State of Siege

Halit Hisar, (State of Siege) Mahmoud Darwish, London & Beirut: Dar Riyad Al-Rayyis, forthcoming. pp96
By Mahmoud Darwish
Mahmoud Darwish's "State of Siege" is to appear shortly in book form. Below, the author's extracts of choice, originally published in the periodical he edits, Al-Karmel
Here on the slopes before sunset and at the gun- mouth of time,
Near orchards deprived of their shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
What the unemployed do:
We nurture hope
[...]
A country on the verge of dawn. We have become less intelligent,
Because we stare at the hour of victory:
There is no night in our night that shines with artillery.
Our enemies stay up at night and light
The darkness of cellars.
[...]
Here, after Job's poetry we waited for none...
[...]
This siege will last until our enemies have been taught
Some of our jahili poetry.
[...]
The sky, pencil-grey at mid-morning,
Is orange at night. As for the hearts
They remain neutral, like roses on a fence.
[...]
Here --
There is no "I" -- here Adam remembers his clay...
[...]
At the edge of death, he says:
No place remains in me for loss:
Free, I am near my freedom. My tomorrow is in my hand.
Soon I will enter life,
And be born free, parentless,
And choose letters of azure for my name...
[...]
Under siege, life becomes time
Between remembering its beginning
And forgetting its end.
[...]
Here, on the heights of smoke, on the stairs of home,
There is no time for time.
We do what those who ascend to God do:
We forget pain.
[...]
Pain
Is: For the lady of the house not to hang out clothes on the line
In the morning, and be satisfied with cleaning this flag.
[...]
Here, there are no Homeric echoes for anything;
Mythologies knock on our doors when we need them.
No Homeric echo for anything: Here a General
Excavates a sleeping state
Under the rubble of a coming Troy.
[...]
Soldiers measure the gap between being and nothingness
Using a tank's gunsights...
[...]
We measure the distance between our bodies and the shells with a sixth sense.
[...]
You, standing on the doorsteps, enter
And drink Arab coffee with us.
[Perhaps you feel you are human, like us].
You, standing on the doorsteps of our homes!
Get out of our mornings,
We need to feel comforted that we are
Human beings, like you!
[...]
We find time for entertainment:
We play backgammon, or leaf through our news
In the papers of a wounded yesterday,
We read the horoscopes: In the year
2002 the camera will smile
For those born under the sign of siege.
[...]
Whenever yesterday visits me, I tell him:
We won't meet today, Go
And come tomorrow!
[...]
To no avail I think:
What did He, who was like me, think, there,
On top of the hill three thousand years ago,
And at this passing moment?
The thought hurts me
And memory is refreshed
[...]
When the airplanes disappear the doves fly,
White, white, they wash the cheeks of the sky
With their free wings, regaining the glory and monopoly
Of the air and of playing. Higher and higher, the doves fly,
White, white. Would that the sky
Were real. [A man, passing between two bombs, told me]
[...]
Glimmer, insight, and lightning
Could look the same...
In a little while I'll know if this was
Revelation...
Otherwise, close friends will know that the poem
Passed, killing the poet
[...]
[To a critic:] Do not interpret my words
Using a teaspoon, or a trap for a bird!
My words besiege me in my sleep,
Words of mine that have not been said,
They write me, then leave me, looking for the remains of my sleep
[...]
Cypress trees, behind the soldiers, are minarets that protect
The sky from slipping. And behind the iron fence
Soldiers urinate -- sheltered by a tank --
As an autumnal day continues its golden stroll in
A street wide as a church after Sunday prayer...
[...]
We'll love life tomorrow.
When tomorrow arrives, we shall love life
As it is, ordinary, sly
Grey or coloured.. No resurrection. No afterlife.
And if there must be joy,
Let it be
Light on the heart and on the waist
"A practiced believer is not bitten
By joy... twice!"
[...]
[A writer told me humorously:]
If I knew the end, from the beginning,
There would be no work for me to do in language
[...]
Fog is darkness, densely white darkness
Peeled off by the orange, and a promising woman.
[...]
Siege is: waiting,
Waiting on a leaning ladder in the middle of the storm.
[...]
Alone, we are alone till the end,
except for the visits of the rainbow
[...]
We have brothers beyond the distance.
Kind brothers. They love us. They look at us, and they cry.
Then they say to themselves:
"Would that the siege were..," not finishing the sentence:
"Do not leave us alone. Do not leave us".
[...]
Our losses: Between two and eight martyrs a day.
And ten wounded.
Twenty houses.
And fifty olive trees...
In addition to the structural faults that
Damage poem, play and incomplete painting.
[...]
On the road lighted by a lantern in exile,
I see a tent torn by the four winds:
The south is resilient before the wind,
The east is a west become mystical,
The west is a truce of the dead minting the currency of peace,
As for the north, the far north
This is neither geography nor direction
It is a pantheon.
[...]
A woman told the cloud: Cover my loved one
My clothes are wet with his blood
[...]
If you do not become rain, my love,
Become trees
Saturated with fertility, become trees
If you do not become trees, my love,
Become a stone
Saturated with humidity, become a stone
If you do not become a stone, my love,
Become a moon
In your lover's dream, become a moon
[Thus a woman spoke
To her son at his funeral]
[...]
You, staying up late! Aren't you tired
Of watching the light of our salt,
The glow of roses in our wounds
Aren't you tired you staying up late?
[...]
Standing here. Sitting here. Always here. Eternally here.
And we have one single united goal: To be.
After that we differ on everything:
On the shape of the flag (my living people, you would do well to choose the simple shape of a donkey);
On the words of the new anthem
(you would do well to choose a song on the mating of doves);
On the duties of women
(you would do well to choose a woman to head the security apparatus).
We differ on percentages, on public and private,
We differ on everything. We have one goal: To be...
And after that each finds space to choose a goal.
[...]
He told me on his way to prison:
When I'm set free, I shall know that praising the homeland,
Like mocking it,
Is an occupation like any other!
[...]
A little boundless, absolute blue
Is enough
To ease the burden of this time
And clean the mud of this place
[...]
My soul should dismount
Walk on its silky feet
By my side, hand in hand, like two old friends,
Sharing the old, familiar bread
And the old familiar glass of wine
Let us walk this road together
Then our days can go in different directions:
Me to the metaphysical. As for my soul,
It wants to sit up on a high rock
[...]
[To a poet:] Whenever you feel absence becoming more absent
You slip into an isolation akin to that of the gods
So be the wandering "subject" of your object
And the "object" of your subject. Be present in absence
[...]
There is time for irony:
My phone does not ring
Neither does the door bell
So what makes me sure that I
Wasn't here!
[...]
There is time for song:
In waiting for you, I cannot wait for you.
I cannot read Dostoyevski
Or listen to Umm Kulthoum, or Maria Calas, or any others.
In waiting for you, the hands of the watch move to the left...
To a time without place.
In waiting for you, I did not wait for you. I waited for eternity.
[...]
He asks her: What flowers do you like?
She says: Carnations... black
He says: Where are you taking me, when carnations are black?
She says: To the centre of light within me
And she says: And further... further... further
[...]
This siege will last until the besieger feels, like the besieged,
That boredom
Is a human quality.
[...]
I do not love you, I do not hate you --
Said a detainee to the interrogator: "My heart is full
Of what does not concern you.
My heart is flooded with the scent of sage.
My heart is innocent, radiant, full,
There is no time in my heart for interrogation. Yes,
I do not love you. Who are you that I should love you?
Are you a sigh, a tea date,
The huskiness of the nay, a song, that I might love you?
I hate detention, and I do not hate you,
Said a detainee to the interrogator: My emotion does not concern you.
My emotion is my private night...
My night that moves between pillows free of metre and rhyme!
[...]
We sat far from our destinies, like birds
Building their nests in the curves of statues,
Or in chimneys, or in the tents
Set up on a prince's road to a hunt...
[...]
On my ruins the shadow sprouts green,
And the wolf dozes on my ewe's fleece,
Dreaming, like me, like an angel
That life is here.... not there
[...]
Myths refuse to adapt in plot
They might be temporarily flawed
Ships might drift towards land,
Uninhabited land,
And thus the imaginary is infected by the real,
But they never change in plot.
Whenever they find reality unfitting
They change it with a bulldozer.
Truth is the slave girl of the text -- beautiful,
White, untarnished...
[...]
[To a half Orientalist:] Let it be.
Let us assume that I am an idiot, an idiot, an idiot.
That I do not play golf.
That I do not understand technology,
And that I cannot fly a plane.
Is this why you took my life to make your life?
If you were another, if I were another,
We would have been friends confessing our need for idiocy.
Hath not an idiot -- like the Jew in The Merchant of Venice--
a heart, bread, and eyes that fill with tears?
[...]
Under siege, time becomes place,
Fossilised in its eternity
Under siege, place becomes time
Lagging behind its yesterday and its tomorrow
[...]
This land is low, high
Or holy, an adulteress
We do not care much for the charm of adjectives
The benevolence of the sky, its opening
Might become a geography!
[...]
The martyr besieges me when I live a new day
He asks me: Where have you been? Return the words you gave me as presents to the dictionaries,
Relieve the sleepers from the buzzing echo
[...]
The martyr teaches me: There are no aesthetics outside my freedom.
[...]
The martyr explains: I have not searched beyond the distance
For eternity's virgins, I love life
On Earth, among the pines and figs,
But I had no access to it. I've searched
For it, using every last thing I own: blood in a body of azure.
[...]
The martyr besieges me: Do not walk at my funeral
Unless you knew me. I don't want compliments
From anyone.
[...]
The martyr warns me: Do not believe their ululations.
Believe my father when he looks at my picture, crying:
Why did you change turns, my son, walking on ahead of me.
Me first, me first!
[...]
The martyr besieges me: I've changed nothing save my position and my poor furniture.
I've placed a gazelle on my bed
And a half moon on my finger,
To ease the pain!
[...]
This siege will last until we're persuaded to choose harmless slavery, in complete freedom!
[...]
To resist means: To be confident of the health
Of the heart and of the testicles, to be confident of your incurable malady:
The malady of hope.
[...]
And in what remains of the dawn I walk outside myself;
And in what remains of the night I hear the echoes of footsteps within me.
[...]
Peace be upon him who shares my alertness at
The ecstasy of the light, the light of butterflies in
The darkness of this tunnel.
[...]
Peace be upon him who shares my cup
In the darkness of a night spilling over the two seats:
Peace be upon my ghost.
[...]
[To a reader:] Do not trust the poem --
The daughter of absence. It is not intuition, nor
Thought. It is the abyss sense.
[...]
If love is sick, one treats it
With exercise and irony
And with separating the singer from the song
[...]
My friends always held a
Farewell party for me, a comfortable grave in the shadow of oak trees
With a gravestone of the marble of time
But I would always precede them to the funeral:
Who died... who?
[...]
The siege transforms me from a singer into... a sixth string on a violin.
[...]
The woman martyr, the daughter of a woman martyr, the daughter of a martyr, sister of a martyr,
the sister of a woman martyr, the daughter-in-law of a martyr's mother, the granddaughter of a martyred grandfather,
And the neighbour of a martyr's uncle [etc.. etc..]
But this news does not disturb the civilised world,
For the barbaric age is over.
The victim is anonymous, common,
And the victim -- like truth -- is relative, and [etc... etc]
[...]
Quiet, quiet, for the soldiers now want
To listen to the songs
The martyrs listened to, and which remained,
Like the aroma of coffee in their blood, fresh.
[...]
A truce, a truce to examine the teachings: Do airplanes turn into ploughs?
We told them: A truce, a truce to examine intentions,
Perhaps a bit of peace might seep into the soul.
At that point we compete to love through poetic means.
They answered: Don't you know that peace with oneself
Opens the doors of our fortress to hijaz and nahawand music?
So we said: What then? ...what next?
[...]
Writing is a small puppy biting nothingness
Writing wounds without blood..
[...]
Cups of our coffee. The birds, and the green trees
In blue shadow. The sun leaping from one wall
To another, like a gazelle.
The water in the endless shapeless clouds of what remains for us
Of the sky. And other things, their memories postponed,
Prove that this morning is strong and glorious,
And that we are the guests of eternity.
Ramallah, January 2002
Translated by Amina Elbendary
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