Mahmoud Darwish Translated by Fady Joudah (An Elegy to Edward Said) Counterpoint For Edward Said New York, November, Fifth Avenue, the sun a shattered metal saucer, I said to my estranged self in the shade: Is this Sodom or Babylon? There, at the door of an electric abyss high as the sky, I met Edward thirty years ago, time was less defiant then, and we each said: If your past is experience make your tomorrow meaning and vision! Let’s go to our tomorrow certain of imagination’s candor, and of the miracle of grass. I don’t recall that we went to the movies that evening, but I heard ancient Indians calling me: Trust neither the horse, nor modernity. No, no victim asks his torturer: Are you me? If my sword were bigger than my rose, would you wonder whether I would act similarly? A question like this piques the curiosity of the novelist in a glass-walled office overlooking some irises in the garden… where the hypothetical hand is as white as the novelist’s conscience when he settles his account with the human instinct: There’s no tomorrow in yesterday, onward then… Though progress might be the bridge of return to barbarity… New York. Edward wakes to a sluggish dawn. Plays a Mozart piece. Runs around in the university tennis court. Thinks of the migration of birds over borders and checkpoints. Reads The New York Times. Writes his tense commentary. Damns an orientalist who guides a general to the weakness in the heart of a woman from the East. Showers. Chooses his suit with a rooster’s elegance. Drinks his coffee with cream. Screams at the dawn: Come on, don’t procrastinate! On the wind he walks. And on the wind he knows who he is. There’s no ceiling for the wind and no house. The wind is a compass to the stranger’s north. He says: I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. I have two names that meet and part, and I have two languages, I forget with which I dream. For writing I have an English with obedient vocabulary, and I have a language of heaven’s dialogue with Jerusalem, it has a silver timbre but it doesn’t obey my imagination. And Identity? I asked. He said: Self-defense… Identity is the daughter of birth, but in the end she’s what her owner creates, not an inheritance of a past. I am the plural. Within my interior my renewing exterior resides…yet I belong to the victim’s question. Were I not from there I would have trained my heart to rear the gazelle of metonymy, so carry your land wherever you go, and be a narcissist if you need to be. I asked: The outside world is an exile and the inside world is an exile so who are you between the two? I don’t completely know myself lest I lose myself, he said. I am what I am and I am my other in a duality that finds harmony between speech and gesture. And if I were a poet I would have said: I am two in one like a sparrow’s wings when spring is late content with bearing the good omen. He loves a land then departs from it. (Is the impossible far?) He loves departure to anything. In free travel between cultures, the researchers of human essence might find enough seats for everyone. Here is a periphery advancing. Or a center receding. The East is not completely East and the West is not completely West. Because identity is open to plurality, it isn’t a citadel or a trench. Metaphor was asleep on the riverbank and were it not for pollution it would have embraced the other bank. I asked: Have you written a novel? I tried, he said…I tried to bring back my image in the mirrors of faraway women, but they had already infiltrated their fortified nights and said: We have a world separate from text. Man will not write woman, the riddle-and-dream. Woman will not write man, the symbol-and-star. No love resembles another love. No night resembles another night. They enumerated the traits of men and laughed. -So what did you do? -I laughed at my absurdity and threw the novel in the trash! The intellectual reins in the novelist’s rendition and the philosopher dissects the singer’s rose. He loves a land then departs from it and says: I am what I become and will become. I will make myself by myself and choose my exile. My exile is the backdrop of the epic scene, I defend the poets’ need to join tomorrow with memories, I defend trees the birds wear as country and exile. I defend a moon still fit for a poem of love. I defend an idea fractured by its owner’s fragility and a land the myths have kidnapped. -Can you return to anything? -What’s ahead of me drags what’s behind me in a hurry. There’s no time in my wristwatch for me to write down lines on the sand. But I can visit yesterday, like strangers do, when they listen in the evening to a pastoral poet: A girl by the spring fills her jug with the milk of clouds she laughs and cries from a bee that stung her heart in the wind-rise of absence. Is love what aches the water or is it an ailment in fog…? etc, etc. -Then you are prone to the affliction of longing? - A longing to tomorrow is farther and higher. My dream leads my steps. And my vision seats my dream on my knees like a cat. My dream is the realistic imaginary and the son of will: We are able to alter the inevitability of the abyss! -And what of longing to yesterday? - A sentiment that doesn’t concern the intellectual except to comprehend a stranger’s yearning to the tools of absence. My longing is a conflict over a present that grabs tomorrow by the testicles. -But didn’t you sneak to yesterday when you went to the house, your house, in al-Talbiah, in Jerusalem? -I prepared myself to stretch out in my mother’s bed as a child does when he’s scared of his father. And I tried to retrieve my birth and trace the Milky Way on the roof of my old house, I tried to palpate the skin of absence and the summer scent of the jasmine garden. But the beast of truth distanced me from a longing that was looking over my shoulder like a thief. -Were you frightened? What frightened you? -I couldn’t meet loss face to face. I stood like a beggar at the doorstep. Do I ask permission, from strangers who sleep in my own bed, to visit myself for five minutes? Do I bow respectfully to those who reside in my childhood dream? Would they ask: Who is this inquisitive foreign visitor? Would I be able to talk about war and peace between the victims and the victims of victims without interruption? Would they say to me: There’s no place for two dreams in one bed? He’s neither himself nor me he’s a reader wondering what poetry can tell us in the age of catastrophe. Blood and blood and blood in your land, in my name and yours, in the almond blossom, in the banana peel, in the infant’s milk, in light and shadow, in wheat grains, in the salt container. Proficient snipers hit their marks with excellence and blood blood and blood… This land is smaller than the blood of its offspring who stand on the threshold of Resurrection like offerings. Is this land really blessed or baptized in blood and blood and blood that doesn’t dry up with prayer or sand? No justice in the pages of this holy book suffices for the martyrs to celebrate the freedom of walking on clouds. Blood in daylight. Blood in the dark. Blood in the words. But he says: The poem might host defeat like a thread of light that glistens in a guitar’s heart. Or as a Christ on a mare adorned with beautiful metaphor. Aesthetic is only the presence of the real in form. In a world without sky, land becomes an abyss. And the poem, one of condolence’s gifts. And an adjective of wind: northern or southern. Don’t describe what the camera sees of your wounds and scream to hear yourself, to know that you’re still alive, and that life on this earth is possible. Invent a wish for speech, devise a direction or a mirage to prolong the hope, and sing. The aesthetic is a freedom. I said: A life that is defined only in antithesis to death…isn’t a life! He said: We will live, even if life abandons us to ourselves. Let’s become the masters of words that will immortalize their readers — as the brilliant Ritsos said. Then he said: If I die before you do, I entrust you with the impossible! I asked: Is the impossible far? He said: As far as one generation. -And what if I die before you do? He said: I will console Galilee’s mountains and write: The aesthetic is only the attainment of the suitable. Now don’t forget: If I die before you do, I entrust you with the impossible. When I visited him in the new Sodom, in 2002, he was struggling against Sodom’s war on the Babylonians, and against cancer. He was like the last epic hero defending Troy’s right to share in the narrative. A falcon bids his summit farewell and soars higher and higher. Because residing over Olympus and other summits produces boredom. Farewell, farewell to the poem of pain.
Posted on: Fri, 31 May 2013 21:26:25 +0000