The memoir shows us some of the reasons that Darwish is one of the foremost Arab poets. Darwish eschews the heroic mode and instead criticizes everyone, including the Palestinian resistance movement and its Arab allies, just as he exposes his own weaknesses." - New York Review of Books Reviews ""Extraordinary prose poems translated from Arabic, written out of the siege of Beirut." - The Guardian ".a scathing, lyrical, darkly funny, electrifying memoir of his last terrible month in Beirut under Israeli siege.
Sinan Antoon’s foreword, written expressly for this edition, sets Darwish’s work in the context of changes in the Middle East in the past thirty years. Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity. What is the meaning of exile? What is the role of the writer in time of war? What is the relationship of writing (memory) to history (forgetfulness)? In raising these questions, Darwish implicitly connects writing, homeland, meaning, and resistance in an ironic, condensed work that combines wit with rage. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day). Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege.
One of the Arab world's greatest poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems.
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