我
The past is a shadow that clings to our heels.
I am nothing but a wound in the memory of time.
They had said that the city was a paradise, but I found it a hell.
Memory is the only paradise from which we cannot be expelled.
I believe that all writing is a form of resistance.
Literature is the only homeland we can never lose.
In the ruins of our cities, we search for the fragments of our identity.
Memory is a wound that never heals, and literature is the bandage we put on it.
In the labyrinth of Beirut, we find both our past and our future.
We suffer from an incurable disease called hope.
I do not decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.
We have on this earth what makes life worth living.
I am from there. I am from here. I am not there and I am not here.
I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to live.
Poetry is perhaps what teaches us to nurture the charming illusion: how to be reborn out of ourselves over and over again, and use words to construct a better world, a fictitious world that enables us to sign a pact for a permanent and comprehensive peace ... with life.
The sea is my language, and the desert my alphabet.