A River Dies of Thirst

‘In the midst of what is going on now, it is hard, when you sit down at a desk, to feel that morning after morning spent fiddling with words and rhythms is a justified activity.’

I didn’t see Jews as devils or angels, but as human beings. I always humanise the other. I will continue to humanise the enemy. Poems take the side of love not war.

‘If you go on writing such poetry,’ he said, ‘I’ll stop your father working in the quarry.’7

So of course he went on.

One thing that occupation does is threaten a sense of self:

‘I carry exile everywhere, as I carry my homeland,’ Darwish said once. ‘Exile is not a geographic state.’

Haifa says to me: ‘From now on, you are you!’

Did somebody once say that the master of words is the master of place? This is neither vanity nor a game. It is the poet’s way of defending the value of words, and the stability of place in a language which is vowelised and therefore mobile.

There is a region in my heart, uninhabited, which welcomes children looking for an unoccupied area to pitch their summer camp.

There is no mist. It’s just a pine tree on Mount Carmel whispering to a cedar on Mount Lebanon: ‘Good evening, sister.’

I couldn’t see a general to ask him: ‘What year did you kill me?’ but I saw soldiers sipping beer on the pavements and waiting for the end of the approaching war, so that they could go to university to study Arab poetry written by the dead who have not died. And I am one of them.