Another nice collection of Arabic poetry in English is online at Kikah.
Among the poets there is the innovative free verse pioneer Badr Shakir al-Sayyab who died in 1964 as the Tammuzi poets’ moment was drawing to a close. His poem Return to Jaykur starts like this:
I roamed the hills
on the grey horse of a dream
fled the outstretched vistas,
fled the marketplace teeming with vendors,
fled the weary morning,
the barking night, the quiet passers-by,
the gloomy light,
fled the wine-drenched landlord,
fled the shame decked in flowers
and death in its leisurely stroll
along the river’s drowsy currents.
If only its waters would wake up,
if only the Virgin would come to drink,
if only the blood-drenched setting sun
would immerse herself within these banks,
or else just rise.
And if only the branches of night
would burst into leaf,
if the brothel would close its door to its customers.
on the grey horse of a dream
fled the outstretched vistas,
fled the marketplace teeming with vendors,
fled the weary morning,
the barking night, the quiet passers-by,
the gloomy light,
fled the wine-drenched landlord,
fled the shame decked in flowers
and death in its leisurely stroll
along the river’s drowsy currents.
If only its waters would wake up,
if only the Virgin would come to drink,
if only the blood-drenched setting sun
would immerse herself within these banks,
or else just rise.
And if only the branches of night
would burst into leaf,
if the brothel would close its door to its customers.
If only…reading all this poetry, especially the Iraqi poetry, makes one squirm a little with the uneasiness of knowing what has become of the “if only’s” in that region. “Return to Jaykur” blends these observations of desert life with Christian images in a way which seems startling given the cultural conditioning of the present moment that leads us to believe that there is a clean break between this world and that. Lines like:
Who will hear my poems
when death’s silence dwells inside my home,
when night settles in my fire?
Who will lift the burden of my cross
in this long night of dread?
Who would cry out, who would answer to the hungry,
care for the destitute?
Who would lower Jesus from His cross,
who would drive the vultures from His wounds,
remove the lid of darkness from His dawn?
Who would replace His thorns with a crown of laurels?
Jaykur, if you would only hear –
if you would only just be there –
if you would only give birth to a soul,
even an aborted, stunted soul,
as travelers could behold a star
to illuminate the night.
For those without a path
when death’s silence dwells inside my home,
when night settles in my fire?
Who will lift the burden of my cross
in this long night of dread?
Who would cry out, who would answer to the hungry,
care for the destitute?
Who would lower Jesus from His cross,
who would drive the vultures from His wounds,
remove the lid of darkness from His dawn?
Who would replace His thorns with a crown of laurels?
Jaykur, if you would only hear –
if you would only just be there –
if you would only give birth to a soul,
even an aborted, stunted soul,
as travelers could behold a star
to illuminate the night.
For those without a path
…could be lifted from a myriad of human experience located out of any time and place. If anything, retreading some of this thirty or forty year old poetry is taking me to a time when in fact the Middle East and the Far West were involved in an incredibly rich and sophisticated and complex relationship of culture and politics. I think it is a mistake now to assume that this is no longer true, that we in the West are only bound to these poetic voices from the East because of economic or global political imperatives. The fact is, and this is perhaps a great secret, we share much history and culture and our current societies owe much to our joint origins which course through our social veins like so many blood memories, stretching from 2003 back to our shared beginnings in the mud of Mesopotamia.
Cain murders Abel
by Marc Chagal
I was thinking about Yusuf al-Khal’s poem “Cain the Immortal” today when I stumbled across this fantastic archive of Marc Chagall interpretations of Genesis.
A propos of nothing I was thinking of two friends of mine, both men, who have just gotten married, despite the objections of a sizable minority of Canadians who say that gay marriage will tear apart the family.
And then I looked at various images of Cain murdering his brother out of jealousy, and re-read al-Khal’s poem for the lament that it is, and I wondered just what this ideal of “the family” is supposed to be. The very first one, the family that is held up by conservative Christians as the model for God’s plan that men and women should get together to procreate, was torn apart by murder in its very second generation, following hot on the heels of sin in the first. In fact the Genesis story and the “fall of man” is all about how these first humans made so many egregious errors that God bestowed suffering on all their descendants thereafter – suffering of childbirth, of toiling in fields and so on.
And rather than re-examine the business model, the heterosexual family has somehow remained the template in whose name gays and lesbians (and blacks, and Ojibways and many others) were forbidden from marrying.
It’s really a wonder to me that after thousands of years of proof, my friends love each other THAT much to want to join the institution and see if they can’t help to recast it in a better light. I like their optimism though. It’s the same thing vote for hope that I made when I got married ten years ago.
Adding more poets to my collection of Tammuzi poets, I have just found a few poems by Muhammad al-Mughat from Lebanon. This one, “When the Words Burn” exhibits the kind of duende I associate with Lorca, but, given the Arabic influence on Adalusian poetry, I can see where it comes from. Check it out:
Lebanon… white woman under the water;
mountains of breasts and fingernails.
Scream, voiceless country!
Raise your arm high till the shoulder splits
and follow me, the empty ship,
the wind laden with bells.
Over the faces of mothers and captive women,
over the cold ashes of verses and metres
I will spurt fountains of honey,
I will write about trees or shoes, roses or boys.
Tell the misery to depart,
tell the pretty hunchbacked boy
that my fingers are long as needles,
that my eyes are two wounded heroes,
that this is the last day for verses.
When Lebanon breaks, and the slow nights of poetry close
I shall put a bullet in my throat.
mountains of breasts and fingernails.
Scream, voiceless country!
Raise your arm high till the shoulder splits
and follow me, the empty ship,
the wind laden with bells.
Over the faces of mothers and captive women,
over the cold ashes of verses and metres
I will spurt fountains of honey,
I will write about trees or shoes, roses or boys.
Tell the misery to depart,
tell the pretty hunchbacked boy
that my fingers are long as needles,
that my eyes are two wounded heroes,
that this is the last day for verses.
When Lebanon breaks, and the slow nights of poetry close
I shall put a bullet in my throat.
Reading Rothenberg and Joris’ Poems for the New Millennium I stumbled across a section of Arabic poets who published from 1956 to 1964 as the Tammuzi poets, taking their name from the ancient Mesopotamian god of seasonal decay and rebirth. These poets were born in many places in the Middle East, including Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Iraq and their poetry is a nod to classical Arabic forms, yet informed by the spirit of inquiry brought about by exile, post-colonialism and avant-garde movements elsewhere.
Chief among these poets is Adonis who was born Ali Ahmad Said in Syria in 1929 (see this interview for more). He sort of set the stage for Tammuzi poetry with a journal called Shi’r (meaning “poetry”) which published 1956-1964 in Arabic. In a later book called Poetry and Apoetical Culture Adonis wrote of the group’s poetics:
Reading is not an act of consumption; it is an act of creation. Therefore, after the problem of easiness comes the difficulty engendered by poetic investigation. The light such investigation may cast on the unknown only enlarges the unknown’s dimensions, announcing its depth and its extremity as if light were transforming itself into night. And if this light opens the horizon to the night of the world, the limits it makes poetry cross open poetry to the unlimited. As if the darkness were amplified by the very movement of the light, as if poetry knew only its own limits. The dark work that is illumined is the very thing that leads poetry toward an even darker world.
– Adonis, quote in Rothenberg and Joris, Poems For the New Millennium vol II, pp 182-83
This poetics is captured equally elegantly in a poem from the same collection by Yusuf al-Khal, Adonis’s Lebanese co-editor:
Cain the immortal
by Yusuf al-Khal
(translated by Sargon Boulus and Samuel Hazo)
by Yusuf al-Khal
(translated by Sargon Boulus and Samuel Hazo)
When you turn at the road’s
last bend
you eat the distance with your eyes
as if it were an idol raised to heaven.
You can go back,
you will wither and fall
or reach the crossroad
until some oracle is appears
like an image on the wall.
Perhaps the oracle is nothing
but the fist of god
dropped open with a sign?
No,
you are leafed with worry,
devoured by stares,.
Grumbling, you pierce the dust
with a curse
like Adam’s rib,
and wander off
into forbidden grounds
into a cleft between
two shores —
the region of your death.
Not knowing
where you belong.
Your pallbearers are carrying
no one in your coffin.
Cain cannot die.
I�m collecting more Tammuzi poetry at the Parking Lot Wiki, where I will eventually assemble another collection.
For more documentation of the devastation of Hurricane Juan in PEI, visit Steven Garrity’s blog, Acts of Volition. Here’s hoping everyone gets up and running quickly on PEI.