With fourteen collections and hundreds of poems, and a poetic career spanning more than thirty-two years, specifically since the year 1411 AH/1990 AD, which is the date with which he appended the three oldest poems in his first collection, My Shadow, My Successor Among You (“ẓillī khalīfati ʿalaykum”), and with a remarkable creative imprint that enabled him to spread widely among the masses, and to win successive various literary awards in the Arab world, with all this and more, talking about Al-Suhaiyh’s authentic poetry seems to be an arduous exercise in reductionism and contentment with gestures.
However, gesture has its necessities and requirements, and from here this reading will depend on capturing the semantic fields associated with the major themes that make up the poetic fabric for Jassim Al-Suhayih, and monitoring the uniqueness of their presence: Quantitatively and qualitatively throughout his poetic experience, and through this consistent monitoring, the reading attempts to unlock the keys to the creative specificity that gave this poetic voice its own imprint and rhythm that set it apart from the rest of the poetic voices.
This reading, then, approaches Jassim Al-Suhayih’s poetry in a series of successive sections drawn from his recurring themes. The key themes explored are the mask of the body and the feminization of the world, the fire of the villages and the bed of flames, the river of confusion and the paddle of questioning, the string of lamentation sun in an Iraqi melody, the lost paradise of Abel, the shadows of the ancestors, the obsession with simplification, the allure of simplicity, the seductive allure of bows, and the temptation of resonance. These topics are detailed as follows:
- The mask of the body and the feminization of the world:
Perhaps the theme of sense and body is the primary lens through which Al-Suhayih presents his poetry to the reader. It is the most prominent and recurring element in his work, with a high density of repeated words like excitement, aspiration, pleasure, ecstasy, desire, lust, nudity, romp, instinct, virility, whim, seduction, conquest, intercourse, and deflowering – a familiar vocabulary in his poetic lexicon. In addition to the constant flow of artistic imagery, both explicit and figurative, that portrays the female form in detail, love and flirtation poems are a cornerstone of Al-Suhayih’s collection. Most of these poems consistently emphasize the connection between love and physical pleasure, suggesting that love is incomplete without quenching the thirst of the flesh. Indeed, for Al-Suhayih, poetry itself seems to find meaning through the flow of pleasure, as evidenced by his line: “Thus, I implore you, come, for the poem remains unfulfilled, until the bed is embraced.”
Within his sensual tradition, Jassim draws on a lineage of poets who celebrate pleasure, extending back to the early masters of Arabic verse like Imru’ al-Qais, Tarafa bin al-Abd, and Al-Minkhal Al-Yashkuri. This current continues through Omar bin Abi Rabi’ah, al-Ahwas, and Abu Nuwas, reaching into the modern era with figures like Saleh Jawdat, Elias Abu Shabaki, and Nizar Qabbani. This emphasis on sensuality is accompanied by a parallel theoretical current exploring the poetics of the body and the aesthetics of the senses. Here, it’s worth noting the insistence of the most prominent theorist of poetic modernity: Adonis. In more than one occasion, he challenges the traditional opposition between body and soul, echoing a long legacy of Sufi wordplay that often preferred to allude to the hidden spiritual with the visible physical. Characteristically, Adonis pushes the concept further, quoting Palamas: “The body is the dome of the soul!” Al-Suhayih reflects this merging of body and soul when he says:
In joy’s relentless light, our souls will shrink,
If bodiless we dwell, at pleasure’s brink.
Thus, for Al-Suhayih, the soul finds no life without the body’s fulfillment, and modest flirtation holds no place for the true master of love. But what of longing, the sweetness of the beloved, and distant dreams? How does this more moral emotion find form in the poet of pleasure? Here too, there’s no ambiguity: longing fails to rouse the poetic spirit within him, ringing its bells, unless he cloaks it “in the robe of instinct:”
Within me, birds of yearning take to flight,
As whimsy’s season paints the world in light.
Even when the poetic tradition draws him to some spiritual transcendence in love, he says, for example:
Amidst veils, passion and love in disguise,
I seek solace, escaping their watchful eyes.
Al-Suhayih brooks no delay, following up directly with his saying:
Though mud still holds my spirit’s trust unworn,
I sink yet deeper in the bed’s soft morn.
Al-Suhayih pushes the boundaries of celebrating the senses even further, believing you reach your most authentic self by indulging in sensual pleasure. He rejects any claims of asceticism or piety as mere pretense. The true poet, in his view, is “the one who is rooted in living beings,” the one who:
Unbound by flesh’s call, in every guise,
His love would sear him, with impassioned eyes.
A sister’s touch, a kiss that sweetly played,
A brother’s brush, a thrill that passion made.
In his desires, honesty profound,
Yet falsehood dwelled where piety was found.
Due to the poet’s profound ‘honesty’ in expression, he crafts a bitter invective towards the word most cherished by him, namely ‘metaphor.’ He believed that this frequently appearing word in his poetry – intended to emphasize and glorify its impact – could only be subjected to invective, as it assumed a foggy and deceptive portrayal, serving as a metaphorical expression of sensual desires for the beloved. This inspired the poet to compose a complete poem titled Invective Against Metaphor (“fī hijāʾ al-majāz”), where he urges his partner to embrace the present moment and call things by their true names!
Within the poet’s commitment to calling things by their true names, we find his reluctance to idealize the desires of lovers, exemplified by a humorous and sensual image he recurrently employs—the image of the lover as a bull. This comparison between the lover’s intense physical passion and the bull’s furious energy appears in three distinct poems from different collections. This repetition across his works underscores the significance and grip of this imagery on the poet. In his collection A Mystical Dance (“raqṣa ʿirfāniya”), he devotes an entire poem to exploring this parallel, with the poem’s title given one word, The Bull! In his other collection The Olympics of the Body (“ūlambiyād al-jasad”), another instance is found, where you’ll discover these two beautiful lines:
She queried, “What sign doth thy form display?” I professed: Taurus!
Within my chest, its bellow roars, a vengeful chorus!
In his collection, Behind the Singer’s Throat (“ma warāʾa ḥanjarat al-mughanni”), he says, “I confronted the ailment of time through the female.. she diverted my attention from Leo to Taurus.”
This passionate depiction permeates even the poems where the reader experiences the heaviness of grief and the sting of anguish. Consider, for instance, the poem titled The Weighty Burden of the Coffin on Its Carriers (“al-naʿshu athqala ḥāmilīh”). It is a condolence for a woman who underwent a mastectomy due to cancer. Can this situation evoke anything other than sadness and empathy for the profound loss? Al-Suhayih’s imagination, however, is ever-expansive, surpassing your expectations. He can swiftly transcend spiritual awakenings borne from moments of pain, effortlessly shifting to a topic he frequently raises: suffering and its curious intersection with raw sensuality and extended, hedonistic desire. The poem then concludes, leaving you to ponder: Was the poet offering solace or succumbing to lust?
This sensory indulgence expands until it includes nearly all experiences, both sensory and moral. It’s like a cosmic painting devoid of any sense of dullness.
The wind sang past, a distant, mournful sigh,
A gypsy’s yearning trapped within my eye.
Each flash of lightning, on the cloud it fell,
Consumed by hunger for a radiant shell.
Did you miss the presence of sky in this passionate cosmic painting? This was not lost on the poet, for it has its ample share of this appetite in other places in his poetry:
The pristine heavens, I dared not defile,
With murmurs that might pierce their virgin veil.
This lustful virility is repeated in another image of skies that evokes – perhaps unintentionally – the era of glorified odalisques:
Across the feminine expanse I roam,
A cloud adrift, in search of a new home.
Palm trees also have their rituals to receive fertility:
In hatred’s storm that tears across the plain,
The virgin palm’s hushed prayer is rent in twain.
And when the poet says, for example:
Within your form, Eve’s rhythm did reside,
Till hips, like mountains, hardened in their stride.
Here, the reader might mistake his description for that of a woman sculpted to impossible standards, but Al-Suhayih is instead painting a city of God, called Abha!
The idea also has its strong physical presence in the poet’s eyes: “I am in a state of confusion… and I seek the idea of soft breasts that will breastfeed me with certainty, not wean.” In the prose introduction to his collection Behind the Singer’s Throat (“ma warāʾa ḥanjarat al-mughanni”), you will come across such an eager description of the idea that “emerges from a hot bath in a cloud of insomnia… opens half of its pocket, and I stare at its breast that’s sitting cross-legged on the chest of the paper”! The poem is also a subject of temptation and arrogant desire, so writing poetry is nothing but a red creative night:
Night’s hush descends, a lover’s cloak so deep,
Where words find rest, in fancy’s arms to sleep.
How many thoughts, untouched and pristine,
Are tarnished by a dream we can’t convene?
If poems bloom from blood’s most fervent tide,
Can verses born of sin be purified?
In keeping with this lusty depiction of poetry and moments of creativity, it would not be surprising that the poem’s rhymes are always eager to unite:
The rhymes yearn for our shade,
for without our dark veil,
they could not have been made.
What about feelings inside a person? Feeling afraid, for example? According to Al-Suhayih, it is nothing but a ritual impurity from which the heart would get better after washing up:
My heart, once tarnished by fear,
was cleansed, its purity made clear.
Now noble and brave, it stands strong,
its courage shining all along.
And to escalate this trend: It is remarkable that the poet, even in his most anguished poetic state, cannot conceive of the relationships of existence, no matter how spiritually sublime, without the meaning of physical fertility. For example, in his long lamentation over Hussein, the poet addresses him, saying:
Towards truth’s goal our sights now turn,
Weighing all sides, this truth we earn.
Your water in each barren craving,
Brings forth life, fertility’s aching.
From the balcony of the senses, then, this poet overlooks existence and its worlds, and from the gate of the body, he observes the presence of the woman in it. Despite the apparent abundance of love poems in Al-Suhayih’s poetry, this does not necessarily mean that they are the product of true love experiences. The poet himself admits that “the experience of love” in his life is very rare. In his prose introduction to his collection, So that the Planet Does Not Tilt (“kay lā yamīl al-kawkab”), Al-Suhayih kept repeating the phrase “I rarely loved,” within the limits of one page seven times, then he added: “all girls had one flavor in my soul, because I had not experienced the love that gives women the taste of uniqueness, and I am not one of the virgin poets.”
Thus, Al-Suhayih realizes that his sensual passion for women does not mean that he is in love, so how do we explain all these flirtatious poems in his poetry? Are we going to say: the “sparkle of the body” that does not go beyond the limits of the senses is the motivation for most of what Al-Suhayih wrote about flirting with women? I believe that a phenomenon of this breadth, diversity, and urgency – and creativity as well – is too complex to be reduced to a single motive, and this article argues that Al-Suhayih’s (preoccupation with women) was not merely a poetic expression of sensual seduction, and that this preoccupation has hidden and more complex motives.
The first of these motives: the headache of truth, will be discussed in detail in the third section of this article. However, our focus here is: The impact of this crashing slide and free fall felt by a boy who spent part of his life clinging to the ropes of reassurance and prior answers. Then, after the burning questions grew inside his mind, and the howling of the wolf (the wolf of consciousness, according to his expression) grew louder within his soul, he finally willingly released the ropes of reassurance from his hand, content to face the abyss without help from anyone or the current, and with no other means than: fateful questions that continue to increase, and a bird of extreme lightness and agility, with amazing fluttering and flight, that is called: poetry, and a being that is solid in its fragility, fragile in its solidity, as if it was created to spread warmth throughout the parts of the world, and it is called: woman.
As a cure for this chronic headache, for the disappointments of life that continue to come, and for the holes in the soul that keep expanding and growing, this grief-stricken boy had no choice but to throw himself into the embrace of the female body, immersed in the numbness of its softness, escaping from the awakening of thought to the slumber of dreaming and from the awakening of consciousness to the intoxication of pleasure, and clinging to this exciting sensual mask that hides the confusion of the mind and the trembling of the soul.
For this reason, Al-Suhayih has been asking himself since his second collection: “Is life a hole that you patch with women… and the strength of fate pierces it?” Then he answered that life is nothing but bitter coffee, and love is its sugar that softens some of its bitterness: “your tenderness, come back… for in reality, life is nothing but bitter coffee .. and love is its sugar.”
Throughout his subsequent collections, this ‘Nuwas-esque’/‘Khayyam-esque’ idea (curing the headache of truth by indulging in sensual pleasure) continued to recur for a long time in his poems: “and there I immerse my confusion in the foam of laughter… possessed, I comb the hair of my memory… and in my blood the old me shuts down and the young me ignites,” and: if the horses of worry break out..: “what does a person do other than pretending to feel joy.. and dreaming of returning the horses to the ghost barn.”
In his long poem, O Sea, Sheikh of narrators (“ya baḥr, ya shaykh al-ruwāt”) there are verses in which Al-Suhayih describes the sea, as if he were describing himself, exhausted by grief and content with fun. He says:
Your sadness hid in bubbles bright,
Smiling, you shone in colors light.
Yet do not scorn the laughing foam,
For long, a bursting bubble’s roam
Revealed your anguish, raw and true.
And from dark mirrors, your face too
Emerges, where stars drown from view
Within those depths they must subdue.
In his poem An Invitation to Drown (“daʿwa lil gharaq”), he presents his own recipe for escaping the pain of consciousness: drowning in the pleasures of temptation:
More desirous than ebb and flow,
Life has not tasted us, we don’t know
Temporary beings, that’s enough –
For beings temporary, pain’s tough.
Where’er the hunt leads, we pursue,
Whether gazelle or woman fair drew.
Drowning, we rush to meet our fate –
O safety, take the lifebuoy, don’t wait!
In his collections, Close to the Sea, Far from Blue (“qarīb min al-baḥr, badʿīd an al-zurqa”), and Terrains of Delirium (“taḍārīs al-hidhyān”), are two similar poems in inviting the female to dance, and his philosophy in this invitation is the summary of the same antidote: “dancing: the art of jumping over our wounds,” to escape from the tragedies of the world, the disappointments of reality, and the brokenness of the self, by faking enjoyment, even if it is a lie: “a lie like this shall be respected!”
In his last collection of poems Birds Flying in a Trap (“ṭuyūr tuhalliq fī al-maṣyada”), he is more clear in his expression, as the playful singing is nothing but a mask worn by the in-denial mourner, and the ‘orchestra’ performed by the choir of musicians is in reality the murmur of a lone person:
Whoe’er sees me, sees me sing,
Yet I my mourning rites do bring.
I sing: “O wounds of the soul, be healed!
And soul of wounds, be thou appeased!”
Thus, it seems that attempting to forget the headache of truth was the most prominent motive for this immersion in sensual stimulation. After that, other motives will collide, and the rational reasons and intellectual justifications for this existential and poetic position will be formed together. The poet first declares: that fun is the goal of life:
To this world we came to have our fun,
Not to fix what’s been left undone!
Based on this initial establishment of the primacy of absurdity, asceticism in earthly pleasures and the “apple” of the body is a mistake in betting: “An exam like this, which traps the horse in the soul, is not worth betting on.. the mistake of that exam.. another mistake: to pass over the earth in a hurry, so as not to celebrate the place.”
Celebrating the earthly place is what this gardening poet does, having ‘broken his saintly scissors’, filling his eyes with the pleasures of earthly life: “The earth is a very beautiful idea… for it to be an punishment for us,” and contenting himself with a less fluttering ambition: “I am trying to make the earth the eighth of the heavens”! However, it remains an earthly heaven that is far from idealism and the requirements of seriousness:
Don’t demand my love be pious-pure,
Love’s harvest dies in piety’s lure.
We’re weary of the grand club we run,
Diligently, forgetting to have fun.
Then secondly, the poet presents his own interpretation of sensual love, for nudity is the constitution of nature:
I believed in nudity as autumn believed in it… even if we have differed to a degree.
Based on the virginity of senses, he sees that the body is the original home of poetry, and that love is a gateway to the absolute, he says in The Olympics of the Body (“ūlambiyād al-jasad”):
Poetry’s home is on lovers’ skin,
Wretched the poems not carved therein!
Then he reaffirms the same idea in his later collection, Close to the Sea, Far from Blue (“qarīb min al-baḥr, badʿīd an al-zurqa”):
From every part of you, inspiration flows,
Suggesting the body as a poem form shows.
It is therefore the poetics of the physical body, and the physical body of poetry, and for this reason the poet presents testimony of his disapproval of virginal love and chaste spiritual attachment, and of: “the continuation of love without weaning,” making the body a fulcrum for the true emotion of love: “Our bodies: our first homelands, we abandoned them into exile of words… these words became dead… love is the measure of involvement in the dirt,” refraining from this (earthly involvement) makes love like (a garden without singing), as is the title of another poem of his, which he starts by saying:
Clay’s not at ease till it embraces clay –
Nor do I want you sweet and pretty to play.
In other words: There is no separation between the pleasures of the body and the joys of the soul, or as he says in Terrains of Delirium (“taḍārīs al-hidhyān”): “Dancing is the water of the soul in its jug… so abandon stagnation and stir the jug.”
Then the poet concludes, thirdly, by condensing his great sensual project into one expression: to win a woman’s love, and he repeats this expression/dream in two poems: “I have never dreamed of anything other than the love of a woman..”, and: “all I aspire to is the love of a woman who will renew the furniture of existence in my soul.”
The female, as Al-Suhayih perceives her, is the embodiment of earthly temptation, and a poet consumed by carnal desire seeks nothing but the most captivating allure: :it was necessary to have females to complete the temptation on earth and to intensify the test.” The female is, in fact, a temptation for all, not merely for men. One can read his poem You Come As a Marching River (“tajīʾīn nahriyyat al-mashy”) and observe how he begins to trace the sensations evoked by the garment that drapes the exquisite form, the raging impulses of yearning and possession that burn within him, and the fires of desire and jealousy. He continues to meticulously unveil the emotions stirred by this ‘cursed’ attire, until the reader is reminded of the atmospheric quality of Ali Mahmoud Taha’s poem The Lover Moon (“al-qamar al-ʿāshiq”).
The female is also the compass of his heart when he loses himself: “She leads my heart towards me when it forgets me,” and she is also what the place needs in order to become more comfortable and expansive:
Yet when our space grows ever tight,
We seek a woman to expand it right.
This feminine expansiveness reaches its maximum limits in Al-Suhayih’s poetry, through “the feminization of the world.” Living beings and things are clothed in his poems with the spirit of women and the flavor of femininity:
All that is fair we “female” deem,
As poets’ comfort does it gleam.
If fair women are wine, then we
Get drunk on them, and wine’s a she.
Wherever tenderness touches him in beings, he will only see an additional embodiment of the abundance of femininity in it: “I feminize the earth, taken by its tenderness,” and some of the conditions and details of women are often attributed to entities, such as to the night (Scheherazade’s breast), and to the morning as well, and this is also repeated with nature, and with life. As for consciousness, it has: (its breast, its womb, its pregnancy, and its menopause), while the station (feels like) the train, and the poem compresses in (its labor and release). The utmost thing she aspires to after all this labor and release is “to be an alternative for a woman.”
But the most amazing manifestations of feminization in his poetry: the feminization of masculinity, and the poet begins with himself, and despite the excess of masculine lust that is widespread in his poems, this does not prevent him from acknowledging that: “At forty, I reached the age of menopause in myself,” and in a more frank expression, he says: “And I saw – due to the abundance of femaleness in my body – being squeezed by the vine and bitten by the apple,” and he does not see any ambiguity in this overlap:
As much as I was masculine, I was female too,
And as much as I was feminine, I was a male, it’s true!
The ultimate point that the feminine tidal wave reaches within itself is when the singing excites it and the string encourages it:
Within my soul, a woman blossomed, fair,
And in my head, a garden grew its share.
I sing, and singing is a lake, where float
My sorrows. I’m overwhelmed, no doubt,
By stringed femininity’s allure,
And sensual excess, and tenderness pure.
At the conclusion of this discussion, we are left to ponder the significance of this grand celebration of femininity in Al-Suhayih’s poetry, without necessarily finding definitive answers. Is this poetic vision the result of a well-reasoned and consistent intellectual stance towards women? Or does the resurgence of sensual passion have a role in fueling this trend and amplifying its ‘recurrent’ presence in his work? As we engage with this poetry, is it possible to disentangle the threads of principled position from those of circumstantial factors and the unbridled imagination of the poet?
- The fire of the villages and the bed of flame:
Jassim Al-Suhayih, this ever-restless fisherman, perpetually captivated by the glow of fire and the smoke of wood stoves, whose poetic ardor is stirred by nothing as much as the storms of change and the hurricanes of surprise. Each path he treads seems futile if the fire of Sinai does not blaze within it, aglow with the hidden promise on the horizon. Were I to envision him as a reader of human history, I suspect he would linger long on the page where the Prophet Moses beheld the fire from afar, which inspired the idea of its discovery. This is precisely what Al-Suhayih awaits at every turn: to find his own flame kindled from the fire of the villages. In truth, he was merely describing this innate attraction toward the burning when he spoke of Abu Al-Tayyib Al-Mutanabbi, saying:
A fire appeared, and to himself he said
What Moses once unto his family pled.
Barefoot, he walked to that prophecy’s light,
So waiting’s fire his sandals would ignite
This is the image that Al-Suhayih will return to more than once throughout his poetic experience. For example, in his talk about (the poet who is surrounded by creatures), he says:
Towards the meaning, a prophet’s walk he makes,
As once did Moses, up to Sinai’s breaks.
In his depiction of the call of love, he only finds this scene of warming to express the specificity of the call and the eagerness to respond:
For us, the valley, and your love, the fire
Of revelation – no prophet uncalled, entire.
Then he returns to Tuwa Valley for the fourth time in a more recent poem, and says:
I said: “Take care, we embrace Tuwa’s vale –
Enter not Tuwa’s vale with sandals frail!”
In his last collection, Birds Flying in a Trap (“ṭuyūr tuhalliq fī al-maṣyada”), he returns to the fire of the mount for the fifth time, and says about ‘the metaphorical Salma’:
From two mounts I was called – your face and passion –
To receive revelation and illusion in fusion.
And I was told of two fires – one of temptation,
The other growing only through desire’s elation.
This repeated evocation of Al-Suhayih’s fire of the mount reminds me of another poet’s evocation of it, Muhammad Abd Al-Bari, who says in his poem Gone Like Lightning (“dhāhiban kalbarq”):
I’ve drawn my blood to women’s mount, yet found
No guidance in the fires that there abound.
As for Al-Suhayih, it is still difficult for him – he who had the longest journey – to accept the conclusion reached by Abd Al-Bari. How much guidance in the fire of ‘the mount of women’ will Al-Suhayih find! How many embers wil hel take from it and use it to warm himself in the face of the winter winds that are blowing the world, at least as his poetry suggests.
In fact, there is something like a close friendship between Al-Suhayih and the idea of flame. The fiery field is very common in his poetry, to the point that almost all of his poetry is fire that attracts the bed of flame to burn ‘in its hot furnace,’ or as he said ecstatically:
Insights gathered ‘round my fire’s glow,
And selves savored flames’ ecstatic flow.
He hopes that this fiery poetry will become even more fiery, and that his poems will become ‘the maidens of hell’ in this fiery kingdom:
Take us as crumbs of ember through obsession’s pyre,
That with us you may build your infernal region’s fire.
Ignite your hell, and turn our poems to hellfire’s glow,
That with them you may fulfill desires’ ardent flow.
Like his poetry, he summarizes his life as nothing more than blazing stations of burning flames, but nevertheless he is grateful for the burning tones and dancing embers they have given to him:
Within life’s hearth, the burning flames gave me a song,
And my embers taught me how to dance along.
And in his prose introduction to his book So that the Planet Does Not Tilt (“kay lā yamīl al-kawkab”), for which he chose a striking title, My Little Jahannams (“jahannamāti al-ṣaghīra”)! He says: “I am one of the sons of fire. My siblings are matches, and my father is the matches’ box. I came from the mouth of hell looking for a woman to raise my little Jahannams with me until the flames grow!”
The most expansive field in which its little Jahannams appear is the field of love, where the fires of passion burn and the embers of youth burn:
A lover’s hearth, by wind’s breath kindled bright
With femininity’s blazing, charming light.
I am an ember, reckless flame’s bright spark,
In passion and youth’s hearth, glowing in the dark.
What will this ember spend its time doing, other than inhaling the smell of fires in its surface, and observing the heat of the flames in its burning interior:
I smell the scent of fires within me burn,
And discover the bliss of my passion’s turn.
The embers also have their own logic, as they see the mutual combustion between them as nothing more than an expression of their freedom to kindle the flame:
Let us burn in an embrace, without fear –
Our freedom lies in the flames burning here.
In another place, the poet expresses this fiery embrace as ‘A Dialogue Between Two Flames’, as is the title of one of his flirtatious poems in The Olympics of the Body (“ūlambiyād al-jasad”). The fire yearns to combine with another fire that increases its flame:
I wish your storm to be absorbed by my letter,
That it may carve the flames and fires, and better
Throw itself on my papers to ignite their hue –
A letter speaks no truth unless it burns them too.
In these two verses, one of the secrets of The Fire Thief is unveiled, as well as an additional motive behind Jassim Al-Suhayih’s ‘poetics of the body.’ He employs the fire of emotion to ignite the flame of creativity within him. Ultimately, poetry is his great fire, which he is ever-vigilant to keep burning by adding more kindling and smaller flames. You will realize that he did not choose the title of his collection Behind the Singer’s Throat (“ma warāʾa ḥanjarat al-mughanni”) arbitrarily when you read this confession in one of its poems, which nearly reveals everything: “I am still riding the female wave to the shore of the poem in order to defend my imagination with the poem.” How close the poet would have been to completing the circle of this sequential employment that summarizes his poetic journey if he had added: “in order to defend my choice with imagination.” This appears to be Al-Suhayih’s circle of existence: a body completed by a woman, a woman who inspires the poem, a poem that explores the surge of imagination and creativity, and creativity that defends – as will be shown later – the freedom of choice in humans. This freedom of choice then opens up to the horizon of questioning and doubting the validity of the choice, until it plunges into the well of confusion and anxiety, only to have its ropes extended anew toward the body striving for completion with a woman.
While you are still marveling at the ‘fiery nature’ of this poet and his inextinguishable fires, your astonishment will increase while reading as you see evidence of his ‘watery nature’ also multiplying before your eyes, ever since he said in his first collection of poems My Shadow, My Successor Among You (“ẓillī khalīfati ʿalaykum”): “the rush of water fluttered through my being,” and after that he still complained of the water flooding inside him: “and when the lake of our bodies overflows as wide as the place,” and after the flood there is nothing but drowning, sometimes in the waters of truth: “I am still drowning in the waters of my reality,” and sometimes in the waters of virginity and the childhood of things:
I was drowned in all things in their childhood days,
And returned, dripping, from those waters’ ways.
In Al-Suhayih’s poetry, there are clear references to the instinctive connotations conveyed by certain aquatic imagery, such as this evocative description of an intimate encounter:
The estuary called out for us, from where
Euphrates starts, to Tigris’ waters fair.
Two rivers that never cease their joyful dance,
As if in endless party’s pleased expanse.
From the highest tongues of flame to the furthest flow of the torrent, the wings of this being spread. The poet himself is acutely aware of this effervescent mixture of fire and water within him, and he made the title of his second collection, Embraces of Candles and Tears (“ʿināq al-shumūʿ wal-dumūʿ”), a testament to this blending. His collection The Olympics of the Body (“ūlambiyād al-jasad”) also contains more than one perplexing hint of this fusion, as evidenced by this line: “Am I a body of water or fire? I was confused and felt completely alone with them. The room inside me became confused, and I was amazed by the mass of embers swimming in the stream of the rill!”
As expected, his favorite playground to display this blend in his most amazing rush is the playground of instinct:
When we embraced, a garden of fire bloomed,
Into whose depths a well of water flowed.
Mahmoud Darwish has a poem entitled Faces of Truth (“wujūh al-ḥaqīqa”) in which he seems to describe this puzzling mixture between the loud dance of fire and the overwhelming flow of water according to Al-Suhayih. Darwish says: “Truth is a metaphorical female… when water and fire mix in its form… and truth is a character in the poem… it is not what it is or its opposite… it is what drips from its shadow.”
This poem – or the ‘metaphorical female’ as Darwish calls it – appears to be Al-Suhayih’s antidote to the dilemma of the contentious struggle within him. It is a struggle between the scorching questions of fire and the soothing answers of water, between the cacophony of the erupting volcano and the tranquility of the ocean brimming with secrets. Ultimately, the poem provided him, through the elixir of metaphor, with what he needed to alleviate the intensity of this internal conflict: the elusive drippings from the shadow of truth.
- The river of confusion and the paddle of questioning:
A major theme that the reader’s eye cannot miss in Jassim Al-Suhayih’s poetry: the theme of the persistent, doubtful question, since his second collection of poems Embraces of Candles and Tears (“ʿināq al-shumūʿ wal-dumūʿ”), then became a very noticeable phenomenon in his poetry with his fourth collection A Mystical Dance (“raqṣa ʿirfāniya”), and it continued to be evident until his fourteenth collection, Birds Flying in a Trap (“ṭuyūr tuhalliq fī al-maṣyada”), and over a quarter of a century: “the lamp of questioning did not fail,” as he put it. Contemplation inevitably leads to questioning, and “awareness is the trap of questioning,” as he also says. If the most popular description among recipients of Al-Suhayih’s poetry is that he is a poet of youth and flirtation, then the closest description to his deeper truth is that he is a poet of recurring questions, he says:
The questioning still fascinates, and it led
Me to worship its calf, like Samaritans did.
He also says:
Oh, how confused I am when I am a dune
Of questions, o’er which my ancestors’ winds croon.
And he says:
I did not fortify with delusions’ might –
My questioning alone provides me strength and light.
Questioning is his stronghold. Because it is the beginning and end of knowledge: “If knowledge was unreachable, let it be a question…” Then, a wide-open question is the shortest way to keep childhood amazement inside his soul, and that is why he said:
I must have a question on his childhood’s ways,
That lingers, though my age brings silvered days.
Why does the childish question remain valid throughout life? Because his answer often remains limited, temporary, and shrouded in ambiguity, how miserable the ‘old child’ is with this ambiguity, and how much does this confusion hurt him, and it is a multiplied pain; because this mysterious world, by its nature, cannot match ‘this child’s’ remarkable ability to explain himself and his approach. It is as if the weakness of the universal response to this ease of interpretation and this extensive and hospitable explanation to him is what causes him all this frustration and despair, as he spends his life contemplating the silent existence around him without the ability to penetrate, like a transparent glass surrounded by compact walls on all sides.
As for his questions, they were so many that they weighed heavily on his shoulders as he traveled his long winding path with them:
How many questions weigh upon my back
As I wander lost, the path at my feet racked?
However, the mystery of death and fate remains one of the mysteries that raises the most questions for him. He said: “The unseen is my greatest tragedy,” and he also said: “My soul yearns for the unseen,” and in his abundant lamenting poems he hardly tires of asking the same question again to the boats departing for the shores of life, as if he were ‘a voice at the door of eternity,’ he wonders:
What lies beyond the sea, other than a space
Compact, by total mystery’s guard in place?
In his prose introduction to his collection So that the Planet Does Not Tilt (“kay lā yamīl al-kawkab”), Al-Suhayih contemplates the graves and sees them as nothing but waste bins in which drafts of writing are thrown, and as is usual, he quickly moves beyond this visible scene, towards his urgent forward-looking question: “What’s behind those waste bins?”
He does not congratulate the dead on anything as much as he congratulates them on their arrival at the port of answer and the planet of secrets. He says this in his lamentation for his father:
O’ the one who ascended to the planet of secrets, inhabited… by a soul freed from the planet of boredom
As he says in his eulogy for Ghazi Al-Gosaibi:
And today, when youth’s peers called, and did meet –
One peer facing another, in council’s seat.
Today you know which puzzle, veiled in mystery,
Has hidden truth within its depth’s dark sea.
He also says it in his other eulogy for Muhammad Al-Thubaiti:
Today you grasped the meaning’s bird, its flight –
Feathers and fluff between your hands took flight.
The secret you reveal is death’s own due –
Be joyful in this revelation, what it gives to you.
The funny thing is that he has an aversion to certain and close answers that try to close the circle of questioning, as he once said: “And I began to ask questions and the certainty / the old man usurped the answers,” and he was fed up with their besieging him and restricting him: “Here we are, questions with little certainty.” However, all of this did not prevent him from trying to provide an answer to the wisdom of the unseen, the concealment of destinies, and the breadth of the horizon of the unknown:
What if the mail from unseen realms arrives,
And delivers an envelope with words for our eyes?
Were we honoring the land, its cloth cleaning,
Cutting and mending it, our work completing?
If neck and sword make peace, will passion remain
For us, or will its fire only pain?
But in the river of confusion in which this anxious boat is sailing with the paddle of questioning, this ‘hypothetical’ answer will remain closer to a lost flash in the middle of the fog, so the question in this river: An eternal paddler, as it sometimes seems as if his goal is not to bring the turbulent boat to the stable bank, but rather to continue rowing indefinitely. The reassuring and stable banks from afar always arouse his moving suspicion and anxiety, and he is “afraid of a reassurance that rusts the soul,” while the river gives him the privilege of apprehension: “here my anxiety does not repent, and my soul is polished with doubts,” or as he says in three later poems: “my soul is filled with doubt,” “my doubt is my backbone…” and “my doubt turns me around with its thorns,” and for all of this he hardly excludes anything from his looks of suspicion:
There’s naught in creation that did not make me drown
In doubt – the whole world is a flood, a doubting gown.
I float, bearing certainty’s remains on a board –
The unknown’s philosophy, my mind’s untoward.
In several places in his poetry, he laments his ancient certainty and ancient reassurance: “I am the certainty whose foundations have been torn down,” and he depicts his self as if it were a sea with roaring waves:
The ships of certainty with it have sunk down,
And vainly I try their grappling hooks to own.
My doubts have grown like nails over this sea –
Not all can be trimmed, they cling stubbornly.
He is amazed when he remembers his first steps on the path; how did his visions and circumstances change?
The ancient Eastern mystic ways no more
Fill my flutes with lyrical glow as before.
Am I the man who, in first prayers, could tame
The desolation of the vessel’s frame?
O voice of my history, I beg your grace –
I’ve betrayed you by echoes’ chaste disgrace!
In his prose introduction to his collection Behind the Singer’s Throat (“ma warāʾa ḥanjarat al-mughanni”), there is a solemn monologue about certainty bending to the stormy winds of doubt, and this brokenness will intensify later, leaving an overwhelming feeling of loss and alienation:
Between my doubt and certainty lies a space
Whose strangeness has made me lose my place.
In his latest collections, starting with his collection So that the Planet Does Not Tilt (“kay lā yamīl al-kawkab”), doubt will appear in a more consistent and stubborn way, and the questions will grow, as is clear in his poems: Unfinished Confessions (“iʿtirāfat lam taktamil awrāduha”), Socrates, The Genius Poison (“soqrāṭ, al-summ al-ʿabqarī”), My Book is The Dust of the Earth (“kitābī turāb al-arḍ”), Tears of the N of Nakhla (“dumūʿ nūn al-nakhla”), According to the Crow Calendar (“ḥasab taqwīm al-ghurāb”), and The Transient in Interpretations (“al-ābir fī al-taʾāwīl”). This is what his saying in the poem Dwelling Between Two Possibilities (“sākinun bayna iḥtimālayn”) refers to:
I sought refuge in doubt, to find a way
To express meaning in contentment’s still sway.
He also said in the poem, May I not Live if Trapped in Your Desires (“lā ʿishtu shirkan fī hawāk”):
I am a friend to believers, though my soul
Harbors more doubt than they could well condole.
It is noteworthy that this suspicious poetry is often inspired by Solomon’s hoopoe, as this bird – in addition to the crow: our old teacher – is one of the most symbolically invoked birds in Al-Suhayih’s poetry, but the symbolism of the hoopoe does not refer to the meaning of “certain news” for him as expected, but rather, the contrary: to the meaning of doubt, confusion, and diaspora, as he says in A Mystical Dance (“raqṣa ʿirfāniya”): “How much we hurt a hoopoe with doubt when the monologues became disturbed,” and he says in Terrains of Delirium (“taḍārīs al-hidhyān”):
How can I drag my feet and still move on,
When the hoopoe guiding my path is dispersed, gone?
In his poetry collection So that the Planet Does Not Tilt (“kay lā yamīl al-kawkab”), the poet explains why the hoopoe’s attempts to convince him of his “certain news” seem futile:
I bear the doubts of Solomon, so please excuse
If with my mind I the clever hoopoe lose.
As a natural tendency, this confusion will search for its parents, extending its ropes far towards the very confused fellows, the most prominent of whom is: Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri, and the poet has singled him out for inspiration in more than one poem, such as his confused poem: (Bumping Against the Walls of the Self), which he entirely devoted to his monologue, in which he says:
Tighten my stirrup in certainty’s filly steed –
My path is paved with doubt, its steps to heed.
O revealer of the unknown, what drew me
To your fair mystery’s allure, tell me?
Who are we, but a unit of two contrasts –
A certainty veiled by doubt that ever lasts?
Then he mentioned it later in the poem Dwelling Between Two Possibilities (“sākinun bayna iḥtimālayn”), in which he says:
With gentle touch, their memory I hold,
No Al-Ma’arri, these tombs I’ve left unsold.
He also mentioned it in the poem According to the Crow Calendar (“ḥasab taqwīm al-ghurāb”), and said:
The lamp of questioning did not fail or fade,
No spark in Al-Ma’arri’s Zand him betrayed.
Then there will be no shortage of repeated evidence of his constant – unauthorized – inspiration from the spirit of Al-Ma’arri and his constricted stance towards the world and the feasibility of living, such as what he said, for example, in the poem Angels Without Heaven (“malāʾika bilā samāʾ”):
Our lives repeat the same story day by day,
As if they were endlessly copying, deleting away.
If a womb here a newborn child does spawn,
The lips of eternity utter a weary “uff” anon.
What is left for us to say is that the poet – in parallel with all these confused thoughts – has prepared his answer for those who rush to conclusions, as he does not see that the question of doubt conflicts with faith; Because as he says: “There is no evidence that leads me towards the truth other than my doubt about the truth,” and in a clearer formulation he says in his poem A Mystical Whispered Prayer (“munājāt ʿirfāniya”):
Enough of the unseen on earth still remains
For me to be immersed in your idea, it sustains.
The intensity of Allah in my soul is twice
As strong, for doubt and uncertainty are its spice.
I must ask a timeless question, one that will spur
Me on to truly believe in you, my Lord, be sure.
You will find that – even in his last collections – he turns every time to a transparent spirituality, saying: “O’ Lord, protect me from the pitfalls of a weak mind… teach my soul how to renew its forest with trees and air… O’ Lord, do not leave my heart in darkness… do not leave (Joseph) In the depths of the pit,” and he says:
O jeweler of the unseen, faith a jewel divine,
Mend the scratch on my faith with your gems so fine.
And he says:
Within the letter ‘O’ of “O Lord” I rose up high,
Yet my roots remained wet in earth’s depths that lie.
It is still a minaret, negotiating its reach
For a loftier space where it higher may breach.
- The wailing string strung in an Iraqi melody:
In the opening of his early pulpit collection, The Nests of Angels (“aʿshāsh al-malāʾika”), Jassim Al-Suhayih wrote a prose introduction entitled, My Poetic “I”, which was closer to an argumentative argument, in defense of the poetry of special occasions, and the legitimacy of combining the personal ‘I’ and the collective ‘I’ in poetic expression. In fact, a stream of questions soon rains down on you as you read the large poetry collection that included Al-Suhayih’s pulpit collections, and you wonder: Is this really the same sensual, playful and joyful poet? From what deep, wailing well does he draw his melancholy sadness whenever the mood of the tribe changes? Where did the poet of sensual longing and mental doubt, penetrating to the utmost extent of the soul, get this amazing integration into the atmosphere of ritual lamentations and melodies of ‘devout’ sorrows, such that he composes dozens of weeping poems that contain three collections, taking up a total of 600 large pages? Is it from the ties of remembrance? Childhood fingerprints? Features of kinship? Unity of apprehension? Sharing fate? Blood temperature? The attraction of the ‘mythical model’ in history? Symbolism of superiority and resistance? Allegory of anguish and suffering? Then, how can a skeptical, scrutinizing look at the text of the story as a whole be combined with humble, astonished belief in a specific footnote? Was our poet one with this paradoxical combination between broad initial doubt and limited selective submission when he said in the poem Your Window is The Weeping Altar (“shubbākuka al-mabkā”):
Your blood is certainty, all else is a mere
Candidate for doubt, deception, obsession’s fear.
Then when he said in the poem A Journey through the Wound of Hussein (“riḥla fī jarḥ al- ḥusayn”):
I gauge the measure of certainty by your love –
For as far as I can see, that’s my guide from above.
I stripped away all legends, save one I kept near –
The legends of your love, which I hold ever dear.
And to you I came, in mindlessness’ ecstasy,
Dragging my mind’s own funeral pyre with me.
The strange thing is that the poet himself had marveled – before us – at this sorrow that was afflicting him and streaming its rhymes in the river of sadness, despite the fact that he devoted himself to enjoying the earthly fields and glorifying their dancing joys: How could the melancholy tree of lamentations find a spacious place in the middle of this bustling garden crowded with flirtatious flowers and the scents of yearning… had it not been for the ‘wailing well’ that was tightly buried under its fresh soil:
I hid my soul within the fields, but I wonder
From what rhyme did my anguish come sneaking under?
I long for the tree of lamentations in my blood,
And strengthen its branches with wailing’s sad flood.
This precedence in astonishment and explanation is clear evidence of the phenomenon of ‘poetic sufficiency’ according to Al-Suhayih, by which I mean: that his poetry interprets itself on its own, to the point that it almost seems to do without explanation and interpretation, and this is due to two things: The first is: the poet’s high critical sensitivity, which enables him to capture its recurring themes and semantic paradoxes as well, and try to interpret them creatively in subsequent poems, to achieve a degree of harmony in his poetic vision. The second is: His remarkable keenness to disclose and reveal himself to the recipient, as if he were writing down his autobiography with poetry, and this keenness to disclose is what makes him tend toward clear expression and evident depiction. A detailed discussion of this stylistic feature will come in the seventh section of this article.
From the ‘wailing well,’ then, the poet captures this collective grief, and that is why he says in his poem Angels Without Heaven (“malāʾika bilā samāʾ”): “We come from the lineage of lamenting,” and he also says in his poem I am Blind and my Staff is Failing me (“aʿmā wa tukhṭuʾunī ʿasāy”): “Sadness is the home of my lineage since the dynasty, and wailing is the descendant of my ancient ancestors… I am nothing but the grandson of sadness, carried by my wailing.”
What confirms the effect of the ‘symbolic load’ in keeping this emotional string taut and able to resist any (mental) slackness is that the poetic self finds in the symbol a mirror of the special sufferings it goes through:
The Karbala’s my soul has experienced, they
Have made me feel the Karbala revolution’s sway.
I’ve moistened my voice with Hussein – how could it
Be dry when his name is upon my lips writ?
The poetic self also finds a broad title that emphasizes the ‘eternal return’ that characterizes the human tragedy in this symbol, as if time had no mission other than preserving its long nails so that old wounds could be healed in every era:
Whenever Cain returned to the stones of his sin,
He’d awaken the wound of the Karbala’s within.
As for what bears witness to the effect of ‘the ties of memory and human feature’ in the poet’s continued longing for ‘trees of lamenting,’ it is: what this collection contains of poems of lamenting and praise addressed to sheikhs, notables, and friends whom the most important thing that unites them with the poet is: human relations; regardless of the different intellectual orientations. You can go back, for example, in the collection The Nests of Angels (“aʿshāsh al-malāʾika”) to his very sad poem Tears Between the Dome and the Mihrab (“dumūʿ bayn al-qubba wa al-miḥrāb”), in which he lamented the imam of the mosque in his small village: Ali Al-Khalifa, and also in the collection of The Writer of the Last Revelation (“kātib al-waḥy al-akhīr”) to his poem in which he lamented his neighbor, the muezzin, to see how clouds of emotion pour down for Al-Suhayih when religion is embodied in noble human features.
However, the wailing string would not have remained tight in rhythm, if it had not been composed with melodies and sorrows in the Iraqi melody. In Al-Suhayih’s poetry, Iraq appears as if it were the homeland of the soul, not with its ‘official’ geographical framework, but with its heavy historical legacy that arouses in itself a lot of grief, anguish, and nostalgia, and here specifically we reach the wound, rather the river of wounds within it. Iraq, in his cultural and poetic awareness, is: a grand map of pain, or another version of the way of ‘via dolorosa’ in Christianity, and because of this intense emotional symbolism, it was not strange for the poet to say: “No country on the equator of love in my soul has been as complete as Iraq’s has been.” And he also says:
If Iraq is where I belong, then my excuse would be
That Iraq belongs to all people, as it ought to be.
Iraq is always present in the poet’s mind, regardless of the poetic topic that attracts his attention. Here he is contemplating the beautiful eyeballs, and their sparkle does not remind him of anything the way it reminds him of the two rivers of Iraq:
Your eyeballs came to mind, so my heart turned green –
One eyeball, the Tigris; the other, Euphrates’ sheen.
These two river quotes remind us of another witness that we encountered in the second section of the article in which the poet also brought the two rivers of Iraq when he said: “the estuary shouted for us, it starts with… Euphrates and goes towards the Tigris.” As for his poem, Love is a Dual Musical Effort (“al-ḥub ʿazfun muthannā”), he tells how he was overcome by longing for the beloved, and then how his feelings were stirred up by a crying Iraqi song whose lyrics were written by the Iraqi poet Muzaffar al-Nawab under the title, To the Rail and Hamad, and in depicting this ecstasy, Al-Suhayih says:
I hear “we passed by you” as the “train’s night-time” glide
Runs over me, and “Hamad inside me cried.”
As an escalation of the music of the Iraqi melody, the poet marvels in his collection of poems, And We Softened the Poem for Him (“wa alannā lahu al-qaṣīd”), at the connection between the tragedies and Iraq: history, reality, and the horizon of possibilities:
Iraq is growing, yet no tomorrow’s in its morrow,
It’s generous, but no hand within its own hand to borrow.
A nation whose resource is sorrow’s uniqueness, true,
The same way all prophets were unique, through and through.
A nation that has learned from darkness of its fate
Not to be surprised by a dark fate it must await.
The poet has a poetic epic entitled Water, O Father of the Two Rivers (“suqyāk ya wālid al-nahrayn”), which he recited at the Baghdad Poetry Festival ten years ago, in which he mentioned Iraq as much as he wanted, and wept over its historical tragedies as long as the tongue of wounds could contain:
Here is Iraq, and were it not for Tigris’ waters fleet,
The clay of this world would not have come to exist, complete.
Long ago it was manifest, when non-existence reigned supreme,
And it prepared the earth until it became fit to teem.
By God, O Father of the Two Rivers, if a mountain were to face
The trials you have encountered through eternity’s vast space,
It would be crushed to rubble, without a chance.
You remain the scapegoat of earth, slaughtered without remorse
By the herd’s master, to please an idol’s dark course.
Then the enthusiasm of sorrow continues to incite the poet until he declares his aversion to the desert culture and The Suspended Odes of the ruins, favoring the water civilization and the river culture:
I’ve come to renounce a Suspended Ode’s command
About myself, where there’s no money, no blood to withstand.
Do not ask a poet of the tribe that lives by
Inheritance of misery and suffering’s dark sigh.
My grandfather Al-Farazdaq, my uncle Jarir, they
Kept asking for dirty, stinking insults to sway.
Let me reproach the harsh one in my language’s tone:
How much of a rich river was wasted, left alone!
Do not be fooled by books bound in golden gleam,
For they may contain worms and mold, hidden within their seam.
Love has no logic. Otherwise, would Jarir and Al-Farazdaq live and chat in a city other than Basra, Iraq? Has the poet himself “wasted a rich river in the desert” when he composed his two long poems in which he conversed with: Imruʾ al-Qays and Antara Al-Absi in the collections A Mystical Dance (“raqṣa ʿirfāniya”) and Close to the Sea, Far from Blue (“qarīb min al-baḥr, badʿīd an al-zurqa”)? Then what would remain of the Arabic poetry composed by ‘the metropolises’ – including the metropolitan areas of Iraq – if we remove the desert legacy from it?
It remains that ‘the umbrella of occasions’ is what tightens the threads of rhythm in most of the poems of the three pulpit collections included in this poetry collection, not only through the dominance of the pulpit ‘style’ in them, but also through this ‘objective’ concern for the poems to include the most important historical events and the founding figures whose mention excites the scholarly community and popular circle. In addition to this is a group of poems addressed to contemporary figures and symbols, and finally: repeated poems previously published in ‘general’ collections, and this last remark is significant, as there seems to be a distinction between two types of readers. The readers who receive these pulpit collections may not look forward much to reading the poet’s other collections, and for this reason there is no harm in bringing some suitable poems for them.
At the conclusion of this section, all that remains for us is to say: The Iraqi melody – with all its attractiveness of sorrow and the sorrow of attractiveness – did not make the poet from the land of Hajar forget his origins in Al-Ahsa, he has mentioned it for a long time throughout his poetry collections. But it often appeared in the form of a lonely palm tree, or an oasis isolated from the surrounding sand and dunes.
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