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Memory for Forgetfulness

University of California Press

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. Darwishb s family, as he tells us in the book, stole back into the homeland, but too late to be included in the census of the Palestinian Arabs who had remained in the country. Until 1966 the Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel were under military rule and subject to a complex set of emergency regulations, including one that required them to secure a permit for travel inside the country. Lacking identity papers, the poet was vulnerable and was kept under constant watch by the Israeli military. Between 1961 and 1969 he was imprisoned and put under house arrest several times. He had not committed any crimes other than writing poetry and traveling without a permit inside the country: b For the first time theyb d given us permission to leave Haifa, but we had to be back at night to report to the police station.b &b Put this in your record: Ib m present!b b The rhythmic return to the poetb s life in the homeland, including the periods of restricted movement, forms the pole of memory in the text, while the events surrounding the invasion of Lebanon and the siege of Beirut form the pole of forgetfulness.

Nearly ten years earlier, in Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Yawmiyya:t al-Huzn al-?a:di: [1973], p. 94), Darwish had described Palestinian existence under Israeli rule as a paradox:

You want to travel to Greece? You ask for a passport, but you discover youb re not a citizen because your father or one of your relatives had fled with you during the Palestine war. You were a child. And you discover that any Arab who had left his country during that period and had stolen back in had lost his right to citizenship.

You despair of the passport and ask for a laissez-passer. You find out youb re not a resident of Israel because you have no certificate of residence. You think itb s a joke and rush to tell it to your lawyer friend: b Here, Ib m not a citizen, and Ib m not a resident. Then where and who am I?b Youb re surprised to find the law is on their side, and you must prove you exist. You ask the Ministry of the Interior, b Am I here, or am I absent? Give me an expert in philosophy, so that I can prove to him I exist.b

Then you realize that philosophically you exist but legally you do not.

In 1971 Darwish left Israel for Cairo, where he worked for the leading Egyptian daily, Al Ahram. In 1973 he joined the Palestine Liberation Organization as assistant to the director of the Palestine Research Center in Beirut, and helped edit its scholarly journal, Shub u:n FilasTi:niya (Palestinian Affairs). Soon after, he became the director of the center and chief editor of the journal. In 1984, while still recuperating from the heart attack he alludes to in this work, he was unanimously elected president of the Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists. And in 1987 he became a member of the highest Palestinian decision-making body, the PLO Executive Committee, from which he resigned on 13 September 1993, when the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization signed a b Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangementsb (otherwise known as b Gaza-Jericho Firstb )b not necessarily because he opposed it, but because he did not want to be held responsible b for this risky accord.b b My role on the Executive Committee,b he said, b was that of a symbol. I was there to provide a moderating influence on the tension and to help reconcile differences. I have never been a man of politics. I am a poet with a particular perspective on reality.b 2

The historical background to Memory for Forgetfulness is the siege of Beirut (b the small island of the spiritb ) in 1982. For more than two months, from 14 June to 23 August, the Israelis and their Phalangist supporters surrounded and besieged the Palestinian resistance and their nationalist Lebanese allies. In 1985, three years after the Palestinian leadership were driven out and the Israeli army entered the city, Darwish isolated himself in his Paris apartment for ninety days or so, and wrote with a passionate commitment this masterpiece of Arabic literature. Its form is that of a memoir, the record of a single day on the streets of Beirut when bombardment from land, sea, and air was one of the most intensive a city had ever known. The Sunday Times of London for 8 August 1982 quoted a cable sent to the State Department by then U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Robert S. Dillon: b Simply put, tonightb s saturation shelling was as intense as anything we have seen. There was no b pinpoint accuracyb against targets in b open spaces.b It was not a response to Palestinian fire. This was a blitz against West Beirut.b

Extraordinary conditions foreground the ordinary, and the heroic consists in living every moment to the full. With shells exploding everywhere, the effort to maintain the primacy of the quotidian becomes a challenge to the bombs, and an ordinary task like making coffee turns into a meditation on the aesthetics of hand movement and the art of combining different ingredients to create something new. In a conversation with me in Tunis in April 1993, Darwish said that although Palestinian writing had not dared admit to fear, his own text was an attempt to confront the fact of fear, the violence and the destruction. By calmly carrying on with daily routines, one could defy the onslaught and take hold of oneself. Sheer survival during a blitz assumes heroic proportions, and a walk on the streets of the city that apocalyptic day, 6...