all my movements
are prayers
i’ve got to write
before the ink & blood
run out
i’ve got to say one more thing
before i die
it’s the distance the narrator takes that’s jarring. that he only speaks from “I” a few times in actual dialogue throughout the book.
he is speaking death. the concrete in between whose cracks life slips through. now & then. not every day. only the burden of vice is worth living for. coffee. sex. the occasional victory. the temporary evasion of death that is every living day in Beirut.
a militantly–but beautifully–oppositional narrative, darwish subverts every possible symbol that might tempt the reader to comfort herself with a thought of peace, justice, or escape. but this world is beyond (or below) any harmonious imagining even a reader most skilled in denial could construct around the events taking place in this story. darwish’s portrait of terror is bloodcurdling in its simplicity of language & demonstration of the workings of a sensitive & rational mind on the verge of psychosis–indeed, weaving in & out of altered states amid the chaos of “war” (genocide as usual). darwish shows us how a poet tells a story: line by line, strung like pearls on a chain of words.
the poet speaks death.
breathes not oxygen but metaphor
he moves in a persona of madness. he has virtually no personality besides a half-joke he makes about women using makeup like coffee to wake up in the morning. reminiscent of the dry absence of the narrator in Camus’ L’Etranger, darwish uses madness as a weapon as well as to drive his words, jigging in spirals in the ears of the reader. the end comes wildly back to the first page, & the repetitions recalled their earlier iterations so strongly i thought i was trippin.
imagination replaces life. the poet repeats the images, asks questions unanswerable. does a bomb have grandchildren? US.
the poet speaks death. marks with Yemeni blood-rain the meeting of imagination, history, & poetry. he “shift[s] from martyr to spectator” (121) for “protection.” to protect himself, or the reader? his meta-narrative is haunting. it is as if a dead man writes this.
it’s certainly a possibility.
“darkness is white, pitch-white” (176)
life pushes through the cracks of the inevitable. “i am in the middle region between life & death” (181). “here, i didn’t die,” the narrator repeats as he surveys the city, the decade he spent there. the last pages come back to the first: “are you alive?”
in the final pages, darwish finally inserts himself by name (“Brother Mahmoud…”). perhaps his privacy is the code to this work. his spectatorship is so painfully detached that it is as if the shoes of Memory for Forgetfulness are empty of feet. the sardonic, tragic, mad, dizzying poetry lies in darwish’s many tones: absurd, prophetic, unconcerned. subtle. his detachment is, well, maddening.
while the character is absent, the poet is definitely there.
