The Rebels, the Committed, and the Others

Jabra Jabra

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From Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature
© 1980 Three Continents Press; © 1996 by Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Used with permission of the publisher.

INTRODUCTION

Two generations ago Amin al-Rihani, a brilliant phrase maker, said he would willingly barter the poetry of the East for the planes of the West. That was the time when all Arabs were under foreign domination, with hardly any armies, and certainly no planes, of their own. The intense desire to be part of the 20th century, however, was not to be fulfilled by merely resorting to barter: we wanted to do things in the "modern" manner and were wondering whether our addiction to poetry was not an impediment to it all. In the thirties we had teachers who, though poets themselves, also complained that poetry meant largely lovemaking or weeping, neither of which did us much good as a nation: but then the East was always spiritual and the West material. It was a naive misunderstanding of the function of civilisation, still rather common among us even today. In a moment of holy anger a Rihani would denounce the "spirit" (which was all ours) in favour of planes, and the matter would rest there. Younger writers, however, were to discover the falsity of such a dichotomy and consider that skill in making poems would perhaps improve further with the acquisition of skill in making planes: they were complementary, not contradictory. For the West, despite its so-called materialism, was still producing the great poems our generation wanted to read.

Fortunately poets over the last fifty or sixty years have played a role in public life which has maintained the importance and relevance of the art of poetry. Until World War II, almost all great Arab poets were noted for their patriotism: patriotic poetry, al-Shi’r al-watany, was an added function to the classical aghrad (purposes) of poetry. Poets might write love poetry, often sad and despairing, but their fiery nationalist poetry, directed against the British and the French who succeeded the Ottomans in dominating the Arabs and gradually created a Zionist state out of an Arab Palestine, was what became truly noteworthy: from Egypt's Baroudy, Showqi and Mutran, to Palestine's Ibrahim Touqan and Abdul Rahim Mahmud, to Iraq's Rassafi and Jawahiri. Thus, long before "commitment" was launched in 1953 by Al-Adab magazine of Beirut, under Sartre's inspiration, as a pre-requisite of literature, Arab poets had become, essentially, committed writers. A great deal of their poetry was oratorical, militant, and of an instantaneous effect. The oppressor, in the person of a foreign ruler, was very much there, a tempting target. Very few writers would pause to think whether they were of the Right or the Left: the nation, in an almost primordial innocence struggling against a visible and powerful alien ruler, had not yet suffered the inner split which was to come in the '50s and '60s. Poetry might be condemned as too weak a toy against guns, but in actual fact it was often as good as dynamite. It gave point to a whole nation's suffering and wrath. It crystallized political positions in telling lines which, memorised by old and young, stiffened popular resistance and provided rallying slogans. Arabi's revolt in Egypt, Palestine's continual revolt from 1919 on, Syria's Battle of Maysalun, Iraq's struggle for independence in the twenties, were all made vivid in the minds of Arabs everywhere by unforgettable poems that no guns could suppress. The boys of my generation were intoxicated by such defiant lines as these by a Palestinian poet:

O prison darkness now descend,
We've always loved such darkness.

So much else, however, was written which in essence was an echo of the great poetry of the Abbasids, even with a difference. The wordiness, the poetic diction, was a continuation of a tradition of scholasticism in which dictionary learning tended to be of superior urgency to private visions. The love of language was heady, ecstatic. The poets carried on with the task of reviving words, phrases, and ideas that had remained dormant during five or six centuries of intellectual stagnation. The poetic imagination seemed to be the exclusive function of a few people, who seemed to be possessed of a great memory and whose words, redolent of al-Mutanabbi, Abu Nuwas, Umar Ben Abi Rabia, Abu Tammam, entranced their eager public perhaps too easily and too uncritically.

The more lyrical poets, the expatriates in the Americas, the Ali Mahmud Tahas, were very much easier to understand, but their poetry, whenever it abandoned the great patriotic themes, was plagued with sugariness and sentimentality that made it merely fit for singing. Although it was popular and lent itself to pleasant quotation, the spread of education and increasing contact with foreign literatures made it seem less and less satisfactory, and capable critics like Akkad and Taha Husein began scrutinising its weaknesses and calling for an utterance of greater organic unity and relevance to individual experience. A change was bound to come, and when at last it came about twenty years ago it was devastating. For the change meant a change in form as well as content; indeed content seemed intractable without doing violence to form.

Arabic poetic form, like all classical forms, is the refinement of centuries of civilisation: subtle, variable, musical, and_at least so it seemed until about 1950_resourceful. It was the creation of a civilisation which had produced so much splendid poetry that it could force its attitudes, and imagery upon the modern poet. This meant, implicitly, he would have to compete with the great names of the past if he had anything worthwhile to say. But he was soon to find that such competition was impossible. There was an intensifying sense of "time" and "period", and a new sensibility demanded a new outlook. If a new thing had to be said, a new means had to be devised to say it.

The new sensibility was history-conscious: it could not help being so. The new rhythms and stresses of life were insistent and inescapable. Moreover, after the political struggle of the first half of the century, there was the new anguish of a vast nation in travail. The Arabs were suddenly on their own: independent in most cases, but beset by a world that seemed to make a travesty of their independence, with the added trauma of having most of Palestine hacked up into an illogical Zionist state. A supreme agony, a crucifixion. The poet's response was severe and radical.

It was no accident, therefore, that the great change in Arabic poetry started more or less with the Palestine disaster. In the decade that followed, from 1948 to 1958, what happened to Arabic writing was cataclysmic. Suddenly, with the shock and the bitterness, young people all over the Arab world not only saw things in a new light but had to express them in a new way, more immediate, less form-ridden, taking Western innovations in their stride in a struggle for a freer imagination. The word "new" was mysterious, seductive. A myth was in the making, a myth of death and resurrection, in which the nation's tragedy and hope could find expression.

A dam had burst, and the unpredictable in thought and vision flooded forth. Influences from East and West, from Mayakovsky to Eliot, ravished the minds of the young who abandoned themselves to contemporary fads and fashions without shame, in an attempt to cope with their experience. They were fascinated by the art movements of the last fifty years, especially surrealism and expressionism. Mythology was discovered and exploited: Greek, Arab, Babylonian: Christian and Moslem alike. Gilgamesh and Icarus and Sinbad, Tammuz and Ishtar and Sisyphus, all became urgent and unavoidable allusions. And in less than two decades Arabic poetry acquired a stance that had been forgotten since the great mystics of the past: the private, individual stance. It was no longer sufficient for the poet to be merely a public symbol, a voice of the tribe. Now that the nation had embarked upon a new phase of search for its identity and sources of strength, the poet's stance was one of intense consciousness of self. It was history-conscious, humanity-conscious and, above all, freedom-conscious. Evil was all that went contrary to this complexity of awareness. In defence of his stance, the poet would now question and expostulate. His poetry, once revelling in oratory, became more and more of a soliloquy, a dramatic monologue, which soon gave its speaker the look and manner of a rather incomprehensible "hero", an outsider at variance with his society. The poet fell to examining the new City_a theme that underlies much Arabic writing today. The pilgrim's progress to the City of God thus began, and it was not an easy one; the slough of despond was often just around the corner.

It would be interesting to try and reconstruct a poet's concept of his City of God. But is it really possible? Poets, like prophets, may be revolutionaries but not necessarily reformers. They may be angry with the ways of men and full of visions of horror which inspire them, but the evil they condemn is often of greater significance to them (and perhaps to us) than all the alternatives they have no time to enunciate. One of the striking characteristics of the new poetry, the writer having acquired a symbolic and allegorical equipment ignored by his predecessors, is this very "prophetic" tone of voice in rejection, denunciation, suffering. The extremely personal attitude, with the use of an individually invented set of symbols and allusions, marks the best poets of the last fifteen years; their attitude could only be an angry one against the City that falls so short of their dream, where decay, sickness and injustice make impossible their connivance with it.

It is only when this attitude has been clarified that one can understand the violent reaction that it has elicited from so many quarters. The poet for the Arabs has always been the voice of the tribe: he celebrates its glories and eulogises its exploits. He urges it to war: he forewarns and counsels it; he crystallises its wisdom. Altogether, he tends to be in harmony with it. When a poet falls foul with all this and tends to shock society - the new "tribe"_by taking it to task, by insisting on his own individual judgement in attempting to measure its worth in purely human terms, the shock is not likely to be taken easily. Gradually, the poet acquires a quixotic look and fancies himself to be driven into a position of tense challenge: a sort of knight errant turned into a tragic rebel, who cannot avoid his tragic end except by silence.

Society, no doubt, can resist the poet with lesser means than attack: by minimising his importance first and, finally, by altogether ignoring him. This is a process that has been going on for some years now. Poets have never been less influential than recently and, curiously enough, they are themselves blamed for this decline in their power for mass fascination. Their very achievement is often held against them as a failure. (Jawahiri of Iraq, now living in self-exile in a Communist country, is perhaps the last of the major popular figures in whose poetry interest is still very much alive, although he has written very little that is of value in the last ten years.) In fact, what has happened is all part of a vast cultural and social mutation. When power is split between the military and the technocrats, unless he is willing to remain an amorous entertainer, the poet will be simply exiled from the City. His fulminations and his laments will be heard, if at all, from afar, from without the City walls. Within the walls, other voices are rising, leaving little room for poets' soliloquies. When just over two years ago Badre Shaker al-Sayab died at the age of 38, he was taken from hospital in Kuwait to his home-town Basrah where, under conditions of unspeakable poverty, he was given a pauper's funeral. And yet Sayab was the greatest Arab poet of the last decade.

The artist's alienation, of course, is nothing new. For more than thirty years, proud and inexhaustible, Al-Mutanabbi was on the run from state to state and prince to prince,, until he was killed on a deserted road by a band of pursuing assassins. That was a thousand years ago. Thirty years ago, however, writers in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, indeed anywhere in the Arab world, achieved through their works and reputations positions of power and distinction that to their readers seemed right and proper. Whether they were with or against authority, it did not basically matter. Ahmad Showqi's death in the early thirties had the semblance of an earth-shaking event. Dr. Taha Hussein became a minister, introduced educational reform and opposed the King. Those who did not become ministers enjoyed such eminence, political and otherwise, as no poet or prose writer could hope to achieve today. At best, nowadays, writers may be given directors' appointments in the Ministry of Culture and Guidance or editorial posts on natonalised newspapers. Or they are adopted by political parties. Unless they have prodigious talent and originality, they soon become the apologists of prescribed policies and shifting ideologies. They become committed. For some, this is taken to be the way for the creative intellectual to end his exile, to merge back into the "tribe" and regain his harmony with it. Commitment thus acquires a psychological healing value to a would-be rebel, and rebellion is obviated.

One may venture to say that commitment and rebellion, though products of the same intellectual soil, gradually tend to become incompatible. For the latter is mainly directed inwards, towards one self and one's own society: its validity depends on its critical penetration, its sense of justice, its emphasis on individual human values, and its final power to say No. Forces outside this particular society are encountered by the rebel with exactly the same principles of criticism, justice, humanity, and the power to refuse. Commitment, on the other hand, is directed outwards: the target is the "other": society, or group, or power. Inner criticism has to be submerged. It is always group-propelled and can only therefore be political; it makes partisanship inevitable. For the committed, the inward rebellion is unacceptable and may be coped with by occasional spells of indulgent self-criticism. A rebel cannot become, in Lenin's words, a "professional revolutionary"_a term many committed writers like to apply to themselves because it is in the essence of his rebellion to be unique and unpredictable in thought and language. The language of the committed authors, on the other hand, though pretty strong, tends to get stereotyped: it has already developed a readily recognizable lexicon of its own, like a professional jargon. Their thought has become more or less equally predictable.

Rebellion is based on a moral and philosophical attitude adopted by an individual who finally aspires to effect a change in the lives of men as individuals. There is something of the millennial dream in all rebels, but just as rebellion wells up from within the individual, partaking of an inner experience, vision or suffering, its aim is the achievement of a moral change within man himself. That is, it aims at a change in sensibility, in fundamental attitudes and ways of thinking consonant with man's freedom and dignity and the all-important right to say No. The rebel contends that revolution, in the strict sense, is the organised uprising of a group, party, etc. which, though originally inspired by rebels, usually achieves, if successful, a change at the top_that is, an institutional change. Such a change is a change in collective power, not in individual morals. By the very nature of its being organised it ceases to be a rebel's act. The "professional revolutionary" therefore seeks a form of group organisation working for an institutional power change, and has consequently to abide by his group, to remain committed to it. The rebel remains an undigested element: his concern remains with individual dignity and freedom whenever threatened, regardless of the source of such a threat.

Arab writers, those that matter, are split into these two camps, the rebels and the committed, both responsible for new poetic forms, with a third camp completely out of sympathy with them. It is that of the classicists, who are irked by all this talk of "free verse" and mythological allusions and "hybrid" ideas. They represent a reaction of considerable tenacity. What is surprising is that they may write much poetry, some of which retains the old hypnotic beauty, but I do not know anyone among them who has written any fiction of note.

The classicists find themselves on one side of the fence with both the rebels and the committed on the other side. The battle between them has been largely one-sided: the classicists fire their salvos on a camp of so-called renegades who do not much bother to hit back, preferring to analyse their problems and solutions to one another. The old-school gentlemen accuse the new poets of undermining tradition, not only by playing hell with metrical laws and the one-rhyme scheme, but also by introducing themes and symbols that are alien to the spirit of Arabic tradition. They would in particular cite "pagan" allusions, essentially Christian concepts of "sin", "cross", "Golgotha", Marxist phraseology, etc.

The new poets having made their mark, continue with their experiments unperturbed. For them, language is dynamic and capable of the most complex expression, providing one has the skill to tap its resources. Tradition will itself atrophy by being merely sanctified and repeated by rote ad infinitum : it can only be alive by actual extension. For tradition to be alive it has to be allowed to be a fountain of power for things undreamt of, things to come, - without knowledge that concepts and symbols, regardless of their occasional religious associations, are basically as ancient as man and of a significance unlimited by time, culture or place. Finally, no expression is taboo, and no art-form can survive in a stereotyped mould.

The upshot of all this has been the discovery of dynamic form. The old concept that art forms are immutable and implicitly sacred, having been given their final perfection by our ancestors, is now relaxing its hold. Form has to reflect the inner workings of the subject matter and every work of art has to carry its rules and justification within itself. The other arts, notably painting and architecture, have been equally influenced by this conviction, which makes change in Arab arts, indeed the whole of Arab society, a closely interrelated story.

The following poems, which I have chosen and translated from works published within the last ten years, will illustrate some of the points I have made in the preceding essay. They are essentially what I call soliloquies, the poet unconsciously assuming the hero's_or antihero's_dramatic stance. Needless to say, they are too few to be adequately representative. For a reasonably comprehensive view of the avant-garde movement some twenty more poets would have to be cited.

The new poetry has been generally called "free verse", al-shi’r al-hurr, a convenient but inaccurate term. The error stemmed from a misunderstanding of the Western term by poets in Baghdad who were the first to break away from the old distich form. Most of this new poetry uses a relatively simple metre, repeating a taf’ila rather like an iambus or a trochee in English verse, and employs irregular and varied rhymes allowing some of the lines, which are usually of unequal length, to remain unrhymed. As Arabic is rich in rhyming words most poets would still feel unhinged without this musical anchorage, however, "poetical" their imagery or style. But there have also been some more daring poets who actually write free verse in the accepted sense of the term. Theirs would be an even more difficult position to maintain, were it not for the force, intensity and often complex structure of their poems. With them Arabic poetry attains an extreme opposite to the old norm: it is spare, terse, and concrete. It rejects abstractions and seeks a visual effect.



FROM RETURN TO JAIKOUR

(Jaikour is the village where the poet was born. It recurs in his later poetry as a symbol of fertility and salvation to be sought after going through drought and anguish.)"

III

Jaikour, O Jaikour, where's the bread and the water?
Night has come, the guides have slept,
But the travellers are awake from hunger and thirst.
The wind is harsh, the world all echoes.
A desert in whose endless range appears
No road to us, and night's sky is eyeless.
Raise, Jaikour, a door for us to enter,
Or entertain us with but a star that has some light.

IV

Who hears my poems?
Death's silence is in my house.
In the long fearful night
Who bears the burden of the cross?
Who is it that cries, that answers
One hungry and naked?
Who will bring the crucified down from his tree,
Scare buzzards away from his wound,
Lift darkness from his morning,
Replace the thorns with laurels?

V

Dying but no death,
Sound but no speech,
Labour but no birth.
Who crucifies the poet in Baghdad,
Will buy his hands or eyelids?
Who will make his crown from thorns?
O Jaikour, Jaikour,
The strings of light have stretched
The morning's swing:
To bird and ant now make
A feast out of my wound.

Badre Shaker al-Sayab



POEM

Extend O streets
And twist and darken,
Emit your odours and aim the whispers well,
Hide ghosts in corners
Under half-lit lamps,
Cuddle your hags who natter in joy, in sorrow,
And wash yourself in gutters
That ever fill your pot-holes.

I do not come to you in the evening
(Scouring you from south to north
And north to south,
Slow and solemn
As if I were in a new quarter
Of a city I arrived in but yesterday)
For fun to enjoy the sights
Taking, as it were, a dog for a walk
Or a delightful thought.

Your mud, spattering my shoes and clothes,
Churning in my heart, my head,
Is my unpurging purgatory,
And my drifting in darkness
Is a repentant's counting
Of his beads for no salvation.
I walk your streets unwearied
Until, having said enough
I add a few extra prayers
To end another night's expiation.

Then as the first morning light breaks in
I flee to a bed which copes with sighs singly
But gets a grim outrageous mixture
As if a radio blasted forth
The same announcer's voice
From a dozen stations all it once:
Book and brothel,
Church and heretic club.

I assail my bed like an enemy
But it offers me, affectionately, a lifeless hand
Into which I plant my nails_
A slain and gasping animal
That tears it and himself to bits.

Tawfiq Sayigh



SODOM

Disaster's dead. We've been dead for years.
The nights of the dead are ever the same:
No memory to inflame regret from time to time,
No seasons:
We shall remain beyond the sun's throw and the sad snow,
Untempted by begging the accursed tyrant
To give back some of what he's bled out of us,
Some bright vision, certainty,
Some memory.
What memory, what memory?
What memory of an emptiness, vast and dead, a desert
That wiped out all then vanished itself,
After which has vanished the taste of time?

It's the memory of that hideous morning_
Sickly, worse than a sorry night.
The village was constrained,
It laboured in gasps, suppressing its moans,
And silence ruled the earth.
An owl then hooted and bats flew off,
The horizon darkened
And thunder roared and tore the hot red clouds apart,
And rained salt and fire and brimstone,
And the torrent flowed in a blazing hell
And burned the village, stripped it naked,
Folded up the dead, and passed on.

The fire ordeal passed through us,
Its terror passed us grave by grave.
When we turned to where once we had
Homes, companions, memories,
We found our breasts were silent as rocks,
An emptiness vast and dead, a desert.
We were pillars of salt,
Travesties of time's idiocies,
That might remind a passer-by of the dead
But would not themselves remember: blank,
Without today or yesterday or memory.

Khalil Hawi



MIHYAR THE POET

I

Mihyar is King,
And dream is his palace and fire gardens.
Today a voice that died
Complained to words against him.
Mihyar is King
Who lives in wind's kingdom
And reigns over mysteries' land.

II

Mihyar is a face betrayed by its lovers;
Mihyar is bells that do not ring;
Mihyar is marked on people's faces
Like a song visiting us stealthily
On the grey roads of exile.
Mihyar is a bell of lost men
In this Galilean land.

III

Receive him O city of followers
With thorns or stones
Hang up his hands
In an arch under which may pass
The grave, and crown his temples
With brands or burning coals.
Let Mihyar burn.

Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said)



FROM A POEM SEQUENCE

X

I speak in my own voice.
If I sometimes roar it's because I've had the sea for friend,
And he who accompanies someone for forty days_
But I have accompanied it for forty years,
And like it flung myself at every dawn
Upon the long bare beaches.
I speak in my own voice through a mask
Of iron and stone, but every word of mine
Is a ship in which a thousand adventurers may sail.
Amid the flocks I stand,
Firm-footed among the aimless hoofs,
My head hitting the sun unhesitatingly:
What nonesense is this that says I should
Shove my face into the backside of everyone four-limbed?
Here I stand and make
Both myth and reality in my own way
And live the violence of my dream and reality.
My dream is even more awake,
More biting into the flesh
(Like the sea) than all reality.

Jabra I. Jabra



FACE BETWEEN TWO BOOTS

I think I am collapsing on pavements.
I shall die at the turning of the street one night
My fingers twisting on flagstones like apple-worms
Observed by nobody.
I see my end
I see some dagger in the dark aimed at my heart,
An extinguished vehicle
Carrying my desk and papers into the desert.
A strong wind will then blow
Caressing my short fingernails
And sweeping my poems along the streets like vegetable peels.
Through its moans I hear
The final lashes falling on my people,
I hear the music of battered doors
Slammed to by bayonets
By fingers frozen on moustache points.
I shall contemplate a foot, sunk in mud,
As it turns my face over on both sides
To find out who I am:
Whoever is this stranger, dead in our streets?

Mohammad al Maghout



DEPARTURE

I rise and go away from Saharnaya
From the shadow at the height of noon,
The turtle's pace_its feet
Lie on dead leaves' flesh
In the last autumnal corners.

I rise and go away from Saharnaya
And shake the dust off myself,
And at the last turning where
It disappears and the curtain descends,
I shall forget the stone faces, forget
The needle-like grasses
Clinging to stagnant pools
Hoping for rain that never falls,
Forget a crow we saw swoop
Into them in search of carrion: neither life
Nor death is in that city.

I rise and go away from Saharnaya
Sad, companionless,
For in Saharnaya was I born and there
On a wall by the roadside
I hanged my god. In the sand
In the darkness of sterile words
I buried my weapons, folded my wings,
Concealed the crime.
In Saharnaya I buried my daughters alive,
And I was their tomb.
My face was distorted there,
Swung round by every wind that blew.

I rise and go away from Saharnaya
And follow the road to its end
Where I shall hug the earth's face,
Hear God's silence
And from the wind build me a house
Against boredom's flies
And wolves prowling at night
In hungry search for flesh or stone.

Yousef al Khal



FROM EVERY MAN'S A GOD

They're at a loss like me,
Muttering the same question
But dare not look at the terror in faces
That pass them by,
Nor dare they dig up withfinger-nails
Out of these hating faces
Some good
Or love
Or charity.
The road is rough, bleeds their feet,
And heavy is my cross.
Let them stone everyone
Whose feet will bleed
As he carries his cross
And says man is god.

Let them ask me
About this that dwells within me,
They do not know the howl
Of my being torn up within,
My terror, my inhabiting god,
My eyes' own delirium
I am lost in their
Enquiring stutter, their static brains,
But they cannot break my wings.
I shall bear my cross,
Will never put it down:
Every man's a god.

Riad Najib al Rayyes

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