A River Dies of Thirst Read online

  MAHMOUD DARWISH

  A River Dies of Thirst

  journals

  Translated from the Arabic by Catherine Cobham

  archipelago books

  Originally published as Athar al-Farâsha, by Riad El-Rayyes Books, Ltd. in Beirut in 2008

  Copyright © Mahmoud Darwish/Actes Sud, 2009

  English translation copyright © Catherine Cobham, 2009

  First Archipelago Books Edition, 2009

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form without prior written permission of the publisher.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Darwish, Mahmud.

  [Athar al-farashah. English]

  A river dies of thirst : journals = Athar al-farasha : yawmiyyat / Mahmoud Darwish ; translated by Catherine Cobham.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-9357446-7-2

  I. Cobham, Catherine. II. Title. III. Title: Athar al-farasha.

  PJ7820.A7A8713 2009

  892.71'6--dc222009012083

  Archipelago Books

  232 Third Street, Suite A111

  Brooklyn, NY 11215

  www.archipelagobooks.org

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  www.cbsd.com

  Cover art: “Les hiboux et les courbeaux” from the Kalila wa Dimna reproduced with the permission of the Bibliothèque Nationale de France

  This publication was made possible with support from Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency.

  Contents

  The girl/The scream

  Green flies

  Like a prose poem

  If only I were a stone

  Beyond identification

  The enemy

  Nero

  The forest

  Doves

  The house as casualty

  The cunning of the metaphor

  The mosquito

  An eagle flying low

  A personal duty

  A common enemy

  The rest of a life

  The colour yellow

  If only the young were trees

  We arrived too late

  Two strangers

  What’s it all for?

  A talent for hope

  I am only him

  I did not dream

  The pretty girls’ neighbour

  How far is far?

  He sees himself as absent

  He said: ‘I’m afraid’

  The roar of silence

  A person chasing himself

  A longing to forget

  A river dies of thirst

  The wall

  The law of fear

  I walked on my heart

  Routine

  A gun and a shroud

  If we want to

  Cheated time

  Perfection

  One, two, three

  Empty boxes

  On nothingness

  My imagination . . . a faithful hunting dog

  If I were someone else

  Assassination

  Rustling

  A metaphor

  In the company of things

  A shawl made of silk

  A sort of loss

  A shameful land

  Summer and winter

  A coloured cloud

  A spring passing quickly

  Life to the last drop

  The butterfly effect

  I was not with me

  The faces of truth

  As if he were asleep

  Visible music

  The road to where

  The humour of eternity

  The indifferent one

  The picture and the frame

  Snow

  An infectious disease

  A bed of lavender

  Most and least

  I am jealous of everything around you

  Lose one of your stars

  Private meetings

  She said to him

  A sneeze

  In praise of wine

  At the top of the cypress trees

  Point of view

  The mercy bullet

  Shyness

  Perfection is the same as imperfection

  Prickly pear

  In the empty square

  A short holiday

  Fame

  If I were a hunter

  Nightmare

  Iraq’s night is long

  In Cordoba

  In Madrid

  High is the mountain

  I don’t notice

  That word

  Echo

  The second olive tree

  Willow tree

  Right of return to paradise

  If it were not for sin

  Italian autumn

  Two travellers to a river

  A killer and innocent

  As if she is a song

  My poet/my other

  A clear sky and a green garden

  A single word

  The essence of the poem

  Satire

  On oratory and orators

  Half and half

  I think

  The second line

  Higher and further

  The canary

  On a boat on the Nile

  The lonely man’s addiction

  In Rabat

  Description

  In Skogås

  The exile finds his way

  Boulevard St Germain

  Things would be different

  A life beginning

  The hand of the statue

  In Beirut

  The return of June

  If only people envied us

  From now on you are somebody else

  From now on you are you

  Acknowledgements

  I am very grateful to Sabry Hafez for his invaluable help with the meanings and cultural contexts of a number of words and phrases. I would also like to thank John Burnside, Maudemarie Clark, David Cobham, Dina Frangi, Ronak Husni, Javier Letrán, and Tetz Rooke for their useful comments on specific linguistic, literary, or other cultural issues.

  Responsibility for any mistakes and infelicities rests with me.

  Catherine Cobham

  St Andrews, 2009

  A River Dies of Thirst

  The girl/The scream

  On the seashore is a girl, and the girl has a family

  and the family has a house. And the house has two windows and a door

  And in the sea is a warship having fun

  catching promenaders on the seashore:

  Four, five, seven

  fall down on the sand. And the girl is saved for a while

  because a hazy hand

  a divine hand of some sort helps her, so she calls out: ‘Father

  Father! Let’s go home, the sea is not for people like us!’

  Her father doesn’t answer, laid out on his shadow

  windward of the sunset

  blood in the palm trees, blood in the clouds

  Her voice carries her higher and further than

  the seashore. She screams at night over the land

  The echo has no echo

  so she becomes the endless scream in the breaking news

  which was no longer breaking news

  when

  the aircraft returned to bomb a house with two windows and a door.

  Green flies

  The scene is the same as ever. Summer and sweat, and an imagination incapable of seeing beyond the horizon. And today is better than tomorrow. But the dead are what’s new. They’re born every day and when they’re trying to sleep death takes them away from
their drowsiness into a sleep without dreams. It’s not worth counting them. None of them asks for help from anyone. Voices search for words in the open country, and the echo comes back clearly, woundingly: ‘There’s nobody here.’ But there’s somebody who says: ‘It’s the killer’s right to defend the killer instinct,’ while the dead say belatedly: ‘It’s the victim’s right to defend his right to scream.’ The call to prayer rises to accompany the indistinguishable funerals: coffins hastily raised in the air, hastily buried – no time to carry out the rites, more dead are arriving at speed from other raids, individually or in groups, or a whole family with no orphans or grieving parents left behind. The sky is leaden grey and the sea blue grey, but the colour of blood is hidden from the camera by swarms of green flies.

  Like a prose poem

  An autumnal summer on the hills is like a prose poem. The breeze is a gentle rhythm I feel but do not hear in the modest little trees, and the yellowish plants are peeling images, and eloquence provokes similes with its cunning verbs. The only celebration on these mountain paths is provided by the lively sparrows, who flit between sense and nonsense. Nature is a body divesting itself of trivial adornment until the figs, grapes and pomegranates ripen and the rain awakens forgotten desires. ‘If it weren’t for my mysterious need for poetry, I wouldn’t need anything,’ says the poet, whose enthusiasm has waned so his mistakes have become less frequent. He walks because the doctors have advised him to walk, with no particular goal, to train the heart in a kind of indifference necessary for good health. Any idea that occurs to him will be purely gratuitous. The summer only rarely lends itself to verse. The summer is a prose poem which takes no interest in the eagles circling high above.

  If only I were a stone

  I would yearn for nothing

  no yesterday passing, no tomorrow to come

  and my present neither advancing nor retreating

  Nothing happening to me!

  If only I were a stone – I said – Oh if only I were

  some stone so that water would burnish me

  green, yellow – I would be placed in a room

  like a sculpture, or exercises in sculpture

  or material for the eruption of the necessary

  from the folly of the unnecessary

  If only I were a stone

  so that I could yearn for something!

  Beyond identification

  I sit in front of the television, since I can’t do anything else. There, in front of the television, I discover my feelings and see what’s happening to me. Smoke is rising from me and I reach out my severed hand to pick up my scattered limbs from many bodies, and I don’t find them but I don’t run away from them either because pain has such an attraction. I am besieged by land and air and sea and language. The last aircraft has taken off from Beirut airport and put me in front of the television to witness the rest of my death with millions of other viewers. Nothing proves that I exist when I think, as Descartes says, but rather when I am offered up in sacrifice, now, in Lebanon. I enter the television, I and the beast. I know the beast is stronger than me in the struggle between aircraft and bird. But I have become addicted, perhaps more than I should have, to the heroism of the metaphor: the beast has swallowed me but has not digested me. I have emerged unscathed more than once. My soul, which was confused in the belly of the beast, has inhabited another body, lighter and stronger. But now I don’t know where I am: in front of the television or inside it. Whereas I can see my heart, rolling like a pine cone from a Lebanese mountain to Rafah!

  The enemy

  I was there a month ago. I was there a year ago. I was always there as if I was never anywhere else. In 1982 the same thing happened to us as is happening now. We were besieged and killed and fought against the hell we encountered. The casualties/martyrs don’t resemble one another. Each of them has a distinctive physique and distinctive features, different eyes and a different name and age. The killers are the ones who all look the same. They are one being, distributed over different pieces of hardware, pressing electronic buttons, killing and vanishing. He sees us but we don’t see him, not because he’s a ghost but because he’s a steel mask on an idea – he is featureless, eyeless, ageless and nameless. It is he who has chosen to have a single name: the enemy.

  Nero

  What’s going on in Nero’s mind as he watches Lebanon burn? His eyes wander ecstatically and he walks like someone dancing at a wedding: This madness is my madness, I know best, so let them set light to everything beyond my control. And the children have to learn to behave themselves and stop shouting when I’m playing my tunes!

  And what’s going on in Nero’s mind as he watches Iraq burn? Does it please him that he awakens a memory in the history of the jungle that preserves his name as an enemy of Hamurabbi and Gilgamesh and Abu Nuwas: My law is the mother of all laws, the flower of eternity grows in my fields, and poetry – what does that mean?

  And what goes on in Nero’s mind as he watches Palestine burn? Does it delight him that his name is recorded in the roll of prophets as a prophet that nobody’s ever believed in before? As a prophet of killing who God entrusted with correcting the countless mistakes in the heavenly books: I too am God’s mouthpiece!

  And what goes on in Nero’s mind as he watches the world burn? I am master of the Day of Judgement. Then he orders the camera to stop rolling, because he doesn’t want anyone to see that his fingers are on fire at the end of this long American movie!

  The forest

  I couldn’t hear my voice in the forest, even if

  the forest were free of the beast’s hunger

  and the army defeated or victorious – there’s no difference – had returned

  over the severed limbs of the unknown dead to the barracks or

  the throne

  And I couldn’t hear my voice in the forest, even if

  the wind carried it to me, and said to me:

  ‘This is your voice,’ I couldn’t hear it

  I couldn’t hear my voice in the forest, even if

  the wolf stood on his hind legs and applauded me:

  ‘I can hear your voice, so give me your orders!’

  And I said: ‘The forest is not in the forest

  Father wolf, my son!’

  I couldn’t hear my voice unless

  the forest were free of me, and I were free of

  the silence of the forest.

  Doves

  A flight of doves scatters suddenly from a break in the smoke, shining like a gleam of heavenly peace, circling between the grey and the fragments of blue above a city of rubble and reminding us that beauty still exists and that non-existence is not making complete fools of us since it promises us, or so we like to think, a revelation of how it is different from nothingness. In war none of us feels that he is dead if he feels pain. Death pre-empts pain, pain is the one blessing in war. It moves from quarter to quarter bringing a stay of execution. And if someone is befriended by luck he forgets his long-term plans and waits for the non-existent which already exists circling in a flight of doves. I see many doves in the skies of Lebanon playing with the smoke which rises from the nothingness.

  The house as casualty

  In one minute the entire life of a house is ended. The house as casualty is also mass murder, even if it is empty of its inhabitants. A mass grave of raw materials intended to build a structure with meaning, or a poem with no importance in time of war. The house as casualty is the severance of things from their relationships and from the names of feelings, and from the need of tragedy to direct its eloquence at seeing into the life of the object. In every object there is a being in pain – a memory of fingers, of a smell, an image. And houses are killed just like their inhabitants. And the memory of objects is killed: stone, wood, glass, iron, cement are scattered in broken fragments like living beings. And cotton, silk, linen, papers, books are torn to pieces like proscribed words. Plates, spoons, toys, records, taps, pipes, door handles, fridges, washing machines, flower v
ases, jars of olives and pickles, tinned food all break just like their owners. Salt, sugar, spices, boxes of matches, pills, contraceptives, antidepressants, strings of garlic, onions, tomatoes, dried okra, rice and lentils are crushed to pieces just like their owners. Rent agreements, marriage documents, birth certificates, water and electricity bills, identity cards, passports, love letters are torn to shreds like their owners’ hearts. Photographs, toothbrushes, combs, cosmetics, shoes, underwear, sheets, towels fly in every direction like family secrets broadcast aloud in the devastation. All these things are a memory of the people who no longer have them and of the objects that no longer have the people – destroyed in a minute. Our things die like us, but they aren’t buried with us.

  The cunning of the metaphor

  Metaphorically I say: ‘I won’

  Metaphorically I say: ‘I lost’

  And a bottomless valley stretches in front of me

  and I lie in what remains of the holm oak

  And there are two olive trees

  surrounding me on three sides

  and two birds carry me

  to the side which is empty

  of the peak and the abyss

  so that I don’t say: ‘I won’

  so that I don’t say: ‘I lost the bet.’

  The mosquito

  The mosquito, and I don’t know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is more destructive than slander. Not content with sucking your blood, it forces you into a fruitless battle. It only visits in darkness like al-Mutanabbi’s fever. It buzzes and hums like a warplane which you don’t hear until it has hit its target: your blood. You switch on the light to see it and it disappears into some secret corner of the room, then settles on the wall – safe, peaceful, as if it has surrendered. You try to kill it with one of your shoes, but it dodges you and escapes and reappears with an air of malicious satisfaction. You curse it loudly but it pays no heed. You negotiate a truce with it in a friendly voice: ‘Sleep so that I can sleep!’ You think you’ve convinced it and switch off the light and go to sleep. But having sucked most of your blood it starts humming again, threatening a new attack. And forces you into a subsidiary battle with your perspiration. You turn on the light again and resist the two of them, the mosquito and the sweat, by reading. But the mosquito lands on the page you are reading, and you say happily to yourself: ‘It’s fallen into the trap.’ And you snap the book shut: ‘I’ve killed it . . . I’ve killed it!’ And when you open the book, to glory in your victory, there’s no sign of the mosquito or the words. Your book is blank. The mosquito, and I don’t know what the masculine form of the word is in Arabic, is not a metaphor, an allusion or a play on words. It’s an insect which likes your blood and can smell it from twenty miles away. There’s only one way you can bargain with it to make a truce: by changing your blood type.