The Existential Nothingness in the Poem “You Forget As If You Were Never” by Poet Mahmoud Darwich

Critical Study / Ali Tlemsani

I am not entirely satisfied with what has been written about this text, which was extracted by poet Mahmoud Darwich from the depths of his soul soaked in the abyss of disappearance and existential nothingness. He embraced it seeking hope and salvation after a journey through the chaos of senses and wounds. I am not satisfied because the text returns the barren land with Baudelairean longing in pursuit of an impermissible salvation, deeply rooted in despair and poetic nihilism, which can’t be found in meaning but in the music of the poem. The lackluster playing of the poet’s soul, which lost its trembling and shaking that his poem, beginning with “There is in the earth what deserves life,” once carried, can be found here in a cold melody barely visible under an eternity of death and grayness.

I said I am not satisfied with what has been written about this text because many of the readings haven’t gone to the depth of the word, play, and meaning, revolving around an idea of existence that unfolds a deep melancholy, one that Sartre spoke of. The poet lives his life with a conceptual idea that he will transform into human heritage, realizing in himself pain and intense suffering through naked contemplation of the tragedy that excessive feeling brings to a unique, closed life, that of invasive nihilism in its loud repetition in every era.

And the poem begins with two simple meanings that resemble the introduction of Beethoven’s Symphony of Fate: “You forget as if you were never.” After his journey, the poet faces the tragic fate of navigating a world of oblivion, dissipating from the collective in which he lived for years, seeking refuge in beauty and art in search of a deeper spiritual conviction than the rational conviction of the validity of human suffering by living the other. And here the absurdity reveals itself, not after death, but a deeper absurdity that existed before.

Thus, the poet summarizes the entire experience by stating two truths: the first is his passage to final disappearance. This disappearance was already present before, and here the letter “Kaf” of comparison raises the vision. Even Mahmoud Darwich didn’t avoid many pitfalls in Arabic poetry.

Metaphors follow, supported by the capacity of poetic imagery, bringing the living existence of the man closer to that of other forms of existence such as: “The death of the bird,” “The abandoned church,” “The fleeting love,” “The rose in the wind and snow.” The first part ends and then begins:

“I am for the road – There is the one whose steps preceded mine – The one who imposed his vision on mine – The one who scattered words on his own – To tell the story – Or to illuminate those who will come after him – A sung trace and a crossroad.”

Here nihilism moves from the poet’s fate to a continuous fate for man, who transmits his painful experience to others, and the intensity of this nihilistic experience becomes a series extending from the past to the future. The word becomes the only false immortality that the poet expresses by: “Words lead me, and I lead them – I am their form – And it is the free manifestation.” Writing is the manifestation, and the poet is only the form. Here the depth of experience reveals itself: writing is not a salvation but an exploitation of the poet’s being to realize its existence, leaving the poet’s soul as a perforated dramatic shape on the side of a path full of pain.

The poet intensifies the description of his discovery of nihilism, resorting to poetic techniques, saying: “I am the king of the echo, I have no throne except the margins.” The Sisyphean pain deepens in the Sisyphean nothingness. The king of the scattered echo in the vastness and the throne in the margins are reintroductions of the meaning of inevitable oblivion.

In his attempt to transcend the feeling of being doomed to extinction, the poet creates a lovely meaning, a disturbance of time in the experience of existence, saying: “There is the one whose steps preceded mine – And the one who will precede me in my vision,” an attempt to look beyond, seeking to escape a destiny where the past and future blur over a present imbued with black perfumes of imposed non-being.

The poet continues, changing the instruments of his melody to express his belonging to exile, to a movement ending in nothingness by saying: “I am for the road, for all of life and its grandeur belong to the road, the symbol of movement and wandering far from places of peace and mercy.”

We would have wished the poet continued his explorations in exile and nihilism, leaving the reader to draw his own conclusion, but the poet falters at a moment of poetic weakness, a habitual moment where an experience that began with great depth and a sudden turn fails to maintain the initial intensity of the text. And by crossing the inevitable and the absurd toward hope and the promise that he sees as a farce, he says nevertheless:

“There is the one who will say poetry after me,
Freed from my broken fate.”

The poet, after crossing the nihilistic abyss, bursts forth with redemption symbolized by the return of existence itself in the poet’s form into a future tense: “He will say a poem praising the gardens of exile in front of the house.” Here, the poet smiles bitterly and violently at the future which restores life, beauty, and hope by singing of gardens, and adds: “Freed from my broken fate.” He frees the future from the weight of the fate shattered by knowledge and tragic confrontation.

“Freed from my broken fate,
Freed from the worship of the past,
From my earthly paradise,
Freed from my metaphors and verses,
I testify that I am free and alive when I forget.”

Here, the poet’s soul breaks, the text shortens, and the experience ends in the intensity of his heroic existential pain towards the experience of the romantics, where truth is fabricated and vision killed by an idea of futility. The poet thus frees himself from the past, the language, and the lost paradise toward a religious tone translated by the word “I testify.” We don’t know who the poet addresses, as in his subconscious there is always a reader demanding his testimony of freedom and life, in the first meaning that symbolized nothingness. Freedom and life explode suddenly because he will forget, and we recall the beginning once again: “You forget as if you were never.”

And we conclude by crystallizing the experience in this fragment: the poet, in his confrontation with the idea of nothingness and nihilism, suffers and cries in a spirituality stretched to death and extinction, fighting the apparition of nothingness, seeking salvation since the beginning of suffering. After wandering in his soul and in the confines of experiences, surrounding his soul in a tragic fate, he makes a movement (and forgive the expression) a crazy movement when he decides that freedom lies in forgetting, with life. He is free and alive and asks us to testify to that. And here emerges the idea of salvation coming from Christian tradition, a message of the victory of life over death and freedom over enslavement. We notice that it remains a random positivity, unjustified except by the force of the existential decline experienced by the poet.

Finally, we arrive at a Freudian sense of poetry and art in general, as psychological salvation from an inevitable confrontation, similar to the idea of catharsis in ancient Greek philosophy.

My words here are not a literary study, but rather a reading of a deep journey despite its condensation and transformation into a life-saving rope. We cannot criticize the Arab poet by attributing to him the same responsibility as the experience of T.S. Eliot or Baudelaire. All modern poets have not been liberated from the narrowness of poetic breath, except for the experience of Abdel Wahab Al-Bayati, who attempted to extend and follow the deep poetic text, sacrificing the musicality that our poet Mahmoud Darwich clings to, who stands out in Arab poetry for his Western existential flavor draped in an Arab cloak of rhythm and musicality.