Mahmoud Darwish's Memory for Forgetfulness: Redeeming Worldliness through Exilic Consciousness

Abstract

This essay focuses on Mahmoud Darwish's exilic experience as depicted in Memory for Forgetfulness: August Beirut 1982 (1986). For Darwish the siege of Beirut was a climactic moment in which he realized that he is stuck on a perpetual threshold. Imposed by the sovereign power this exilic threshold characterizes the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon bereft of their rights as citizens and held outside their homeland and political domain. I wish to argue that rather than being trapped in this condition Darwish takes it as a vantage point to critically reconstruct the notions of homeland and political belonging. This involves a contrapuntal approach to the notions of homeland diaspora and memory and acts as a form of resistance. It converts the exilic threshold that keeps the poet neither outside nor inside the political domain into a site of worldliness in both the Arendtian and Saidian sense of the term. Elaborating on Judith Butler's account of cohabitation and diasporic thinking I argue that the exilic condition Darwish describes can give rise to a political ethic that resists the homogenization of spaces and temporalities and allows for an alternative sense of political belonging.