In Eleven Planets
In this collection I had to defend a forgotten history; or to put it more clearly, I’d say I had to defend the land of the past and the past of the land, the land of language and the language of the land. I believe that the unwavering commitment to resistance and defense is not some sort of nostalgia, but the saturation of the present and the future with the past, without which neither present nor future will come to be. For that reason, I feel that the past is subject to plunder, and have always said that it should be the arbiter of the conflict. The past is more ambiguous than the future. - Mahmoud Darwish
