Palestinians are non-entities
Rehnuma Sazzad explores the reflections of a poet
Memory for ForgetfulnessMahmoud Darwish
Translation 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: 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. 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. 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. 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. (This review is a reprint) Rehnuma Sazzad writes from CaMbridge, UK.
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