![\"mahmoud-darwish\"](\"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/mahmoud-darwish.jpg\")
<\/a>Last night, just before falling asleep I was reading in Pascal Quignard\u2019s Sur le jadis<\/i> (volume 2 of his Dernier Royaume<\/i> series) & came across the following sentence: \u201cC\u2019est une plaie qui cherche son couteau. \/ It is a wound looking for its knife.\u201d I put the book down to go to sleep, but the sentence kept running through my mind & for some reason started to irritate. I turned the light back on, opened my notebook & wrote: \u201cBut if it is a wound, it has already known its knife & does not need it any longer. Except to heal? How could that be?\u201d Then I went to sleep. This morning, waking up to a glorious sunrise, the French sentence returned, but twisted, in my mind as \u201cC\u2019est une plaie qui fuit son couteau \/ it is a wound that flees its knife\u201d \u2014 though when writing it down in the notebook a bit later, I mistakenly translated my own French as \u201cit is a sentence<\/i> that flees its knife.\u201d\u00a0 So now sentence replaces wound. A wound is a sentence & a sentence a wound. A sentence does go both ways. Wounds can heal, can scar over. Sentences are ab initio<\/i> traces, i.e. scars on the air we speak them through or on the paper we trace them on.<\/p>\nIt is then that the fact that today is the 5th anniversary of Mahmood Darwish\u2019s death came to accompany, or better, to shadow this wound \/ sentence \/knife thought chain. Not that it resolved anything. Not that it made anything clearer in my mind. These two events, Quignard\u2019s sentence, & the anniversary of the Palestinian poet\u2019s death are simply, i.e. complexly there, together, unconnected. Or not connected in a simple \u2014 healing? \u2014 way, such as claiming that the writing of his, Darwish\u2019s, poems is a scaring over, thus some sort of a healing of the wounds the loss of his people\u2019s land & lives represents.<\/p>\n
An image now comes to mind: the tongue that speaks the sentences that scar the air & the paper is itself in the shape of a knife \u2014 it is the tongue-knife that emerges from the mouth of the horse in Picasso\u2019s Guernica<\/i>. (Notice that the terrorized human heads in the painting are all tongueless, though open-mouthed in silent screams of horror & agony.)<\/p>\n
The poem this knife-tongue speaks is sentenced to stay an open wound that does not look back, that cannot return to its pre-wound status, & yet it will always remain a poem, that is a jubilation, a life-force.<\/p>\n