Maḥmūd Darwīsh

"Darwish is to be read with urgency, in the night, when nothing else moves but his lines." ?The Village Voice By one of the most transcendent poets of this generation, a remarkable collection of prose poems that explores themes of love, pain, isolation, and connection. In this self-eulogy written in the final years of Mahmoud Darwish's life, Palestine becomes a metaphor for the injustice and pain of our contemporary moment. Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was one of the most acclaimed poets in the Arab world. His poetry collections include Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? and A River Dies of Thirst (Archipelago Books). In 2001 Darwish was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize.

In the Presence of Absence

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So do not reconcile with anything except for this obscure reason. Do not regret a war that ripened you just as August ripens pomegranates on the slopes of stolen mountains. For there is no other hell waiting for you. What once was yours is now against you.

The ney draws you into the distance and you cry like one who could anticipate a catastrophe. There are no black clouds on the horizon. So why do you cry when death is distant and the garden of your house is high, the balcony is high, the willow tree is high, so why do you cry?

You ask: What is the meaning of “refugee”? 

They will say: One who is uprooted from his homeland. 

You ask: What is the meaning of “homeland”? 

They will say: The house, the mulberry tree, the chicken coop, the beehive, the smell of bread, and the first sky. 

You ask: Can a word of eight letters be big enough for all of these, yet too small for us?

There is nothing we can do and there is no tomorrow, they said, when we are in this state, bound to firm fates, tied to abyss after abyss. We take water from the neighbors’ wells and borrow bread from the rock’s bounty. We live, if we are able to live, in an infant past, planted in fields that were ours for hundreds of years until a moment ago, before the dough rose and the coffeepots cooled. In one ill-fated hour, history entered like a bold thief through a door as the present flew out through a window. With a massacre or two, the country’s name, our country, became another. Reality became an idea and history became memory. The myth invades and the invasion attributes everything to the will of the Lord who promised and did not renege on his promise. They wrote their narrative: We have returned. They wrote our narrative: They have returned to the desert. They put us on trial: Why were you born here? We said: Why was Adam born in paradise?

The two sworn enemies approach and shake hands: one reluctantly, the other with cheerful confidence. The carefully selected audience applauds a juncture in history on the lawn of the White House. But the language you hear brings your heart back to its senses: No, this is not my language. Where is the eloquence of the victim recalling his long suffering in the face of the misery of the moment when enemy looks enemy in the eye and shakes his hand insistently? Where are the voices of those murdered, old and recent, demanding an apology, not only from the murderer, but from history as well? Where will meaning go when opposites meet? Where is the scream from a surgical procedure where the past is severed from the present in the adventurous march toward an uncertain tomorrow? And where is my language?

The poison-tipped questions were shot at you: What will you write without exile? What will you write without the occupation? Exile is existence. The existing occupation is what hinders the efficacy of the imagination. I will write better.

Your father is your father. Whenever you sit with him you speak hurriedly, and he does not expose his wound in front of you. You do not know how to hide the cruelty of your pity from him, so you inherited his wound.

Dreams will find their dreamers and all a dreamer has to do is remember.

none of whom would call the others by name since names had become numbers.

He suffers from the malady of the present, so take him to tomorrow.

In the Presence of Absence quotes

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