“Dear Sir,
Excuse my presenting the following matter for your consideration. Today at 11 o’clock in the morning, one Ali Chemmak, a worker at the warehouse where I am employed, became very insolent toward me, and I allowed myself to strike him, without anger.
The warehouse coolies and various Arab witnesses then seized me, in order to allow him to strike back, and the said Ali Chemmak hit me in the face, tore my clothes, and finally grabbed a stick and threatened me with it. Some people present intervened, and Ali left, to go shortly thereafter to lodge a complaint against me at the police station for assault and battery, and brought several witnesses to state that I threatened to stab him, etc., etc., and other lies designed to prejudice the case in his favor, and to arouse the hatred of the natives against me.”
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This letter, written by the renowned French poet Rimbaud on January 28, 1883, was addressed to M. de Gaspary, the French Vice-Consul in Aden. It offers a glimpse into Rimbaud’s later life, which was a departure from poetry, and a vagabond-like life filled with arts and madness as he accompanied Walibah Ibn Al Habbab the Frenchman, otherwise known as his fellow poet Verlaine:
I saw us two normal boys roaming freely in the paradise of sadness.
We were lost, nourished by Palerma wine and road bread,
And I am in a hurry to find the place and the style.
Thus, the big and precious soul departed, as Verlaine puts it in his first reaction to the Rimbaud phenomenon, who began to dreamily walk and write poems on his way, leaving his village in the south of France, Charleville, arm in arm traveling with his friend to the old countries of Europe!
However, tragedy soon struck in Brussels when Rimbaud made the decision to return to Paris. After months of living a vagabond-like life filled with poetry and the desire for self-destruction, Verlaine was determined to keep him by his side. The toxic nature of their relationship combined with the alcohol from Charleville, pushed the jealousy to its limit, between the insistence of the two friends desire to leave and desire to stay, to separate and to unite, between Rimbaud’s struggle to break free from Verlaine’s love, and Verlaine’s attempt to compensate for the love he lost in his wife after his affection to this French man., the toxic relationship, then, reaches the limits of jealousy. This serves as a reminder of the positive aspect of Dik al-Jinn’s jealousy over Ward.
Verlaine is determined to slaughter his mate just like what the green-eyed Dik al-Jinn did to Ward, whose grave he watered with the blood of his love.
Rimbaud describes the moments of fatal love in the arrest book recorded by the Brussels police:
“Verlaine still wished to prevent me from carrying into execution my plan of going back to Paris. I remained resolute. I even asked his mother for some money for the journey. Then, at a given moment, he locked the door of the room which gave onto the staircase and sat on a chair against this door. I was standing, leaning my back to the wall facing it. He then said to me: “this is for you, then, since you are going!” or words to this effect; he aimed his pistol at me and fired a shot at me which hit me in the left wrist; the first shot was almost immediately followed by a second, but this time the weapon was no longer pointing at me, but down at the floor”.
At these moments, many scholars who studied Rimbaud’s life and analyzed his poetry search for the dividing line between Rimbaud’s poetic life, starting with when he was seven years old, when he used to pick lice from his hair and throw them on the priests, finishing with him on the threshold of twenty as a dazzling poet who shook French poetry violently, and going over his unknown life in between, which was completely separate from his poetic life.
After this incident, Rimbaud returns to the family farm in Maroush. As soon as he catches his breath after the chaos of the demonic journey, he starts weeping deeply and afterwards enters a state of silence, which leads him to go to the granary in which he locks himself in for days, after which he writes his artistic will, declaring a break from poetry, society and the world.
He wrote A Season in Hell after Poetry and Illuminations to record in the history of French poetry a dangerous shift in poetic writing, which was later known in the works of the rebels among the creative people of Europe and supporters of the values of freedom and modernity.
After writing A Season in Hell, Rimbaud left France and abandoned poetry to travel to Aden, using the port of Alexandria. Unfortunately, his money and documents were stolen during the journey. In order to continue his travels, he resorted to deception and managed to travel across the Red Sea, stopping in the port of Jeddah, where he was punished with imprisonment for months by customs officials. Despite these challenges, he continued his journey to the coast of the Horn of Africa, driven by his dream of finding gold, all while he wrote poetry that blurred the lines between imagination and wakefulness, dream and reality, madness and travel.
He repents, just like Abu Nawas repented, atoning for his life, his sins, his poetry, his vile behavior, and his insanity when he went to hajj. He even wrote poems full of asceticism and repentance. Didn’t Al-Sayyab do the same thing after a life full of poetry, auspicious love, and a tragic struggle with illness? In the end, he repents, speaks to Job, and thanks God despite the affliction.
The poetic phenomenon of Rimbaud was an expression of violent transformations that prevailed in Europe after the historical development reached by its societies.
The anxiety and departure from the norm we might find in Rimbaud’s poetry and life was nothing but a response to the concerns of his society, which was summarized in his home and his family, exchanging his difficult life with a happy life. However, this was a difficult demand due to the fact that the capitalists of France were dominating the wealth and enjoying all the delights. Thus, the culture of enlightenment – at that time – was glamorous, while poetry was liberal and resonant.
This is how Parnassism expressed the atmosphere of bourgeois Paris in their literary gatherings, transcending reality.
This was due to the luxurious phenomenon of colonialism and its political and economic activities, which extended in the East and spread in the West.
From here comes Rimbaud’s tumultuous life that is characterized by all that is contrary, an ill-mannered poetic expression against all the systematic conventions in life and poetry. Therefore, before declaring a break from poetry and France, he was determined to declare a break with these prevailing conventions, which were fed by the proceeds of money looted from the colonies of the East, just as the Abu Nawas phenomenon was fueled the flow of money in the Abbasid era from the proceeds of the conquests.
A Season in Hell is a summary of Rimbaud’s short poetic life, later it has became a manifesto of poets against everything that is traditional, cowardly, and static, whether related to the social norm or the poetic style.
In his masterpiece Venus, Rimbaud insists to seek the paradox between Venus in Greek myth as an absolute symbol of beauty and what he imagines in her, as she turned into a hideous woman with all the ugliness, sores, and cruelty in his life, experience, and society. Here, he is mocking, as Dr. Abd Al Ghaffar Makkawi says in his book Thawrat Alshier Alhadit (The Revolution of Modern Poetry), the Parnassism poets who used to embellish their poetry with myths that go in harmony with the lights of the Parisian gatherings, which Rimbaud hated and rebelled against, attacking them madly with his poetry.
Accordingly, Rimbaud continues his mockery attacking these poets whose only concern was to beautify and embellish their poetry with flowers and beautiful symbols of nature! For this reason, he wrote his poem What One Says To The Poet On The Subject Of Flowers? In the era of capitalist greed, revolutions, the Hundred Years Wars, the plunder of the Arabs and African wealth. In an era where the colonial countries of Europe, led by Napoleonic France, were making their way to a military presence in Egypt, the Levant, Morocco, southern Arabia, and the coast of the Horn of Africa through the opposition and competition with Britain on global trade routes, stealing the wealth of the East, and dominating its picturesque magic!
Rimbaud, with his extraordinary novel poetry, was establishing new artistic values that underpinned the aesthetics of modernity in the new world. However, his sin was an indignant expression of Christian sin, where he was destroying his senses in order to possess the power to inspire poetic future, and it was the reason that he associated the poetic action to Bohemian-Satanic illusions and practices, where the human action is absent from reality.
For him, beauty transforms from an absolute value hanging freely in the air, far from the gravity of the earth and man, into a beauty with a bitter taste. This is what he feels when “one evening sat Beauty on his knees and armed himself against Justice”.
Fake justice, the justice of Europe’s colonial capitalists, who painted a fixed, empty, and enclosed pattern of life, arts and literature, which made him experience existential alienation while frequently visiting Parisian cafés.
Rimbaud was honest with himself, his almost miserable social situation was disintegrating as a result of his parents’ divorce, a social disintegration that was an extension of the European collapse occurring in the institutions of the medieval years, aspiring to embrace the new world after the English industrial revolution and the political, social and cultural revolution of French. Consequently, this led Rimbaud to rebel against his quiet routine life in a village in Charleville.
However, this glow fades and disappears suddenly, as he returns from Brussels after his conflict with his teacher and lover, Verlaine.
After writing A Season in Hell, he decides to declare a break with himself as a poet and to leave Europe, saying in 1873, “sea air will scorch my lungs: lost climates will tan me.” Then, he determines – as Colin Wilson says in his book Religion and the Rebel – to lose any textual connection to Rimbaud’s poetic life, other than what everyone knows about his adventurous journey to Africa, trading slaves and gold, and to begin his other life there.
The poet within him died, and the European, whose mind was filled with the dreams of a colonizer, dominated. This image reveals to us the abundance of Rimbaud’s prose heritage, but not through the letter sent to the French Deputy Consul in Aden, in which he explained his aggression against the Arab Ali Chemmak. The Lebanese poet and critic Charbel Dagher attempted to highlight this heritage – as a counter to Colin Wilson’s design – by writing a book that contains Rimbaud’s letters entitled al-ʻĀbir bnʻāl min Rīḥ (Passing by with Slippers of the Wind). Al-Karmel magazine, at the time, published a chapter dedicated to Rimbaud’s letters, with a critical, artistic-historical introduction. That letter, which was referred to earlier, was one of the many windows to Rimbaud’s mysterious and unknown other life until his death from cancer in 1891. “Women care for those fierce invalids returning from hot countries,” as he wrote in his poem A Season in Hell.
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Rimbaud eventually came to the realization that he would never achieve success in contemporary literature. He was certain that literature, which he had perfected up until that point, was unable to effectively convey his stubborn and rebellious ideas. With the supplication of an anxious human being and a long struggle to manipulate language and tones by distorting the chemistry of words and by applying the profound, vast, maddening disturbance of all the senses, he found inspiration and creativity in his writing. Afterward, he immersed himself in the chaotic and bustling world of cities, stations, and ports.
This is how Khalil Shata and Bashir Al-Nahhas express it in their book Rāmbū Rāʼid al-shiʻr al-ḥadīth (Rimbaud, Pioneer of Modern Poetry), since Rimbaud set off sailing from the port of Marseille, to work in the rock quarries in Cyprus. He was unrelenting until he approached the East, to realize his poetic vision, through tangible touch and directness, which led him in his famous poem The Drunken Boat to unknown places in the Eastern world that he had never seen before, such as the Arabian Peninsula and Africa. He is now in Alexandria, and later will go searching for a job in all the ports of the Red Sea, in Jeddah, Suakim, Massawa, and Hodeidah. I came here – to Aden – after I tried in vain what to do in Abyssinia.
He is now in Aden 1880, where he found it dreadful “it is a horrible rock without a single blade of grass or a drop of fresh water: we drink distilled sea water”, where nothing can be seen or touched except for the distilled rock. The sides distilled prevent air from entering, and we are roasting at the bottom of this hole as if we were in a Kelsey pot.
During this period, the Western colonial powers were attacking the Arab and African regions, their attention was focused on the Horn of Africa, where the West rushed to celebrate its commercial project the Suez Canal, which saved it a lot of effort and money. The Canal linked the colonial kingdoms in India, Africa, and Asia, to its political centers and economic houses in Europe.
Since Rimbaud is a descendant of those forces which he rebelled against when he reached eighteen, why would he not be an extension of them after he burned all his papers, poetry, burning at the same time his revolution against the colonial policy of his country after that?
In some of his letters in Aden, he criticizes France and Britain, but from a standpoint of self-criticism which ultimately serves their colonial interests in the Eastern world.
However, Rimbaud did not settle in Aden, not only because he wished to obtain huge wealth, but rather his anxious psychological mood was the reason for his movement and wandering in a number of cities of the Red Sea and its coasts, between Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. At some time, he was trading in Tadjoura (Djibouti), other times in Harar, then in Abyssinia, with coffee, leather, gum, ostrich feathers, and cloves, exchanging them with the European cotton products he has.
When he delved into the African desert, he thought about establishing a project to hunt elephants, as he explains in his letter to Devism. In another letter, Rimbaud’s ambition to earn money drops until he seeks clarification from the French consul in Beirut on how to purchase four stallions of donkeys, with full strength, from the best asset used to produce the strongest and largest riding mules in Syria? What could be its price and the shipping cost by sea transportation and taking custody of it while shipped from Beirut to Aden! Rimbaud explains that this is to deliver an order for King Felic in Shawa (Abyssinia) where there are no non-purebred donkeys, and where there is a desire to improve the breed of mules.
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The letters hint to us that Rimbaud was not the luckiest when he fell into the land of reality, trading, working, and searching for money, after he had been the subject of ridicule for his mother. This woman, the widow who was extremely keen on preserving money to face the difficulties in life with, exaggerated to the point of mocking any moral act. She faulted her son’s efforts in raising his poetic spirit, for his vague and financially useless poetry!
Therefore, he carries this reproach wherever he goes, frequenting between jobs in order to accumulate enormous wealth, with which he can resist any reproachment, whether it comes from his mother or from society.
Rimbaud has rejected the family’s calls to return to France because he believes that he has become unknown and insignificant in society, declaring the social and value-based transformation that has come to be determined there by material utilitarian standards. Consequently, he is completely determined to break with his poetic past, by fleeing to the African desert, riding camels or mounting a horseback, heading to the King of Showa, who supplied him with a set of weapons.
Despite Rimbaud’s misfortune in trading and earning money, he finally became lucky about two years before his death, when Fenelik became king of Abyssinia after his revolt against the Negus.
Rimbaud’s business expands amazingly in Abyssinia, as a weapons dealer and a private supplier to the new majesty, filling his bags with gold that he chased since he was a poor boy eating from the garbage of the new bourgeoisie in the streets of Paris.
However, he was not as happy when he gained the gold, nor did it help him settle down as he had hoped, so that he could get married and have a boy, who he can raise him well as he had wished to be raised when he was younger and wished that he become an important and wealthy engineer!
In a brief and mysterious letter, to the Italian journalist who prepared a journalistic investigation from the Black Continent and got acquainted with Rimbaud during one of his visits to Africa, Rimbaud reveals a mysterious relationship with a woman, whom he will send away quickly. He will give her some taliras to go sailing on the boat at Rasali, to reach Obock where she can go wherever she pleases. Wasn’t he very stupid when he brought her from Showa?
Rimbaud almost married a beautiful Abyssinian girl, as some sources say, and for that he took care to teach her French etiquette, which he was revolting against, and at the same time insisting on teaching her the principles of the Christian religion. Perhaps she was the one concerned in this letter.
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As for declaring a break with his poetic past, during which he revolted against the Christian heritage, it was a revolution in which he condemned the idea of sin, screaming from the depths of his soul that he was abandoning all morality!
The sky, at that time, was not covered by clouds, but rather sparkled with the glorious light of Idolatry.
When we go beyond the sandy beaches and mountains, we will celebrate the birth of new work, new wisdom, the escape of tyrants and demons, the end of superstitions and we will first and foremost return to the birth on earth. Yes, it coincides with a real hatred towards Muslim Arabs.
Rimbaud, who used his poetry to support the patriots in the famous communist Paris Commune, looks down on simple people in Aden, like Ali Chemmak. Rather, after leaving them to Tadjoura, he starts judging them as idiot bastards. Wishing, in one of his letters, to see Aden, the filthy place that he always described using the ugliest descriptions, completely destroyed.
As for Abyssinia, it has a good atmosphere, and its people are hospitable Christians.
The journey of repentance in poetry ends for Rimbaud with a break with humans, unlike Abu Nuwas and Al-Sayyab.
In light of this, we reach a conclusion that the real reason for his disagreement with the simple Arab workers, who found in his insult to their colleague, Ali Chemmak, the opportunity to rally against him, was a symbol of colonialism.
Similarly, and in harmony with his new situation in his other life, Rimbaud starts writing political reports to the Geographical Society to introduce the colonial powers in his country to the sites of prosperity, strategies, trade, and gold, in Aden and in the Horn of Africa in which he lived and his dreams of owning gold were fulfilled.
Is this the reason the French President Emmanuel Macron refused the request from Arthur Rimbaud’s family to transfer his remains from his family’s cemetery in Charleville to the Panthéon, which contains the remains of distinguished French citizens?
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