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  • Edward Said:A Contrapuntal Reading
  • Mahmoud Darwish (bio)
    Translated by Mona Anis (bio)

New York / November / Fifth Avenue The sun a plate of shredded metal I asked myself, estranged in the shadow: Is it Babel or Sodom? * * * There, on the doorstep of an electric abyss, high as the sky, I met Edward, thirty years ago, time was less wild then . . . We both said: If the past is only an experience, make of the future a meaning and a vision. Let us go, Let us go into tomorrow trusting the candor of imagination and the miracle of grass/ * * * I don't recall going together to the cinema in the evening. Still I heard Ancient Indians calling: Trust neither horse, nor modernity * * * No. Victims do not ask their executioner: Am I you? Had my sword been bigger than my rose, would you have asked if I would have acted like you? * * * [End Page 175] A question like that entices the curiosity of a novelist, sitting in a glass office, overlooking lilies in the garden, where the hand of a hypothesis is as clear as the conscience of a novelist set to settle accounts with human instinct . . . There is no tomorrow in yesterday, so let us advance/ * * * Advancing could be a bridge leading back to Barbarism . . . / * * * New York. Edward wakes up to a lazy dawn. He plays Mozart. Runs round the university's tennis court. Thinks of the journey of ideas across borders, and over barriers. He reads the New York Times. firites out his furious comments. Curses an Orientalist guiding the General to the weak point inside the heart of an Oriental woman. He showers. Chooses his elegant suit. Drinks his white coffee. Shouts at the dawn: Do not loiter. * * * On wind he walks, and in wind he knows himself. There is no ceiling for the wind, no home for the wind. Wind is the compass of the stranger's North. He says: I am from there, I am from here, but I am neither there nor here. [End Page 176] I have two names which meet and part . . . I have two languages, but I have long forgotten which is the language of my dreams. I have an English language, for writing, with yielding phrases, and a language in which Heaven and Jerusalem converse, with a silver cadence, but it does not yield to my imagination. * * * What about identity? I asked. He said: It's self-defense . . . Identity is the child of birth, but at the end, it's self-invention, and not an inheritance of the past. I am multiple . . . Within me an ever new exterior. And I belong to the question of the victim. Were I not from there, I would have trained my heart to nurture there deer of metaphor . . . So carry your homeland wherever you go, and be a narcissist if need be/ The outside world is exile, exile is the world inside. And what are you between the two? * * * Myself, I do not know so that I shall not lose it. I am what I am. I am my other, a duality gaining resonance in between speech and gesture. Were I to write poetry I would have said: I am two in one, like the wings of a swallow, content with bringing good omen when spring is late. * * * He loves a country and he leaves. [Is the impossible far off?] He loves leaving to things unknown. [End Page 177] By traveling freely across cultures those in search of the human essence may find a space for all to sit . . . Here a margin advances. Or a center retreats. Where East is not strictly east, and West is not strictly west, where identity is open onto plurality, not a fort or a trench/ * * * Metonymy was sleeping on the river's bank; had it not been for the pollution it could have embraced the other bank. * * * —Have you written any novels? I tried . . . I tried to retrieve my image from mirrors of distant women. But they scampered off into their guarded night. Saying: Our world is independent of any text. A man cannot write a woman who is both enigma and dream. A woman cannot write a man who is...

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