“Destroyed Village, War Front” (1974) | Donald Shaw MacLaughlan / Smithsonian American Art Museum / CC0
One of the cruelties of the Iliad is how alive each person is made to appear just before they are killed. That is the point of Homer’s long, detailed lists of Greeks and Trojans: names, deeds, parents, brothers, spouses, children, lovers, skills, bad hair, swift feet, words, and weapons. The poem about mass death insists on human particularity. British poet Alice Oswald’s adaptation, Memorial (2011), focuses solely on those names and the individual stories of each person, reminding us that the poem is a recitation, both vocative and invocative, a speaking, or singing, which allows each of the dead a unique place in the vibrations of the voices of the living:
Like leaves who could write a history of leaves
The wind blows their ghosts to the ground
And the spring breathes new leaf into the woods
Thousands of names thousands of leaves
When you remember them remember this
Dead bodies are their lineage
Which matter no more than the leaves.
When Oswald reads the poem live, you can literally hear her breath attempt to expel the dead into the air, a person on each exhale. None of this makes the scale of the slaughter any more bearable. It was not the poem’s nobility Oswald was after, but the energeia, praised by the ancient critics, its “bright unbearable reality.”
The poetry collection I turned to when Wilson’s English Iliad became unreadable was Time by the Lebanese American painter and writer Etel Adnan, superbly translated from the French by Sarah Riggs and published in 2019. Few artists gave shape to the long century of the Arab experience of exile with such total creative persistence and intensity as Adnan, who was born in Lebanon in 1925 and lived most of her life in California and Paris until her death in the city in 2021. She began the sequence of poems collected in Time in 2003, the year of Said’s too-soon death at age 67. Conceived as a series of postcards sent to her friend Khaled Najar, the Tunisian poet and publisher, the poems trace the constellations of absence and presence, death and loss, in the context of the Second, or Al-Aqsa, Intifada, and the US war in Iraq and its sequelae across the Middle East.
Adnan was already in her late 70s as she wrote poems collected in Time. This was not her first apocalypse (The Arab Apocalypse, published in 1980, was the title of the concluding volume of her trilogy chronicling the years between 1967 and the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975). One poem, “No Sky,” opens by recalling the mind-wrenching multiple negatives of Said’s exilic contrapuntal imagination:
There are no frogs
in this vast sky
no messages
there is no sky
in this brain
no words
no brain
in this body
no connection
the drought
is in the mind
and on the ground.
No, no, no—the negatives belong both to the mind of the exile and to the landscape unhomed through war and occupation. It is no surprise to find Adnan explicitly evoking Simone Weil’s reading of the Iliad a few stanzas later:
Fate stirs,
you remain still,
having become a thing among other
things
Indeed, across a landscape in which nothing seems ever fully present, nothing placid or secure, Homer and his poem are one of the few constants:
Today, the sun,
tomorrow, the sea,
and often Homer reciting
the Iliad in a city
in Arabia.
None of these poems can be made “to serve humanism” in the sense that Said warned against. Something else is at stake. Human vulnerability lies stark and tender in Adnan’s poetry:
she buried her face
against a mattress the curve
of the back showed the loss
was unbearable
Yet her poems never allow you to forget how that vulnerability is politically created. The humanism of exile has long been used as a cover-up for the starker realities of modern placelessness—and as an alibi for political complacency. If loss can be generalized as part of the human condition, then it is easy to forget how people get to be abandoned in camps and ghettos in the first place. Not for Adnan, for whom the conflagrations of 2003 were also the mutilations of Sabra and Shatila in 1982:
I would lay on sheets
bathed in my sweat.
the month of August in Beirut happens
without the world knowingthere is no other consolation
left to counter pain than
pain itself
Forty years after Said’s “Reflections on Exile,” 80 years after Arendt first called out the stark reality of contemporary statelessness, Adnan’s refusal of consolation—only more pain can counter pain—was one of her late acts in a lifelong creative protest of the historical forgetting of the realities of exile.
Simone Weil wrote of an “incurable bitterness that continually makes itself heard” in the Iliad, sometimes just in a word or a line break. The bitterness tells us both that these lives were lived and that they could have been lived otherwise, which is also, she says, the source of the poem’s deep tenderness. Mahmoud Darwish’s memoir of his last day in Beirut on August 6, 1982, Memory for Forgetfulness, opens with a similarly stark tenderness. Here is Darwish, beautifully translated by Ibrahim Muhawi, meticulously describing making his morning coffee on Beirut’s corniche as Israeli shells are fired into the city from the sea:
How can I diffuse the aroma of coffee into my cells, while the shells from the sea rain down on the sea-facing kitchen, spreading the stink of gunpowder and the taste of nothingness? I measure the period between two shells. One second. One second: shorter than the time between breathing in and breathing out, between two heartbeats. One second is not long enough for me to stand before the stove by the glass façade that overlooks the sea. One second is not long enough to open the water bottle or pour the water into the coffee pot. One second is not long enough to light a match. But one second is long enough for me to burn.
Again, the preciousness of each human action is made more acute through its contrast with indiscriminate violence. Death between two heartbeats or between breathing in and out; by two-edged bronze sword or by the vacuum bombs whose fireballs suck out the air from within buildings they target and from within the lungs of those inside them. Weil again: “Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face.” Later in his text, Darwish describes what happens when a vacuum bomb hits a large apartment block of people: “And we see a building gulped by the earth: seized by the hands of the cosmic monster lying in ambush for a world that human beings create on an earth commanding no view except of a moon and a sun and an abyss.” August 6 was not only Darwish’s last day in Beirut; it was also the date on which, on another late summer day, in 1945, the United States dropped its atom bomb on Hiroshima.
Darwish wrote his memoir in just two months, largely in solitude, exiled once again, this time in Paris. He wrote feverishly, anxious to preserve his memory of Beirut, a city that “accommodated the chaos” of multiple exiles—”an imagined democracy” with the promise, now dashed, of a different kind of human community. The “cosmic isolation” (his words) of the Palestinians remaining in Lebanon, the dead of Sabra and Shatila, made that task the more urgent. He was remembering the forgotten, the always and brutally unremembered refugees of Palestine. “In its essence,” Darwish had written 10 years before in Journal of an Ordinary Grief, “writing remains the other shape of the homeland.” Yet by 1982, there were few poets who knew better the limitations of writing during wartime: “How then can the new writing—which needs time enough for leisure—crystallize and take form in a battle that has such a rhythm of rockets?”
This is an excerpt from an essay first published in Social Research: An International Quarterly in the journal’s Summer 2024 issue, Exile.
