Mahmoud Darwish once wrote: ‘All roads lead to you, even those I took to forget you.’ On first reading, it sounds like the lament of a man caught in the undertow of lost love, circling endlessly back to the figure he most wishes to escape. But linger with it a while, and the line grows deeper, heavier, until it begins to sound less like the sigh of a lover and more like a metaphysical axiom.
For what Darwish describes is not merely romance – it’s the condition of memory itself. Memory isn’t a library in which one may close a book and shelve it forever. It’s more like Augustine’s description in the Confessions: a great cavernous palace, where the past waits in ambush. You go down one corridor seeking peace and instead stumble upon a scent, a word, a turn of light, and the beloved rushes back unbidden. The Freudian would call this the repetition compulsion, the unconscious need to return to the very wound one most wishes to seal. The poet, of course, needs no psychoanalysis to tell him that exile and belonging are always twinned.
Darwish himself was the poet of exile par excellence – Palestine’s wandering bard, forever circling back to a homeland he could never quite inhabit. Is it any wonder that his lines about a beloved read like lines about a country? The personal and the political are fused. To forget the beloved would be as impossible as forgetting the land: both live in the body, in the pulse, in the dream. ‘Even those I took to forget you’ – there’s the tragedy. Forgetting requires walking, moving, taking roads away; and yet those very roads, like some cruel Möbius strip, bend back upon themselves.
The Greeks knew this well. Consider Odysseus: every attempt to escape the pull of Ithaca leads him closer to it. He fights, he detours, he dallies with Calypso, yet fate drags him home. So it is with memory and love: Ithaca waits at the end of every journey, even when the traveller swears he’ll not return.
There is, too, a biblical echo here. The Psalmist cries: “Whither shall I go from thy spirit? Or whither shall I flee from thy presence?” (Psalm 139:7). Darwish rephrases this not as a cry to God but as a cry to the beloved. Even atheists, I suspect, know the experience: that sense of inescapable haunting, as though the world were structured in such a way that one person – or one sorrow – sits at its centre.
The existentialists would phrase it differently. For Sartre, consciousness is doomed to its objects: once we’ve loved, the beloved becomes part of our being-in-the-world, stitched into the fabric of our existence. To try to ‘forget’ is only to acknowledge how deeply interwoven they are. Camus might have called it absurd – that no matter which road you take, you return to the same point – but he’d also have smiled at the stubborn dignity of the walker who keeps taking those roads anyway.
And so we’re left with Darwish’s paradox: forgetting is impossible, for every attempt to do so is already an act of remembrance. The road to forgetting winds back upon the very thing we hoped to escape. Love, grief, homeland, God – these aren’t destinations we can simply leave behind. They’re centres of gravity, black holes of memory, bending all roads back toward themselves.
Perhaps the truest response, then, isn’t to flee but to sit. To stop taking roads at all, and let the beloved come as she will, unbidden, inevitable. For sometimes the only way to live with memory is to cease trying to forget.
Wording 