Not only those of land and occupation, and the confines of oppression, but also those of country and nationalism. It was a magical night in Ramallah, the magician’s night in Ramallah, the magician, Mahmoud Darwish, whose spell was cast the way it has been through ages…” In his tireless quest for freedom, Mahmoud Darwish successfully transcends all kinds of borders. We did not know a word of Arabic, but we heard his voice reach out and sink deep down to pluck the strings of the Palestinian soul.
The renowned Nigerian poet Wole Soyinka eloquently describes this effect: “Then came silence. Sinan Antoon’s foreword, written expressly for this edition, sets Darwish’s work in the context of changes in the Middle East in the past thirty years.To read Mahmoud Darwish is an unforgettable and transformative experience, one of beauty and simultaneously of profound pain for it makes the reader vividly aware of the injustice and staggering cruelty that Palestinians have endured for almost seventy years at the hands of Israel, a genocide the entire world is accountable for. Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day).
Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege.
One of the Arab world's greatest poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems.
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