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A review by blurstoftimes
Memory for Forgetfulness: August, Beirut, 1982 by Mahmoud Darwish
4.0
More accurately a 3.7
Darwish’s prose is some of the most powerful and erudite I’ve ever read. This book in its totality is a formidable manifesto of anti-war ideals. But what it is truly about is displacement: the infamous exile of the Palestinians in Beirut and how the Israelis worked to extinguish the Arabs during the 1982 Siege of Lebanon
For this reason and more, this book becomes exhausting rather quickly. While Darwish is exceptionally wise and strings together hauntingly beautiful lines of phantasmagorical poetry, staying with it for too long can become arduous.
This is a book that you really have to be patient with. Reading it in my Literature of Exile class allowed me the proper academic space to learn more about what Darwish meant by motifs like “the sea.”
An entire book of prose poetry is intimidating enough, but reading recurring statements about constant bombings with exponential causalities and the disappearance of a sense of self within the writer becomes an elegiac, often illogical, journey into disharmony and reverie; the result of this can either be enlightenment or nausea for the reader.
Still, this is a book worth reading. You just have to wrestle with it a bit.
Darwish’s prose is some of the most powerful and erudite I’ve ever read. This book in its totality is a formidable manifesto of anti-war ideals. But what it is truly about is displacement: the infamous exile of the Palestinians in Beirut and how the Israelis worked to extinguish the Arabs during the 1982 Siege of Lebanon
For this reason and more, this book becomes exhausting rather quickly. While Darwish is exceptionally wise and strings together hauntingly beautiful lines of phantasmagorical poetry, staying with it for too long can become arduous.
This is a book that you really have to be patient with. Reading it in my Literature of Exile class allowed me the proper academic space to learn more about what Darwish meant by motifs like “the sea.”
An entire book of prose poetry is intimidating enough, but reading recurring statements about constant bombings with exponential causalities and the disappearance of a sense of self within the writer becomes an elegiac, often illogical, journey into disharmony and reverie; the result of this can either be enlightenment or nausea for the reader.
Still, this is a book worth reading. You just have to wrestle with it a bit.