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In memory of Jacques Derrida

You ask me about that country whose details now
escape me,
I don't remember its geography, nothing of its
history.
And should I visit it in memory,
It would be as I would a past lover,
After years, for a night, no longer restless with
passion,
     with no fear of regret.
I have reached that age when one visits the heart
merely
     as a courtesy
            (Faiz Ahmad Faiz, The True Subjet, 45)

     Je vous demande pardon, je m'apprete à vous
saluer dans ma langue ...    ; la langue ... de l'autre, la langue de l'hôte, la langue de l'étranger, voire de l'immigrant, de l'émigré ou de l'exilé
              (Jacques Derrida, La Contre-allée, 67)

No reader of Bei Dao, Mahmoud Darwish and Edward Said, three of the most celebrated writers, who spent most of their lives in exile, has failed to be impressed by their intelligence, conviction and innovation. These artists cobble together fable, sermon and poetic fragment to produce a modernist way of writing about their rootprints. However, what is most admirably ambitious about them as mapped out solitudes lies in the following question: What do they have in common and from which mysterious perennial do they draw their endless energy as writers in exile? In their poetry and narrative, the ever present dispossessed subject introduces himself as a metaphysical foreigner twice displaced. For all three, the search is for the "logic of irreconcilables." Unlike Said and Dao, however, Darwish, almost like a jealous child, is reluctant to share his homeland with others. And while he and Dao continue to strike with iron in their souls, and the metal bars ring out to dismantle all the words in order to construct a single one, Home, Said lays the fragile foundations for a home-coming. In the process, their plight, which is founded on and built in the language they use to describe their private anguish, dreams and surroundings, travesties the idea of a single homeland. For all three, exile is an unusual, not to say urgently fraught, occurrence.

Poetry is a place of perfection, and we should resent anyone for attempting to insinuate into it some of the squalor of ordinary life in that it provides intimacy with the dead, a solace and comfort in our necessary isolation. Each poet, nevertheless, fashions his or her own allusive manner and chooses a subject-matter: Dryden and Pope use allusion when writing about inheritance and succession; Burns, about coupling and love-children; Byron, about money; Tennyson, about winds, ghosts and solitude; Darwish, about estrangement and exile from within that concern generation and sonship, or haunting and echoing, or filiation and affiliation, because allusion itself can be described as filial inheritance or spectral reproduction or covert intermingling. For Bei Dao, in the face of lonely suffering and anxiety, poetry and allusion embody the comfort of company. Distance is inexpressible except in dignity of language. There is pathos in this choice, but it is only half true. For both Darwish and Dao, however, the presence of the poet is an elusive one: he is not really there, so his presence (in absence) cannot temper his loneliness. Viewed from this angle, poetry must exacerbate solitude as much as it soothes insofar as it does exert a strange power of speech.

The beauty of the poetry written by Darwish and Dao is its openness, its recognition of a due gratitude. A critic like Said, on the other hand, did participate in such gratitude. As a matter of fact, gratitude became him, and it becomes us. His forte was identifying effective poetry, and explaining why it works. (An essay on W.B. Yeats is a case in point; another on Aimé Césaire gives utterance to things inutterable as Tennyson would have it.)

Said valued the everyday, but only if it could be grist to the mill of his highly formal art. Darwish, like Yeats, has endured the "baptism of the gutter," descending into the underworld of occupation only to gather it into the artifice of poetic eternity, and his aesthetic is similarly redemptive. He grubs among the odds and ends of secular history so as to salvage them for an art which is concerned with nothing but itself. In this, ironically, he can be faithful to the way the world is: the universe itself, he believes, is a set of endless, self-enclosed cycles, which his own art mirrors in its very narcissism. Dao on the other hand, like his art, is concerned with nothing but his displaced self. He is a poet in the Valerian mode, for whom writing is a sweated labor in which you might spend a week sculpting a single sentence into shape. His work, like Darwish's and unlike Said's, is designed to insulate the reader from everyday life just surely as writing it had done for him.

However, this attribution of attitude to either Darwish, Dao or Said is not the real crux; to imagine the poet and/or critic as either respectful or ambivalent merely gives psychological coloring to interpretative choices. More important is the poets' or critic's exilic condition: What are the resonances, the ghosts of feeling and meaning, raised by the presence of things strange, in some form or another, in their poetry and narrative? On this question, their views do not clash, but rather pass each other in the night. It matters therefore that one begins by sketching a brief genealogy of their anxiety, rootlessness and seduction.

From the most intimate of frontiers, that of home, to the largest, pan-global scale, the impermanence of the place where one might have felt at ease and at rest, surrounded by ordinary objects that together constitute the feeling, if not the actual state, of being at home, is at the heart of much writing today.¹ The big buildings with battlements like the ones most of us live in are a distortion of the idea that every man's home is his castle: it's like Gulliver's Travels. And like Lemuel Gulliver, the uprooted² has a pain he cannot locate; it seems to wander about his body, nibbling here, stabbing there, flitting every time he tries to touch it. He knows that homes are always provisional, that borders and barriers, which enclose him within the safety of a familiar territory, can also become prisons. Just as he stands outside his new home, so too no abiding locale is possible in his partitioned world, which articulates so fundamental a dislocation as to assault not only his memory of what once was, but proclaims too how distant from the original abode he finds himself. For now, the border, still elusive and invisible, forces him to face the future with varying shades of foreboding.³

Suddenly rooted nowhere, the uprooted moves backward into a future that has transcended the boundary altogether and moves forward in order to disprove the illusion of home. He feels certain that there are times in life when the next, clear, logical step seems one he cannot take at all. In the process, he becomes what Theodor Adorno aptly called "des Intellektuellen in der Emigration" for whom rootlessness is a metaphysical project - a meditation on space, a sermon on his estrangement. Timely, too, is the drama and struggle to create on the page the mind in action. Pushing and pausing, cresting and deepening, the intellectual as exiled intelligence is driven, over his writing life, to many strategies and reflections not on but from damaged, bruised, mutilated life; reflections marked by pain and scarred by injury. As it happens, his mind plunges down into what the empty future represents: the attempt to hold a sidewalk-place lest another take it. The debris he left behind fuses with the shore rubbles, and the empty wrappings with the empty response to anonymity. The flurrying thoughts that flash through his mind are those of a baulked mind, weighing questions of dislocation, incertitude and responsibility. When the high tide of his private thoughts journeys out, it deposits fragments on the foreign shore, then he realizes he too is a piece of the debris.

There is a certain urgency to the life of the uprooted during the first few weeks following flight, as the vastness of what has been lost makes itself known in unanticipated ways. The moment is captured with consummate skill by Bei Dao, the exiled Chinese poet, who writes about how it feels to be out of place :

In six years between 1989 and 1995, I moved fifteen times through seven countries.... My first stop was West Berlin.... Shortly afterward, I moved to Oslo.... Until then, I hadn't realized I wouldn't be able to go home again.... Winter came and, with it, northern Europe finally gave color to look at: pitch black.... On New Year's Day 1990, I ... moved to Stockholm.... A group of Chinese exiles, who lived in a refugee camp in another part of the country, came to spend the night, bringing with them their escape stories. Among them were workers, business people, and college students, all taught a lesson in loneliness in this large world. In the midst of darkness, we helped each other. Winter in Stockholm was depressing; the sun just climbed out, rose a little, when darkness swallowed it like a fish, spitting out a little froth. With this day/night reversal, it was best to keep the window blinds closed all day....

He continues:

Spring went and summer came, and, as before, I closed the blinds to shut out the noisy days and nights. That autumn, I moved to Denmark's second largest city, Aarhus.... In the beginning of October in 1992, I moved from Denmark to Holland.... Before coming to America, I lived in Paris for three months.... Early in 1994, I moved to ... Ann Arbor.... A [migrant's] ... life is always between departure and arrival, and it doesn't matter where you're coming from or going to. The most important thing is to maintain this attitude of not knowing and in the midst of wandering have a firm grasp of yourself, yes, wandering and possessing nothing (81-4).

The gist of this passage, which I have had to quote at length, lies in the terror of survival, which is all that the uprooted thinks of, at first, as he sits with other fellow exiles who are amenable to one another, congregating in the shade of a tree or around the brightness of a lamp-post, the new totem-pole of their togetherness.

Gradually, however, the uprooted realizes that his world is changing. Light and color are draining from his mind, and even the arrival of spring does not restore it. The grey ache of absence is too much to bear; and why bear it, if it can be celebrated in the sadness of a traveling narrative as he reminisces and engages a million man-hours of rootless time in introspection and self-analysis, and consequently feels more depressed at the end of the day than he was at dawn? He is suicidal, passive and docile. Like a great many migrants, he is also metaphysically reflective, pondering on the curse that has been visited upon him. Only much later, in the small hours of the morning, in the privacy of the sleepless dark, with insomnia as his theater, does he divulge his secret worries to himself. "When my mood was good," Dao observes, "I walked clockwise and, when it wasn't, I walked counterclockwise. I'm afraid that a designer must take great pains to make an animal cornered in a cage, or a prisoner allowed out for exercise, always turn in circles" (85). This way, the uprooted takes in what he has unwittingly done: leaving home as Chinese, Algerian, Bosnian, Rwandan, or Palestinian, and arriving in the host country as different "Other." Only a few days separates him physically from home, but the distance is greater when he revisits it in his memory.

Rejected by those who have erected great walls to keep him out, the uprooted leaps into a confining stockade of his own making. By leaving the warmth of his bed back home as he did and, by stepping across the line, it is as if he has demolished the bridges linking him to his place of birth. The journey will create him. He has a more or less fixed memory of the date of arrival in the host country: "On August 25, 1993," Dao goes on to add, "I carried my passport stamped with a visa that showed I had the intention of becoming an immigrant, passed through customs, and, dirty and disheveled, stepped onto a new continent, not at all in the heroic spirit of Columbus" (86). As an intended consequence, however, the migrant becomes the frontier he traverses. To cross into another language, another climate, another sound, another food, another smell, another way of life and/or being, is to take a step toward beatitude, the worldly blessedness to which all migrants aspire, but only for a while.

For when his movement becomes circumscribed within the narrow parameters of his alienness, the migrant reminds himself often, as does Dao, how fear, in effect, liberates him from a sense of belonging and its opposite, unbelonging. He then comes to a sudden halt, as if unwilling or unable to proceed, though something not expressed must be understood as in the case of the door handle that Edward Said speaks about in "The Art of Displacement":

Consider the door handle's place as you stand before the entrance to a room. You know that as you reach forward, your hand will move unerringly to one side or another of the door. But then you don't encounter the handle, curl your fingers around it, and push forward because ... it has actually been placed two feet above your head in the middle of the door, perched intransigently up there where it eludes your ready grasp, cannot fulfill its normal function, and does not announce what it is doing there. From that beginning dislocation others necessarily follow. The door may be pushed open on only one of its hinges. You must therefore enter the room sideways and at an angle but only after your coat or skirt is caught and torn by a nail designed to do that every time the room is entered. Inside, you come upon a carpet of undulating curves, which on close examination reveal themselves to be intestines frozen into plastic stillness.⁴

By braving the unknown, which is the first in a series of fixed steps, beginning with the idea of home and ending at the threshold of his state of mind, the uprooted makes a commitment to saving his life rather than waiting for possible death - an act that requires an affirmation of self-regard, and trust in one's right to live. "Sometimes I sit in the backyard and reconsider and feel it wasn't I who moved all those years but it was the world revolving like a stage" (Dao, 90). To this end, the migrant, like the writer, is one of the many people of a half-way house. Each may build a (new) house, but only one can construct a narrative or a poem, which may be thought of as another dwelling, except that it leaves no home to come back to.

As writers twice displaced, in sentences of great precision and balance, Dao, Darwish and Said reanimate the dilemma of the exilic experience - the pathos of marginality and solitude, the fear of throwing oneself into a void and the fear of the liberated "I" to remake its home elsewhere. As they do so, does the fact of stepping across the border commit them to become wanderers of sorts, belonging to the weak and unrepresented? Can a case be made for them not as passive subalterns but as active voices determined not to "shut up," but to sing on, in spite of attacks? After all, these exilic intellectuals do not respond to the logic of the conventional but to the audacity of daring, and to representing change, to moving on so to speak, not standing still. And yet the question remains as to whether there is or can be anything like an independent, metaphysical exile, one who is not beholden to, and therefore constrained by, his loyalty to family, constituency and country.

Every poet, Heidegger once contended, always rewrites the same unsayable poem: a belief borne out both by the tortuous genesis of Mahmoud Darwish whose poems evolve, mutate, divide and recombine and by the (never quite) finished product: the time is always evening, the season autumn, the mood despair. The same images recur verbatim throughout his work, functioning like hieroglyphs to indicate an inscrutable higher meaning, and the same colors - silver, red, blue, yellow, black, white - are used to evoke a kaleidoscopic reality. One may regard Darwish as the "singer of the hidden" East, and this certainly reflects his own cultural ambition: in the Arab world he explicitly attacks the great inertia and impotence of the Arab will, and foresees the Arab world's impending doom. In the manner of Adonis and Al-Bayati, though without their faith in an imminent golden age, his poems display a historical dialectic, manifest both in the individual and in civilization, which moves from a pristine state of being "unborn" via birth, decay and death into a redemptive metaphysics.

As befits a poetry in which "things fall apart," Darwish's poems often resemble shards or palimpsests. By its very texture, his poetry invokes a tradition that stretches from the effusions of al-quasida (poem), through the 19^th century, down to Darwish himself. It is inevitably translated in the following poem, which enacts the drama and pathos of resistance to Israel's genocidal occupation:

I will slog over this endless road to its end.
Until my heart stops, I will slog over this endless, endless road
with nothing to lose but the dust, what has died in me, and a row
       of palms
pointing toward what vanishes. I will pass the row of palms.
The wound does not need its poet to paint the blood of death like a
     pomegranate!
On the roof of neighing, I will cut thirty openings for meaning
so that you may end one trail only so as to begin another.
Whether this earth comes to an end or not, we'll slog over this
     endless road.
More tense than a bow. Our steps, be arrows. Where were we a
     moment ago?
Shall we join, in a while, the first arrow? The spinning wind whirled
     us.
So, what do you say?
I say: I will slog over this endless road to its end and my own (2003: 3).

Darwish contradicts the bleakness in the streets of Ramallah, and presents the same imagery with wistful awe. Given the terrors he confronts on a daily basis, his humility when aligning himself with his dying countrymen and women caught in the jaws of a brutal Israeli army, bent on destroying the indigenous population's sense of temporal and spatial continuity so that they either leave or become indentured servants, is strangely endearing. But it also implicates him in their death. When he apostrophizes an object or a feeling in order to conjure its real presence, he betrays his helplessness in the face of an existence that propels him toward silence and destruction. "An Exile's Letter," for example, expresses the tension in his work between "Thought [as] ... a place of exile: /... / The past [as] ... a place of exile / ... / [and] Poetry [as] ... a place of exile" as they change over time: "I've built my homeland," he writes, "I've even founded my state - in my language."⁵ The antiphonal symmetries of "Who am I, Without Exile" shows the mind in constant motion; in and out, back and forth, up and down. We find there a naked early phrasing of the longings for home (that never was) that continue to animate "An Exile's Letter": a desire that our sense questioning should mend and change us. To this, he adds that the world of the exile also desires, as we receive its conflicting aspects, that we should repair or calm its incoherences in our reciprocating consciousness.

This Janus-faced spatial and/or temporal precariousness in which the exile turns to the resources of the provisional new homeland, the text, where strangeness and a new sense of belonging are locked together in a logic of paradox, brings to mind one fragment, number 18 in Minima Moralia, which encapsulates the idea of in-betweenness with delicacy and reserve and in a manner that might suggest issues beyond the specific ones addressed here.

Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we have grown up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with the musty pact of family interests.... [People] live, if not in slums, in bungalows that by tomorrow may be leaf-huts, trailers, cars, camps, or the open air.

Thus Adorno states, the "house is past [i.e. over].... The best mode of conduct, in the face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one.... It is part of morality not to be at home in one's home."⁶ Or, to put it differently, not only does the exile feel that he cannot return to the way things were, but there is also a sense of how odd and "normal" the new abode is: the bed looks like the one he left behind, and the new comb most definitely resembles the old one; it is just that the bed's springs are unusually bare, or that the teeth of the comb somehow feel too rough. Domesticity is waiting to be re-defined. The search for lost time has no good effect. For now, he must accept his new surroundings since the old address has been annulled once and for all. As Rilke once put it, the exile can become a beginner in his circumstances, and this new fate allows him a new style of life and, above all, a different, often unpredictable, destiny.

The expense of relocating, the logistical maneuvers required, the wear and tear on the nerves, means that in leaving home, the exile brings along with him damaged memories. Time and time again he speaks of the terror through which he has lived, his demeanor undignified, his eyes mournful, his temperament as liquid as an orphan's tears. He reminds one of the earth recently dug and piled by a grave as yet unfilled: one senses that, buried among the ashen memories he brings with him, are incommunicable worries. And before he is conscious of his dislocation he starts to play host to a set of memories - leaving his bed unmade, the chairs in his dining-room upturned, his kitchen unswept, his dishes in the sink, his future undone. He runs as fast as he can, not bothering about where he might end up, in another country among the displaced and stateless. He locks up his house as though he is going away for a week-end trip into the country. Afraid of what might happen to him if he stayed on, he does not question the wisdom of leaving. He crosses the border or is arrested on the spot, walled up somewhere, confined to a cell or a residence under surveillance.

The predicament of the placeless place might well be explained, I think, as the difference between Said and Darwish, one the great angry secular architect of minute dislocation, isolation and discontinuity; the other the eloquent mourner of the loss of "two Edens, [the one] ... who lost Paradise twice." If for Said, the migrant experiences life as multiple: "to cross the frontier is to be transformed" (2002: 352) - for Darwish, what once was can be restored by prayer, ritual and language. The narrator of his poem, "An Exile's Letter," sets out from home as a place where one begins, then wanders off aimlessly until he finally realizes that the passage of time culminates in not going back to what had once been but in carving a place for himself in a world of drifters, which is full of grotesque structures that bespeak excess as well as paucity. His masira (plight) travesties the idea of a single homeland. It is founded and built in the language he uses to describe the exile's most private anguish, dreams and surroundings.

[A]ll I have in my exile
is a tiny knapsack
of breadcrumbs and longing,
and a notebook laden with griefs
in whose pages I spat out
all the bitterness possessing me.
       

My eyes can still see.
There is still a moon in the sky,
And my old clothes aren't quite worn out.
They're only frayed,
but I mended them
and it's fine.

The obsessive drive toward remembrance through representation, entangling sense and mind in a Gordian knot poses the problem underlying poetic composition: How to make a meaning, a linguistic one, in which the senses represent mind, and mind re-creates the senses. Every achieved line is built on the paradox by which an object (the poem) reproduces, on the virtual plane of language, sense and mind moving inextricably together, as they do in every act of consciousness.

O brother, what is a man worth
if he falls asleep hungry every night?

But I am well,
I am well.
I have a piece of barley bread
and a small basket of vegetables.

And my sister how is she?

Is she all grown up
and do young men come round to court her?

Does she still sit beside the door
praying for us all,
praying for the peace of mind and good fortune?

How to follow the flickers of consciousness without reducing it to pure remembrance (that Proustian fiction) is one aim of the poetry of Darwish; another is to accept consciousness as a universal without prior limitation by identity or location; a third is to caress the universe as the exile examines it.

"It is myself that I remake," W.B. Yeats once wrote.⁷ So does Darwish. The riveting seven-page poem is all drama, in which the reader is urged into active and strenuous co-operation. The poet's courage in remaking his poetry over the years is exemplary. He has not shrunk from his large self-set tasks: to make language fit the mind's motions, to accept the burden of uncertain modernity, to describe the phenomenon of occupation passionately and exactly, to claim what he can (in the absence of a collective narrative) for feeling, for knowing, for thinking. The three languages of his upbringing (Arabic, Hebrew, which he learned in prison in Israel, and French, which he taught himself while in exile in Paris), the countries in which he has lived (Palestine, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, France), his mixed fields of study (literature and politics) account in part for his comprehensive, ever-evolving and inclusive view of the physical world and of human identity and suffering. He has learned from both classic and modern masters, from Farid-u-a-ddin Al-'Attar and Al-Mutanabbi to Rilke and Lorca, and his linguistic resource, especially in description, is astonishing. In the long sequences, he risks everything, and perhaps cannot always keep the several parts from flying apart - but the wildness of the risk is itself exhilarating to encounter. Reading "An Exile's Letter," one can feel a nostalgia for the shapeliness of the pure lyrics in Fewer Roses and A Bed for the Stranger (2003). But no good poet can stand still, and to read under Darwish's powerful impetus is to have one's consciousness, like molten glass, pulled into unforeseen and sometimes almost unbearable shapes.

Like "Who am I, Without Exile?", "An Exile's Letter" evolves in tandem with human migration, beginning with the ritual of greeting a guest, except that this time the guest is an uprooted "who came here and couldn't go home."⁸ This self-scrutinizing frame-by-frame style is suddenly abandoned when continuous narrative memory is required for what is left behind.

How is my father?
Does he still love and praise God?
And of the children? And the land? And the olive trees?
And how are my brothers?
Have they become government workers?

Once I heard my father say
They will all be teachers.

I heard him say
I go hungry so they can have books.

And how is our house,
its worn-out threshold, and the stove, and the doors?

Here, memory oscillates between a past moment and the same past moment revived as a present-tense moment. Spliced into these two ways of "doing" memory is the "real" present-tense moment of writing (in exile), which compulsively swerves back into the past-which-is nonetheless-present. By the time the exile "dies without even a shroud," the poet has taken on the challenge of representing the self not only through its dialectics, or its reflexive consciousness, or its memory, but through its simulacra of the world. It is an astonishing leap of confidence. The poet says, implicitly: "If I describe how the world of the exile looks to me, you will know who I am." The paradigm of this step-by-step process resembles someone who unweaves as they weave, keeping alive in their mind a lover's desire for them by prolongation of their own desire for the beloved. This predicament yields the frantic exhaustion of the errantry which combines disillusionment and disappointment. As the poem evolves, it dissipates the forces it gains, then briefly forces its dissipation to cohere, and then watches its achieved coherence disperse into inefficacy. One of its summary lines celebrates a utopia insofar as, for the poet, a true home is a lost one.

So much for what might be called (though inappropriately) the exilic underpinning of Darwish's poetry. But why this obsessive fastening on boundaries and border crossings which, at times, can lead to cultural misunderstandings and even tragedies? In the play of sense opened up by this analysis, I want to draw on Edward Said, who, by contrast, offers a totally redeemable home from the one Darwish speaks about after the first one is lost. There is a double perspective in the Saidian narrative on rootlessness that never sees things in isolation. For displacement forces the exile to see things in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and now. He tends to discern things not simply as they are but as they have come to be that way. In the process, he is more likely to see world and mind as incongruent, the one resisting any fixed interpretation by the other. Once he speaks through the voice, however, the self is fractured as the aspectual world. Forward direction is lost as the mind, in fission, hovers like diamond-dust over the scattered thoughts, and will not or cannot go forward to a formed conclusion, a shape. It is also well adapted to the circumstances that surround the exile - say, Edward Said whose dislocation and transplantation were derived in part from his loneliness as a Palestinian under siege in New York, itself a city of migrants in transition. For an exile like him, always at odds with his immediate surroundings, scarcely able to come to terms with the reality of being at home, the proper way to comprehend what he calls al-manfa (displacement and estrangement) is to understand it as a process generated from its point of origins, which one can always locate in extremely humble circumstances. This state of exilic condition, Said notes, means seeing things as having evolved from definite beginnings as opposed to origins, as the adult human being derives from the babbling child.⁹

Or - to put it more simply - moving from the image-sense world of the infantile place represented by the maternal order to the symbolic mode of language or the paternal realm, may be our first taste of exile, one that seems to haunt and yet energize much of Proust's writing. In this respect, we may all be exiles of a sort - perhaps this is why even those of us who have not shared the terrible fate of those driven from home can nonetheless grasp their fate emphatically. Said put it succinctly:

Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that, to borrow a phrase from music, is contrapuntal. For an exile, habits of life, expression, or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.¹⁰

Said recognizes the benefit of movement outside of one's primary place, to a new location from which the self, and its others, are seen in a different light altogether.

Despite its seemingly traditional, almost Schubertian cadences, Said's narrative on exile embodies an ideal of linguistic truth-telling curiously close to the later Darwish. Indeed, in addition to the exilic link between the two, there are deeper affinities, including their shared plight as "strangers who lost the way to the strangers' picnic" (Darwish, 106); but above all, both came to reject the concept of truth as logical correspondence, replacing it with a notion of inner coherence. Darwish occupies a central place not just among the Palestinian people who see him as their national poet of dispossession, but in the grander line that stretches from Abu Nawas to Abu Al-Kacem A'Chabbi. Where A'Chabbi attempted to restore a lost idyll in his verse, Darwish is concerned with the irresolvable conflict between idyll and reality, the former conceived as a dream, the latter as fallen, sick and evil. In this sense, he reminds us of Georg Trakl who writes: "Feeling at moments of deathlike being: all human beings are worthy of love. Waking you feel the bitterness of the world; therein lies all your unresolved guilt; your poem an imperfect penance."¹¹ The vatic poet wishes to redeem the darkness by his art. As Trakl did before him, Darwish encircles the trauma of modernity. But it is not just what Darwish says that matters, it is how he captures the unspeakable. As Said notes, Darwish's poems revolve around their silences. He quotes Rilke as saying:

The rise and fall of this poem possesses an unutterable sweetness, and what moved me most were its inner distances. It seems as if the poem were built up on its pauses, a few encirclements around the infinite silence: that's how the lines come to stand. Like fences in a flat land, beyond which the encircled territories continuously merge again into a great, inalienable plain (2001: 34).

Here, Rilke is speaking of "Helian," a poem by Trakl whose personality he compares to "Linos-like mythic" ("linoshaft mysthisch"), linking him with a figure whose death, according to Homer, inaugurated the history of lament. For Rilke, Linos and his modern incarnation are Orphic beings, poets who by their sacrifice produce art from silence. This notion also informs Darwish's mythology, the heroic scenery of death in "He Embraces his Murder," and its subtle elaborations in "When the Martyrs Go to Sleep" (2003: 17, 22). These poems more than others show Darwish struggling with form, the discipline of line, the tussle for expression, with all their incremental ambiguities.

This is not yet the mature Darwish. To find his own, increasingly oracular voice, he undoes traditional forms, and in such poems as "We Were without a Present," "Sonnet II" and "The Stranger Finds Himself in the Stranger" develops his own verse (2003). This jagged style, often resembling montage, suppresses the lyric impulse, foregrounding instead the poet's pity at the horror of Palestine. In doing so, he, like Said, responds to his existential moment in answerably ambitious terms; and it is he, therefore, who in raising the most searching questions about the world and its contents, is able to produce the finest literary art. Said on the other hand stands as a rootless, Palestinian émigré turned pin-striped New Yorker. His own personal version of the entire world as a foreign place is at the center of his narrative. One might, to be sure, see Said the New Yorker as a belated re-invention of Said the Jerusalemite.

The modern artist, so Baudelaire once declared, trades in both the eternal and the ephemeral, and this is true of Said's exilic condition. While its fractured surface is nervously responsive to fleeting sensations, its mythological sub-text is stealthily at work converting all this supposedly random stuff into archetypal truths. Said articulates the point with dash.

Better disparity and dislocation than reconciliation under duress of subject and object; better a lucid exile than sloppy, sentimental homecomings; better the logic of dissociation than an assembly of compliant dunces. A belligerent intelligence is always to be preferred over what conformity offers, no matter how unfriendly the circumstances and unfavorable the outcome. The point is that the past cannot be entirely recuperated from so much power arrayed against it on the other side: it can only be restated in the form of an object without a conclusion, or final place, transformed by choice and conscious effort into something simultaneously different, ordinary and irreducibly other and the same, taking place together: an object that offers neither rest nor respite.¹²

In this sense, Said the avant-gardist and Said the traditionalist are secretly at one: if the illusions of suburban consciousness, and the permanent, imperishable selfhood are to be shattered, a good many guerilla raids on ordinary language will prove necessary. But the post-modern condition of the exile proves unable to stabilize the relation between the changeless and the contingent - a relation which usually turns out to be frustratingly oblique, or, as the ironic form of Joyce's Ulysses would suggest, flagrantly artificial.

Threading its way throughout this inquiry is a question that came to preoccupy Said: What do the lucky owe to the unlucky? Nadine Gordimer attempts an answer:

There is no ivory tower that can keep reality from beating at the walls. In witness, the imagination is not irreal but rather, the deeper reality. Its exigence can never allow compromise with conventional cultural wisdom, and what Milosz calls "official lies." The intellectual of no compromise, Edward Said, asks who, if not the writer, is "to elucidate the contests, challenge and hope, to defeat the imposed silence and normalized quiet power?" (2002: 5).

For Gordimer, a writer's highest calling is to testify to the evils of conflict and injustice not to scurry in and scurry out the way Susan Sontag did when she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize in 1991. In her acceptance speech, Sontag deliberately chose to ignore the Palestinian issue, but spoke instead about her "love for Israel with emotion and the world with obligation." When notified of the Israeli accolade, her response was: "I trust you have some idea of how honored and moved, deeply moved, I am to have been awarded this year's Jerusalem's Prize."¹³ Rightly so perhaps insofar as Sontag was the second female recipient of the award since its inauguration in 1963, the first being Simone de Beauvoir whose record on Israel was perfect: she never deviated and remained a complete supporter of the Jewish State until her death in 1980 while totally neglecting the Palestinian cause.

Unlike Sontag and de Beauvoir, when Gordimer was awarded the same prize in 1996, she declined, saying that she did not care to travel from one apartheid society to another. To take that kind of courageous position would be a risky course for a careful (and by a less obliging token) a cowardly intellectual like Sontag who opted for "the laws of intellectual safety on her side so that she can lay claim to what is politically safe, but not to what is intellectually respectable" (Cockburn, 4). For to lend one's name to a wide variety of causes, to speak out against injustice of any kind as a matter of universal principle, not just for one's people, is vividly enacted in Gordimer's, not Sontag's, stand. In the age of migrants, curfews, identity cards, refugees, exiles, massacres, camps, and fleeing civilians, Gordimer's voice stands for the poet's mouth, a mouth that does not fear to face its oppressors implacably. We, like Gordimer, may be tempted to remind ourselves that

[t]he time for the liberation of heart and mind
has not come as yet.
And that we are to

[c]ontinue [our] ... arduous journey.
Press on, [for] the destination is still far away (Faiz, 45).

  Notes

1. Jacques Derrida, Tourner les mots (Paris: Galilée, 2000); Edward Said, Reflections on Exile (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000); Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Colored People (New York: Random House, 1995); V.S. Naipaul, Reading and Writing: A Personal Account (New York: NYRB, 2000); Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of My Mother (New York: A Plume Book, 1997) easily come to mind. I am indebted to Said's writings on exile for shaping my own ideas about the subject.

2. I intend to use "uprooted, exile, émigré, immigrant, rootless" interchangeably insofar as they all fall under what Jacques Derrida has aptly called "mapped out solitudes." See, in this context, his Fichus (Paris: Galilée, 2002): 34. I also use the male pronoun throughout, even though in the current social, political, global world women are equally or likely to be uprooted.

3. Edward Said expounds on the idea of "leaving home" in Reflections of Exile and Other Essays (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000): 165-73; 337-46.

4. Edward Said, "The Art of Displacement," in Mona Hatoum, The Entire World as a Foreign Place (Nottingham: The Sherwood Press, 2000): 15-16.

5. Mahmoud Darwish, Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003): 41. The poems convey a stylistic exilic venture.

6. For more on what Adorno called "My Homeland, the Text," see Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (1951; rprt. London & New York: Verso, 1997): 43-47.

7. This is persuasively set out in W.B. Yeats, A Life: The Arch Poet, 1915-1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 45-61.

8. Darwish stubbornly refuses to declare defeat to a ruthless and deliberate genocide inflicted by Israel on innocent civilians, who are forced to live under appalling conditions. There is a shrewd account of the poet and his people under siege in Mahmoud Darwish, "Under Siege," trans. Marjolijin de Jager Autodafe 3/4 2004: 45-6.

9. I owe much gratitude to Edward Said for the formulation of the idea I develop in this paragraph. For more on the subject, see Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual (New York: Pantheon, 1994): 43-44.

10. Said, Reflections on Exile, 186. Some instances describe Said longing for the home that never was.

11. For more on the subject, see Georg Trakl, Poems and Prose, trans. Alexander Stillmark (London: Libris, 2001): 122-34.

12. Ibid., 7. Here Said confronts the pain of exile with irony. Roughly, a forlorn apprehension of all humanity as the virtually unresisting prey of the powerful, made or sane - of men who enjoy, day in and day out, the infliction, on an enormous scale, of pain, misery, and death. Think of the movement of Zion in Palestine and the case will be clear enough.

13. For more on Sontag and Said, see Alexander Cockburn, "Said, Sontag and the Laws of Intellectual Safety," Left Coast 20 March 2001: 3-5.

Works Cited

• Adorno, Theodor. Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Trans. E.F.N. Jephcott. 1951; rprt. London & New York: Verso, 1997.

• Cockburn, Alexander. "Said, Sontag and the Laws of Intellectual Safety." Left Coast 20 March 2001: 3-5.

• Dao, Bei. "Reciting." Autodafé (Fall 2001): 177-185.
  -. "Journal de mes déménagements." Autodafé (Fall 2000): 81-90.

• Darwish, Mahmoud. "An Exile's Letter." Trans. Mustapha Marrouchi, Wayne Tompkins and Salwa Ben Zahra. I have used our translation throughout.
  -. Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Trans. Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.
  -. "We Have an Incurable Malady: Hope." In The Trip to Palestine. Paris: Ed. Climats, 2003: 34-36.

• Faiz, Ahmad Faiz. The Rebel's Silhouette: Selected Poems. Trans. Agha Shahid Ali. Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.

• Gordimer, Nadine. "Treatment of the Word." The Guardian Weekly 15 June 2002: D4.

• Lorca, Alexie. "La voix de la conscience." Lire (October 2000): 100-109.

• Rossi-Landi, Guy. "La Responsabilité des intellectuels." Lire (May 2001): 95-102.

• Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2000.
  -. "The Art of Displacement." In Hatoum, Mona. The Entire World as a Foreign Place. Nottingham: The Sherwood Press, 2000: 15-17.
  -. Representations of the Intellectual. New York: Pantheon, 1994.
  -. Peace and Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process. New York: Vintage, 1996.