Evren Akaltun Akan2025-10-06202010848770, 147013161084-87701470-131610.1080/10848770.2019.1683323https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85075199617&doi=10.1080%2F10848770.2019.1683323&partnerID=40&md5=35107de6fe68668e6319d2adf07554b7https://gcris.yasar.edu.tr/handle/123456789/9222This 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. © 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.EnglishExilic Consciousness, Mahmoud Darwish, Memory, WorldlinessArticle