ABSTRACT

In this chapter, I examine the memory triggers of the night of expulsion in 1948 in the works of Mahmoud Darwish. I discuss various accounts of that arduous and painful experience along with the sites of memory that prompt this recollection of loss and exile in his poetic anthology Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?, while drawing on his prose narratives In the Absence of Presence, and Journal of Ordinary Grief. The night that is remembered is the night the young child along with his family was exiled, and this banishment disrupted their lives forever. Darwish’s work not only conjures up the experience of loss by repeatedly returning to it in his oeuvre but also the poet metaphorically invokes the memory of his village and a symbolic return to it through his words. His work fills the gap between the various diasporic experiences of Palestinians, elevating the writer to an iconic status, that of the storyteller of his people.