Palestinians are non-entities everywhere
Rehnuma Sazzad explores the reflections of a poet
Memory for Forgetfulness Mahmoud Darwish
Trans. Ibrahim Muhawi
University of California Press
ON 11 August 2008, Peter Clark writes in a Guardian obituary that as a poet, author, and politician, Mahmoud Darwish 'did as much as anyone to forge a Palestinian national consciousness.' While Clark's comment is undebatable, it is also true that Darwish's poetry transcends its national boundary by reflecting on universal humane values through the mirror of the Palestinian experience. It is one of the major reasons why Darwish now is a great name in world literature. Memory for Forgetfulness is his exquisitely written prose-memoir. Ibrahim Muhawi's adept translation brings out the delicacy of the piece. It is based on Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that was aimed at wiping out the PLO's base from southern Lebanon. The fact seems most startling when one reads the memoir containing evocative details of Beirut under siege. Darwish, however, lifts up the sufferings of the invasion to an aesthetic level through his musings on reality, belonging, history, resistance and the role of art involving these. The entire book is an extended internal monologue (the poet's thoughts in his mind) about which Robyn Creswell writes in Harper Magazine's January 2009 issue:
The experience in Lebanon also led to Memory for Forgetfulness, a classic of modern Arabic letters and one of the great war memoirs of the twentieth century.
And I could not agree more with Creswell on this.
Darwish writes this passionate memoir three years after the siege while he is living in Paris. He starts with the memory of bomb shells falling down relentlessly by destroying the normalcy of life. Desperately attempting to make some coffee in his eighth floor apartment with no water or electricity, Darwish realizes how mundane affairs like having a cup of coffee, relishing its aroma or just being alive in an ordinary sense become so costly, almost luxurious, in the life-in-death situation of the terrible siege. One remembers the black night of 25 March 1971, as Darwish's soliloquy begs to the forces of massacre for just a few moments of peace from sipping a cup of coffee:
What if this inferno were to take a five-minute break, and then come what may? Just five-minutes! I almost say, "Five minutes only, during which I could make my one and only preparation and then ready myself for life or death."
As the atrocities reign outside, this yearning for coffee turns into a symbol of a desire to live by resisting 'the steely howling' outside. Since the attackers want to extinguish the Palestinian refugees and exiles like Darwish himself, he records this time under the siege so as to defy the attempt. As opposed to being erased from the face of the earth, his writing proclaims that he and his people 'exist', despite the antagonism. Thus Darwish's poems transform the unerasable memory of the siege, which is both personal and collective, into a powerful opposition against the injustice against them.
This is where the political and historical dimensions of the memoir come into view. Understandably, Darwish achieves these dimensions by connecting his personal sufferings with those of his people. He does not only evoke the moment by moment feeling, passing of time, mixing of different sounds (e.g. sound of birds, water, and splinters) and changing of colours but also prove the heroism of his own and Lebanese people under the bombardment. Speaking of the bravery of Palestinian children born in the refugee camps, who worked alongside Palestinian and Lebanese fighters to resist the invasion, Darwish comments:
But do they realize, these youths armed to the teeth with a creative ignorance… are correcting the ink of a language that… has driven the whole area east of the Mediterranean toward… nothing more than slavery…
Darwish alludes to the history of the Palestinian dispossession here. No matter how hard his people try just to continue to be, uprooting seems to be their preserved destiny. These marginal people, who are already living in exile in Lebanon, are going to be displaced again because of the invasion.
"You're aliens here", they say to them there.
"You're aliens here", they say to them here.
The Palestinians are the non-entities everywhere and yet they are brought to bear the brunt of the attack to be denied of an identity once again. Darwish steels his emotion to report on the Palestinian children born in the refugee camps: 'these youths are still being born without a reason, growing up for no reason, remembering for no reason…' However, the truth remains that Darwish is one of them. However dire the situation is, his poetic mind resiliently brings their struggle for existence into focus. Darwish is bitterly ironic as he records the struggle of 'these outcasts':
Thus he who's expected to forget he's human is forced to accept the exclusion from human rights that will train him for freedom from the disease of forgetting the homeland.
Despite being ironic, Darwish's angry voice raises a serious question of 'freedom' and 'homeland'. From this viewpoint, the Palestinian suffering becomes comprehensible to anyone who has ever known the struggle for achieving a free homeland. However, Darwish is not interested in sentimentalising their case. That is why he combines his rage with an admirable wit: 'He has to catch tuberculosis not to forget he has lungs and he must sleep in open country not to forget he has another country.'
Not just the wit, Darwish's memoir is brilliant for being a mixed-genre writing as well. Being a poet and journalist, Darwish adorns his writing with fragments of prose-poems, journalistic reports, dialogues (both realistic and surrealistic), historical stories, familiar incidents, lists, eulogies, ravings, arguments, allusions (both to the Koran and Bible and literatures), graphic descriptions of the destruction and even quotes from his previous poems and editorials etc. But all the while his use of simple vocabulary and plain, recurrent images holds them all together and adds to the beauty of this sustained soliloquy. Some of the recurrent images are that of a sea, dream, death, sound, silence, blood and streets, stones, mirrors, etc. Clearly, the fragmentary writing represents the poet's search for a meaning to be attached to their exilic existence through all the sights, sounds and thoughts. The mirror image is especially significant. Through the fragmentary style, the entire memoir appears as a broken mirror: it reflects on a nation in exile from varied perspectives so that the poet can give voice to his people's disconnected life and its painful but heroic continuity.
It is no coincidence that Darwish sets the writing on 6 August, though the invasion started on 13 June. Because the 6th is Hiroshima Day, Darwish wants to connect the invasion with a similar historical atrocity. In doing so, he renders history ironical; because the historical memory seems to be easily forgettable. Otherwise, writings would have been able to stop the barbarity. Darwish quotes his favorite author Robert Louis Stevenson in the title, as one of Stevenson's characters says in Kidnapped: "I've a grand memory for forgetting". Since Darwish knows that the Israeli invasion will also be forgotten in due time, he concludes the fragmentary memoir in a befittingly abstract way:
No one understands anyone
And no one understands anyone…
I don't see a shore.
I don't see a dove.
Rehnuma Sazzad writes from Cambridge, UK.
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