One of the Arab world's greatest living poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for this sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish vividly recreates the sights and sounds of a city under terrible siege. As fighter jets scream overhead, he explores the war-ravaged streets of Beirut on August 6th (Hiroshima Day).

Memory for Forgetfulness is an extended reflection on the invasion and its political and historical dimensions. It is also a journey into personal and collective memory. 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.

Ibrahim Muhawi's translation beautifully renders Darwish's testament to the heroism of a people under siege, and to Palestinian creativity and continuity.

Mahmoud Darwish has lived most of his life in Lebanon and Palestine. The author of fourteen volumes of poetry and numerous prose works, he now lives in Paris. Ibrahim Muhawi is coauthor and translator of Speak Bird, Speak Again: Palestinian Arab Folktales (California, 1988) and Journal of an Ordinary Grief (Archipelago Books, 2010), for which he won the PEN Translation Prize. He is currently a Visiting Professor of Folklore and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.

"A disturbing and beautifully written account of the 1982 Israeli invasion—specifically of August 6th, when land, sea, and air bombardment was at its most intense. It is not a memoir in the ordinary sense, written with the leisurely distance of time, but the embodiment of an agony in which time itself is the subject of meditation."—Voice Literary Supplement

"Extraordinary prose poems translated from Arabic, written out of the siege of Beirut 20 years ago."—The Guardian Review (UK)

"One of the Arab world's greatest living poets uses the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the shelling of Beirut as the setting for his sequence of prose poems. Mahmoud Darwish recreates the sights and sounds of a city under siege in an extended reflection which is not only a documentary of the invasion and its political and historical dimensions but also a journey into personal and collective memory." —Shofar

"Every paragraph in this book is a gem of wisdom to be digested. But then it is the work of the foremost Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Darwish; and the translation by scholar and writer Ibrahim Muhawi is a work of art. . . . A book you will want to keep by your bedside and refer to often for its incomparable descriptions of the tragedy of Beirut . . . and the Palestinian people."—Beirut Times

"Memory for Forgetfulness rendered lucidly into English by Ibrahim Muhawi, . . . chronicles one day in the life of the poet in a city torn by civil war and foreign invasion. More than just a collection of sobering tales of the besieged city, the book includes thoughtful ruminations on such diverse topics as solitude, soccer, coffee, love, and of course, the struggle of Palestinians for a homeland."—San Francisco Examiner

"Memory for Forgetfulness is . . . a welcome event for anyone interested in learning more about Arabic literature in general and Palestinian literature in particular. . . . The book is at once a personal memoir, a work of history, a prose poem, and a political essay—an all-inclusive and fragmented text that defies traditional generic expectations. . . . Through a juxtaposition of dream and reality, poetry and prose, past and present, Darwish probes issues that have been central concerns in his writing: the proper role of the intellectual at a time of war, the tensions between poetic and political expression, the relationship between memory and history."—World Literature Today

Acknowledgments
Introduction
Memory for Fogetfulness