Even now, a refusal to mourn

During the intifada, if a bus was blown up in the streets, it was taken away and the pavements were cleaned. The bodies were attended to by Orthodox volunteers who collect body parts in order that the dead be buried in accordance with Jewish tradition. The blood was cleaned from the No Parking signs. The flesh was scraped from the window panes. The arm bones were removed from stomachs. The leg bones were removed from eye sockets. The ears were lifted off engine parts.

The grotesque absurdity of the exploded bodies was cleared away and what was left was a street in more or less the same condition as it was before the bombing.

Yehoshua was disturbed by the cleaning, perplexed by the desire of his fellow Israelis to live a normal life. It was a kind of formula, he says, as if nobody knew any longer how to mourn. "The heart was becoming hard, very hard," he says. "Israeli society, I saw, was repressing these deaths."

Yehoshua, long seen as one of the more optimistic of Israeli novelists, recently admitted to the New York Times that he has lost a great quantity of his optimism, and yet he still holds out hope for his children and his grandchildren. "I can be a pessimist for myself, but I have to be an optimist for them." He holds this hope even in the unfolding of events over the last month – the war with Hezbollah, the massacres, the brinkmanship, the savagery.

It's surely is a strange world in which a man like Yehoshua can hold out hope, but novelists, playwrights and poets tend to swim in waters that most sensible people would drown in. They wave their hearts around by their bloody strings for a short while, and then retreat into silence to try to make sense of what they have seen. Yehoshua, for his part, makes up for his new pessimism in his latest novel with moments of pure oxygen, and one wonders if it is not the job of the novelist or the poet to find any ray of light they can, even in the overwhelming dark.

After all, we all know we're going to die at some stage and we feel called upon to make up songs about this death and the short reprieve we are travelling through. It's why I carry Seamus Heaney's new book in my pocket when I walk around the streets of New York. It's why the new poems of John F Deane and Mary O'Malley and many others really matter. It's why I shut the page for silence when I read a page of John Berger. It's why I think Michael Ondaatje is always somehow there when the bread comes out of the oven.

I believe in writing – or rather, words -- and the optimism they can present, even in those terrible moments when we turn on a television set and watch, once again, the yellow-vested doctors searching through the rubble. I believe in them, even when they lead us to question our own alliance of optimism and sentimentality.

Is it sentimental to have hope? Certainly, hope doesn't have too much currency these days. Why should it? When we look at the pictures coming out of Qana, it seems impossible to weigh notions of revenge against goodness. But what Yehoshua and others who are brave enough to ask questions are really asking is whether that Qana complex, or that Haifa street, or that dusty borderline between the two places, can be brought to life by a gesture of empathy. What he's asking is if it's possible to still have faith.

The fact that Yehoshua, at the age of 70, has not lost hope for his children is an act of bravery and ambition on his part. He has long been outspoken as an Israeli dove who has sided, at times, with the Palestinians. He has dared to cross paths, as good storytellers must. He is not interested in being a coloniser, but has explored the territory around him instead. He goes into those tiny little anonymous corners of human experience and finds value there. In other words, he breathes, and he does so deeply, and he believes in a sort of radical joy, despite having considered all the facts. The fact of this joy includes the ability to mourn.

His sort of hope is, in fact, unsentimental at its very core and it suggests to all of us that -- even in all the shit and gloom of the everyday slog and the nightly horrorshow of the news – there is still some prospect of decency, and that is not something we need apologise for, poet or streetcleaner or memory-maker.

Colum McCann's latest novel, Zoli, will be published on 1 September 2006