Allow me to see you, now that you have left me and I have left you, safe and sound like pure prose on a stone that may turn green or yellow in your absence. Allow me to gather you and your name, just as passersby gather the olives that harvesters forgot under pebbles. Let us then go together, you and I, on two paths:
You, to a second life promised to you by language, in a reader who might survive the fall of a comet on earth.
I, to a rendezvous I have postponed more than once with a death to whom I had promised a glass of red wine in a poem. A poet is at liberty to lie, but he only lies in love because the heart’s promises are open to alluring conquests.
The celebrated Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish was aware that his own death was nearing when he composed In the Presence of Absence, an intimate synthesis of memory and meditation that not only turns its attention to the past, but looks ahead to contemplate what words can carry into a future that he knows he will not see. It is a self-elegy, an established genre in classical Arabic poetry, re-imagined, reshaped and realized through a unique “convergence” of prose and poetry in which, as translator Sinan Antoon puts it in his Preface: “[t]he living ‘I’ bids farewell to its imagined dying other in a sustained poetic address divided into twenty untitled sections.” Presented as a dialogue between the poet’s present self and his absent self, each section explores a particular experience or theme.
Early on, Darwish invokes his younger self, a mischievous child caught up in the magic of the natural world, lured by curiosity toward adventure and injury. However, another love was also nurtured at a young age: the love of language. The third section is devoted to the endless possibilities that the future poet discovers in the wonder of letters and words. It will become his life:
You become words and words become you. You do not know the difference between utterer and utterance. You will call the sea an overturned sky and the well a jar to preserve sound from the world’s tinkering and the sky a sea hanging from clouds.
There is something that assumes the obscure. It cannot be smelled, touched, tasted, or seen. It is what makes childhood a sixth sense. They called you the dreamer because you often gave words wings invisible to grown-ups.
Darwish devotes several sections to this time of dreams and dreaming before, at the age of seven, dreams turn into nightmares. The Nakba’s destructive force drives him and his family from their homeland under the cover of darkness at a time when his absent self was:
Still too young, you could not imagine your own death. You did not yet grasp that children could die.
Life will go on but, but this sudden, unprecedented displacement will cause him to hate the second half of his childhood and foreshadow the circumstances that will shape the rest of his life.
In the Presence of Absence is not a memoir in the familiar sense of the word, but significant life experiences—imprisonment, exile, heart surgery, a visit to his mother—shape his reflections. Yet, at times, he turns to more open meditation on themes like love, loss, dreaming and what it means to return. These meditations turn on the poetic as poetry is always, for Darwish, more than a vocation, but an essential means of making sense of the world. Ever the dreamer, his dreams are soaked in a melancholy that reveals itself in imagery bound to a land and a life forever lost:
Longing is the absent chatting with the absent. The distant turning toward the distant. Longing is the spring’s thirst for the jar-carrying women, and vice versa. Longing allows distance to recede, as if looking forward, although it may be called hope, were an adventure and a poetic notion. The present tense is hesitant and perplexed, the past tense hangs from a cypress tree standing on its rooted leg behind a hill, enveloped in its dark green, listening intently to one sound only: the sound of the wind. Longing is the sound of the wind.
The more you delve into your loneliness, like that tree, the more longing takes you with motherly tenderness to its country, which is made of transparent, fragile fibres. Longing has a country, a family, and an exquisite taste in arranging wildflowers. It has a time chosen with divine care, a quiet mythical time in which figs ripen slowly and the gazelle sleeps next to the wolf in the imagination of a boy who never witnessed a massacre.
Darwish plays presence and against absence through this text, the image surfaces and reshapes itself in endless variations, including the confrontation with his own absence when he visits the ruins of the village he was born in. For, to articulate an absence that is present or a presence that is absent is not only the task of this self-elegy, it is, for Darwish, a poet’s role. This is, then, more than anything, a book about language—as a means to express, to understand, and to exist in a world that has been torn apart. His prose is rich with metaphor and sensual, even sexual, imagery, but the pain of a man who was denied the ability to live freely within the land of his birth, and witnessed, by the time of his death in 2008, the impact of sixty years of occupation and conflict on the Palestinian people, is never far from the surface. It is, sadly more timely than ever.
Sinan Antoon’s translation honours the poetic energy of this work, aiming, he tells us, to preserve, where possible, the pulse and rhyme of the original. Endnotes supply necessary context, as required. This text, like Journal of an Ordinary Grief and Memory for Forgetfulness, is classified as poetry, but, as poetic as these works are, I prefer to consider them closer to prose lest a potential reader who is apprehensive about poetry be inclined to avoid them. Darwish’s meditative, incantatory prose is neither elusive nor intimidating. He writes from the heart and with the heart his words are best met.
In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish is translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon and published by Archipelago Books.
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