My father used to take me to the fourth floor of our old house,
And there the image is split into two.
To my left, the palm trees sway with their green feathers,
To my right, the blueness of the sea spreads out, bright blue and sparkling in my little eyes, with exciting images of doves spreading their white wings, fishermen’s nets, and mermaids.
In order to complete the mystical image in my imagination about the sea world, with its pearls, fish, and fairies, with its ships, fishermen, and divers, I began to question my father about Bahrain. He pointed with his hand shining under the sun … “it’s right there.”
He added, while carrying me on his shoulders:
You can see it just by following the route of the sailing ships, loaded with dates, bananas, almonds, and lemons, as they sail across the sea to Manama.
I once asked my father:
Didn’t you visit Bahrain before?
He answered: Yes, I visited it once to receive medical treatment at the American Mission Hospital.
He spent a month or more there, during which he encountered bizarre but amazing images – in comparison to his social context. He found people wearing ‘global’ fashion in a way unfamiliar to him, and speaking in different tongues, borrowing words from Hindi, Persian, and English – to the extent of almost affecting the Arabic integrity of its people.
The roads there are clean, the markets are organized, and the faces are full of vitality and boldness. Most people are educated, have hobbies and sports, they read, play, ride donkeys and bikes (the devil’s horse), and drive cars!
They are serious when they need to be serious and funny when it’s time to be funny.
Day after day, year after year, the name “Bahrain” occupied my mind and filled my thoughts, as I listened to stories about it, at home, in markets, and in cafés. This is until a new factor emerged, with a decisive impact on building the realistic image and dismantling the mystical imagination.
It manifested in the voice coming out of the radio, carrying with it the elegance of Ibrahim Kanoo’s performance, Ibrahim Al-Arrayed’s poetry, Muhammad Jaber Al-Ansari’s hadiths, and Hassan Jawad Al-Jishi’s strong opinions.
Bahrain is on the verge of national independence.
Right then and there, I decided to penetrate this imaginary world, when I was just over seventeen years old. I boarded a ship from the port of Khobar, in the middle of the day, and spent four hours among chicken coops and date boxes with a group of travelers including elderly farmers from Qatif and young Aramco workers. These people were traveling to Bahrain for business, or to spend their summer or weekend, amidst their relatives or friends on this magical wondrous island.
However, this first trip was not as romantic as I thought it’d be!
When we arrived at the port of Manama, the small sailing boats did not take us to “Al-Fardha” as they did a century ago to Amin Al-Rihani, the poet, writer, and traveler. I did not find those shining stars reflected on the surface of the sea, as he described in his book Muluk-ul ‘Arab (Kings of the Arabs), nor did I see the donkeys that filled the roads and markets.
I found myself in Qatif!
The fish market in Manama is the same fish market in Shari’a, the farmers of Jidhafs are the farmers of Al-Qudaih, the palm trees of Sitra are the palm trees of Umm Al-Hamam, Ain Adhari is Ain Darush, the workers of Muharraq are the workers of Dammam, and Sheikh Abdullah Street is the Sakka market.
So, what caught my eye?
This was in the summer of 1971.
It was Awal Cinema, Al-Orouba Club, the libraries, the authors, and the overflowing vitality and creativity of Alawi Al-Hashimi, Ali Abdullah Khalifa, Qasim Haddad, Mohammed Abdul-Malik, and Mohammed Al-Majed.
These were the poets and authors of the new era, introducing a modernist realistic spin, raised by the generation of Hassan Jawad Al-Jishi, Muhammad Jaber Al-Ansari, Abdullah ibn Sheikh Jaafar Al-Qudaihi, Ghazi Al-Gosaibi, and Abdul-Rahman Rafi’ … while Ibrahim Al-Arrayed was once again occupying his romantic and impressionistic position alone in the field of poetry, drama, and criticism.
This is how I found him as I visited him every day in his friend’s shop on Sheikh Abdullah Street, enclosed by a legendary aura.
Why not!
He was born in India to Bahraini parents. He lost his mother as an infant, before he could pronounce a word of Arabic. He was raised by an Indian maid, while his father, a pearl merchant, was busy selling the expensive natural pearls of the Arabian Gulf, so that they could be hung on the chests of the wives of Maharajahs and the princesses of Europe before the recession.
This went on until Ibrahim Al-Arrayed settled down as a teacher in one of Bahrain’s private schools, at the age of twenty, reuniting with the Arabic language. He published his first poetry collection al-Dhikrá (The Memory) in the Hijri year 1350, i.e., the beginning of the 1930s. His poems reflected the diversity of his cultural and linguistic upbringing, inspired by the romanticism of Bahraini and British poets, the legends of Indians, the quatrains of Persians, and the majesty of Arabs, combining these influences in his poetry that mixes between cosmic contemplation, the aesthetic sense, and linguistic expression.
Was Ibrahim Al-Arrayed unique among the Arab romantics?
I truly believe so.
Because his life involved the suffering of a true romantic, seeking to escape the burden of the painful reality of his childhood, and the psychological, social, and cultural alienation of his youth. Through self-reflection, he was able to shift swiftly from the Gregorian to the Hijri calendar. This is in addition to possessing an encyclopedic culture that ranges from ancient heritage to contemporary modernism, as he dedicates time and effort to study poetry critically, aesthetically, and stylistically, which was evident in his book al-Asālīb al-shiʻrīyah (Poetic Stylistics) and his remarkable study of Al-Mutanabbi’s works. With his contemplative poems and critical studies, he transcended the context of his traditional cultural society, approaching the poetic theater – by the mid-1930s – with historical elements in his collection Wā-Muʻtaṣamāh (O’ al-Mu’tasim) and patriotism after the first Arab catastrophe ‘The Nakba’ near the end of the 1940s in his collection Arḍ al-shuhadāʼ (The Land of the Martyrs).
On this auspicious trip to Bahrain, I still remember going – one evening – to Al-Orouba Club to meet Hassan Jawad Al-Jishi – the literary nationalist figure corresponding to Ibrahim Al-Arrayed – who had just returned from his political exile. He was meeting with Al-Arrayed and some other friends to converse and play billiards. Al-Jishi sensed in me passion towards the new era of literature and poetry, he took my hand and guided me through the alleys of Manama to the Al-Aleiwat Library, to choose from its shelves two books: Systematic Criticism of the Arabs by Dr. Muhammad Mandour and Shiʻrinā al-ḥadīth ilá ayn (Where is Our Modern Poetry Heading) by the avant-garde Egyptian critic Ghali Shukri. As well as the poetry collections of Al-Sayyab, Al-Bayati, Buland Al-Haidari, Salah Abdel-Sabour, and Ahmed Abdel-Muti Hijazi.
These books are what led me, three years later, when I was about to start my university education, to travel to Cairo in the summer of 1974 to meet Tawfiq al-Hakim, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef Idris, Abdul Rahman al-Sharqawi, Salah Abdel-Sabour, and Amal Dunqul.
***
After the defeat of 1967, no Arab poet achieved true patriotism – outside the poets of Palestinian resistance – as much as the Egyptian poet Amal Dunqul.
He represented a new poetic voice, characterized by simplicity and poetic prophecy that penetrates the tense nerves of the Arab world. Before the catastrophe occurred, Amal embodied the spirit of Zarqa al-Yamamah, known in Arabic mythology for keen eyesight, enabling her to spot the lurking enemy, on his way with his army to invade them. Amal tries to alert the political authority in his country to prepare to fight the battle by force of arms, not by broadcasting radio news (as the broadcaster Ahmed Said did). However, he remained silent, in order to maintain his safety … The Egyptian Antarah was told “Silence!”
So, he said:
And I silenced,
blinded and followed the castrated
Enslaved by Aabs,
guarding the herds
shearing the wool
fending the camels
Sleeping in the sheds of obliviousness
My food is a piece of bread, water and a few musty fruits
And here am I,
at the time of the fight;
when the armoured, the snipers and knights all fled
I, who never tasted lamb;
I, who is helpless and hopeless;
I, who is banned from youngster parties,
am invited to death,
and never was I invited to the festival.
With this ancient rebellious image, with a captivating sorrowful tone, about moralism, heroism, and chivalry, Amal Dunqul began to question the silence that had stifled him along with his society, examining the slowness of camels (are they carrying corpses or loads of iron?), wondering as his grandfather, the pre-Islamic poet, wondered (why are the camels moving so slowly?)
Zarqa al-Yamamah is now alone, blind to the approaching enemy!
After heated discussions in the famous Café Riche, at Talaat Harb Street, Amal Dunqul and I agreed to conduct a press interview for Al-Riyadh newspaper. However, he stipulated that after completing this difficult task, I would pay for his dinner [a plate of Kebab] and have him spend the night in my apartment on Imad al-Din Street. During these nights, Amal would accept my requests to recite his poems – when he was in the mood:
Every morning,
I turn on the fountain in exhaustion,
bathe in its clear water,
suddenly, the water hits my hand, red with blood!
and when
I sit down to eat … forced,
I see in the dishes,
skulls …
skulls …
with gaping mouths and eyes.
What he anticipated had happened: the shameful defeat of Egypt and Arabs before Israel.
On another summer evening in Cairo, Amal began reciting his poem The Book of Exodus before the events of October 1973, with melancholy and a hoarse voice due to the passive smoking (of Cleopatra Cigarettes), engulfed by the choking air polluted with the tense natural and political atmosphere, in the years of neither war nor peace. He found himself among the crowds in Tahrir Square, around the Unknown Soldier Monument, chanting:
When you descend on your kinsfolk, do not greet them first,
For they are carving up your children on platters,
Having set fire to your nest,
Your hay,
And your crop,
And tomorrow they will slaughter you,
In search for the treasure in your gizzard.
Little by little, Amal’s angry voice grows louder, addressing his beloved – is it Cairo? – in the fifth chapter of his poem:
Remember me,
For the headlines have tainted me in the treacherous newspapers.
They have tainted me for I have been colorless since the defeat.
(But for the color of loss.
I used to read my fortune on sheets of sand then.
Sand is scarce now, like a foreign currency,
Laid down beneath the feet of the Defense Army.)
So, remember me, as you would a smuggler, a romantic singer,
The general’s cap, or New Year’s decorations.
After uttering the words weighing on his chest, he took a pen and a piece of paper, and – in a childlike manner – he drew for me the shape of the famous Tahrir Square monument – which had been removed at the time – it looked like a stone cake, and his poem was a song for those who had gathered around it.
***
I picked up the poetry collection The Arabesque of the Daughter of Chalabi from one of the shelves of my library and found a dedication, from Ghailan Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab, signed with overwhelming emotions and dated September 23rd, 1979.
That night I was in Al-Sayyab’s house in Basra, in the village of Jaykur, his birthplace, after reading Alaguenan. I met farmers from his family and neighbors, his son-in-law Fuad Abdul Jalil, and his daughters Ghaida and Alaa from his wife Iqbal.
Before that, I discovered through reading Modern History of the Arab Countries by the great Russian Arabist Lutsky that the Al-Sayyab family had a feudal past – although not in Marxist terms – and they owned agricultural lands.
Is this why Al-Sayyab regains historical awareness through his collection Alaguenan? His family house in Jaykur had a spacious courtyard and a large built area. It seemed to be crumbling with the ruins of a bygone glory. Arab poets, Baghdad’s visitors, stood by it, just as the poets of pre-Islamic times used to stand by their ruins, contemplating ‘Shabak Wafiqa,’ one of the poet’s sources of inspiration. And how inspiring it was!
A flirtatious collection of poetry,
Spreading in the boudoirs of virgins.
My hot breath wanders,
Upon its pages, with love – and hope,
As their breaths meet mine.
Kisses flutter about its sides.
A flirtatious collection of poetry,
Spreading in the boudoirs of virgins.
The Iraqi poet Lamia Abbas Amara, when I met her in Abu Dhabi in 1996, did not hesitate to talk to me about Al-Sayyab’s fascination with her ravishing beauty, while they attended university together at Dar Al-Mualimin Alalia Institute in Baghdad in the mid-forties of the last century.
Because it is in the nature of a romantic poet to exaggerate and indulge in imagination, I was horrified by the sight of the Jaykur River! What I saw was similar to a mere brook in the villages of Qatif. However, the greenery of Jaykur represented an essential element in the opening of Al-Sayyab’s famous poem Rain Song. He says, speaking of the eyes of his beloved:
Your eyes are two palm tree forests in early light,
Or two balconies from which the moonlight recedes.
When they smile, your eyes, the vines put forth their leaves,
And lights dance … like moons in a river,
Rippled by the blade of an oar at break of day,
As if stars were throbbing in the depths of them.
[…]
The song of rain,
Drop … drop … drop.
I discussed this matter with his friend, the critic, translator, and poet, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, in his elegant villa in Al-Mansour neighborhood, as well as with the comparative literature critic Dr. Abdul Wahed Lulua. They both put their critical fingers on the sources of imagery, in Al-Sayyab’s Shakespearean intertextuality.
During my visit to Al-Sayyab’s house, I found translations of some of his poems, in his handwriting, on some yellowing papers.
***
Before the defeat of 1967, roaming the streets of Beirut was the group behind the magazine Shi’r (Poetry), led by Youssef Al-Khal and Adonis – I keep many of the magazine’s issues in my library. These two poets were influenced by two poetic schools: Walt Whitman’s American prose school embodied in his collection Leaves of Grass, translated by Youssef Al-Khal, and the Saint John-Perse French school, free from meter and full of imagery.
Between these two schools, Adonis – in particular – played with words, evident in the texts published in Shi’r. These texts tried to challenge those published in the Al Adab magazine, which had a blatant nationalist orientation, which later became implicit following the existential conflicts in France. I also discussed these dimensions with its founder, publisher, and novelist, Suhail Idris.
Shi’r spoke to our souls in the early sixties, loaded with the dreams of the Syrian Social National Party youth, towards a new geographical, political, and cultural space embodied in Cyprus, the star of the Fertile Crescent! Why did they not choose Athens? The home of Homer’s Iliad and Greek philosophers?
I asked Adonis this question when he and his wife, the critic Khalida Saeed, surprised me with a visit while I was staying at the Meridien Hotel in Damascus, after I had fled Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad in September 1979. I had just finished an intense conversation with Muhammad Al-Maghout, one of the greatest poets who wrote with great sentimental existentialism, without relying on third parties to provide philosophical knowledge – as the Egyptian intellectual Dr. Gamal Hamdan put it – and without reproducing translated poetic imagery!
On these sidewalks as warm as my mother,
I put my hand up and swear by the long winter nights,
I will tear my country’s flag from its pole,
To sew cuffs and buttons on its fabric,
And wear it like a shirt.
I never knew,
In which autumn will my rags fall.
With the first storm that blows over my country,
I’m going up a hill,
A historical hill,
And will thrust my sword into Tariq’s fist,
And my head into Al-Khansa’s chest,
And my pen into Al-Mutanabbi’s fingertips,
And sit naked like a tree in winter,
So that I know when,
New eyelashes and tears will sprout for us,
Will it be in spring?
Before this visit, I had a conversation with Adonis’s professor and mentor of Syrians, the nationalist intellectual Antun Maqdisi. He was the one who taught the poets and critics of modernity about ancient poets. Adonis came to visit me at the hotel, and I was pleased to welcome him humbly despite his overwhelming fame. He had recently published the Anthology of Arabic Poetry trilogy and composed his remarkable thesis The Static and the Dynamic, in which he reads the Arab heritage with critical brilliance, despite being influenced by the approach of his French mentor Jacques Burke.
Adonis did not stop writing with a mixture of heritage and modernity. He continued composing his poetry for his collection Al-Kitab (The Book), in an attempt to introduce a new form of expression. I personally believe that he was only able to reach the highest points when he discussed social issues in his long book A Grave for New York, following in the footsteps of Lorca, the Andalusian poet, and influenced by images of his Granada heritage, avenging Franco’s fascism and the traditions of Spanish poetry. This is also true for his poetry collection This Is My Name and in his poem Time, about the tragedies of the civil war in Lebanon. Many of his followers in the Arab world, from Muhammad Ibn Ness in Morocco to Qasim Haddad in Bahrain, settled on a poetic form with a mixture of Sufism, embodied in the Sufi book Mawāqif al-Niffari (The Book of Standings) and the music of St. John-Perse’s imagery. This mixture is evident in the Iraqi poet Abdul Qadir al-Janabi’s work, since he fled in the early seventies from Baghdad to London, to eventually settle in Paris, issuing the magazines Le Desir Libertaire and Faradis, and the Anthology of the World’s Prose Poets, which covered from Baudelaire to the very last poet born yesterday! As if he were the exclusive agent for marketing the Arab’s poetry scene.
I remember the winter nights that I spent with Abdel Qader Al-Janabi and the Lebanese poet Onsi Al-Hajj at the Fouquets Café in the Champs-Élysées, Paris, in 1977.
Al-Janabi amazed me with his existential rebellion and artistic madness, despite mastering the secrets of traditional poetry, emphasizing in his theories that the musical element is a decisive part in the formulation of the prose poem, and that its construction does not differ from the Labyrinth of Greek mythology, consisting of walls that alternate and intersect. As he says, you will surely get lost in the maze of poetic prose!
He had a deeper cultural background than Muhammad Al-Maghout (who was more talented than him). As for Onsi Al-Hajj, in his collections Lan, The Chopped Head, and The Messenger with Her Long Hair to the Springs, he was a dazzling and dazzled evangelical, a prince of lovers, and I found Al-Janabi to be the king of the arrogant, rejecting any idea, be it spiritual, social, or inherited!
Here I wonder:
Where are the poets of the prose poem, who concealed the secrets of creative texts, brilliant in their images and linguistic composition (The Holy Qur’an, Nahj al-Balagha, and the Sufi masters Ibn Arabi, Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, al-Suhrawardi, and al- Niffari), whose prose texts overflowed with excruciating spiritual experiences and deep existential contemplation, filling the reader’s senses with unmetered poetry? They were unprecedented and nothing will come after them!
Adonis made this essential observation in his book Poetry and Sufism, but it was too late! Arab arenas were filled with prose poets – both viewing it as easy and lenient – flashing their imagery, mostly derived from translated texts, many of them duplicated like the layers of an onion! But lacking in color, taste, or smell. Each of them claims to be a pioneer, comparable to prominent figure (e.g., Al-Rihani, Gibran, Lebanon’s Albert Adib, Saudi’s Nasser Buhimed, and Egypt’s Bishr Fares with his French education and culture, a poet of symbolic prose poetry, knowledgeable of Arabian poetry, and a master of intertextuality with Sufi texts). All of these claims are thrown around amidst the silence of critics – and even their compliments … I am afraid to say that some of them are complicit!
I conclude with Mahmoud Darwish, who reflects a mixture of the romanticism of Egypt’s Ali Mahmoud Taha, Abdul Rahim Mahmoud, and Palestine’s Ibrahim Touqan, the aesthetics of Nizar Qabbani, and Adonisian inspiration. His poetry continued to evolve and transform from Sirhan Drinks His Coffee in the Cafeteria in the early seventies, to his very last poems, with his captivating delivery as a popular poet despite the specificity of his aesthetic.
Mahmoud Darwish is the one who, along with Fadwa, Touqan, and Izz al-Din al-Manasra, submitted an appeal to UNESCO in 1999 to make March 21st a day for international poetry, with the aim of promoting poetry reading, publishing, and teaching, at a time when poetry was faced with an overwhelming question that had previously been discussed by his friend the poet Dr. Ghazi Al-Gosaibi in his famous lecture at the Taif Club in 1978: “Does poetry have a place in the 20th century?” This question was asked at the beginning of the third wave with the explosive information technology revolution, the spread of the culture of consumption, the homogeneity of literary forms, and the global advancement of the novel at the expense of poetry, despite the attempt by the Nobel Prize committee to salvage this by giving a prize to the American poet Louise Glück.
In this context, the Bahraini poet Qasim Haddad was forced to close the Jehat website in 2018, which he launched on the Internet in 1996 to be a “global room” attracting the most important Arab and international poetic voices in the largest electronic poetry encyclopedia. This closure became an elegy for poetry itself and its retreat – according to the comments made by a number of Arab poets and critics – to the back rows, while the novel rises in the literary space without critical judgement of its artistic origins.
Is it because emerging poets who have multiplied on the Internet have overthrown poetic traditions until poetry became unrecognizable, as the Saudi poet and academic Dr. Ashjan Hindi expresses in her book Manifestations of the Digital Poem in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia? Especially after the populists of criticism in the Arab world declared the death of textual criticism, clinging to the locomotive of European and American cultural criticism, whose context was shaped according to objective conditions and knowledge accumulation, which led to the death of the author, or rather to the death of literature as a whole, in industrial societies. That prompted the French Yugoslav critic Tzvetan Todorov to launch his cry Literature in Danger to protest post-modernist critical theories, after they stripped poetry of its meaning, asking:
Isn’t it in our best interest to adopt a better understanding of the human condition, after the dominance of the trinity (formalism, nihilism, and selfishness) in France based on rejection and reversing reality? Alluding to the student movement of 1968 in Paris, and the impression of modernist and post-modernism critical procedures, that the connection between art and the world is nothing but an illusion! He called – that is, Todorov – to free literature from the corset it which it is trapped, made of formal mazes, nihilistic complaints, and self-centeredness, and to open it to the broad debate of ideas or meanings that are centered around humanity as a whole.
The way that some Arab critics, especially in the Arab Maghreb, and their followers in the Arab Mashriq, imitate and keep up with what some universities and newspapers in Europe and America produce, contributed to the isolation of poetry in the Arab world, after cultural critics gave room for tampering with what remained of poetry to the hordes of invaders. This occurred after many years during which poetry was crowned and cherished by critics from Aristotle to Qudamah bin Jaafar Al-Abbasi, and Ibn Hazim Al-Qarthajni, then to my teacher, the literary intellectual Dr. Shukri Muhammad Ayyad Al-Masry, as well as Abdel-Fattah Kalito Al-Maghribi, the creative critic preoccupied with the Arab heritage, after he had mastered the new French critical traditions. In his calm criticism, you cannot see conclusive worldly critical judgments, fueled by stubbornness resulting from self-centeredness, and an obsession with fame and stardom fueled by narcissism.
T1679
