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Foreword

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Mahmoud Darwish died in 2008, leaving behind an astoundingly rich oeuvre. Although predominantly remembered and celebrated for his poetry, his prose works are equally unique and incandescent. His absence has only intensified the reverence and respect his writings command all over the world. Just as he himself wrote in his poignant self-elegy, In the Presence of Absence, “a second life, promised by language, continues” in us, his readers, as we return to his words again and again.

Memory for Forgetfulness is one of three major “prose” works Darwish wrote. “Prose” here is not the most satisfactory category, but rather the most convenient, to classify these works. These texts are teeming with poetry, in form as well as in style and spirit, and the boundary between poetry and its others is blurred and effortlessly transcended. The first of these three works was Yawmiyyat al-Huzn al-’Adi (1973) (Journal of Ordinary Grief) beautifully translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, who also translated Dhakira lil-Nisyan (Memory for Forgetfulness) (1986). The last was Fi Hadrat al-Ghiyab (In the Presence of Absence), Darwish’s own extended self-elegy written in 2006, two years before, and in anticipation of, his own death. While these three works share common themes and concerns, revisit and meditate on the poet’s past, and are at times considered a trilogy, each is a work unto its own. They each represent a unique “moment” in Darwish’s personal trajectory, as well as a phase in the larger historical context both he and his works inhabited.

Like all of his works, this one is still very popular and was reprinted in Arabic numerous times. As I write this it is in its tenth edition. The subtitle “August, Beirut, 1982” points to the event that triggered the text: the Israeli siege and bombardment of Beirut in 1982. A consideration of the immensity of the Beirut wound in Arab and Palestinian history and collective memory, as well as Beirut’s enduring symbolic capital, is crucial for approaching and appreciating this work’s depth and resonance. Asked about Beirut more than two decades after being forced to leave it, Darwish professed his love for the city. “I still carry my longing for Beirut until today . . . I have a beautiful ailment called the constant longing for Beirut,” he said.¹ For Darwish, as for so many others, Beirut was more than a mere city. It was a vibrant, rich, and complex cultural/political space. In Darwish’s own words in this book:

Beirut is the place where Palestinian political information and expression flourished . . . the birthplace for thousands of Palestinians who knew no other cradle . . . [It] was an island upon which Arab immigrants dreaming of a new world landed. It was the foster mother of a heroic mythology that could offer the Arabs a promise other than that born of the June War [of 1967]. . . . [It] became the property of anyone who dreamed of a different political order . . . Those . . . who have no homeland or family . . . projected upon Beirut a finality of meaning that grants their ambiguous relationship to the city the legitimate rights of a citizen.²

. . . Beirut has become my song and the song of everyone without a homeland.³

In addition to being a home for the Palestinian Resistance, Beirut posed a serious threat to regressive forces and orientations within Lebanon itself, as well as the reigning Arab political order, especially that it harbored many dissidents and oppositional factions. Thus, its enemies multiplied. The dreams of Arab liberation were soon crushed by brutal geopolitical realities and powerful regional and international foes. The Israeli invasion and siege of 1982 was the apex and laid bare the extent of the collusion of Israel’s Lebanese allies as well as Arab regimes. The world watched in silence or indifference, as it often does, as the Palestinian faced death alone. The brutality of the moment was poignantly crystallized in one of Darwish’s most memorable epic poems, Madih al-Zill al-’Ali (In Praise of the Lofty Shadow), excerpts of which are embedded in the book (pp. 58–59). Two of its memorable refrains were “The mask has fallen off the mask” and “You were so alone.”

Although quite mesmerized and enchanted by Beirut, Darwish was well aware of its limits and voiced his own critique of the mistakes committed by Palestinian institutions and individuals in Lebanon during the civil war. He was also cognizant of the fascist anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab tendencies that grew in Lebanon during the civil war. If Beirut was the cradle for an individual and collective birth, or rebirth, it became a massive grave where right-wing Lebanese militias, aided by Israeli troops, committed one of the most brutal massacres in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in September 1982.

Beirut became yet another port of departure for yet another exile for the Palestinian resistance and all those working or fighting alongside. A seven-year-old Darwish had been displaced once before in 1948 when Israeli forces depopulated, and later razed his village, al-Birweh. He had to flee to southern Lebanon with his family and return later as a “present-absentee.” Now Israel’s war machine and the “bulldozers of history” were displacing him once again from his adopted home for ten years (1972–1982). The exodus from Beirut made that homeland, Palestine, more distant than ever, both geographically and politically. “My homeland is a suitcase,” another memorable refrain repeated toward the end of “In Praise of the Lofty Shadow,” became the exile’s slogan.

The Palestinian Resistance relocated to Tunis and so did Darwish, who had to be smuggled to Damascus and then Tunis. But he settled in Paris in 1985 and lived there for a decade. He continued to edit al-Karmil, the prestigious cultural review he had founded in Beirut in 1981, but now it too had been exiled to Cyprus. Darwish’s Paris years were the most productive and his output was stunning. In Paris he experienced what he termed his “true poetic birth.” He was far away from the tumult of the Lebanese civil war, which raged on until 1990, and in a city of intense beauty and creativity. His distance and his eventual exit from politics, even though his involvement had been largely symbolic, allowed him the space to contemplate and view the world anew, and the freedom to develop his poetic project. In addition to writing Memory for Forgetfulness (1986), he wrote a number of poetry collections: Hiya Ughniya (It’s a Song) (1985), Wardun Aqall (Fewer Roses) (1986), Ahada ‘Ashara Kawkaban (Eleven Planets) (1992), Ara Ma Urid (I See What I Want) (1993) and half of Sarir al-Ghariba (The Stranger’s Bed) (1999). In these and later works, Darwish, who was never content with his massive and early popularity, nor with the reductive confines and labels of “the national poet” or “resistance poet,” and had resisted them with creative restlessness, transformed his poetry and engendered a new creative terrain. In addition to experimenting with meter and form, there was a shift away from direct lyricism toward a more complex poetic persona, peering into history, mythology, and epic. Palestine remained at the heart of the poet and his words, of course, but it became a universal metaphor.

Darwish was ambivalent and pessimistic about the Oslo Peace Accords of 1993 and had his instinctive doubts that they would ever result in full independence and a sovereign state. He was right. He resigned from the Executive Committee of the PLO. In In the Presence of Absence he recalled his feelings at the time:

You felt that the gate through which the returnees were stepping led neither to independence nor a state. It is true that the occupation has left the bedroom, but is still sitting comfortably in the living room and in all the other rooms⁴

Darwish was not only concerned about Oslo’s material and geopolitical effects, but its equally dangerous discursive effects as well. “No, this is not my language. Where is the eloquence of the victim recalling his long suffering in the face of the misery of the moment,” he wrote. It was no surprise, then, that his next poetry collection, Limadha Tarakta al-Hisana Wahidan (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone) (1995), also written in Paris, was an excavation of individual and collective memory and of place.

Although he loved Paris and was happy there, in 1996 Darwish decided for ethical reasons to “return” and live in Ramallah as a citizen and divided his time between it and Amman. This decision to “return” was as important for him as his initial decision to leave in 1971. But 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.