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Mahmoud Darwich. Une memoire pour l'oubli. Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, Farouk Mardam-Bey, trs. Paris. Actes Sud. 1994. 157 pages. 98 F.
The 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent brutal siege of Beirut doomed the Palestinian people once more to errancy and dispersion. These new wounds have but deepened the scars of a beleaguered memory, and, as fate had it, turning the knife in the fresh wounds, amid the world's indifference, Arab and otherwise, "Les ministres de la Defense jouaient avec les bulles de leurs coupes de champagne tandis que leur parvenaient les nouvelles de l'etau qui se refermait sur le camp de Tell el-Zaatar."
Against this tragic backdrop, Mahmoud Darwish, the most gifted Palestinian poet of his generation, attempts--for every effort at making sense of the surrounding chaos of Beirut, where this memory unfolds, seems absurdly futile--a reenactment of the most recent tragedy that befell the Palestinian people. What happened, how it happened, and who made it happen are questions that are constantly posed but never answered directly, as if to signify all the more their poignancy and complexity: "Tout est bombarde, tout...