from this week's edition of Al-Ahram Weekly:
Poetry is politics
Arabic is Arabic, a girl is a girl and the land is, well, the land:
Tamim Al-Barghouthi tells Amira Howeidy about the poetics of Arab
identity
He's back.
It was on a particularly cold winter evening that he returned to what
is probably Cairo's most popular cultural centre, Al-Sawi's Wheel.
For those who knew of him -- and they're not few -- it was a surprise
to see promotion posters featuring a black-and-white photo of a half-
smiling Tamim Al-Barghouti on the Zamalek billboards, alongside
announcements of a poetry reading, ' Alluli betheb Masr (They asked
me do you love Egypt?), to take place on 10 February.
The last time his name was seen in the news -- March 2003 -- it was
in connection with being arrested and deported to Amman for
participating in the anti-war protests on the eve of the US/ UK-led
war on Iraq. A week later, Al-Barghouti wrote a poem in colloquial
Egyptian Arabic with the intriguing title ' Alluli betheb Masr, which
circulated rapidly and widely on the Internet before appearing in
Akhbar Al-Adab, Cairo's best known literary journal.
The poem was in a sense typical. Then 26 years old, a PhD candidate,
Al-Barghouti, the son of Egyptian novelist Radwa Ashour and
Palestinian poet Mourid Al-Barghouti, expresses his complex emotions
about Egypt, his birthplace and the country where he grew up, often
separated from his father (Mourid Al- Barghouti was deported the year
his only son was born, and for 15 years, this small family could only
meet on holidays), and out of which he was suddenly and unjustly
evicted. Images of fear, love, passion and nostalgia alternate with
bitter sarcasm and angry political critique.
To many the poem marked the beginning of a shift in Egypt's political
climate: it reflected much of what Al-Barghouti calls "the collective
consciousness" of a new and unusually politically engaged generation.
Ironically, on his deportation, the poem sealed his claim to fame.
The streets were conspicuously empty due to the weather as the main
hall of the Wheel filled with intellectuals, artists, students and
journalists representing every possible age group. When the hall was
half full Al-Barghouti went on stage: his voice is deep, sonorous,
clear. Applause as the impact of his last words lingered: "Love is
simple, but Egypt is a complex of many things. It is pretty, bitter,
chirpy and depressing. I can sum up the sun and say 'candle', I
cannot sum up Egypt and call it my love. People of Egypt, hear me
out: they asked me do you love Egypt. I said I didn't know. Go ask
Egypt, for she has the answers." As Al-Barghouti told me later,
however, translating the poem into English tends to strip it of
meaning. A poem in Arabic, his "most efficient" way of expressing
himself, is a complete entity in and of itself. Ask him what a poem
means and he will respond simply, "What I wanted it to mean, I've
already said in it. I'm unable to say it differently."
After They asked me do you love Egypt (Dar El-Sorouk, 2005), Al-
Barghouti presented something of a classical Arabic masterpiece
entitled Kuffu Lisan Al-marathi (Silence the Tongue of Requiems), a
lengthy epic-like diwan on Iraq comprising, according to Al-
Barghouti, a variety of stylistic forms: song, narrative, prose and a
range of traditional metres including the Husainaya Buka'eyat and
even takhmees.
(The former, "the Husayni lamentations", are combinations of song and
narrative depicting Imam Husain's exit from Mecca and entry into
Kerbala, where he was killed. Based on traditional classical Arabic
poems, they incorporate Iraqi dialect and are read routinely on the
feast of Ashoura, often punctuated by collective weeping. The latter,
"fiving", is a 10th- and 11th-century poetic technique almost wholly
absent from modern poetry, in which "an old poem in its entirety is
incorporated into a newer poem, so that every line in the older poem
becomes part of a corresponding line in the new poem").
The result is a unique book -- unlike anything Al-Barghouti has
written, probably unlike anything that has ever been written in
Arabic -- a fusion of techniques he found necessary on feeling "that
everything was threatened", as he explained to me in his parents'
house, off Hoda Sharawi Street, where he still lives.
Fascination with his father's poetry formed only part of the drive to
study "the language of heroes", as the seven-year-old Tamim attempted
to write his first poem. Of the next 20 years' yield of poetry -- and
Al- Barghouti is remarkably prolific -- the Egypt and Iraq diwans
seem to stand out. Since his first and second collections of poems --
Mijana, written in Palestinian colloquial and published in 1999 in
Ramallah and El-Manzar (The Scene), in Egyptian colloquial, published
by Dar El-Sherouk in 2000, Al-Barghouti has established himself as a
master of Arabic language and history -- an achievement unmatched in
his generation of literati.
The poet, who at the age of 28 also teaches political science the
American University in Cairo, strives to counter the collective Arab
depression, according to which "nothing matters" -- a mood that robs
people of confidence and concern. (In this sense, indeed, he is a
breath of fresh air to many Arab nationalists and others concerned
about the gradual extinction of political as much as poetic identity.)
The depression, he says, "has reached language -- we think our
language and moral codes are not good enough, men think girls are not
pretty enough, girls think men are not men enough." He pauses,
laughing. Silence the Tongues of Requiems, which has yet to be
published in its entirety -- only parts of the poem were published in
Akhbar Al-Adab -- is but a shout to counter this depression.
When he wrote They asked me do you love Egypt, he explains, the poet
was "in a state of terror, anger and sadness -- all at the same
time". All through his life he had taken his life in Egypt "for
granted". It was "my country and I'm staying here. It is the safe
place. Part of what I feel towards Palestine is identical to the way
I feel about Egypt -- this very romantic sentiment. But Palestine was
always far, I never seen it before 1998. Palestine is the home I
struggle to have, but Egypt was the home I did have. So when I was
deported, I felt my relationship with Egypt was jeopardized,
threatened. My presence was threatened. It was no longer the safe
place, no longer a home I had.
"And I tried to capture an image of that, like taking a photo of
someone you love before parting. I was taking a photo of Egypt before
leaving, not knowing whether or not I would ever return. My father
couldn't return for 17 years." A replay of that nightmare haunted him
as he wrote, which also tells the love story of his West Bank-born
father and Cairo-born mother. The more popular part of the poem was
written during his first week "in exile". He continued writing, he
says, until the length had almost tripled, and only stopped on 9
April 2003, the day of the fall of Baghdad.
"When Baghdad fell, I suddenly shed the fear deportation had
instilled in me . I felt it wasn't so much my relationship with Egypt
as everything, even God, that was under threat. It is the greatest
Arab calamity in the last 1,000 years of Arab history, more terrible
that losing Palestine in 1948 and 1967, more terrible than and every
single Arab defeat since the first fall of Baghdad under the Moguls
and the end of the Abbasid Caliphate in Iraq. It was as if every
conscious Arab lost an arm, an eye, a leg or a head on the same day."
But why silence the requiems? "For [it] is a luxury," argues the
first line of the diwan, "to stand and weep for those who fell."
Weeping, in other words, is not enough: "You'll have to run and find
a way to resist those who are killing your people in the camp,
something that doesn't give you the luxury of feeling devastated. You
have to be strong." The poem started with Al-Barghouti watching TV as
"they" entered Al-Ferdaus Square in Baghdad. It took him a year to
complete its 40 pages.
"If I attempted, in They asked me do you Love Egypt, to capture a
photo," he said firmly, " Silence the Tongues of Requiems was taking
a photo of Arab existence as a whole, a whole culture. I wanted a
snapshot of that to put in my pocket before someone came and snatched
it away, placing it in a safe box at the White House.
"We don't have that luxury because we do have something worth
fighting for. The Arabic language is beautiful, girls are pretty, men
are men -- and the land is the land. And, yes, a million shoes are
stepping on us but the feeling that we deserve this is completely
useless. Despite all our failures, we don't deserve it."
C a p t i o n : Tamim Al-Barghouthi
photo: Sherif Sonbol
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
Al-Ahram Weekly Online : Located at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/
2005/741/cu2.htm
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