Homage to Edward Said Counterpoint

NEW YORK. NOVEMBER. 5TH AVENUE.

Shards of light in a leaden sky.

In the shadows, I asked my foreign soul: is this city Babylon or Sodom?

There, at the edge of an electric chasm sky high, I met Edward thirty years ago.

The times were less impetuous.

Each said to the other:

If your past is your experience, make the future sense and vision!

Let us move forward, towards our future, confident in imagination’s sincerity and the miracle of the grass.

I no longer remember whether we went to the cinema that evening, but I heard old Indian braves call out to me: trust neither the horse nor modernity.

No. No victim asks his executioner: if I were you and my sword greater than my rose . . . would I have acted as you have done?

That kind of question arouses the curiosity of the novelist who sits behind the glass walls of his study overlooking the lily garden . . . Here the hypothesis is lily-white, clear as the author’s conscience if he closes his accounts with human nature . . . No future behind us, so let us move forward!

Progress could be the bridge back to barbarity . . .

Mahmoud Darwish

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