On becoming a poet
Amal al-Jubouri
My life in Iraq is completely mixed with politics, from the day that I
was born. Consider the year of my birth – 1967, the year of the Arab-Israeli war.
The beginning of my journey to have a critical voice came in 1984, at
the age of 17, when I was called in for interrogation by the representatives of
the Ba’ath regime. A very well-known poet, a man whom I regarded as a
colleague, a poet of my own generation, recorded conversations with me and reported
me to the dictator Saddam Hussein. This is a long story which I shall tell in
detail on a future occasion, not now.
So when I start writing I do not think of being a woman or a man. I am
thinking only as a human being, a human being who wants to scream, through
writing, to become free from fear. Writing is a kind of liberation or healing,
and I have come to feel this more and more. Poetry was and still is my genuine
healer.
After I was interrogated by Saddam’s officers, on several occasions I
tried to end my life. But I failed. I thought that committing suicide would be
a way of ending my fear, because after that incident fear was the absolute master
of my daily life. I was a young girl at the time, and that incident was way
beyond my mental capacity to deal with it.
I was writing. Suicide failed. I
was rescued several times. During this journey of survival, I was writing and
writing because I did not dare to tell the story of what had happened to me to
anybody, not even to my own family. I gave them hints,
but not the full story, because fear was everywhere, and fear was the regime’s
main tool for suppressing the people.
If you feel such a fear, even human dignity goes missing. So I was
searching through writing which is called poetry, for my refuge, my security,
my peace of mind, and my liberation from this world.
People refer to our generation as “the ’80s generation” or “the war
poets”. Of course we grew up just witnessing war and living in the middle of conflicts,
but each conflict was different. The Iran-Iraq War; the
Iraqi-Kuwait War; the Second Gulf War; and then the embargo and the American
occupation in 2003. What was common to them all was the human suffering,
and the peak of that suffering, which is the loss of your beloved ones. It is
not a replaceable thing when you lose someone forever. During the Iran-Iraq war
we were under heavy propaganda from the regime. They were calling for an Iraqi identity for us… all of us were supposedly descendants
of the great Mesopotamia, and we were all Arabs. We had to stand to defend our
country from Iranian attempts to invade it and destroy it. That was the
narrative of the war at that time.
I was very young, not even 14 years old, when the war started, and this
nationalism and patriotism also affected me and my generation. However I was
very lucky, because I did not publish any collection of poetry at that
time. My first and only collection,
published in 1986, The Wine of Wounds, was a personal scream; although I
put it in the frame of the cry of humanity. It was my story, my suffering. I
did not put out any collection of poetry comparable to my generation. I was
involved in journalism, so of course I did write about the war, but from a
different angle. At that time I was involved heavily in publishing my Arabic
translation of modern English poetry, as an ongoing series in the newspaper. We
were focused on the “humanity side” of the war. Now, of course, many years down
the line, I see all wars as the fundamental, most cruel and crazy solutions to
any conflict, because I have experienced many wars and restrictions, repression
and oppression, and I know that the only ones who pay the price are the
innocents, the civilians, while the politicians sit and do deals with the
enemy.
When I started writing poetry, I was writing of my personal crisis at
that time. Then, after also losing my uncle in 1984 (he was disappeared in
Baghdad) and after my interrogation, I discovered that I was just trying to
heal myself. So I started to read translated poetry, because I found it very
simple and much more relevant, not like classical Arabic poetry, which –
especially the pre-Islamic poetry – is very difficult, although at the same
timer it is very powerful. But I also read al-Mutanabbi.
For me he was like a godfather! Many of his verses have became proverbs,
expressions of wisdom, lessons from life applicable to each part of the world,
regardless to ethnicity or East or West. So I liked the poetry of al-Mutanabbi. I also liked the exiled poet Sa‘adi Yusuf. He was exiled because he was from the
communist party. I connected with any powerful poetry that was committed to
resistance and fighting against fear, and for justice and freedom, because that
reflected my personal experience. Al-Mutanabbi was
targeted by other poets, who reported him to the Khalifa,
and that was exactly what I had faced ̶ not the same in details, but I was targeted
by one of my closest poet colleagues. It
seems that this culture of betrayal is traditionally inherited in our society,
especially in the circles of the so-called “elites”. So Mutanabbi’s
experience with cultural figures who were going to the
dictator or the khalifa to report him was a
kind of parallelism of my same experience.
So I did not publish anything and focused on journalism, though I was
writing some poetry. Luckily in 1994 after the war and the uprising in 1991, I
wrote the collection Oh words, set me free!. I had not decided to publish this book. At
that time I was going to the house of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra the great Arab Iraqi of Palestinian origin Every time
I went to his house and recited some new poems he would keep a copy of these
texts in his house. One day he called me on the phone and started reading “Amal al-Juburi is the new Emily
Dickinson and Emily Brontë in the new Arabic Poetry” (not only Iraqi,
but also Arabic!). I was very surprised and
happy, and he told me: “This is the introduction for your new book.” So that
was included in the introduction to my second collections Oh words,
set me free!,
which was published in Amman in 1994 with his support and with his endorsement.
I was very down with what happened after the destructiveness of the war
in 1991, the withdrawal of the Iraqi military who were massacred by the
leadership of Saddam Hussein and by the American bombing, killing Iraqi solders
and burying them alive, bombing every city in Iraq, especially my own city of Baghdad.
I also lost my father at the same time that the war started, and during the war
I lost my nephew. Then came the uprising, and its aftermath, the
mass graves of the Ba’ath regime. All in all it was another turning point
in my life, and I expressed that in my second collection, especially in the
last very long poem Karbala’, where I compared the uprising in 1991,
which was a popular rising started by the people after the defeat of the Iraqi
army, with the famous historical battle which involved the Shi’a
Imam Husayn.
So in my second collection you see the cursing, the lamenting, against war.
I consider all wars as a big mistake, the root of all violence and hate in this
world. There is not a single war that is done for the sake of peace or
prosperity, or for humanity. All wars are the destruction of our humanity.
I write in the style of qasidat al-nathr (prose poetry), because I feel more free with it and
I don’t need to restrain my thought to fit with the format. Poetry for me is
freedom, journey and refuge, and a place where I feel free, but with dignity,
where I feel secure and safe. Poetry never betrayed me and it never will.
However, the freedom of poetry is also a dangerous and very scary freedom,
because you expose yourself to the Others, and once you
publish the text, it is not yours any more. Everybody puts you on the autopsy
table and make their own interpretation. Sometimes it is relevant to your own
thoughts, concerns and ideas, but sometimes it is a completely different
version of what you intended to say.
The figure of the woman Hagar figures strongly in my writings of that
period. If I look back now at the whole Hagar collection,
I find it very heavy and pessimistic. There is no hope at all! Now when
I read this book I feel suffocated because there is not a single sign of hope
there. I wrote it when I was down; it was not only me but was the whole Iraqi
nation, if such a thing as an Iraqi nation still exists. I rewrote the
calamity, the catastrophes, the humanitarian crises, the aftermath of 2003… I
wrote these poems when beheaded bodies were being thrown into the Tigris during
the sectarian civil violence; the families of the victims were searching for
the heads of their beloved sons or husbands. It was not easy… even to think of any sign of light at the end of
the mess of both the American occupation, the heavy inheritance of the former
regime, and the selfish new political Iraqi
elites.We citizens were and are still the only
people who paid – and are still paying – a heavy, bloody price.
After 2014 I realised that in this misfortune there must be a good fortune.
Then Hagar became more powerful (though she was powerful in my book anyway).
But there is much hope in the new generation, especially after the occupation
of Mosul and other cities by ISIS.
From the mass displacement, the collective destruction, and the irreplaceable
loss of innocent Iraqis, there arose a new movement in Iraq, the volunteer
groups who helped the Iraqi displaced, standing with them and transcending all
sectarian and ethnic identities and united a single, human, Iraqi identity.
At the same time, Hagar stays abandoned. When I went to districts such
as Salah al-Din, I saw many mothers and wives who had
lost their men during the ISIS crisis in 2014. I saw them abandoned: they had
no voice because there was no solidarity, neither inside Iraq nor outside Iraq.
ISIS has been identified through deformed narratives, so those women are
suffering doubly: on the one hand they lost their men; and till now their fates
are unknown. So yes, in those areas Hagar is still abandoned and suffering, and nobody recognises her suffering. But when you
go to the Yazidi territories, you find out that the Yazidis have changed the narrative of the rapes. In Iraq, even
if the woman is a victim, our society does not accept her, and the women
victims would be killed by their families. But now during the enslavement by ISIS
of the Yazidi community, the women, with the help of the
international community, are creating awareness with a human rights campaign.
Everything has changed. Even the high religious authorities of the Yazidi community issued a fatwa welcoming the
survivors of the enslavement. So the Hagar of the Yazidis
version is now empowered. She has a voice, like Nadia Murad
and Layla Taalo, coming out
of the thousands of survivors… So we have two kinds of Hagar. This is never
mentioned, in the West.
There is so much more to say, but it will have to wait for another day.
At the present time I am in Iraq, trying to see how a poet might be useful in
the current situation. It is a good time to reflect. I think, looking back,
that I would say that I am a poet of losses. So much loss…
1 October 2020