Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982

Mahmoud Darwish

Mar 1995 · Univ of California Press

About this ebook

One of the Arab world's greatest living poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day).

Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage.

Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity.

About the author

Mahmoud Darwish has lived most of his life in Lebanon and Palestine. The author of fourteen volumes of poetry and numerous prose works, he now lives in Paris. Ibrahim Muhawi is coauthor and translator of Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (California, 1988) and Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Archipelago Books, 2010), for which he won the PEN Translation Prize. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Folklore and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.