This testimonial was read at the Bahraini Writers
Association in the winter of 2005
I woke up in the early morning and tried to recall what friends had said
the night before about this interview: “The memory of modernism in the
Gulf” … A personal experience. I was told that I will be in a paradise
of intimacy but nonetheless I did not have any heartsease.
I woke up in the morning and the eloquent words echoed in my ears and so
did my anxiety. My head was still immersed with questions and my eyes
gazed at the ceiling of the room. Distant voices reached me from outside
to remind me of the time. I am used to escaping but this time I found
myself unable to.
Imagine what electronic chatting might do, especially when it is among
poets who master foolishness and chaos. Today I am a hostage of this
beautiful foolishness, which my friend Fawziyah Al Sindi was responsible
for, and of course I was her partner in liking the idea.
I wanted to be told by friends that the matter would be easy, but what
can I do so you would forgive my feelings of doubt?
What can I say about modernism to friends who are more equipped than
myself? It seems to be a duelling of already anticipated results!
You come bare-chested, amazed by words and their secrets. Your only
weapon is your language and whatever disasters in between are yours
alone and they end with “intimate” bullets.
I spent most of my life – and maybe it’s the case with most of my
generation – being burnt by the fires of this term.
Although we did not want to be parties in the debate around it, we have
been classified as modernist; out of sarcasm, of course, and not out of
acknowledging that this is the truth!
The main reason for this is the fact that we chose to write in blank
verse.
Just as poetry brings you peace it can also bring you a catastrophe,
especially in our Arab world that does not allow you fresh air.
Modernism does not reside in explanation or diagnosis, but in the
ability to live it in a real manner.
Modernism does not concern me as a term and it never did one of those
days. I was not preoccupied with the Arab rivalry that extends from the
ocean to the gulf and is concerned with its meaning and its effects. I
used to watch the ongoing dispute and feel estranged!
I call it a dispute, because in my opinion it never reached the level of
a composed and intellectual discussion.
The journalistic storms would end up being chapters in books and some of
them resorted to translations and depended on copying, so we ended
having double superficiality.
This was the prevalent scene and, unfortunately, for years and years we
were only aided by those who started their own critical and academic
projects. But because they are rare the sound of the void remained loud
in our cultural scene, not only in criticism, but also in creativity.
I hope that what I say here is not taken for being more than a
testimony. Because theory and criticism is not my field, and because
placing me in this stream will make me feel estranged,
I hope you forgive me my commitment not to wade into this kind of
dispute and to be content with speaking about my vision as a human
being, a poet and the understating of myself, of the components and the
effects that played and still play a role in my life and that
contributed in my making, whether directly or indirectly.
Memory:
Like others of my generation I
consider literary resources, be they poetry, novels or drama, some the
most important foundations on which I built my experience.
Arabic poetry formed the main source in my first stage in life in
childhood, as it presented an amazing window to another world that
resembles nothing in reality.
Reading Al Mutanabi, Abu Firas Al Hamadani, Niffari, Abu Nawwas and Abu
Al Alaa Al Miari is a form of complete magic for any pupil in the early,
middle or late period at school.
Maybe our relationship with Arab poetic heritage stems from this
amazement that overwhelms one at a young age and remains in control of
one like an eternal dream.
Or maybe it goes back to this vision that lends some kind of sacredness
to the old poetic texts and transforms them in time into a taboo.
No matter what, this in itself is considered the real substance and
memory in which experience is nurtured.
I remained gripped by this rich and magical heritage until I got to know
the more modernist poetry in high school.
What gripped me most was its ability to register the daily details in a
less complicated language and with images that allow the current mind to
accept them or to accept the similarity between them and the
particularity of time and place.
From there the window of knowledge started to widen because of an
increase in the variety of readings and the beginning of awareness of
what was happening around us, locally and in the Arab world. From there
I also started to imitate, not only in writing but also in drawing.
I have to admit that I enjoyed a rich childhood and a youth in which all
the elements that could contribute to the making of a human being who
has interests of a particular kind were there.
I got the books I wanted easily and also the music and the drawing
utensils.
I wanted to do everything and to learn everything.
Writing started in its awkward form in the late seventies. By the early
eighties I took a firm decision to stop the childish attempts in
imitating the traditional form of poetry and to commit to one form that
is to blank verse, which I like to call free verse.
I used to read with passion and the mystic experience in the verses of
Al Hallaj and Sahrawardi, then Ibn Arabi, added another dimension to my
experience, related to my questions about existentialism and my entrance
into modern philosophical worlds.
Every phase led me to another and like others I was overtaken by
Nihilism, Dadaism, Surrealism then Structuralism and linguistics as well
as other movements that make one more chaotic and bohemian.
In addition to that, there were other fingerprints that left deep marks
in the self and questions that would never ever get an answer.
These fingerprints are exemplified in the poems of Saint John Pierce,
Baudelaire, Rambo, T.S. Eliot, Aragon, Jack Perk and in philosophy as
well as in the verses of Shakespeare’s plays.
I have to here thank Jabra Khalil Jabra for his big project in
translation.
There were also the sacred books that I refer to here as being essential
in deepening my knowledge, in confusing my thoughts and in charging them
and enhancing my language and my spiritual growth.
I wrote a lot that I later refused to put in book form and I chose a
little of it to form my first book The Night of Heaven.
Between The Night of Heaven and Pomegranate Blossoms I faced many
challenges concerning my personal beliefs and my questioning of my text
and the world.
In more than 20 years I produced four books only and my fifth was
electronically published and is not yet printed in book form.
The reason is not because I do not write, but because I am indescribably
hard with my texts and because every time I ask myself for whom do I
write and why?
Translated by Dr
Omnia Amin
comments
