Longing is a conversation between the absent. The distant turning towards the distant. Longing is the spring’s thirst for the jar-carrying women and vice versa. Longing pulls distance back, as if looking forward, which has been called hope. Longing is an adventure and a poetic notion. The present tense is hesitant and perplexed. The past tense is hanging from a Cypress tree standing behind a hill on its rooted leg, enveloped in its dark green, listening to one sound: the sound of the wind. Longing is the sound of the wind.
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The more you delve into your loneliness, like that tree, the more longing takes you with motherly tenderness to its country which is made of transparent, fragile material. Longing has a country, a family, and an exquisite taste in arranging wild flowers. It has a time chosen with divine care. A quiet mythical time in which figs ripen slowly and the gazelle sleeps next to the wolf in the imagination of the boy who did not witness a massacre. Longing takes you around its country like a tour guide in heaven. It takes you up to a mountain where you used to take refuge and wallow in wild plants until your pores soak the smell of sage. Longing is smell.
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Every winter an absent joy pains you and you walk under the rain one in two: you and the person you were in another winter. You speak secretly to yourself words you don’t understand because of memory’s inability to retrieve a previous emotion, and because of longing’s ability to add what did not exist to what existed. Such as the tree becoming a forest and the stone a quail, such as being happy in a prison cell you see wider than a public garden, and the past standing waiting for you tomorrow like a loyal dog. Longing lies and it doesn’t tire of lying because it lies truthfully. The lying of longing is a profession.
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Longing is exile’s punishment for the exiled and the exile’s shame of liking exile’s music and gardens. . . to long means not to be overjoyed by anything here, except with shyness. If I were there- you say- If I were there my laugh would be louder and my speech clearer. Longing is the yearning of words to their initial space even if they are obscure and strange.
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Longing is a wound in the heart and the thumbprint of a country on the body. But no one longs for his wound. No one longs for a pain or a nightmare, but to what was before. To a time where there is no pain except the pain of primary pleasures which melt time like a cube of sugar in a cup of tea, to a time of paradisiacal image.
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Longing is the wailing of right when it is incapable of providing proof of right’s might before extreme might. . . the wailing of homes buried under settlements which the absent bequeaths to the absent, and the present to the absent, with the first drop of milk in exile and in camps. Longing is the sound of silk rising from berries to those who long for it in mutual wailing. It is the fusion of instinct in the conscious and the unconscious. It is lost time complaining of the sadism of the present.
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(Translated from the Arabic by Sinan Antoon)