Abstract

This article examines the ways in which Mahmoud Darwish's contrapuntal notion of memory, catastrophe, and mourning exhibit an aesthetic of freedom, intransigence and resistance. Darwish's intellectual and aesthetic project is primarily premised upon the pleasures and pitfalls of memory and catastrophe as a site of spatial and cultural resistance. For Darwish, memory and catastrophe are not only about the absence and presence of geography and home, but they are also metaphorical in every way. In The Presence of Absence (2011), Darwish argues that metaphors form a peculiar mode of geography and space. Drawing on Edward Said's notion of late style and Judith Butler's argument on the politics of mourning, this article sets out to examine the ways in which Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness and In the Presence of Absence embody a radical form of aesthetic and intellectual praxis, writing against the grain and the politics of mourning.

Highlights

  • Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?Why didn’t you say anything? Why?The desert suddenly began to send back the echo: Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? (1999, 74)Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the SunThe above-quoted lines sum up Kanafani’s novella Men in the Sun in a tragic way, where three Palestinian refugees, Abu Qais, Assad, and Marwan, seek to escape the horrendous and unbearable conditions of refugee camps in Iraq heading to Kuwait

  • The driver of the lorry, Abul Khaizuran, utters the last words in the novella repeatedly in a tragic tone that echoes a voice of mourning and catastrophe: “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?” (74)

  • Whether memory is a form of exile or mourning, Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence and Memory for Forgetfulness displays a narrative and an aesthetic genealogy of writing back and intellectual resilience against the continuous brutalities of Zionist coercion and historical effacement

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Summary

Introduction

The desert suddenly began to send back the echo: Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? (1999, 74). Whether memory is a form of exile or mourning, Darwish’s In the Presence of Absence and Memory for Forgetfulness displays a narrative and an aesthetic genealogy of writing back and intellectual resilience against the continuous brutalities of Zionist coercion and historical effacement. Reading Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness and In the Presence of Absence, one should be attentive to Darwish’s exilic poetics of memory and the systemic discourse of historical and cultural denial by which the question of Palestine has been inflicted and mystified Such a denial culminated in the extreme declaration of Golda Meir, Israel’s former Prime Minister, where she declared so blatantly and shamelessly in 1996 that the Palestinians did not exist (Said, 4-5)

Exile and the Nowhere of Palestine
Late Style and the Politics of Mourning
Memory and Forgetfulness
The Politics of Elegy and Memory
The Politics of Longing and Precariousness
Works Cited
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