Arabic Poetry: A Radio
Script, Part One
Jack Foley
Ever since pre-Islamic days, poetry has been the
mass art form of the Arab language. Through the centuries of classical
Arab civilization in the Middle Ages, the long years of Arab decline,
and into the decades of confrontation with European culture in the
twentieth century, the poets have never lost their place of esteem in
the minds of the people of the Arab world. In modern times, poets have
had a greater impact on popular culture than novelists: there are more
published poets than authors of literary prose in the Arab countries
today, and public readings by poets consistently attract mass
audiences, in settings ranging from rural villages to sprawling and
sophisticated capital cities.
--Abdullah al-Udhari, Victims
of a Map
In Palestine and
Modern Arab Poetry Khalid A.
Sulaiman writes, “The Arab defeat in 1948 and the loss of Palestine
to the Jews have been frequently called the nakba (the disaster), sometimes the ma’sa (the tragedy), by Arab writers when they talk about this subject.”
The term nakba is perhaps in
a sense the Arab equivalent to the Jewish term “holocaust,” though
each of those words carries a different weight of history.
*
This
is Jack Foley. Today’s show is the first of a series dealing with
Arabic poetry. I want to begin with a quotation from John L.
Esposito’s book, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality?
The quotation concerns the term, jihad:
“The
rapid spread of Islam proved a double threat to Christendom, both
religious and political [writes
Esposito]. The armies and merchants of Islam were its
missionaries, bringing both Muslim faith and imperial rule. Islam was
used to bind together, inspire, and mobilize the tribes as well as to
provide a rationale for expansion and conquest. The Quranic notion of jihad,
striving or self-exertion in the path of God, was of central
significance to Muslim self-understanding and mobilization. The term jihad has a number of meanings which include the effort to lead a
good life, to make society more moral and just, and to spread Islam
through preaching, teaching, or armed struggle. Muslim jurists
distinguished ways ‘in which the duty might be fulfilled: by the
heart, by the tongue, by the hands and by the sword.’
“In
its most generic meaning, ‘jihad’ signifies the battle against
evil and the devil, the self-discipline (common to the three Abrahamic
faiths) in which believers seek to follow God’s will, to be better
Muslims. It is the lifelong struggle to be virtuous, to be true to the
straight path of God. This is the primary way in which the observant
Muslim gives witness to or actualizes the truth of the first pillar of
Islam in everyday life. The spread of Islam through ‘tongue’ and
‘hands’ refers to the Quranically prescribed obligation of the
Muslim community ‘to enjoin good and forbid evil.’ Finally,
‘jihad’ means the struggle to spread and to defend Islam. Just as
the example of the Prophet offers a paradigm and the basis for the
fusion of religion and state, so too Muhammad’s movement readily
supplies the model for all Islamic movements in their struggle to
reform society and the world. The world is a battleground on which
believers and unbelievers, the friends of God and the enemies of God
or followers of Satan, wage war: ‘The believers fight in the way of
God, and the unbelievers fight in the idol’s way. Fight you
therefore against the friends of Satan.’ The mission of the Islamic
community is to spread the rule or abode of Islam globally much as
Muhammad and his followers expanded Islamic rule through preaching,
diplomacy, and warfare, and to ‘defend’ it. Islamic law stipulates
that it is a Muslim’s duty to wage war against polytheists,
apostates, and People of the Book who refuse Muslim rule, and those
who attack Muslim territory. To die in battle is the highest form of
witness to God and to one’s faith. The very Arabic word for martyr (shahid)
comes from the same root as the profession of faith (shahada). As in Christianity, the reward for martyrdom is
paradise.”
*
The
poet Adonis (pen name of Ali Ahmed Said) is widely considered to be
one of the Arab world’s greatest living poets. Born in Syria in
1930, Adonis enrolled at Damascus University in 1950 and read
literature and philosophy. He began writing and publishing poems
questioning the validity of various literary conventions and the
social and political structure of Syria. This led to his imprisonment
and finally to his exile to Beirut. He settled in Lebanon, where he
became the central figure of the new Arabic poetic movement. Abdullah
al-Udhari writes, “In 1957 the Lebanese poet Yusuf al-Khal and
Adonis launched their epoch-making poetry magazine Shi’‘r,
whose contributions eventually led to the breakdown of classical Arab
poetic conventions and redrew the map of Arab poetry.” The rest of
today’s program features selections from Adonis’ book, An
Introduction to Arab Poetics.
The book was originally published in a French translation in
1985. An English translation by Catherine Cobham was published by the
University of Texas Press in 1990. Adonis writes:
“If
we go back to the root of the Arabic word for poetry (shi‘r), that is to the verb sha‘ara,
we see that it means ‘to know,’ ‘to understand’ and ‘to
perceive.’ On this basis, all knowledge is poetry. We call the poet sha‘ir (literally, ‘one who knows, understands, perceives’) in
Arabic because he perceives and understands that which others do not
perceive and understand...he knows what others do not know. But in
general the term ‘poetry’ is used for a type of speech regulated
by metre and rhyme, speech ‘defined by markings which are not to be
violated,’ and the verb sha‘ara
has come most often to have another meaning: ‘to feel.’
“Arabic
poetry at the time of the Jahiliyya
(the pre-Islamic era in Arabia) was rooted in the oral and developed
within an audio-vocal culture;...this poetry did not come down to us
in written form but was ‘anthologized’ in the memory and preserved
through oral transmission...
“Pre-Islamic
poetry was born as song; it developed as something heard and not read,
sung and not written. The voice in this poetry was the breath of
life--‘body music.’ It was both speech and something which went
beyond speech...When we hear speech in the form of a song, we do not
hear the individual words but the being uttering them: we hear what
goes beyond the body towards the expanses of the soul. The signifier
is no longer an isolated word, but a word bound to a voice, a
music-word, a song-word. It is not merely an indication of a certain
meaning, but an energy replete with signs, the self transformed into
speech-song, life in the form of language. From this comes the
profound congruence between the vocal and acoustic values of speech
and the emotional and affective content of pre-Islamic poetry...
“If
we go back to the root of the word ‘song’ (nashid)
in Arabic, we see that it means the voice, the raising of the voice
and the recited poetry itself. Two basic principles of pre-Islamic
poetry were that it should be recited aloud and that the poet himself
should recite his own poem: as al-Jahiz says, a poem sounds better
from the mouth of its composer. The Arabs of the pre-Islamic period
considered the recitation of poetry as a talent in itself, distinct
from that of composition; obviously it was of considerable importance
in drawing an audience and impressing them enough to hold them
there--especially so since, at the time, listening was essential to
the comprehension of words and to musical ecstasy (tarab)...The...performance of poetry had its own rules in the
pre-Islamic period which survived into later ages...[S]ong was a
discipline of the voice which required a corresponding aural
discipline. The need to co-ordinate the various elements of song led
gradually to the devising of special rhythmic structures.
“The
characteristics of pre-Islamic poetic orality formed the basis for the
major part of the criticism and theory of poetry in subsequent
periods. Rules and criteria were evolved which still dominate not only
the technique of poetry but the tastes, ideas and areas of knowledge
reflected in it...
“The
Qur’an was not only a new way of seeing things and a new reading of
mankind and the world, but also a new way of writing. As well as
representing a break with the Jahiliyya
(pre-Islamic era) on an epistemological level, it represented a break
on the level of forms of expression. The Quranic text was a radical
and complete departure: it formed the basis of the switch from an oral
to a written culture--from a culture of intuition and improvisation to
one of study and contemplation...[The Qur’an became] a new literary
ideal that [transcended] the old pre-Islamic ideal...Modernity in
Arabic poetry...has its roots in the Qur’an; the poetics of
pre-Islamic orality represents the ancient in poetry, while Quranic
studies laid the foundations of a new textual criticism, indeed
invented a new science of aesthetics, thus paving the way for the
growth of a new Arab poetics...Bashshar Ibn Burd (714-84) was one of
the first poets to attack the poetics of pre-Islamic orality and to
invent a language of written poetics, or a language of the city
instead of a language of the desert...Bashshar Ibn Burd was called the
‘master of the moderns’ and was said to have ‘travelled a road
which no one else had travelled.’ [His work and that of his
followers] involved an insistence on the continual violation of
established practice in order that poetry should always be strange and
new in its language, structures, images and meanings...
“[Literary
criticism, however, ] for the most part took pre-Islamic poetry as a
model and an ideal and evaluted subsequent poetry according to how
closely it adhered to its poetic method. [Criticism] was based on the
assumption that pre-Islamic poetry was the depository not only of Arab
songs and music but also of truths and knowledge...[In fact,
pre-Islamic poetry] was not uniform but plural. The problem arose when
this plurality was compressed into a single model, viewed by the
critics simply as ‘song.’ Thus the values peculiar to song and
recitation became predominant in pre-Islamic poetry, and subsequently
the criteria of poetic orality were the ones most often applied in
appraising poetry. As a result, poetry and thought were definitively
separated...
“It
is important to note that the Arabs codified poetic orality...in the
early years of the interaction between Arab-Islamic and other
cultures, in particular Greek, Persian and Indian...In this climate
the rules of language were laid down for fear that solecisms and
corruptions would creep into the Qur’an and the hadiths
(sayings of the Prophet). Poetic metres were fixed to preserve the
rhythms of poetry and to distinguish them from Greek, Syriac, Persian
and Indian metres and rhythms, and rules for the composition,
appreciation and transmission of poetry were laid down...
“[It
was argued that] Arabs recited and sang their poetry guided by their
instincts and natural aptitude; they had no rules to bring order to
these but relied instead on their taste and perceptions...Arab
scholars feared that:
this
faculty would degenerate and as time went on the Qur’an and hadith
would no longer be understood. They therefore devised rules to govern
this faculty, based on their normal way of speaking, which are now
generally applicable, like universals and basic principles. They used
them to classify all parts of speech...These terms...they set down in
writing and developed...into a separate discipline, to which they gave
the name nahw (grammar).
...[T]he
view of poetry in Arab-Islamic society, particularly in the early
years, was dictated by pre-Islamic orality...Rhyme was the basic
element which distinguished pre-Islamic Arabic poetry from the poetry
of other peoples. Neither in Aramaic, Syriac, Hebrew or Greek was it
considered an essential feature of poetry in the way it was for the
Arabs. Because of this, the ancient Arab critics maintained that the
structure of pre-Islamic prosody was not an imitation of that of any
other nation but was exclusive to the Arabs...
“Today...we
are confronting a crisis in our relationship with this poetry...[C]ritical
discourse, having defined the characteristics of pre-Islamic poetry as
oral poetry, then transformed them into absolute criteria for written
poetics: henceforth poetry was only to be considered as poetry if its
metres followed the rules of oral poetry.... these rules prevailed,
drawing the dividing line between poetry and nonpoetry. The climate of
rule-making and intellectualization, generated by the climate of
ideological struggle between the Arabs and other peoples in the
seventh to the tenth centuries, helped these rules to become firmly
established...As a result, the written poetic text was viewed by the
critics as if it were an oral text, in so far as all that writing
demands--contemplation, exploration, abstruseness, thought itself--was
banished from the domain of poetry. In other words, although oral and
written poetry involve two different physical activities, the same
critical standards were applied to both...
“[The
great critic] Al-Khalil’s successors read a nationalist ideology
into his descriptive work and, influenced by the political, cultural
and nationalist struggles between the Arabs and other peoples, raised
it to the level of a set of normative rules. This was how poetical
speech became confined by specific metrical systems rather than
remaining free, its movement dependent on the creative power of the
poet...
“[W]e
can understand how disturbing the ‘creative text’ was for those
who adhered to the religious and rational systems of knowledge...[The
‘creative text’] offers a kind of knowledge not incorporated into
their systems, and impossible to acquire by the means which they use.
[T]he knowledge in [the] text is dynamic, explosive and unfettered. It
is a dislocation, an experimentation...There is no stability, and
nothing in thought is pre-established...In the Arab-Islamic
epistemological tradition, thought is an answer, and as poetry offers
no answers it is therefore defined as being entirely separate from
thought. But while the poet does not provide an answer, this is not to
say that he does not think: as poetry is a questioning, it leaves the
horizon open to inquiry and further knowledge; it offers no
certainties. Questioning is thought, giving rise to anguish and doubt,
while answering is a sort of cessation from thought, bringing
confidence and certainty. Questioning, in other words, is thought
which provokes more thought...
“Metaphor
in Arabic is more than an expressional device; it is in the structure
of the language itself, an indication of a spiritual need to transcend
reality...metaphor is an act of rejection of existing reality and a
search for an alternative...[M]etaphor releases reality from its
familiar context...changing the meaning of both words and subject
matter...
“[I]f
the spirit does not understand exactly what is meant by the words it
will continue to long for complete understanding, whereas if the sense
is immediately obvious, the yearning for perfection ceases to exist.
The aim of what we know is to arouse a desire in us for what we do not
know, a desire to increase our knowledge until it is perfect. Thus the
world existing within the boundaries of religious and philosophical
knowledge is closed and finite because it is certain; it becomes a
system of beliefs and an ideology. But from the perspective of poetic,
that is metaphoric, knowledge, the world is by contrast open and
infinite, because it is possibility, a continuing process of search
and discovery.
“[Metaphor]...is
a perpetual beginning, a bridge connecting the seen and the
unseen...the joining of two separate worlds into one...It is a
perpetual act of discovery of the infinite, involving a constant
destruction of forms. It does not remain settled in one form....
“Since
the 1950s the cultural background of Arab poets and critics has
derived from two divergent traditions: that of the self (ancient,
traditionalist) and that of the other (modern, European-American)...I
was one of those who were captivated by Western culture. Some of us,
however, went beyond that stage, armed with a changed awareness and
new concepts which enabled us to reread our heritage with new eyes and
to realize our own cultural independence. I did not
discover...modernity in Arabic poetry from within the prevailing Arab
cultural order and its systems of knowledge. It was reading Baudelaire
which changed my understanding of Abu Nuwas and revealed his
particular poetical quality and modernity, and Mallarme’s work which
explained to me the mysteries of Abu Tammam’s poetic language and
the modern dimension in it. My reading of Rimbaud, Nerval and Breton
led me to discover the poetry of the mystic writers in all its
uniqueness and splendour, and the new French criticism gave me an
indication of the newness of al-Jurjani’s critical vision...
“The
problem...is that the modern Arab poet sees himself in fundamental
conflict both with the culture of the dominant political system, which
reclaims the roots in a traditionalist manner, and with the images of
Western culture as adapted and popularized by this system. The system
separates us from our Arab modernity, from what is richest and most
profound in our heritage. It is in collusion with the prevailing
traditionalist tendencies and also with the cultural structures which
came into existence in the climate of colonialism, imposing this
relationship with the technical and consumerist forms of Western
achievement upon us...
“[M]odernity
is the problem of Arab thought in its dialogues with itself and with
the history of knowledge in the Arab tradition. If we are to treat the
problem of modernity, we must first re-examine the structures of Arab
thought. To question modernity, Arab thought must question itself.
Arab modernity can be studied only within the perspective of Arab
thought, on the level of principles and actual historical
developments, within the framework of its specific assumptions, using
its epistemological tools and in the context of the issues which gave
rise to the phenomenon and have resulted from it. To study it from a
Western perspective would be to distort it and distance oneself from
the real issues.
“Today
when we read the poets of the past it is not only to see what al-Khalil
and his successors saw, but also to see what was hidden from them,
what they did not see. We read the blank spaces which they left.
Legislation and codification go against the nature of poetic language,
for this language, since it is man’s expression of his explosive
moods, his impetuousness, his difference, is incandescent, constantly
renewing itself, heterogeneous, kinetic and explosive, always a
disrupter of codes and systems. It is the search for the self, and the
return to the self, but by means of a perpetual exodus away from the
self...
“[W]e
must examine the silence and ask questions of it: why did a single
critical and legislative discourse prevail which expressed a uniform
point of view, despite the many different voices involved? Did it
eclipse the others, and if so why, and how? Was it considered the only
correct view of poetry, and how had this come about? How was it
decided that pre-Islamic poetry could only be understood and evaluated
according to this view when reading it today we become aware of a
diversity which demands a more pluralistic and complex critical
response? Did more diverse views exist, and were they obscured or
forbidden? Why? How? Was there an authority which monopolized the
prescriptive discourse to the point where others ceased to exist? Was
this authority religious, linguistic, nationalistic? Did it represent
a commitment to bedouinism--symbol of purity and authenticity; and a
rejection of the city--symbol of hybridization and a lowering of
standards? Was it an amalgamation of all this? Is the continuation of
this discourse, the repetition of these same views and axioms, an
assertion of identity, and is this why it has a tendency to suppress
all others which may cast doubt on it, so that identity becomes mere
reiteration of the same thing?
“These
questions all imply that behind this permanent, uniform, prescriptive
discourse there exists a silence, an absence, a blank. Today we are
called upon to embark on a reading of our critical heritage which will
reveal these absences and make the silence speak.”
--Adonis, An Introduction
to Arab Poetics
*
THE
PASSAGE
I
sought to share
the
life of snow
and
fire.
But neither
snow
nor fire
took
me in.
So
I
kept my peace,
waiting
like flowers,
staying
like stones.
In
love I lost
myself.
I broke away
and
watched until
I
swayed like a wave
between
the life
I
dreamed and the changing
dream
I lived.
THE
DAYS
My
eyes are tired, tired of days,
tired
regardless of days.
Still,
must I drill
through
wall after wall
of
days to seek another day
Is
there? Is there another day?
--Adonis, from The
Pages of Day and Night, translated by Samuel Hazo)
Jack Foley
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