Karmel and later in Al-Qods Al-Arabi, he addresses this issue again:
A poem exists only in the relation between poet and reader. And I’m in need of my readers, except that they never cease to write me as they would wish, turning their reading into another writing that almost rubs out my features. I don’t know why my poetry has to be killed on the altar of misunderstanding or the fallacy of ready-made intent. I am not solely a citizen of Palestine, though I am proud of this affiliation and ready to sacrifice my life in defending the radiance of the Palestinian fact, but I also want to take up the history of my people and their struggle from an aesthetic angle that differs from the prevalent and repeatable meanings readily available from an unmediated political reading.9
When I asked him whether he thought the text was poetry or prose, Darwish replied that the poet is always a poet; he remains true to himself whatever he does, in life or letters. He pays attention to rhythm and other verse values in all his writings. Therefore, he, Darwish, does not distinguish aesthetically between poetry and prose and takes equal care in the form and content of all his writings. So although the work belongs more properly to poetry than to prose because it was written by a poet, we can say, since its form is prose, that it partakes of the nature of both: with the exception of the segment on literary criticism, it is a collection of prose poems. Darwish himself gives us a clue to this effect in his description of Beirut as “a musical name which can flow smoothly into a verse or a prose poem,” and in his reference to his friend the older poet who was the first writer to write the prose poem in Arabic.
To help him with this scheme, the author draws upon the grammar of the language. Reading in Arabic is not the same process as it is in English, where the movement of the attention from left to right is unhampered. Because diacritical marks, or voweling, are normally not inserted in printed Arabic texts, grammatical relationships are not immediately apparent. Meaning is deferred, and readers are forced to move back and forth within the same sentence. This in part explains Darwish’s practice of writing long ambiguous sentences, with multiple levels of meaning. Further, because Arabic has no tense as such, grammatical time is not, as in English, defined in relation to the moment of speech, a process that interjects an implied subject in every utterance. Arabic prose does not have to maintain the consistent pattern of tense sequence required in English. Hence it is
