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Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness : Redeeming Worldliness

through Exilic Consciousness

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DOI: 10.1080/10848770.2019.1683323

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 The European Legacy
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Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness:

Redeeming Worldliness through Exilic
Consciousness

Evren Akaltun Akan

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Redeeming Worldliness through Exilic Consciousness, The European Legacy, DOI:
10.1080/10848770.2019.1683323

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THE EUROPEAN LEGACY
https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2019.1683323

Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness: Redeeming

Worldliness through Exilic Consciousness
Evren Akaltun Akan
Department of English Language and Literature, Yasar University, Universite Cad. No:37-39, Bornova, Izmir,
Turkey

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This essay focuses on Mahmoud Darwish’s exilic experience as Mahmoud Darwish; exilic
depicted in Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (1986). consciousness; worldliness;
For Darwish, the siege of Beirut was a climactic moment in which he memory
realized that he is stuck on a perpetual threshold. Imposed by the
sovereign power, this exilic threshold characterizes the Palestinian
refugees in Lebanon bereft of their rights as citizens and held
outside their homeland and political domain. I wish to argue that,
rather than being trapped in this condition, Darwish takes it as
a vantage point to critically reconstruct the notions of homeland
and political belonging. This involves a contrapuntal approach to
the notions of homeland, diaspora, and memory, and acts as a form
of resistance. It converts the exilic threshold that keeps the poet
neither outside nor inside the political domain into a site of worldli-
ness in both the Arendtian and Saidian sense of the term.
Elaborating on Judith Butler’s account of cohabitation and diaspo-
ric thinking, I argue that the exilic condition Darwish describes can
give rise to a political ethic that resists the homogenization of
spaces and temporalities, and allows for an alternative sense of
political belonging.

The exilic experience of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, as presented in his prose-
poem Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (1986), focuses on one day, June 6,
1982, of the siege of Beirut, when the city was heavily bombarded by the Israeli army. His
prose-poem, which combines testimony, memoir, autobiography, literary criticism, and
journalism, Darwish describes his immobility and state of suspension. He is unable to
leave Beirut, and yet he cannot stay in what he calls home for the same reasons. It is as if
he is trapped in a state of exile, a threshold condition that keeps him in a perpetual state
of homelessness. “‘You’re aliens here,’ they say to them there. ‘You’re aliens here,’ they say
to them here,’”1 he writes, referring to the exclusion from what he calls home (there,
Palestine) and what he calls his second home, his refuge (here, Lebanon). In Memory for
Forgetfulness, Darwish attempts to resist the socio-political, historical discursive mechan-
isms that keep him and other fellow Palestinians on this exilic threshold. However, I wish
to argue that, rather than being trapped in this exilic threshold, Darwish takes it as

CONTACT Evren Akaltun Akan evren.akaltun@yasar.edu.tr

An earlier version of this article was presented at the American Comparative Literature Association’s annual conference,
“The Aesthetics of Dislocation,” at the University of Toronto, Canada, March 31-April 3, 2013.
© 2019 International Society for the Study of European Ideas
2 E. A. AKAN

a vantage point to construct a critical approach to the notions of homeland, belonging,

and nation, and thereby to resist the hegemonic official history of that condition.
My discussion of Darwish’s work engages the questions Judith Butler raises in Parting
Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012) on the critical potential of diasporic
thinking. Butler addresses the question whether diasporic thinking provides perspectives
on the status of the refugee that might in turn enable an internal criticism of the nation.
She also questions whether political claims that arise from the diasporic condition may
continue to inform and disrupt ideas of the nation and the national even when the
diasporic status is no longer in question. According to Butler, a cohabitation that seeks
to undo nationalism can only be motivated by the collective memory of the ones who do
not belong, the stateless, and by the call for justice that issues from the condition of
dispossession, exile, and forced containment.2 Thus exilic thinking not only provides an
alternative form of belonging that disrupts ideas of nation and the national towards an
understanding of non-homogenous and plural political formations, but also establishes
the ethical mode of this cohabitation. In Memory for Forgetfulness, Darwish provides clues
as to how the kind of diasporic critique evoked by Butler disrupts the homogenous
formation of a nation. By working through the political and exilic threshold, he develops
an exilic consciousness, through which he converts the exilic threshold that keeps him
neither outside nor inside the political domain into an alternative political site that is
heterogenous, plural, and critical of the notions of homeland and belonging.
Butler’s call for the necessary intervention of diasporic thinking in imagining a plural
and heterogenous concept of the nation also provides a useful framework for elaborating
on Hannah Arendt’s and Edward Said’s ideas on coexistence, since both coexistence and
intervention belong to the same genealogy of critical thinking on the nation. More
specifically, by drawing on Arendt’s and Said’s notions of worldliness/worldlessness and
on Arendt’s notion of pariah/conscious pariah, my aim is to examine the narrative
strategies Darwish employs in Memory for Forgetfulness to disrupt the conventional
notions of the nation towards the non-homogenous and plural formations that Butler
develops in Parting Ways.

Absence/Presence, Memory/Forgetfulness
Exile may be described as a mode of being on a political and historical threshold: the
exiled subject is in-between languages, states, and cultures. For Darwish, as for the tens of
thousands of Palestinians in exile in Lebanon, this exilic threshold draws on a more
specific in-betweenness of absence and presence that also carries an existential twist:
for them to be present, they have to first acknowledge that they are absent.3 As Darwish
remarks in Memory for Forgetfulness:

[F]or the first time in our history, our absence is conditional upon our total presence. Present
to make oneself absent, to apologize for the idea of the freedom, and to admit that our
absence is a right that grants the Other the right to decide our destiny. The Other, present
with all his murderous gadgets, is demanding our presence for a while, to announce his right
to push us into the final absence. (149)

The interplay of presence and absence here shows that both states are determined by the
sovereign power and have hardly anything to do with the actual presence or absence of
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY 3

the Palestinians. Holding the Palestinians outside their homeland and the political domain
as well as denying them their rights as citizens, Israel has treated them as “absent.” But it
has also kept them inside the state control mechanisms as “present” in order to justify
their siege on them.
This ambivalence gestures towards the exilic threshold and resonates with what
Giorgio Agamben describes as the topological structure of the state of exception: “Being-
outside, and yet belonging.”4 One may clearly observe the state of exception in Israel’s
decision to label those who were away from their villages when the state was established
in 1948 as “present-absentees.” Thus Darwish’s legal status and that of his family changed
once they arrived in Lebanon when he was six years old under the Israel Absentee
Property Law of 1950. In Journal of an Ordinary Grief, Darwish describes his ambivalent
status on discovering that he was no longer a citizen:

You find out you’re not a resident of Israel because you have no certificate of residence. You
think it’s a joke and rush to tell it to your lawyer friend: “Here I’m not a citizen, and I’m not
a resident. Then where and who am I?” You’re surprised to find the law is on their side, and
you must prove you exist. You ask the Ministry of the Interior, “Am I here, or am I absent? Give
me an expert in philosophy, so that I can prove to him I exist.” Then you realize that
philosophically you exist but legally you do not.5

Beirut, where Darwish lived for ten years, presents itself as a border, where the distinction
between absence and presence is blurred and ever more questionable. Beirut, he says, has
always presented a dilemma for the Palestinians by simultaneously serving as a homeland
while undermining it. Their presence remains a construct made by the Palestinians
themselves, thus rendering its legitimacy dubious. Darwish uses the image of video-
making to explain how the Palestinians created the image of the home in Beirut, an
ideal image as in a Lacanian mirror, which does not correspond to their actual experience:

We saw in Lebanon only our own image in the polished stone—an imagination that re-
creates the world in its shape, not because it is deluded, but because it needs a foothold for
the vision. Something like making a video: we write the script and the dialogue; we design the
scenario; we pick the actors, the cameraman, the director, and the producer; and we
distribute the roles without realizing we are the ones being cast in them. When we see our
faces and our blood on the screen, we applaud the image, forgetting it’s of our own making.
(45–46)

Beirut, in other words, does not provide them with solid ground to feel their “presence” or
a homeland that they can own unconditionally. Hence, it appears to be just another
façade of the exilic threshold for the poet and his fellow Palestinians.
Memory and forgetfulness constitute an equivocal counterpart to the ironic in-
betweenness of absence and presence. Darwish’s use of dichotomous analogies in the
very title Memory for Forgetfulness, as in that of his later semi-autobiographical book, In
the Presence of Absence (2006), point to an intertwined relationship between memory and
presence, forgetfulness and absence. In Memory for Forgetfulness, he uses memory to
invoke presence, perseverance, putting down roots that one can refer to, and creating
a bond with a particular place and community. In contrast, he sees forgetfulness as a form
of violence of the sovereign power in erasing the Palestinians from history and thus
rendering them absent as subjects.
4 E. A. AKAN

Darwish first speaks of memory as a human right that has been denied to the
Palestinians. He queries why “so much amnesia” is expected of them when in normal
circumstances human beings shape their lives to remember and be remembered by
having children, giving names, and building monuments (15). Yet, in this case, memory
is by no means an accumulation of the past or reconstruction of the home; rather, it
suggests an ambiguous future life that may erode any possibility of home or presence.
“Who can construct for them a new memory with no content other than the broken
shadow of a distant life in a shack made of sheet metal?” he asks: “Is there enough
forgetfulness for them to forget?” (ibid.). His words bleakly suggest that the Palestinians
can only hope to have memories that echo the present violence, so any attempt to
construct a new memory is continuously undermined. Thus the repeated histories of
violence the Palestinians have been subjected to ironically continue to define the perso-
nal and collective memories that tie the generations together: “Does a bomb have
grandchildren? Us. Does a piece of shrapnel have grandparents? Us” (90). Any form of
recollection that can give them a sense of their existence, of their presence, is ironically
linked to a chain of violence, and hence to the annihilation of memory.
As their place of refuge, Beirut adds a new layer to this interplay of memory and
forgetfulness, of presence and absence. Darwish attempts to articulate what Beirut means
for the Palestinians at the critical moment of the siege, when the question of absence and
presence becomes ever more pressing. And he suggests in answer that understanding
Beirut would mean understanding his own position in the diaspora:
For ten years I’ve been living in Beirut in cement transiency. I try to unravel Beirut, and
I become more and more ignorant of myself. Is it a city or a mask? A Place of exile or a song?
How quickly it ends! And how quickly it begins! The reverse is also true. . . . In other cities,
memory can resort to a piece of paper. You may sit waiting for something, in a white void,
and a passing idea may descend on you. You catch it, lest it escape, and as days roll and you
come upon it again, you recognize its source and thank the city that gave you this present.
But in Beirut you flow away and scatter. The only container is water itself. Memory assumes
the shape of the city’s chaos and takes up a speech that makes you forget words that went
before. (90–91)

Beirut, it would seem, does not enable him to construct his memories: the impossibility of
recollection informs his very existence, rendering it elusive, “you flow away and scatter.” It
fails to give him the sense of belonging and presence he is looking for. To him this is like
another expulsion of Adam from Eden, the last in the “endless sagas of exodus” where he
is expelled one more time. “I no longer have a country: I no longer have a body,” Darwish
writes, suggesting that both his bodily presence and Beirut have become inscrutable.

Worldliness/Worldlessness, Pariah/Conscious Pariah

The exilic threshold described by Darwish, between absence and presence, memory and
forgetfulness, may be further characterized by Arendt’s notion of worldlessness. The
condition of being stateless, devoid of political rights and bereft of speech and political
agency during the siege of Beirut, echoes Arendt’s description of the worldless in “We
Refugees” (1943). Arendt describes worldless people as those who do not belong to
a world in which they matter as individuals;6 they have become thing-like, bereft of
human dignity, dehumanized, and dehistoricized. Arendt originally developed the notion
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY 5

of worldlessness to describe the condition German Jews and other victims of mass
denaturalization were forced in the years leading up to the Second World War.7
However, this description can also be applied to people who are deprived of their political
rights whether by forced denaturalization or tyranny; it may in fact also apply to anyone
effectively alienated from the public realm or reduced to a state of social exclusion.8
In Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt expanded her notion of worldlessness by
examining it in relation to totalitarianism. As a consequence of destructive totalitarianism,
worldlessness leads individuals to loneliness and political isolation: “What we call isolation
in the political sphere, is called loneliness in the sphere of social intercourse.”9 Loneliness
and isolation, as Anya Topolski notes, are strategies of tyrannical regimes to destroy
human contact, so that “human beings can be totally dominated, controlled and
eliminated.”10
Arendt’s concept of worldlessness can be applied to the tyrannical domination that
isolates Palestinians politically from the rest of the world, and prevents their voices from
being be heard. As the oppressed they are reduced to silence, while the history makers are
deaf to their tragedy. Reacting to the expectation that as a poet he should respond to the
war, Darwish starkly remarks, “I’m writing my silence,” adding that he will write when “the
guns quiet down a little” and when he finds “the appropriate language” (61, 62).
The state of exile evoked by Darwish is also closely related to Arendt’s figure of the
pariah—the homeless person, with no rights, positioned beyond any borders through the
normalization of the state of exception. Arendt first appropriated the term “pariah” from
Max Weber’s characterization of the European Jews after the First World War. Although he
mainly used it in reference to the Jews, he argued that “like the Jews we [Germans] have
been turned into a people of pariahs.”11 And although Arendt too mainly uses it in
reference to the Jews, she distinguishes between the “conscious pariah” and the Jewish
pariah. The latter term refers to Jewish parvenus or “social climbers” who denied their
relationship with the mass of ordinary Jews in order to be “assimilated into the Gentile
European world” instead of seeking the “admission of Jews as Jews to the ranks of
humanity,” which resulted in a delusional feeling of belonging. According to Arendt,
“realizing only too well that they did not enjoy political freedom nor full admission to the
life of nations, but that, instead, they had been separated from their own people and lost
contact with the simple natural life of the common man, these men yet achieved liberty
and popularity by the sheer force of imagination.”12 The Jewish pariahs thus settled for
passive survival to feel at home in a world that merely tolerated them, which, as William
Spanos points out, registers their “unworldliness,”13 whereby they were forced to remain
at the border of the existing “polity,” leading a bare life bereft of speech and action, and
unable to make their own history.14
The exilic threshold, then, is the worldless state of the exiled person who is deprived of
speech and action. Yet the condition of the Palestinians at the siege of Beirut does not
lead Darwish to project the image of the Jewish pariah as articulated by Arendt. Rather,
Darwish develops an in-between perspective, simultaneously of the outsider and insider,
that enables him to transform his pariah status into what Arendt terms a “conscious
pariah” (i.e., the minorities or outcasts who resist being assimilated despite being driven
from country to country, aware of their marginal status in European society).15 These
unassimilated, “conscious” Jewish pariahs, Arendt writes, are never “at-home”; they
achieve their worldliness by becoming aware of their defamiliarizing in-between status.
6 E. A. AKAN

Similarly, Darwish’s exiled figure can attain worldliness and disrupt his exilic threshold by
critically examining the notions of nation, homeland, and the state. By becoming
a “conscious pariah,” the refugee may develop a critical position from within the nation,
which opens the path towards plural formulations of coexistence and alternative forms of
belonging within the nation-state.
This new critical exilic awareness also overcomes the debilitating condition of being
“absent-present,” which excludes the exiles from history-making, while maintaining their
presence merely as a justification of the sovereign’s violence. As opposed to being absent-
present, the state of “minority-majority” provides a compelling critical perspective regard-
ing the nation and majority culture. Darwish deploys this suggestive term to refer to
a diasporic awareness that resists assimilation by becoming sensitive to history-making
processes. He thus interprets his exilic position as a catalyzer for reflecting on the relation
between the Arab writer’s presence within the majority culture:

We realize we’re part of the culture of the Arab nation and not an island within it. Therefore,
we’ve never accepted our voice as the voice of a narrow identity, but see it instead as the
meeting point for a deeper relation between the Arab writer and his time, in which the
Palestinian revolution will become the open password, until the general explosion [. . .] In
writing, we give expression to our faith in the potency of writing. From this perspective, we
don’t feel we’re a minority but announce that we are the minority-majority. (137–41)

The state of being a minority-majority thus entails preserving their Palestinian identity
while also developing a critical stance to their diasporic condition as a starting point for
a new understanding of a decentered and deterritorialized nation.
This critical awareness is closely related to Edward Said’s notion of the “exilic con-
sciousness,” which in a sense is a variation of Arendt’s “conscious pariah” in that both
imply questioning one’s ties to the homeland. In Culture and Imperialism (1993) and in
Humanism and Democratic Criticism (2004), Said elaborates on the “exilic consciousness”
which he initially described as a philological method involving resistance, belonging, and
detachment in the reading process.16 He saw “belonging and detachment,” “reception
and resistance,” and being “both insider and outsider” as the qualities of an exemplary
critical consciousness that should be adopted by humanists. Citing the twelfth-century
monk Hugo of St. Victor on the human attachment to a particular place and culture, Said
emphasizes that transcending borders, as Hugo argued, does not mean rejecting one’s
national identity or native place but rather suggests a Freudian “working through” these
attachments.17
With Said’s insight in mind, when we return to Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, we
find that there is no recovery of the homeland or of one’s attachment to it. Instead,
Darwish works through his attachments and detachments and adopts an in-between and
outside/inside critical perspective with which he attempts to resist the discursive mechan-
isms that dehistoricize and dehumanize the exiled subject.

Darwish’s Methods of Critical Engagement

One of Darwish’s main techniques for reflecting on his exilic condition is to apply the
contrapuntal method to minorize the dominant language. First developed by Said in
Culture and Imperialism, the contrapuntal method referred to an alternative way of
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY 7

reading the major works of the Western literary canon in an effort to draw out and lend
voice to “what is silent or marginally present or ideologically represented.”18 Drawing on
techniques in polyphonic Western classical music, where different themes “play off one
another” instead of existing hierarchically, reading canonical texts with the contrapuntal
method discloses how they are “shaped and perhaps determined by the specific history of
colonization, resistance, and finally native nationalism.” Through contrapuntal engage-
ment, Said contends, “alternative, or new narratives emerge.”19 Similarly, in Darwish’s
testimony, the narrator deconstructs and in effect resists the hegemony of the sovereign’s
language and the linearity of official history by contrapuntally reflecting on the notions of
homeland, diaspora, and memory.
In Memory for Forgetfulness, for example, Darwish blends multiple traditions and
influences in a composite dialogue by re-enacting ancient myths in the present, and
by combining various literary genres, such as autobiography, poetry, journalism, literary
criticism, and memoir, which results in a striking heterogeneity and plurality. This allows
him to excavate and rewrite myths, which blend into a multivocal work, disclosing
a multiplicity of identities and cultures that interacted harmoniously in the past, and
have the potential to do so in the future. He does the same with the myths of the
dominant culture to redeem the subject position inscribed in the destructive accounts
of history. For example, he inserts two Christian parables (Matthew 13:1–8 and 15:21–-
28) after recounting a dialogue with his friends as to how Beirut became a homeland for
exiles, albeit an ambiguous one. Because these biblical stories occurred in the same
lands where the modern siege takes place, they serve as reminders of a long-forgotten
possibility: that it is possible for Israelis and Palestinians to live together harmoniously
(60–61).
Another stylistic device is the deliberate use of a “broken” language, which according
to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari characterizes the literature of minorities and deterri-
torialized languages and reflects the condition of being “a sort of stranger within [one’s]
own language.”20 With its fragmentation, deferrals, and silences, the fractured text of
Memory for Forgetfulness discloses Darwish’s uncompromising minorization of the domi-
nant language, functioning as a textual embodiment of counterpoint and implying that
a deterritorialized language can open the path to plurality and heterogeneity.
Fragmentation, deferral, and resistance, as Theodor Adorno writes in “Beethoven’s Late
Style,” are the manifestations of an author’s “late style.” Taking Beethoven’s late music as
his example, he argues that his later works are “wrinkled” and “fissured;” they lack
“sweetness”; they are disharmonious and incapable of “being subsumed under the
concept of expression.” Adorno defines such works as “catastrophes”: “Objective is the
fractured landscape, subjective the light in which—alone—it glows into life. He
[Beethoven] does not bring about their harmonious synthesis. As the power of dissocia-
tion, he tears them apart in time, in order perhaps, to preserve them for the eternal. In the
history of art, late works are the catastrophes.”21 For Said the fragments, absences, and
silences of these “catastrophic” works represent “a kind of self-imposed exile from what is
generally acceptable.”22 Similarly, Darwish makes no attempt in Memory for Forgetfulness
to draw a coherent picture of the day of siege. As Jeffrey Sacks notes, it is as if his language
was “struck by the siege, and the poet is besieged by language,” evoking a state of
suspension and immobility.23 Darwish’s fragmented style informs and anticipates his
views of exile, absence/presence, homeland, and memory in his later poetry. In his well-
8 E. A. AKAN

known early poem “Bitaqit Hawia” (1964) (“Identity Card”), for example, he repeatedly
asserts his Arab identity against the political oppression with exclamatory persistence
(“Record!/I am an Arab”). His voice in the poem is direct, addressing specifically “what will
become the standard motif in much literature by and about Palestinians during the
seventies: The Palestinian emergence.”24 His later poems, however, reveal a new aware-
ness that complicates the relationship between absence and presence, as in “State of
Siege” (2002):

[to a poet] Whenever the sunset eludes you

you are ensnared in the solitude of the gods.
Be “the essence” of your lost subject
and the subject of your lost essence. Be present in your absence

Here, he affirms both presence and absence, not as notions imposed by the ruling
power, but as a self-imposed exile or alternative form of poetic self whereby he
strives to recreate himself in his aesthetic quest. While the tone is not as direct as
in “Identity Card,” the poem is still fractured, polyphonic, elusive. In his two last
poems, “Mural” and “The Dice Player,” which Darwish read in Ramallah a month
before his death in 2008, he complicates the notions of absence and presence by
blending bodily experience with metaphysical associations. “The Dice Player” ends
with the following lines: “Who am I to defy nothingness? / who am I? who am I?”
In “Mural” he contemplates presence and absence: “This name is mine . . . / and
also my friends’ wherever they may be / And my temporary body is mine / present
or absent.” The poem ends on a pensive note with a negating statement that
resonates with all forms of Palestinian dispossession: “I am not mine / I am not
mine / I am not mine.”25 These ambiguous endings and the complexity of his later
poetry do not mean that Darwish had come to terms with the hegemonic power
or abandoned hope for a Palestinian future. On the contrary, they spring from his
contrapuntal poetic strategy that culminates in a new kind of awareness of the
speaker’s uncompromising position of a minority-majority.
It is this “strained and deliberately unresolved quality” that Said recognizes in
Darwish as instances of a “late style”26 that reconciles “what is not reconciled.”27
Emblematic of this irreconcilability is an excerpt from the poem “Madeeh al-Thill al-
’Aaly” (“In Praise of the High Shadow”), which Darwish includes in Memory for
Forgetfulness and which sets the tone of the text as a whole.28 Reciting the lines in
the company of his stateless friends, in response to being asked what he was writing
during the siege, he introduces them as a “stammering scream.” This expression
conveys the element of irreconcilability of his poetics: while “stammering” implies
that it is impossible to use ordinary language to describe the exilic experience, it
issues as a scream, which expresses the intense desire to be heard by others.
If we assume that language is a stable, homogenous system, and follow Deleuze’s
argument in “He Stuttered,” then to make the language scream, stutter, stammer, or
murmur enables the poet to minorize and deterritorialize it. It also alienates the poet
from his own language as “he carves out a nonpreexistent foreign language within
his own language.” Once this bifurcation occurs, stuttering may be said to be
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY 9

contrapuntal, in that a new syntax replaces the old in the dominant language,
thereby creating “a foreign language within language, a grammar of
disequilibrium.”29
This linguistic disequilibrium can be seen, for example, in the incomplete
sentences, repetitions, twists and pauses, and silences in Darwish’s poem “In
Praise of the High Shadow”:

Our stumps: our names

No. There is no escape!
Fallen, the mask over the mask
That covers the mask.
Fallen is the mask!
You’ve no brothers my brother,
No friends, no forts, my friend.
You’ve no water and no cure
No sky, no blood, and no sails.
No front, and rear.

[. . .]

Our stumps, our names; our names, our stumps.

Block your blockade with madness
With madness
And with madness
They have gone, the ones you love. Gone.
You will either have to be
Or you will not be.
Fallen, the mask covering the mask
That covers the mask
Has fallen, and there’s no one

When the poet finishes reciting the lines of his “screaming stammering,” a “heavy” silence
pervades the room:

Silence. Heavy as metal. We were three, but have now become one in the world crashing
down around us. It’s as if we were here as caretakers of fragile substances and were now
preparing to absorb the operation of moving our reality, in its entirety, into the domain of
memories forming within sight of us. And as we move away, we can see ourselves turning
into memories. We are these memories. (60)

To make one’s language stutter, according to Deleuze, is to push it to its limit or to “its
outside, to its silence—[which] would be like the boom and the crash” (emphasis in the
original).30 What appears to be stuttering ends with a boom and a crash: The silence
Darwish describes, the world crashing down around them, and the loss of physical reality
are not only signs of the physical destruction brought about by the siege but also of
language’s straining to such a limit that it meets its silence after the “boom and the crash.”
Yet the poet has to begin anew, this time to break this silence, the chasm and the void
that awaits him. By deconstructing or disrupting the rules of the language, Darwish’s
10 E. A. AKAN

stammering scream offers a powerful statement against the silence and the deafness of
history. More specifically, stammering becomes a form of resistance, a strategy of minor-
ization of literature, culture, and identity, in order to cross the exilic threshold.
The variety of deconstructive devices Darwish uses in Memory for Forgetfulness thus
qualifies it as an alternative history of Palestine that lends voice to the silenced or
marginally present Palestinians. In an interview with an Israeli television reporter,
Darwish explains his desire to write history from the perspective of the silenced. He refers
to Homer’s Iliad as it relates to the untold story of the Palestinians: “I consider myself
a Trojan poet, that poet whose text has been lost to us and literary history. What I wish to
express, although not with any finality, but with a certain ambiguity, is that I belong to
Troy, not because I am defeated, but because I am obsessed by the desire to write the lost
text.”31 Writing thus makes it possible for the exiled figure, bereft of speech and action, to
regain “worldliness.”
But writing also serves to fight forgetfulness and absence, the two forms of disposses-
sion that correspond to the exilic threshold where Darwish is trapped. Absence does not
only mean being absent from history making processes; it also suggests being excluded
from history-writing processes. The Palestinians, he stresses, are only present when they
are subject to others’ interpretation: “Is there anything more cruel than this absence: that
you should not be the one to celebrate your victory or the one to lament your defeat?
That you should stay offstage and not make an entrance except as a subject for others to
take up and interpret?” (110). In such circumstances, writing becomes a powerful medium
of resistance, communicating the poet’s words to a listening community:

I do want to sing. I want to find a language that transforms language itself into steel for the
spirit—a language to use against these sparkling silver insects, these jets. I want to sing.
I want a language that I can lean on and that can lean on me, that asks me to bear witness and
that I can ask to bear witness, to what power there is in us to overcome this cosmic isolation.
(52)

Thus, for Darwish, writing the history from the viewpoint of the silenced, and alerting his
readers to the sovereign’s violence are of paramount importance for reaffirming his
subjectivity and presence.
The imaginary story of Kamal, a story within a story, with which Darwish’s Memory for
Forgetfulness ends, serves as an allegory of his own exile. It is also a reflection on the
transformative power of literature when constantly faced with silence. Told from different
and shifting points of view, the story is about a man who for twenty-seven years sat on
a rock on the shore of Tyre, the ancient port in Lebanon, waiting for a dove to appear. The
dove turns out to be his hometown, Haifa, which he left twenty-seven years before. Kamal
steals a boat, rows towards Haifa one night and lands on its shore. Having arrived home,
he finds everything untouched and runs into friends and acquaintances from his neigh-
borhood. All of this eventually turns out to be a dream. He is caught by the coastguards,
who nail him to his boat, which will eventually carry him back to Tyre. This ending, “Can
this be the sea? Yes, this is the sea” (172), suggests the hopelessness of ever regaining the
homeland.
At the end of the book Darwish alludes to what the sea symbolizes: “I don’t see
a shore, or a dove” suggests that he sees no hope of change in the condition of the
Palestinians in the near future. The sea here represents the cycle of violence in which
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY 11

the same story is repeated over and over again. It is only the sea: no promises, no
homeland to return to, no hope of that dream materializing, but only the same
threshold where they find themselves stuck. As a metaphor for writing, the sea
suggests that the poet has lost any hope of the transformative power of his words:
“I see in the sea nothing except the sea” (182), which may suggest that he no longer
believes they can change the course of history imposed by those in power.
Ultimately, however, the text was nevertheless written—one which minorizes, is
contrapuntal, and is thus emblematic of Darwish’s worldliness.
In her introduction to Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations, Arendt remarks that “although
the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time
a process of crystallization.”32 The story Darwish tells at the end of Memory for
Forgetfulness is precisely such a crystalline moment that explains the process of decay,
which is paradoxically transformed at the same time that it announces the impossibility of
transformation and of writing fiction. As Darwish tries to find his way into the sea of
words, to break or disrupt the sovereign’s language, and regain “worldliness,” he becomes
increasingly aware that he will not be able to break the cycle of history; nevertheless, he
manages to undermine the hegemonic power by rewriting history from the perspective of
the silenced.
In an interview in 1996 with Najat Rahman, Darwish addressed the question of
exilic writing, asking rhetorically: “Is poetry possible” in times of catastrophe?33 His
question resonates with Theodor Adorno’s famous statement that “to write poetry
after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Nevertheless, the poem (history or testimony) must be
written—even though it is not possible to write it—in order to give voice to the
oppressed and resist the “deafening” silence of official history.34 When Adorno
revisited his statement, he added that, even if it is barbaric to write poetry after
Auschwitz, only art can resist this verdict, since “in art alone that suffering can still
find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it.”35
Darwish’s poetics is, I wish to claim, an attempt to resist the same verdict that it is
barbaric to write poetry after experiencing atrocities and oppression. Thus, when he
laments that “the sea is the sea,” he is implicitly acknowledging that the sea is never
just the sea and that his words will indeed make a difference in reproducing that
condensed, crystallized moment of Palestinian history.

Conclusion: Towards a Critical Worldliness

During his late career, Darwish questioned the idea of belonging and the return to
a homeland. In an interview with Hassouna Mosbahi, he said:
One of the worse things we can do is to reduce the experience of the poet . . . to an experience
of exile followed by a return to a motherland. . . . I confess I’m unable to free myself from
seeing exile as something positive.36

This statement appears to imply that the simultaneous experience of two quasi-homelands
provided Darwish with a critical, contrapuntal perspective and rhetorical devices that
enabled him to break the political order imposed by the sovereign power. Najat Rahman
makes a similar point when he suggests that Beirut, 1982 marked a turning point in
Darwish’s poetry. His later poetry, he points out, differs from the earlier nationalist
12 E. A. AKAN

formulations in its response to “nationalist demarcations of collective identity that have

failed and that have brought on the critical situations of the present.”37 This, according to
Rahman, is most clearly reflected in Darwish’s conceptions of “home” and “exile.”
Butler too argues that Darwish’s approach to exile in the late poetry is more complex than
in the earlier works, and goes beyond the demarcations of belonging and not belonging. She
discusses the works of both Darwish and Said in the last chapter of Parting Ways as a hopeful
gesture to show that exilic thinking can enable us to imagine alternative ways of belonging
other than the homogenous political formation of a nation. Specifically citing Darwish’s 1999
poem “Who am I, without exile?”, Butler claims that the question Darwish poses “What shall
we do without exile?” may refer to the repetition of hegemonic subjugation, and thereby
offers no solution to the Palestinian problem. However, she also suggests that cohabitation
and plural political formations can only be made possible by the internal criticism of exilic
thinking regarding homogenous understandings of nationhood. According to Butler,
Darwish’s elaboration on exile in “Edward Said: A Contrapuntal Reading,” written following
Said’s death in 2007, points to the fact that the poem itself is a call for plurality. Citing Darwish,
Butler contends that, as an imaginary conversation between Said and Darwish, the poem
becomes an exilic site that does not “give us a direction, but a new cartography,” where
alliance and coexistence is possible. This is especially conveyed by the poem’s suggestive line
“where identity . . . open[s] onto plurality / not a fort or a trench.”38
The intervention of exilic thinking is thus a signpost for the future in which we can
imaginatively project a plural and heterogenous nation. As Butler writes: “Exile is the name
of separation, but alliance is found precisely there, not yet in a place that was and is and in
the impossible place of the not yet, happening now.”39 That is, exile is the marker of
a threshold that embodies a critique of the homogenous idea of a nation.
I have argued that Darwish’s poetics in Memory for Forgetfulness emerges from a similar
decentering of nationalist attitudes. Recognizing the pitfalls of the exilic threshold,
Darwish critically transformed his experience into an awareness of worldliness. Instead
of remaining on the exilic threshold, Darwish positioned himself within the dominant
culture, but beyond the dichotomies of minority/majority and center/periphery. In con-
clusion, I propose that Darwish’s critical position should inspire a new political ethic,
a new awareness, that resists the homogenization of spaces and temporalities and by
doing so offers a liberating alternative conception of political belonging.

Notes
1. Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, 13; hereafter page references are cited in the text.
2. Butler, Parting Ways, 209, 180.
3. Israel labelled Darwish an “absent-present alien” during his stay in Palestine/Israel until the
1970s. Other internal refugees whose lands were to be confiscated by Israel were also given
this title.
4. Agamben, State of Exception, 35.
5. Quted in Muhawi, “Introduction,” xiii.
6. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 118.
7. Arendt writes about the worldlessness of the Jewish refugee in “We Refugees”: “[r]emember
that being a Jew does not give any legal status in this world. If we should start telling the truth
that we are nothing but Jews, it would mean that we expose ourselves to the fate of human
beings who, unprotected by any specific law or political convention, are nothing but human
 THE EUROPEAN LEGACY 13

beings. I can hardly imagine an attitude more dangerous, since we actually live in a world in
which human beings as such have ceased to exist for quite a while” (118).
8. Gottsegen, Political Thought of Hannah Arendt, 5.
9. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 474.
10. Topolski, Arendt, Levinas, 52.
11. “The term ‘pariah’ refers to the ‘ritual segregation of the Jews and their negative status in the
eyes of the surrounding societies’.” Swedberg and Agevall, Max Weber Dictionary, 193.
12. Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah,” 100.
13. Arendt’s appropriation of the term “worldliness” or “being-in-the-world” from Heidegger is
strongly related to her idea of “pariah.” In her “On Humanity in Dark Times”, she draws
a parallel between the two notions: “This kind of humanity is the great privilege of pariah
peoples; it is the advantage the pariahs of this world always and in all circumstances can have
over others. The privilege is dearly bought; it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the
world, so fearful an atrophy of all the organs with which we respond to it—starting with the
common sense with which we orient ourselves in a world common to ourselves and others
and going on to the sense of beauty, or taste, with which we love the world—that in extreme
cases, in which pariahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness.
And worldlessness, alas, is always a form of barbarism” (13).
14. Spanos, Exiles in the City, 162.
15. Arendt, “We Refugees,” 119.
16. Said, Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 76.
17. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 335.
18. Ibid., 66.
19. Ibid., 51.
20. Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor, 26.
21. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” 564, 567.
22. Said, On Late Style, 16.
23. Sacks, “Language Places,” 263.
24. Said, Question of Palestine, 156.
25. Darwish, Mural, 68, 54.
26. Said, “On Mahmoud Darwish,” 113.
27. In After the Last Sky, Said compares the qualities of the “late style” he identifies in these works to
Palestinian prose and prose fiction. He argues that because the lives of Palestinians are
interrupted before they can reach maturity, the precarious actuality of the characters repro-
duces the precarious status of the writer, with each echoing the other. The form of Palestinian
fiction (for example, Kanafani’s Men in the Sun) reveals the writer’s efforts to construct
a coherent scene, “a narrative that might overcome the almost metaphysical impossibility of
representing the present” (38). That is why, Said notes, the characteristic mode of Palestinian
fiction is not “a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatim, but rather broken narratives,
fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative
voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations” (38). This might explain
why, according to Said, “[t]he story of Palestine cannot be told smoothly” (30).
28. As footnote no. 18 in Memory for Forgetfulness informs us, this is part of a longer poem
Darwish wrote during the siege of Beirut and published in Al Karmel under the title “In Praise
of the Tall Shadow” (1983) (58).
29. Deleuze, “He Stuttered,” 108, 109–10, 112.
30. Ibid., 113.
31. Sylvain, “Darwish’s Essentialist Poetics,” 148–49.
32. Arendt, “Introduction” to Benjamin, Illuminations, 54.
33. Darwish, “On the Possibility of Poetry,” 322.
34. Felman, “Benjamin’s Silence,” 210.
35. Adorno, “Commitment,” 313.
36. Darwish, “There is No Meaning,” 6.
37. Darwish, “On the Possibility of Poetry,” 41.
14 E. A. AKAN

38. Butler, Parting Ways, 224.

39. Ibid.

Notes on contributor
Evren Akaltun Akan gained her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature at Stony Brook University, New York,
for her dissertation “Towards a Critical Awareness of Worldliness: A. H. Tanpınar’s Huzur, Mahmoud
Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness, and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.” She is currently a faculty
member of the Department of English Language and Literature at Yasar University, Izmir, Turkey.

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