A Central Ontological Transformer

Posted by Lelyn R. Masters on January 18th, 2009

Mahmoud Darwish was born in Galilee in 1941.  The specific conditions we are born into is a crapshoot, and Darwish just lost.  In 1948 his family fled to Lebanon.  He became the poet laureate of Palestine, an expression of a dispossessed people. Like many in his generation his influences included Ginsburg and Rimbaud.  In 1971 he moved to Cairo and worked in Al-Ahram.  In 1973 he joined the PLO, and was hence banned from entering Palestine.  

Published in 1987, his landmark Memory for Forgetfulness expresses the plight of the refugee under siege.  This book is an eyewitness account of the peak of shelling in Lebanon during the civil war, called Hiroshima Day. Comparable to Slaughterhouse 5 or Murakami’s The White Sky of Hiroshima, Memories for Forgetfulness is a coherent exploration of a life that is already forfeit, a life of isolation, injustice and alienation.

When he died in 2008, discussions were held with Israel to bury him in his home town.  He was buried in exile from that home village so that he could be where all Palestinians can visit.  His remains rest in Ramallah at the heart of the disputed West Bank.

What follows is a short excerpt where Darwish recalls going out into the city streets under bombardment.

I was touched somehow with enthusiasm.  The occupation extended over space, the sea, Snobar mountain, the first storms of anxiety, the way of Adam exiled from paradise.  Many are the ways of unending exile.  My country never came back to me.  My body never came back.  The air raids rain down hymns spreading out and conferences of the living dead in blood like light burning the cold question:  what am I looking for?  I fill myself with gunpowder because of repressed and compressed anger.

Missiles enter my body through my pores, leaving in all safety.  What strength!  I don’t feel the hell spreading through the air wile I’m breathing hell and sweating hells.  Yes, I sing the burning day.  I want to sing.  I want to find a language that will change language into steel for the soul, an anti-air defence language… shiny silver insects… I want to sing.

I want a language to support me while I support it.  I want a language to bear witness to me bearing witness to this language that we have the power to overcome this cosmic isolation.  I walk on.

I walk to see myself walking, taking firm steps, free even of myself.   In the middle of the road, the exact middle, with the barking of a phantom airplane overhead.  She spits her fire, and I don’t notice.  What am I looking for?  Nothing.  Maybe the determined hard headedness that hides the fear of being alone.  Or maybe the fear of being alone.  Or maybe the fear of being crushed under rubble is what drives my footfall, striking the sleeping streets.  

I never saw Beirut sleep so late.  For the first time I could see the sidewalks cleared of people.  For the first time I could see the trees.  Clear trees with roots and branches and leaves that never brown.  Is Beirut beautiful in and of herself?  There had been movement and speach and congestion and ll the mercantile traffic hiding away something from view, changing Beirut from a city to a given fact, a signification, a phrase, a sign.  She used to publish books, disseminate media and host conferences and colloquiums on cures for the world’s maladies, and she didn’t pay any attention to herself.  She was busy flexing a sarcastic tongue over the dust and oppression all around.  She was a free workshop, and her walls encompassed the entire modern canon.  

There was a poster factory.  Beirut was the first city to modify poster production into daily newspapers.  Her ability to express patched together variety, death, chaos, freedom, exile, exodus and peoples.  She was filled with and commissioned for (fawada) every known form of expression and found in posters a way to comprehend the burden (fawada) to express the quotidian.  ”Poster” even became a common phrase in tales and epics designating a specialty.

Faces on walls.  Fresh martyrs released from life and published.  The dead repeating the results of death.  One martyr covering the face of another martyr on the wall.  He takes his place until another martyr buries him and then rain.   Slogans inflame slogans which are exchanged and ranked according to sentimental priorities and global daily needs.  

Whatever happens in the world happens here, buy involuted and ideal currents.  An argument between two intellectuals in a Parisian cafe becomes armed conflict her.  

This is because Lebanon has to belong to and keep up with everything new, and every revived old thing, and every new movement and every new theory.  Film revolutions in quick succession.  Video for immediate implementation.  The new leader and new star are candidates of new leader and new star in their respective fields..  They jump over walls with pictures and words  They salivate over bitterness behind a consciousness trading itself in.  To stars their ages, riegns are shortlived.

No, the public here is sensitive.  In fact, there is no public here, for the race is run in the American style even if their goals are hostile to America.  There are always representatives here from every new realization and every new melody and every new enthusiasm: from the coquetish yearnings in the chest of a young woman in tight jeans indicating leftist excesses, to the one in a viel covering face and hands indicating fundamentalism, to the grasping of every fading sign of Karl Marx in his Orientalist catalogue indicating gusts of eastern wind.

Here is a central ontological transformer for everyone who is out of the race.  It was popularized as an employment service for a people busy securing foodstuffs and water, busy burying their dead.

I am walking through streets that no one walks through.  I remember before walking through streets that no one walks through.  And I remember someone who was not with me saying:

Him:  Stop this oratory and come with me.

I:  Where to?

Him:  To see this man.

I:  What does this man do?

Him:  He is going to his house.

I:  But he keeps retracing his steps.

Him:  That’s just how he walks.

I:  He’s not walking.  It’s much better that that:  he’s dancing!

Him:  Watch him carefully.  Count his steps.  1,2,4,7,9 steps forward.  1,2,3,7,8 steps back.

I:  What’s that prove?

Him:  That he is walking, and this is the only way he knows how to get home.  10 steps forward, 9 steps back.  He still advances one step.

I:  What if his mind wanders and he miscounts?

Him:  Then he will never get home.

I:  Are you trying to tell me something?

Him:  Not at all.

Translation:  Lelyn R. Masters