Memory for Forgetfulness by Mahmoud Darwish
“Why should so much amnesia be expected from them?”
A book is many things, personified: courage, hope, a lamp in the dark.
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For over decades, Mahmoud Darwish has been the most prominent Palestinian poet.
Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness originally in Arabic, appeared in 1986, under the title The Time: Beirut/ The Place: August. It was published under its present title in Beirut.
What is the genre? The book “recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege.” Darwish explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut. It focuses on one day, June 6, 1982.
As for style, the book in many senses has defied traditional generic expectations. Along with prose poems, it also combines history, personal memoirs, literary criticism, journalism and testimony.
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A lot of juxtaposition came into play as I sat late evening, electronically flipping through my Kindle. The terse relationship between memory and history is probed through the juxtaposition of past and present, of poetry and prose. His description of exile is seemingly about a particular moment in history but for readers, it somehow seems to seep through time and place: as he continued to love the city where he could not move freely and write this book in isolation somewhere in Paris.
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An essay that I read last year while making some research on Darwish described how Darwish takes his condition (the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, held outside their homeland, bereft of their rights as citizens) as a vantage point to critically reconstruct the notion of homeland and belongingness and the politics that drive the wedge in between.
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The book opens with the author waking at dawn from a dream and closes with him going to sleep at the end of the day. As shelling continues, the quotidian turns into some kind of aesthetic meditation. Darwish offers a multi-vocal text where different kind of writing converges. The apocalyptic interpretation of a city during the siege is suspended between competing meanings as times change, in an age of global warfare.
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The text remains as an “open work,” every reader takes what he understands. The title itself is paradoxical: simple words that obscure as much as it reveals. A haunting work that questions identity, destiny and historical inevitability- the book weaves an ongoing epitaph for every memory that waltzes dangerously close to forgetfulness. The paradox that creates both history and erasure in the canon of human civilization.
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“I came but did not arrive. I came, but did not return!”
