Famous Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was confined in his West Beirut apartment under the Israeli bombings of 1982 when he wrote “Memory for forgetfulness”. In this sequence of prose poems and fictional dialogues, he shared his anxiety towards being locked down and towards the craziness of war. The book 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)” ? All topics that still ring true, almost 30 years later…

Memory for Forgetfulness was first issued in Arabic in 1986 under the title The Time: Beirut / The Place: August.

Darwsih was one of the Arab world’s greatest poets. His work has been translated into more than 20 languages. A lot of his poems were interpreted by Arab singers such as Marcel Khalife, Magida el Roumi and Georges Qurmuz. He died in 2008 in Houston, USA. 

Below is a selection of some of his quotes that we liked:

“Exile is more than a geographical concept. You can be an exile in your homeland, in your own house, in a room.”

“I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here. I have two names, which meet and part, and I have two languages. I forget which of them I dream in.”

“Nothing is harder on the soul, than the smell of dreams, while they’re evaporating.”

“I don’t decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.”

“Life defined only as the opposite of death is not life.”

Sources
Dima de Clerck, historian
France culture
Le Monde
wikipédia