POETIC VOICES FROM THE ARAB WORLD

Sep 07, 2008 Features / Columnists, The Arts Forum

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Cultural freedom is the right of individuals and communities to define themselves and to protect traditional values and diverse ways of living threatened by conservatism, fundamentalism, materialism, totalitarian-ism and, lately, globalization. Writers, poets and artists are recognized as individuals whose works celebrate the human right to freedom of the imagination and its expression.
Every nation celebrates its writers, poets and artists, none more so than the Arab world. When the poet Mahmoud Darwish died on 9th August, at age 67, in the USA, Palestine declared three days of mourning. Darwish was buried on a hillside of Ramallah instead of the Jewish-Arab village in which he was born and from which he was an exile.
Darwish was one of the greatest Arab poets of the 20th century. His searing lyrics on Palestinian dispossession and the human condition caused him to be recognized as the pioneer of the “modern Palestinian cultural project”.
The 19th century revival of Arab nationalism produced poetry that was dominantly romantic in tone, looking to the golden age of the past. However, the creation of Israel catapulted Arab poetry into the 20th century— its old forms and images no longer relevant to a people whose world had been turned upside-down after 1947. The Six-Day War, the destruction of Beirut in 1982 and other such galling events all engendered bitterness and alienation among the people that expressed itself in a poetry of despair.
Here is a poignant verse by Mahmoud Darwish for us to reflect upon, written after the expulsion of Palestinians from Lebanon:

We travel like other people, but we return to nowhere. As if traveling is the way of the clouds. We have buried our loved ones in the darkness of the clouds, between the roots of the trees.
And we said to our wives: go on giving birth to people like us for hundreds of years so we can complete this journey
To the hour of a country, to a meter of the impossible
We travel in the carriages of the psalms, sleep in the tent of the prophets and come out of the speech of the gypsies.
We measure space with a hoopoe’s beak or sing to while away the distance and cleanse the light of the moon.
Your path is long so dream of seven women to bear this long path on your shoulders. Shake for them palm trees so as to know their names and who’ll be the mother of the boy of Galilee.
We have a country of words. Speak speak so I can put my road on a stone of a stone.
We have a country of words. Speak speak so we may know the end of this travel.

From Classical Arab Poetry
A translation by Charles Greville Tuetey (1988).

If the translated version of the poem is so lyrical, how much more moving and poignant must the original version in the Arabic be, a language whose sounds are a powerful echo and reminder of that great truth: “In the Beginning was the Word, and the Word was God”.
On the other hand, whereas Darwish’s poems speak specifically to the anguish of the Palestinian people, the poems of Kahlil Gibran embrace a much wider range of universal themes, not only the political. Gibran is much better known and his poetry has greater resonance in the western world than many Arab poets.
Gibran was born on 6th December, 1883 in the shadow of the Cedars on Lebanon’s treacherous mountains but spent his mature years in the shadows of the skyscrapers of New York. Gibran’s family had fled the rule of the powerful Turkish Sultan – Turkey having conquered Syria as early as 1517. The history that shaped Gibran’s perceptions and informed his poetry would make the most interesting reading.
Meantime, this poem from Gibran is worth reflecting upon and pondering on the affinities in world communities as we all try to gain better understanding of the human condition:
Pity The Nation by Kahlil Gibran

Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion.

Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats
bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows
not from its own winepress.

Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems
the glittering conqueror bountiful.

Pity the nation that despises a passion in its dreams, yet submits
in its awakening.

Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a
funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save
when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.

Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a
juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.

Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpetings
and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with
trumpetings once again.

Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong
men are yet in the cradle.

Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself
a nation.

Perhaps, in these so-called Third World countries, we should become more aware of the resonance of art coming from other besieged communities and try to see if we share any affinity with them with regard to the human condition.

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