Mural Read online

  Mural

  Mural

  Mahmoud Darwish

  Translated by

  Rema Hammami and John Berger

  With an Introduction by

  John Berger

  This paperback edition first published by Verso 2017

  First published by Verso 2009

  © Estate of Mahmoud Darwish 2009, 2017

  Translation © Rema Hammami and John Berger

  Introduction © John Berger

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Verso

  UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG

  US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

  versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-057-5

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-058-2 (UK EBK)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-059-9 (US EBK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Typeset in Garamond by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

  Printed in the US by Maple Press

  To Mahmoud, with thanks for his generous encouragement

  We would like to thank Maria Nadotti, Tania Nazir, Leila Chahid, Alex Pollock and Beverly Bancroft for making this collaboration possible.

  R.H. and J.B.

  Contents

  Al Rabweh by John Berger

  Mural

  The Dice Player

  Notes on the text

  Al Rabweh

  by John Berger

  A few days after our return from what was thought of, until recently, as the future state of Palestine, and which is now the world’s largest prison (Gaza) and the world’s largest waiting room (the West Bank), I had a dream.

  I was alone, standing, stripped to the waist, in a sandstone desert. Eventually somebody else’s hand scooped up some dusty soil from the ground and threw it at my chest. It was a considerate rather than an aggressive act. The soil or gravel changed, before it touched me, into torn strips of cloth, probably cotton, which wrapped themselves around my torso. Then these tattered rags changed again and became words, phrases. Written not by me but by the place.

  Remembering this dream, the invented word landswept came to my mind. Repeatedly. Landswept describes a place or places where everything, both material and immaterial, has been brushed aside, purloined, swept away, blown down, irrigated off, everything except the touchable earth.

  There’s a small hill called Al Rabweh on the western outskirts of Ramallah, it’s at the end of Tokyo street. Near the top of this hill the poet Mahmoud Darwish is buried. It’s not a cemetery.

  The street is named Tokyo because it leads to the city’s Cultural Centre, which is at the foot of the hill, and was built thanks to Japanese funding.

  It was in this Centre that Darwish read some of his poems for the last time – though no one then supposed it would be the last. What does the word last mean in moments of desolation?

  We went to visit the grave. There’s a headstone. The dug earth is still bare, and mourners have left on it little sheaves of green wheat – as he suggested in one of his poems. There are also red anemones, scraps of paper, photos.

  He wanted to be buried in Galilee where he was born and where his mother still lives, but the Israelis forbade it.

  At the funeral tens of thousands of people assembled here, at Al Rabweh. His mother, 96 years old, addressed them. “He is the son of you all,” she said.

  In exactly what arena do we speak when we speak of loved ones who have just died or been killed? Our words seem to us to resonate in a present moment more present than those we normally live. Comparable with moments of making love, of facing imminent danger, of taking an irrevocable decision, of dancing a tango. It’s not in the arena of the eternal that our words of mourning resonate, but it could be that they are in some small gallery of that arena.

  On the now deserted hill I tried to recall Darwish’s voice. He had the calm voice of a beekeeper:

  A box of stone

  where the living and dead move in the dry clay

  like bees captive in a honeycomb in a hive

  and each time the siege tightens

  they go on a flower hunger strike

  and ask the sea to indicate the emergency exit.

  Recalling his voice, I felt the need to sit down on the touchable earth, on the green grass. I did so.

  Al Rabweh means in Arabic: “the hill with green grass on it”. His words have returned to where they came from. And there is nothing else. A nothing shared by 5 million people.

  The next hill, 500 metres away, is a refuse dump. Crows are circling it. Some kids are scavenging.

  When I sat down in the grass by the edge of his newly dug grave, something unexpected happened. To define it, I have to describe another event.

  This was a few days ago. My son, Yves, was driving and we were on our way to the local town of Cluses in the French Alps. It had been snowing. Hillsides, fields and trees were white and the whiteness of the first snow often disorientates birds, disturbing their sense of distance and direction.

  Suddenly a bird struck the windscreen. Yves, watching it in the rear-mirror, saw it fall to the roadside. He braked and reversed. It was a small bird, a robin, stunned but still alive, eyes blinking. I picked him up out of the snow, he was warm in my hand, very warm and we drove on.

  From time to time I examined him. Within half an hour he had died. I lifted him up to put him on the back seat of the car. Yes, he was a male. What surprised me was his weight. He weighed less than when I had picked him up from the snow. I moved him from hand to hand to check this. It was as if his energy when alive, his struggle to survive, had added to his weight. He was now almost weightless.

  After I sat on the grass on the hill of Al Rabweh something comparable happened. Mahmoud’s death had lost its weight. What had remained were his words.

  Months have passed, each one filled with foreboding and silence. Disasters are flowing together into a delta that has no name, and will only be given one by geographers, who will come later, much later. Nothing to do today but to try to walk on the bitter waters of this nameless delta.

  Gaza, the largest prison in the world, is being transformed into an abattoir. The word strip (from Gaza Strip) is being drenched with blood, as happened 65 years ago to the word ghetto.

  Day and night bombs, shells, phosphorous arms, mortars, machine-gun rounds are being fired by the Israeli army from air, sea and land against a civilian population of 1.5 million. The estimated number of mutilated and dead increases with each news report from international journalists, all of whom are forbidden by Israel to enter the Strip. Yet the crucial constant figure is that for a single Israeli casualty there are one hundred Palestinian casualties, of whom almost half are women and children. This is what constitutes a massacre. Most lodgings have neither water nor electricity; the hospitals lack doctors, medicines and generators. The massacre follows a blockage and siege.

  Certain voices across the world are raised in protest. But the governments of the rich, with their world media and their proud possession of nuclear weapons, reassure Israel that a blind eye will be cast on what its soldiers are perpetrating.

  “A place weeping enters our sleep,” wrote the Kurdish poet Bejan Matur, “a place weeping enters our sleep and never leaves.”

  Nothing but landswept earth.

  I am back, four months ago in Ramallah, in an abandoned underground parking lot, which has been taken over as a working-space by a small group of
Palestinian painters and sculptors, amongst whom there’s a sculptress named Randa Mdah. I’m looking at an installation conceived and made by her entitled Puppet Theatre.

  It consists of a large bas-relief measuring 3 metres by 2, which stands upright like a wall. In front of it on the floor there are three fully sculptured figures.

  The bas-relief of shoulders, faces, hands, is made on an armature of wire, of polyester, fibreglass and clay. Its surfaces are coloured – darkish greens, browns, reds. The depth of its relief is about the same as in one of Ghiberti’s bronze doors for the Duomo in Firenze, and the foreshortening and distorted perspectives have been dealt with with almost the same mastery. (I would never have guessed that the artist is so young. She’s 26.) The wall of the bas-relief, in its crowdedness and with its ceremonial colours, is like “the hedge” that an audience in a theatre resembles when seen from the stage.

  On the floor in front are the life-size figures, two women and one man. They are made of the same materials, but with more faded colours.

  One is within touching distance of the audience, another is two metres away and the third twice as far away again. They are wearing their everyday clothes, the ones they chose to put on this morning.

  Their bodies are attached to cords hanging from three horizontal sticks which in turn hang from the ceiling. They are the puppets, their sticks the control bars for the absent, or invisible puppeteers.

  The multitude of figures on the bas-relief are all looking at what they see in front of their eyes and wringing their hands. Their hands are like flocks of poultry.

  They are wringing them because they are powerless to intervene. They are bas-relief, they are not three-dimensional, and so they cannot enter or intervene in the solid real world.

  Some of them look like commentators, some look like angels, some look like government spokesmen, some look like Presidents, some look like fiends. All express impotency. Together and collectively, despite their wringing hands, they represent silence.

  The three solid, palpitating figures attached to the invisible puppeteers’ cords, are being hurled to the ground, head first, feet in the air. Again and again until their heads split. Their hands, torsos, faces are convulsed in agony. One that doesn’t reach its end. You see it in their feet. Again and again.

  I could walk between the impotent spectators of the bas-relief and the sprawling victims on the ground. But I don’t. There is a power in this work such as I have rarely seen. It has claimed the very ground on which it is standing. It has made the killing field between the unreal spectators and the agonising victims sacred. It has changed the floor of a parking lot into something landswept.

  This unforgettable work prophesied the Gaza Strip.

  Mahmoud Darwish’s grave on the hill of Al Rabweh has now, following decisions made by the Palestinian Authority, been fenced off, and a glass pyramid has been constructed over it. It’s no longer possible to squat beside him. His words, however, are audible to our ears and will remain so and we can repeat them.

  I have work to do on the geography of volcanoes

  From desolation to ruin

  from the time of Lot to Hiroshima

  As if I’d never yet lived

  with a lust I’ve still to know

  Perhaps Now has gone further away

  and yesterday come closer

  So I take Now’s hand to walk along the hem of history

  and avoid cyclic time

  with its chaos of mountain goats

  How can my tomorrow be saved?

  By the velocity of electronic time

  or by my desert caravan slowness?

  I have work till my end

  as if I won’t see tomorrow

  and I have work for today who isn’t here

  So I listen

  softly softly

  to the ant beat of my heart …

  Ramallah and Haute Savoie

  Early autumn, 2008

  Mural

  Here is your name

  said the woman

  and vanished in the corridor

  A hand’s reach away I see heaven

  a dove’s white wing transporting me to another childhood

  and I don’t dream that I’m dreaming

  Everything is real

  I meet myself at my side

  And fly

  I will become what will be in the final circuit

  Everything is white

  The sea hanging above a roof of white clouds

  in the sky of the absolute white nothingness

  I was and was not

  Here alone at the white frontier of eternity.

  I came before my hour so no angel approaches to ask:

  what did you do over there in the world?

  I don’t hear the chorus of the righteous or wailing of sinners

  I’m alone in whiteness

  alone …

  At the gate of resurrection nothing hurts

  neither time past nor any feeling

  I don’t sense the lightness of things nor the weight of apprehension

  There’s no one to ask:

  where now is my where?

  Where is the city of death

  Where am I?

  In this no-here …

  no-time

  and nothingness

  As if I had died already

  I know this story

  I know that I go towards what I don’t know

  Perhaps I’m still alive somewhere

  Aware of what I want …

  One day I’ll become what I want

  One day I will become a thought

  that no sword or book can dispatch to the wasteland

  A thought equal to rain on the mountain split open by a blade of grass

  where power will not triumph

  and justice is not fugitive

  One day I’ll become what I want

  One day I’ll become a bird

  that plucks my being from nothingness.

  As my wings burn I approach the truth

  and rise from the ashes

  I am the dialogue of dreamers

  I shunned body and self to complete the first journey towards meaning

  but it consumed me then vanished

  I am that absence

  The fugitive from heaven

  One day I’ll become what I want

  One day I’ll become a poet

  Water obedient to my vision

  My language a metaphor for metaphors

  I don’t speak or indicate a place

  Place is my sin and subterfuge

  I am from there

  My here leaps from my footstep to my imagination …

  I am from what was or will be

  I was created and destroyed in the expanse of the endless void

  One day I’ll become what I want

  One day I’ll become a vine

  Let summer distil from me now

  so passers-by beneath the chandeliers of this most sugared place

  may drink my wine!

  I am the message and the messenger

  The small addresses and the post

  One day I’ll become what I want

  Here is your name

  said the woman

  and vanished in the corridor of her whiteness

  Here is your name, memorize it well!

  Don’t quibble over a letter of the alphabet

  Ignore the tribal banners

  Be friendly to your name which doesn’t stand but lies across the page

  Test it out with the living and the dead

  Train it in its proper pronunciation with strangers

  Write it on a rock in the empty cave

  O my name: you will grow as I do

  You will carry me as I carry you

  for strangers are brothers to strangers

  We’ll entice the feminine with a vowel devoted to flutes

  Oh my name: where are we now?

  Speak out: what is now what is
tomorrow?

  What is time and place?

  What’s old what’s new?

  One day we’ll become what we want

  The journey hasn’t begun and the path hasn’t ended

  The wise haven’t reached their exile

  nor the exiles their wisdom

  The only flower we know is the red anemone

  Come let’s go towards the highest mural:

  The land of my poem is green and high

  God’s words at dawn are the land of my poem

  and I’m the faraway

  far away

  In every breeze a woman mocks her poet:

  Collect the woman you saw in me

  who was shattered

  and give me back my femininity

  for I have nothing left to do but contemplate the lake’s wrinkles

  Get rid of my tomorrow

  Return my yesterday

  and leave us alone together

  After you

  nothing leaves and nothing returns

  Take back the poem if you want

  for me there’s only you in it

  Take back your “I”

  The exile will be complete with what’s left of handwriting written for the carrier pigeons

  At the end which me am I in us?

  Of the two of us

  let me be the last

  A star will fall between the written and the said

  A memory will lay out its thoughts: we were born in the time of the sword and the trumpet

  between the fig and the cactus

  Death was slower then more clear there was a truce across the mouth of the river

  Now the electronic button works alone

  the killer doesn’t hear his victims

  and the martyrs don’t read out a testament

  What breeze brought you here?

  Tell me the name of your wound and I’ll tell you the road where we’ll lose ourselves twice!

  Your heartbeats hurt me for they lead to the time of legends

  My blood hurts me

  Salt hurts me …

  and my jugular vein

  In the broken jug the women of the Syrian plains lament the length of the journey

  and are scorched by the August sun

  I saw them on the road to the well before my birth

  and I heard the water in the clay weeping for them: