Mahmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness: Redeeming Worldliness through Exilic Consciousness

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on Mahmoud Darwish’s exilic experience as depicted in Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 (1986). For Darwish, the siege of Beirut was a climactic moment in which he 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 worldliness in both the Arendtian and Saidian sense of the term. Elaborating on Judith Butler’s account of cohabitation and diasporic 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Mahmoud Darwish
• exilic consciousness
• worldliness
• memory

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 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 reproduces 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.

38. Butler, Parting Ways, 224.

39. Ibid.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Evren Akaltun Akan

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.