Oh my goodness…the folks at BlogsCanada have included Parking Lot in their list of top Canadian blogs for this month. I am truly flattered.
Go visit the list for some great Canadian reading.
Thanks to judges Jay Currie and Jim Elves, and all of you anonymous folks who nominated this humble scratch pad.
Nelly’s Poem by Etel Adnan
From the Lebanese Women’s Association site
I conclude this survey of Tammuzi poets with some lines from the Lebanese poet and painter Etel Adnan from her long poem “The Spring Flowers Own“:
I see heading East the pearl-colored
march of clouds
roses lend their blood to young
soldiers drowning in the Tigris
flowers triumph
over the human race
their tragedies are
short-lived
their agonies exude incense and myrrh
at the entrance of
temples they are the
ones to be eternally eternal.
march of clouds
roses lend their blood to young
soldiers drowning in the Tigris
flowers triumph
over the human race
their tragedies are
short-lived
their agonies exude incense and myrrh
at the entrance of
temples they are the
ones to be eternally eternal.
I envy their youth
their lucency their
quiddity
we are the shadows and they,
our hosts.
Adnan originally started writing in French and now writes in English. Her first poems were published in Shi’r as translations from French to Arabic in 1964, just as the Tammuzi poets were moving on and Shi’r was wrapping up. In many ways, Adnan embodies the dispersed identity and complex and sophisticated voice that the Tammuzi poets seemed to me to represent. She has essentially been an exile all her life which she said in an interview, has affected her thusly:
I was always an Arab, and have been like that not even as a Lebanese or a Syrian. I always felt like an Arab. It makes no difference to me. For example, I went to Morocco in 1966 and when I entered to the hotel and heard Umm Kalthum in the lobby, I said to myself: here is the Arab World. When it comes into expression, of course there is a problem because I went to French schools and my mother being Greek we did not speak Arabic at home. Children learn language at school and at home. I didn’t speak Arabic neither at home nor in the school. I grew up knowing French. I also speak Greek and Turkish, because my mother was Greek from Turkey and my father was an Arab in the Ottoman Empire. So, I knew these two languages, but I never learned them in school. So I don’t have a problem in identity like saying who am I? Because I feel I am an Arab, I am a woman, and I am a person in the 20th Century, and hopefully the 21st Century. But, when I write of course I have that question. For whom am I writing? For Americans I am an Arab. Arabs say why don’t you write in Arabic? So, we have to solve that problem through translations, and also I think the notion of identity should change. Identity is not a race. It is a culture and it is a commitment. I am committed to the Arab World and I am an Arab.
I have collected 19 poems and two full books of poetry from the Tammuzi poets over the past few days. You can view them at the Parking Lot Wiki: Tammuzi poets collection, where you can feel free to add more poems or poets if you find them. It’s a fascinating collection of poetry in English, giving a slice of Arab culture that is lost in the current cloudiness about good guys and bad guys. Enjoy!
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.