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

Five years ago almost no women in Egypt wore the headscarf (hijab). Now they nearly all wear it. A man cannot address a woman in public. Marriages are arranged, and the couple usually meet under parental supervision. Women are subordinate to men, and a woman whose honor is in question, through infidelity, rape or pre-marital promiscuity, may be killed by her family so that they save face. Without honor, a man cannot find work, and his entire family will bear the shame.

In 1979 a law passed to protect women’s rights made it more difficult to marry several women, and more difficult to divorce. In 1985 another law reversed the earlier 1979 law. But I ask you, is a law that protects a woman’s right to an inherently one-sided relationship really a protection of her rights? It still remained nearly impossible for a woman to ask for a divorce.

Although many women these days go to University, many others are taken out of education early to protect their honor by limiting their exposure to males. Others get their degrees only to find their employment options limited by segregation in the work place, or by the demands of their husbands and fathers.

Here there are women who are killed when on their honeymoon the groom finds out she is not a virgin. Many doctors perform surgeries to restore apparent virginity.

So here’s my question, and I don’t think it’s too ethnocentric: is anyone happy? Someone will say that there is a different conception of happiness that is fulfilled with arranged marriages. The couple may never know the burning pang of love that we in the west seem to covet, but they are often comfortable with each other. And they have avoided the hell that westerners put themselves through while seeking a mate.

So maybe it’s not about happiness. Maybe what I really wanted to say was: didn’t you ever do something just because you wanted to? And I can ask that question of Americans. Society gives you a bunch of ideas about what you should have in your life: a car, a house, a degree, a wife and kids. Did you ever in all your life, even once, do something just because you wanted to?

And if someone did step out of line a little, should that person die, or be excluded from the cares of society? I would say no, and I don’t think there’s any way to convince me otherwise.

I came to Egypt to learn about humanity, and to see a different way of life. I wanted to see an alternative way of dealing with modernity. However, the more I learn about this country, the less I want to know. I don’t want this country to disappoint me anymore than it allready has. Which leads me to another issue: corruption. But that will have to wait for my next installment.

Further reading:
Human Rights Watch: Women’s Rights in Middle East and North Africa