In the Presence of Absence

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Dutchcharts.nl – Kansas – The Absence of Presence" (in Dutch). Hung Medien. Retrieved July 24, 2020. Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Sing like the Southerners Do, 2019, sound-drawing installation. Courtesy the artist.

What Sinan [Antoon] has done withIn the Presence of Absenceis a kind of miraculous work of dedication and love. Reading this volume is sheer enjoyment and sublimity.” Tras una juventud dentro de la Palestina ocupada, años salpicados por numerosos arestos, se trasladó a Egipto y después al Líbano para realizar su sueño de renovación poética. Será en su exilio en Paris, tras tener que abandonar forzosamente el Líbano, donde logre su madurez poético y logre un reconocimiento ante los ojos occidentales. Antoon’s translation puts a greater emphasis on re-creating rhythm: “It rises and falls, an echo of an echo of a sky stripped of the howling of steel. As if hearing water dripping from a leaky tap. Or listening to footsteps approaching the door, but never arriving.”A] unique achievement… It offers costly wisdoms from a life journey, rendered in the opaque lyricism of Darwish’s poetry…His is the voice of dispossessed Palestine but its longings, including sheer lust, are universal. This book overflows with resonant lines and questions… It is a book for life. —The Independent Not so much a review but some reflections. It very well may read like a glorified journal entry, so feel free to skip.

The book never forgets the author’s connection to real and imaginary Palestines. It is full of descriptions of Gaza and Deir Yassin and Sabra and Shatila. But it also has many personal moments, when Darwish faces his mortality. In Chapter 11, he recounts a meeting with a sculptor-friend:The book must have provided an exceptional challenge to its translators. Last December, Mohamed Shaheen’s translation, “Absent Presence,” was published by Hesperus Press. At times, the weight of Shaheen’s sentences makes the prose difficult to enjoy. In places where the rhythm should carry us along, we are sometimes left to drag ourselves along. Without rhythm, Darwish’s words become loose and meaningless. After all, as Darwish writes, poetic structures are “formed by the movement of meaning through rhythm.” This is how fights start in high schools. There was no time for it when there was a case to investigate. But, it is also the living that keep you alive. In the expiration of your body, you remain with those that have made a home for you in their memory. To those that love you, your absence will make itself known, making its presence known through various acts of remembrance. I think about how my mother is named after her late grandmothers, and how I am named after her. How I know about them, though I’ve never met them. They live in not being forgotten. Framing: A fictionalized Van Booy receives the journals of a dying writer, Max Little, and puts them together to create a novel under his own name at the behest of Little’s wife Hadley. There is a brilliant section on memory and afterlife: “Since becoming ill, I have often felt sad that my physical death would be accompanied by the complete loss of memory. All the previous things I had experienced would cease to exist. To think, all those places and people who had brought me such deep joy, gone forever.” I agree with the protagonist that this is the beauty of life, its transiency. He explores how the concept of an afterlife assumes a retention of memory in some form. He explains how people seek confirmation of an after-life or reincarnation as “The idea of living again mitigates the fear of impending nothingness.” I wholly identified with his acceptance that life is to be lived while alive, as an afterlife is unlikely, or at least in a such an unrecognizable form that it bears no connection to its former life.

There are two maps of Palestine that politicians will never manage to forfeit: the one kept in the memories of Palestinian refugees, and that which is drawn by Darwish’s poetry.” No list on Palestinian literature is complete without the acclaimed poet Mahmoud Darwish . . . In the Presence of Absence is a fascinating piece of prose, with an aging Darwish reflecting on his youth and tracing the journey that his life will take him, infused with the poetic voice for which Darwish is renowned.” — Esquire Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Remy Jungerman, PROMISE IV, 2018–2019 (left) and Sadik Kwaish Alfraji, Sing like the Southerners Do, 2019 (right). Photo Peter Tijhuis. It was as though I had been a bystander, a voyeur who contributes ideas but who has no real hand in governance… Ironic how the fleeting nature of time compels us to act, yet is indifferent to our chronic inaction”Muncy: Captain, I noticed that Velasco's motorcycle isn't parked outside for the third day in a row. I don’t know why I feel like I don’t know why I am here. I am not here for myself. That is something I have known for the majority of this short life I’ve - begrudgingly - lived so far. In Simon Van Booy’s extraordinary novel, The Presence of Absence, each well-wrought sentence builds upon the next, taking us deeper into Max Little’s life with staggering lucidity. The first part of the story is constructed in descending numerical chapters that decline with a sense of fatalism as the narrator reconstructs his life’s highpoints interspersed with uncanny, existential observations on the business of life, death, and dying. Max confesses his mind’s innerworkings with adroit ease. “Do people ever walk around their homes, wondering which room they will die in? Whether it will be a Wednesday night or Saturday morning at the table with toast and coffee?” And “What would happen to things like knives and forks once I was gone. Would my wife keep them?” Mahmoud Darwish was laid to rest on a hill in the West Bank overlooking Jerusalem, his legacy transcendent and present in his homeland. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.

Would you like to visit In the Presence of Absence? Follow the routes that have been marked out in the museum. The galleries are large enough for you to move about freely. Please stay 6 feet away from other visitors in the exhibition spaces and follow the instructions of museum staff and volunteers when given Installation view In the Presence of Absence. Proposals for the museum collection. Ghita Skali, Ali Baba Express: Episode 2, 2020. Photo Peter Tijhuis.

Kansas move The Absence of Presence release date to July 17". Brave Words. June 16, 2020 . Retrieved June 19, 2020. a b c d e f g h i j k l m Robert Dye (May 13, 2020). "Stellar Musicianship Drives New Kansas Album 'The Absence Of Presence' ". American Songwriter . Retrieved June 4, 2020.