“The time: Beirut; the place: a day in August 1982,” notes the subtitle for Mahmoud Darwish’s 1986 book, Memory for Forgetfulness (????? ???????). What appears at first as a simple stamp of time and place is revealed to be much more, as it purposefully conflates the two axes; the time is Beirut, the place is one day in 1982 during the Lebanese Civil War and the Israeli invasion. This statement demonstrates one of the book’s central elements – the destabilizing of space and time – as a direct result of the Nakba of 1948. But if the relation between time and space generates in Bakhtin’s terms a chronotope, in Darwish’s book it is presented in negation, almost an anti-chronotope. The narrator is a Palestinian refugee living in exile in Lebanon, whose life is permeated by violence and precarity. He was expelled from his land, and falls victim to related violence in his new dwelling place, which is impermanent and volatile. The Nakba is often understood in terms of displacement, evident in literature as well, as Salma Khadra Jayyusi notes that exile is a prominent quality of modern Palestinian literature. However, my paper argues that Darwish’s book underscores the related instability of time. In conditions of constant violence, the narrator loses his sense of time, and narrative time becomes fluid and dream-like, making it difficult to trace the events which all take place in one day that also feels like a lifetime. Given this narrative and historical timelessness, Darwish’s narrator conflates what has happened with what may happen, actual events and his musings and imagination. The destabilization of time and place are simultaneously geopolitical and literary, contributing to the sense that the narrator is removed from the world and even from himself. A clear manifestation of this is his fractured relation to his body, as he often imagines his body falling apart, sees himself dying and even visualizes his own funeral. The narrator, and with him the readers, is increasingly unable to distinguish between life and death, as the ongoing conditions of strife he lives in due to the tragedy of the Nakba have altered what being alive means. Through the interlacing of space, time and body as equally precarious, Memory for Forgetfulness demonstrates that the Nakba is not a moment in time but an unfolding and interminable event, and that its effects on the lives of Palestinians are pervasive.