In one minute the entire life of a house is ended. The house as casualty
is also mass murder, even if it is empty of its inhabitants. A mass grave
of raw materials intended to build a structure with meaning, or a poem
with no importance in time of war. The house as casualty is the severance
of things from their relationships and from the names of feelings, and
from the need of tragedy to direct its eloquence at seeing into the life of
the object. In every object there is a being in pain - a memory of fingers,
of a smell, an image. And houses are killed just like their inhabitants.
And the memory of objects is killed: stone, wood, glass, iron, cement
are scattered in broken fragments like living beings. And cotton, silk,
linen, papers, books are torn to pieces like proscribed words. Plates,
spoons, toys, records, taps, pipes, door handles, fridges, washing
machines, flower vases, jars of olives and pickles, tinned food all break
just like their owners. Salt, sugar, spices, boxes of matches, pills,
contraceptives, antidepressants, strings of garlic, onions, tomatoes,
dried okra, rice and lentils are crushed to pieces just like their owners.
Rent agreements, marriage documents, birth certificates, water and
electricity bills, identity cards, passports, love letters are torn to shreds
like their owners' hearts. Photographs, toothbrushes, combs, cosmetics,
rz I shoes, underwear, sheets, towels fly in every direction like family secrets
broadcast aloud in the devastation. All these things are a memory of
the people who no longer have them and of the objects that no longer
have the people - destroyed in a minute. Our things die like us, but they
aren't buried with us.
مَحمُود دَرْوِيْش (Mahmoud Darwish; 1941 - 2008), A river dies of thirst: journals (2009) [English translation]. Translated from Arabic by Catherine Cobham, published by Archipelago Books. Originally published as Athar al-Farasha by Riad El-Rayyes Books, Ltd. (2008).