In the Presence of Absence

You wonder: What kind of a linguistic or legal wunderkind could formulate a peace treaty and good neighborliness between a palace and a shack, between a guard and a prisoner?

What does it mean for a Palestinian to be a poet and what does it mean for a poet to be Palestinian?

In the first instance: it is to be the product of history, to exist in language.

The second: to be a victim of history and triumph through language. But both are one and the same and cannot be divided or entwined.

For what can a poet do before history's bulldozer but guard the spring and trees, visible and invisible, by the old roads? And protect language from receding from metaphorical precision and from being emptied of the voices of victims calling for their share of tomorrow's memory on that land over which a struggle is being waged. A struggle for what lies beyond the power of weapons: the power of words.

Longing is the groaning of right when incapable of providing proof of the might of right before the might of oppression. The groaning of homes buried beneath settlements that the absent bequeathed to the absent, and the present to the absent, with the first drop of milk in exile and in refugee camps. Longing is the sound of silk rising, in mutual groaning, from the mulberry to the one longing for it. It is the convergence of conscious and unconscious instinct. It is lost time protesting the sadism of the present.

Longing has a favorite season: winter

Memory, your personal museum, takes you into the realms of what is lost.

A sesame field, a plot of lettuce, mint, a round sun that falls into the sea.

What is lost grows in you and in the sunset, which grants what is distant

the attributes of paradise and purges it of any defect. Whatever is lost is

worshipped. Yet it is not so!

You saw your self at the next airport a persona non grata because documents lack the logic linking geography to names: He who was born in a country that does not exist... does not exist either. If you say, metaphorically, that you are from no place, you are told: There is no place for no place. If you tell the passport official: No place is exile; he answers: We have no time for rhetoric, so if you like rhetoric, go to another no place.

You see yourself at a third, fourth, and tenth airport explaining to disinterested employees a lesson in contemporary history about the people of the Nakba, scattered between exile and military occupation, without them understanding or granting you permission to enter. You see yourself in a long film slowly narrating what befell your people whose tongue, wheat, houses, and proof of existence were stolen the moment the gigantic bulldozer of history descended upon them and drove them away, leveling the place according to the dimension of a sacred myth, armed to the teeth.

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?

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?

but why did you come down from Mount Carmel? The question is absent for others, but present in you alone, secret and hidden like the phantom pains awakened by a severed body part.