The South Carolina Modern Language Review |
Volume 4, Number 1 |
“Seeking Glory in the Dunghills”:
Representations of the City in the Writings of Modern Arab Poets
by
Yair Huri
Hebrew
University and Ben Gurion
University of the Negev,
Israel
Abstract
The purpose of this paper
is to examine the image of the city as represented and conceptualized in the
works of prominent modern Arab poets, mainly since the 1950s. In this article,
I will argue that the attitude of these modernists toward the city is
characterized by a unique ambivalence. On the one hand, many of them
(particularly those who migrated from provincial towns and rural areas to a
capital city) unequivocally depict the city or metropolis as a harsh and cruel
prison. On the other hand, these same poets recognize the immeasurable
possibilities and the immense cultural space the big city offers its
inhabitants, especially its poets and artists. Accordingly, a more incisive
reading of their works reveals that modern Arab poets are also enthralled and
captivated by the modern city. They feel that they have to put up with the
metropolis, awe-inspiring as it may be, distant from the “first sky” as it may
be, because it allows them to confront paradox and incongruity, thus eliciting
creativity. Therefore, as far as most Arab modernist poets are concerned, their
having being uprooted from their home village has put them face to face with
“the other”. In their eyes, it is exactly this challenge to their comfortable
and somewhat stolid existence that propels them to the forefront of artistic
creation.
1. Introduction
The cities
break up
The land is
a train of dust
Poetry alone
knows how to marry this space.
(Adonis,
The Book of Siege)
In an essay
titled Semiology and the Urban, Roland Barthes attempts to portray the
complex and multifaceted interaction between the city and the text. In the
following passage, he encapsulates his view of the city: [1]
The city is a discourse and this discourse is truly
a language: the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city, the city
where we are, simply by living in it, by wandering through it, by looking at it
To use Barthes’ terminology, this paper is an attempt to discover how
modernist Arab poets “speak”- or better “write”- their city. It goes without
saying that different “readers” and “writers” of the same city necessarily
create different texts, and as scholars point out, discussions of the cityscape
among contemporary urban semioticians―such as Walter Benjamin, Umberto Eco and
the Roland Barthes―finally boil down to the question: whose city? [2]
This article focuses mainly on the image of the city in the poetic and
discursive works of some of the most prominent poets from the Arab literary
renaissance of the 19th and early 20th centuries until
the present time. I would like to pay special attention to the works of
prominent modernist Arab poets since the 1950’s, who, interestingly enough,
were born in rural areas and later immigrated to the city.
2. The City in Classical and Neo-Classical Arabic
Poetry.
Commencing with
the rise of Islam in the 7th century, classical Arabic poetry
underwent an extended process of urbanization and acculturation, which was
completed by the 10th century. As Joseph Sadan and other scholars
have pointed out, one the main themes that consistently pervade classical
Arabic poetry is the distinct dichotomy between city and country life, or to be
more specific, between the urban-sedentary and Bedouin-nomadic way of life.[3]
Classical Arab poets who advocate the nomadic ways of life aggrandize the
Bedouins’ innate wisdom, their sagacity, their remarkable eloquence, and their
spiritual supremacy over the educated and supposedly sophisticated city
dwellers. The Bedouins are commonly described as intrepid warriors and as being
able to endure gracefully the hardships of desert life. For this reason, their
image has long stood in stark contrast to the image of the pampered urban Arab.
On the other hand, pro-sedentary literature harshly attacked the Bedouins and
sought to portray them as unrefined and ignorant, incapable of comprehending or
appreciating the refined urban life. They were generally described as poor and
uncouth, someone who has yet to be redeemed by urban life.[4]
The urban-sedentary tendency was given a unique expression and was
firmly anchored in the works of many prominent Abbasid poets, most notably, Abu
Nuwās (762-810), a wine poet of Persian origin. In his poetry, he celebrates
the increasing splendor of Baghdad and praises the Persian cities (even after
their obliteration). At the same time, he harshly decries the Bedouin’s
deprived existence.[5] In the eyes
of Abū Nuwūs, there is no room for comparison between the glorious urban
civilization of Persia, symbolized in his poems by the palaces of Persian
kings, and the Bedouin ascetic way of living, symbolized in his poem by the
drinking of camel’s milk. In the following lines, for instance, the poet
responds to those who criticize him for his harsh anti-Bedouin attitude: [6]
Critic, relent!
Your hope for repentance
Will meet with
disappointment.
For this is the life,
Not desert tents,
Not camel’s milk
How can you set the Bedu
Beside Kisra’s palace?
Similar to Abū Nuwūs, al-Buhturī (821-897), another highly-acclaimed
Abbasid poet who was also an inhabitant of an increasingly urban culture, grew
restless with the nomadic way of life and with the ways it was represented in
pre-Islamic poetry. In his most famous poem- and perhaps one of the most famous
poems in all of classical Arabic poetry, I
have preserved my soul from what pollutes my soul, al-Buhturi describes his
journey to al-Mada’in, the site of the Sassanian Persian imperial ruins about
twenty miles southeast of Baghdad. Though less blatant than Abū Nuwūs,
al-Buhturī uses both the trip and his descriptions of the royal palace to sing
the praises of the urban civilization of the long lost Persian imperial
dynasties; but even more important is the fact that by doing so, he obliquely
states that he no longer wishes to be associated with the “poetics of the
desert” to which he held an ingrained aversion. [7]
After almost three centuries, the long-lasting struggle between the
urban and the nomadic in classical Arabic poetry was ultimately won by the
city’s exponents. It would not be an exaggeration to assert that in the eyes of
most prominent classical poets, the Arab city―with its monuments, green spaces
and its springs and rivers- became the embodiment of Paradise on earth.
Neo-classical Arabic poetry, which marked the beginning of al-Nahda (the Arab literary renaissance
of the 19th century and the early 20th century), was in fact a return to the
themes, images and poetic diction of Abbasid poetry. Though most critics and
scholars regard the neo-classical school as the first phase of modern Arabic
poetry, it did not offer a new poetic approach toward the city, and did not change
the longstanding and deeply-rooted attitude toward urban life. The
neo-classical Arab poets, headed by the Egyptian Ahmad Shawqī (1868-1932),
continued to allude to every Arab (and Western) city they toured as Paradise,
using almost the same phraseology as classical Arabic poetry. Accordingly, in
Shawqi’s poetry (which best represents neo-classical poetry in its heyday) we
find, for instance, the following verses in which he refers to Damascus while
using Edenic imagery: [8]
I believe in God and exalt
his Garden
Damascus is an absolute
joy, gardens of Eden and sweet sage
In Damascus, the river of Barada, which flew and
stormed, welcomes us like Ridwan who welcomes you before (you enter) Paradise.
In one of his most famous poems, which was written during his exile in
southern Spain, Shawqī expresses his yearning for Egypt after being banished
from it by the British governor. In the following lines, he depicts both Egypt
and Cairo's landscape and monuments, again using the Edenic images: [9]
Egypt―though it hid its
affection (for me)―
is a stream of Paradise
which serves us camphor.
This glorifying approach is evident in the poetic works of almost every
prominent neo-classical poet. The classical poetic conventions, which were
fully and without reservation espoused by most of the highly acclaimed
neo-classicists, prevented them from expressing any sort of criticism toward
the increasingly urbanizing cities in the Middle East. Far-reaching and radical
changes in the attitude toward the city occurred only with the emergence of a
new generation of young Arab poets in the late 1950s and later on in the 1960s
and 1970s.
3. Representations of the City in Modern Arabic
Poetry.
More than one
factor has contributed to the forging of a new attitude toward the city and
urban life in the works of the modern Arab poets. An element of great
importance has been the increasing openness of this young generation of poets
to Western poetry and to the manner in which the Western city has been
portrayed. As Shmuel Moreh has indicated, most of these poets were deeply
influenced by T.S. Eliot’s criticism of the modern city, as reflected in his
most celebrated poem The Waste Land (1922).[10]
Eliot depicted life in the modern city as insufferable, evoking strong feelings
of spiritual emptiness, alienation and palpable estrangement among the city’s
dwellers. The harsh drabness of modern
life and the
gloomy representation of urban existence are mostly evident in the following
famous lines from the poem’s first stanza, entitled “The Burial of the Dead”:[11]
Unreal
City
Under
the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A
crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I
had not thought death had undone so many.
Sighs,
short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And
each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Nonetheless, Eliot also maintains that one of the prime duties of the
true modernist poet is to employ his art for the exploration of the
multifarious interaction between urban life and poetic discourse. In his
well-known essay What Dante Means to Me, Eliot states that as a
modernist poet, he constantly strives to discover “the poetical possibilities, never developed by any
poet writing in my own language, of the more sordid elements of the modern
metropolis, of the possibility of the fusion between the sordidly realistic and
the phantasmagoric, the possibility of the juxtaposition of the matter-of-fact
and the fantastic.”[12]
In his book of essays My Life in Poetry (1969), the Egyptian Salāh
abd al-Sabūr (1931-1981), one of the prominent young Arab poets whose early
poems were written in the spirit of “Socialist Realism,” attempted to delineate
Eliot’s influence upon both him and the young generation of Arab poets.
Commenting on one of the most powerful and famous poetic image from The
Waste Land, which portrays an unpalatable lovemaking scene between two
young inhabitants of the Western city, abd al-Sabur pens the following: [13]
Is this life? No, it is barrenness and aridity. For
the modern city has violated all sublime human values. It transformed solitude―
the most productive element which the individual possesses― into tediousness
and dejection. It transformed love into corniness, frivolity, and irritation
similar to a skin disease’s irritation. It transformed music into a somber
spiritual drone.
Another fundamental factor that propelled this sweeping change in
attitude toward the city was the fact that the great majority of these modern
young poets were born in rural areas, and commenced publishing their poetic
works upon their immigration to a capital city. The cultural and mental shock
inflicted upon them by the city was undoubtedly overwhelming and was strongly
reflected in both their poetic and discursive writings. An emblematic example
of the way the city was conceived by these poets can be found in the following
lines, written by the Iraqi poet Abd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (1926-1999), one of
the key figures among the poets of the 1950s. In these lines, al-Bayātī
describes his arrival to Baghdad and his first encounter with the city:[14]
I come from the country. There I used to live,
sometimes living it, always returning- until 1944, the year I joined the
Teachers College. My first shock was when I discovered the reality of the city.
It was false, spurious […] It was no more a city than a clown is a clown by
virtue of sticking on his clothes every color or patch he can find. I felt that
the depth of the real city that had lived for several centuries on the banks of
the Tigris, and which was born among and was contemporary with great
civilization, had died and disappeared forever. I hadn’t expected such a city
to return, but I had expected it to have some continuation like that of the
river which springs from and flows towards the great sea, embraces it and is
absorbed by it. For this reason, my revolt against the city was a rejection of
its existing perceptual form. It was not an emotional rejection, but formed the
nucleus of a revolt which generated the revolution.
These two factors―the influence of Eliot and the rural origins―primarily
accounted for the deep-seated change in the representation of the city in the
fifties; their impact on the way modern Arab poets perceived urban life can be
clearly observed in almost every volume of poetry that was published from this
period on. The city became the ultimate embodiment of evil and iniquity on
earth. In addition to the fact that it represented alienation and seclusion it
was portrayed as a place in which true justice no longer exists, a place in
which indignant and vindictive residents to take the law into their own hands.
In the following lines from the poem The
City’s Poem, included in the
volume Chronicles of a Professional
Politician (1970), al-Bayātī
dolefully describes his own dreadful encounter with Baghdad and its dismal
reality:[15]
When the city became naked
[…]
I saw in its sad eyes the
gallows being set up
the jails and the
incinerators
Anguish, loss and smoke
I saw in its eyes: man
is glued like a mail stamp
to everything
I saw: blood and misdeeds
match boxes and jerked meat
I saw in its eyes the
childhood and the lost orphan girl
seeking in the dunghills
for glory,
for a dying moon
above the houses’ cadavers.
I saw the man of tomorrow,
exposed in the warehouses’ facade
wrapped with grief and
bleakness,
handcuffed. The policeman,
the sodomite,
and the pimp
spit in his eyes.
But despite this distasteful depiction of the city, al-Bayātī’s speaker
does not wish to leave it and does not lose hope that he will be able to bring
change to his city. Instead, he feels that he is challenged to create
poetically the utopian “Noble City”, a term coined by the distinguished
medieval Arab philosopher al-Fārābī (870-950). In his poem The Moon of Shiraz (1975), he seeks the help of Aaisha, who, among
other things, is also a legendary muse, who artistically inspires him to
“paint” a new city:[16]
I own her… I reside in her
I worship her
With her feather, I paint
noble cities in which poets pray.
This ambivalence attitude towards the city can be also found in the
works of Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (1926-1963). Al-Sayyāb, al-Bayātī’s colleague
and the most highly acclaimed poet among a group of leftist Iraqi poets,
portrayed yet other aspects of urban existence in Baghdad. As another poet who
was also born in a small village in southern Iraq, al-Sayyāb bewailed the
complete loss of intimacy, familiarity, and genuine affection between the
citizens of the city. In his famous poem The
Brothel House, included in his celebrated collection Hymn to Rain (1954), al-Sayyāb likens Baghdad to a huge brothel,
wholly dominated by moral dissipation and sexual debauchery. After depicting
the profligate life of the metropolis, he summarizes his view of modern
Baghdad: [17]
Is this Baghdad?
Or is it Gomorra that has
been
revived, but its revival
was indeed death?
But alongside this menacing and ominous perception of the city, we can
discern in other poems by al-Sayyāb that he also expresses compassion and
empathy for the very same city. In his celebrated poem Christ after Crucifixion, also included in Hymn to Rain, the poet uses Jesus as a poetic persona and depicts him as lord of nature and redeemer of the
wretched of the earth. The following stanza is salient to our discussion, for
it reveals the poet’s veiled affection for his city, an affection expressed in
his ability to heed the city’s subdued “wail”:[18]
I listened. The wail was
Crossing the plain between me and the city
Like a rope pulling at a ship
As it sinks to the seabed.
The dirge
Was like a thread of light between dawn and midnight,
Upon a grieving winter sky.
And the city, nursing its feelings, fell asleep
This attitude towards Baghdad can be also found in the works of Sa'dī
Yūsuf (b. 1934), a key figure among Iraqi modernist poets. Yūsuf was born in
the small village of Abū al-Khasīb in southern Iraq and migrated to the Iraqi
capital when he was 18 years old. Like to his colleagues, Yusuf was overwhelmed
by both the harsh social reality and the chaotic rhythm of life that dominates
the Iraqi metropolis. In the poem The New
Baghdad, included in the volume All the Nights (1976), Yūsuf gives voice
to a kaleidoscope of impressions of the big city, while likening it to a woman.
The feelings of distress, melancholy and deprivation noticeably pervade the
following lines: [19]
She comes to me with a bowl of soup
when I am besieged by
fumes
of cheap arak.
She comes to me in dusty noons.
And with each sunset night snatches
she comes to me with
an
evening star.
In the cafes she sits to bitter tea.
In the market she sells cheese
and buffalo livers.
She dusts her used-clothing stores,
searching for bones in a bowl of soup,
for milk to the lips of a child
and a glimmer in a pair of eyes
and something a woman does not yet know
and streets where water never greens.
At night
she roams among houses abandoned by the poor
and churches where a muffled mass fades
and huts where poor girls faint.
At midnight
she returns to her enchanted shelter
behind muddy streets,
carrying the bread of the dead,
myrtle flowers,
slivers of buffalo liver
and two bones for a bowl of soup.
At dawn she stops by all her houses,
waking all her children,
dragging them to the street,
the thousands waiting to march on Baghdad.
Yet, in a poem entitled A Calling
Card, included in his volume Distant
from the First Sky (1970), Yūsuf, like the Iraqi poets who preceded him,
also expresses deep compassionate and empathy towards his city. Similar to both
al-Sayyāb and al-Bayātī, he sees the big city as a place of human bereavement,
but at the same time as a space that triggers his poetic creativeness. In the
following lines from the poem, he describes a numinous nocturnal journey of an
anonymous vagrant in the western Baghdad district of al-Karkh: [20]
The year 2000, in the middle of the night, in the garden’s gate
A wanderer has passed, his footsteps burdened by
The bullets of the long lost life. They tell the story of how they died.
This is the land:
He
wonders: where is the city?
Did it
go away or plunge into the underworld?
Or did
it fly to the place where the larks fly?
He
wonders: have the living people died?
Or maybe
its dead people have dispersed and then were revived?
The city
Is like
a dry branches of palm, vestiges of a ship
The wind
whistles on its dusty banks, whistles sadly
In a place where the
Tigris is not red and the Euphrates is not yellow.
O land,
he knows what has been said once about the soil
of its
graves: it is a wasteland.
But
something is still being born inside of you,
Pure as water running
through leaves, and it imbibes the elegies of
your
Residents and their songs.
It is clearly evident that Yūsuf does not even attempt to diminish the
feelings of despair and hopelessness that strike the nocturnal vagabond as he
wanders the streets. For Yūsuf, these feelings are normal and unavoidable.
Nevertheless, at the end of the stanza, he turns to the city and proclaims
that, in his eyes as a poet, despite its misery and death, “something is still
being born” inside its commotion. The source of this “birth” is the very same
misery and death, the “residents’ elegies,” to use the words of the poem. The
notion of Weltschmerz, bleakness, is
a potent force that encourages creativity and brings forth poetic inspiration;
it is used by Yūsuf to elicit a sense of ambivalence towards the city.
The murky representation of the city as a harsh prison that dehumanizes
its residents became a key motif that permeates the works of almost every
modernist poet in the Arab World. In the following lines from his celebrated
poem The Book of Genesis, included in
his poetry volume entitled The Coming Testament (1975), Egyptian poet
Amal Dunqul (1940-1983), portrays the modern city―supposedly the symbol of an
enlightened civilization―as both a primeval and a merciless place in which no
resident is sheltered from its cruelty and bestial atmosphere:[21]
And I said:
Let justice be on earth, an eye for an eye and a tooth for
a tooth
I said: Does the wolf eat the wolf? The sheep eat the sheep?
Do not place the sword against the necks of these two:
The child or the old man
And I came to see the son of Adam
Slaying the son of Adam, setting
cities ablaze, thrusting his dagger in the wombs of
pregnant women
tossing his children's fingers as silage to horses …
Justice became death, the handgun its measure
its children were crucified in the squares or hanged in the
city’s corners.
And I said:
Justice was now the possession
of those who sit on thrones of skulls with shrouds
for mantles
And God saw this was not good.
It can be
easily observed that Dunqul incorporates biblical language and its idiomatic phraseology with the
purpose of constructing a poetic image epitomized by sheer
havoc. This havoc foreshadows an apocalyptic ending and effectively elicits a
feeling of disgust and revulsion towards the modern city. Dunqul, who was born
in a small village in Upper Egypt, migrated to Cairo in his early life, and in
spite of his prolific literary output, he suffered a life of wretchedness and
unrelieved poverty.
The image of
a metropolis that spiritually devours its inhabitants pervades many of his
poetic works. It is true that the Romantic Arab poets who preceded Dunqul and
his colleagues portrayed the image of the city in a similar manner. However, it
should be emphasized that they did so purely to make an unsophisticated and
rather simplistic comparison between the pastoral country life and the
boisterous life of the industrial city. Dunqul, as a true modernist poet, goes
far beyond this one-dimensional comparison and transforms the image of the city
into a multifaceted allegory encompassing diverse dimensions of modern human
existence.
However, Dunqul also senses that the turmoil that dominates the city
evokes his innate creativity and triggers his poetic inventiveness (“the pen
within my heart,” in his words). He conveys this notion in the following lines
from his poem Stories of the Silvered City (1971), in which he describes
his encounter with the Egyptian capital: [22]
The city was boisterous
I carried nothing except a pen within my heart
I was carrying nothing except… my pen.
In my hand there were five mirrors
Reflecting the light that beamed from my
blood to the city
Then I knocked on the city's door.
Salāh abd al-Sabūr, whom I have already mentioned, is yet another “poet
of Cairo.” He migrated to the Egyptian capital from the town of Zaqaziq in the
Delta, and like Amal Dunqul, he also uses dreary and downcast poetic images to
portray the city in which he has chosen to reside. These images are evident in
the following lines from the poetic cycle entitled Sailing through Memory (1981): [23]
going down the
sandy, narrow path
down the canal that wore straps made out of its withered
flowers
as mourning clothes […]
Moving from one sad village to another […]
I have arrived in it in the middle of summer […]
Its voice, under the whips of sun and sand,
was groaning
and groaning
and groaning [...]
The ears of the men and the observers fail to hear it
Those who can hear it are the city’s lost dogs,
some of its lunatics,
and the poet …
Similar to al-Sayyāb’s avowal that he could hear the city, Abd al-Sabūr,
too, avows that the inimitable capacity to hear the city’s “groaning voice”,
its “deep streams,” is granted only to a handful of creatures: the city’s dogs,
its dying people, its crazy residents, and the poet. This unique capacity to
sense the “true” city impels the poet to also reflect upon the interaction
between urban life and the poetic process. He is confident that by divulging
the distressing truth of urban life as he sees it, he can achieve two goals: he
can ingeniously create a utopian city (or as he calls it “the lightening
city”); and through this creation, he can attain “poetic redemption.” This
notion is ingeniously reflected in a poem entitled The Poem of Exodus included
in the volume The Dreams of the Old Knight (1964), in which Abd al-Sabūr
describes a mystical journey from the city to the desert:[24]
I am leaving my city, my
old residence
leaving in it the vicious
burdens of my life […]
in my journey’s anguish
lies my redemption
and death in the desert
will be my resurrection
If I die, then I’ll live as
I wish in the lightening city
the city of clarity, abundant
with lights
the sun will not forsake
the noon hour
O, lightening city
city of visions which
imbibes light
city of visions which churn
with light
are you just an illusion
into which the roads converge?
or are you the truth?
or are you the truth?
The city, which transforms into the “city of visions,” is now also a
source of poetic inspiration despite its despondency and desperate. The
“vision”, the most important element which the modernist poet needs for his
inspiration, now becomes embodied in the city. Moreover, when this vision is
combined with the “madness,” which assails the poet the minute he encounters
the pandemonium and mayhem of urban life, he senses that he can poetically
articulate the experience he undergoes. This notion is expressed in these
following lines from his poem I Have
Survived in which he seeks refuge in madness when he is confronted with the
city:[25]
Tell me what to do
I implore you […]
If you are wise tell me how to become mad
to feel the pulse of this mad universe
[…] after that I shall not ask it for wisdom
Abd al-Sabūr’s resolve to become “crazy” in order to confront the city’s
uproar is inspired by the poetics of Adūnīs (pseudonym for Alī Ahmad Sa‘īd, b.
1930), the most prominent modernist Arab poet. Adūnīs regards “madness” to be
that crucial quality the poet possesses when he faces modern life. This is how
Kamal Abu-Deeb elucidates Adonis’ “madness”:[26]
It is sufficiently clear […] that Adonis’s madness
is not insanity, it is not the dislocation of mental faculties, the ascendancy
of chaos over order, of the irrational over the rational, of the profane over
the sacred. Madness is an intellectual position, a position of rejection and
total commitment. Madness is the power to create new relationships, a fresh
language, to give things new identities, to “seduce the universe” […] For,
without a total, comprehensive revolution; without changing the structure of
reality, of society and the culture, without destroying “the time of
ossification” and instituting “the time of creativity”, all efforts to bring
about a new world will be in vain. As, indeed, they―to a great extent― have
been.
Deeply stirred by this “madness,” which propels him to surmount the
pessimistic reality of his city, Abd al-Sabūr’s speaker realizes that despite
the city’s “ailing pulse,” he chooses to reside in it: [27]
But I love it, I love this city
How slender is the space between love, mercy and
ill will
I love to live inside its flesh and blood
To feel its ailing pulse in
its hidden veins
The ambivalent approach towards the city is also
evident in the poetic works of Khalīl Hāwī (1925-1982), a Lebanese modernist
poet and one of the more inventive and idiosyncratic voices in modern Arabic
poetry. Hāwī was also born in a provincial area (the small town of Shwayr) but
many of his poems take place in Beirut, to which he migrated. In his poem The
Chant of the Beirut’s Nights,
included in his volume The River of Ashes
(1962), he expresses his complex attitude toward the liberal Lebanese capital:[28]
The jinn is fuming inside of us
Sins and crime seduce us:
“In Beirut lies a world not like this world”
“Toil and monotonous death”
“It has an enchanted inn”
“Wine, a bed made of fine scents”
“It is for the bemused ones,
who are walking in the deserts’ mazes
in the cursed corridors
and in the city’s brothels”
Hāwī attributes his love-hate relationship with the city to the jinn, the muse who instigates the
creative process, according to the classical Arab poetic tradition. In the
poet’s eyes, the Lebanese capital is a place of “toil and monotonous death”,
infused by a spirit of sexual gluttony, hedonism and decadence. Despite this,
the big city in his eyes is also tantalizing and beguiling. Accordingly, though
feeling lost and misplaced, the poet is lured by his “fuming jinn” to the
sordid, underground world of his city. In the eyes of the befuddled poet, the
exploration of the city’s “cursed corridors” becomes both the source and the
quintessence of his poetic inspiration.
The image of Beirut as brooding and ominous yet stimulating and enticing
also pervades the works of the Palestinian poet Mahmūd Darwīsh (b. 1942). In
his long poem entitled Beirut’s Poem
(1983), Darwish defines the Lebanese capital as a city of history’s “gold and
fatigue”. To him, it is a city of war, grimness and anguish, but it is also his
“mistress”, who is constantly entrancing and inspiring. In the following lines
from the poem, Darwīsh attempts to depict the Lebanese capital as he senses it:[29]
An apple for the sea, marble narcissus flower,
Stone butterfly, Beirut
Shape of the soul in the mirror
Description of the first woman, smell of early mist
Beirut is built of gold and fatigue
Of Andalusia and Damascus
Silver, seafoam, bequests of earth in the plumage
of doves
Death of a cornstalk
Vagrancy of a fugitive star between my love and me
Beirut―I did not hear my blood before I uttered
The name of the mistress
Who sleeps across my blood, who sleeps…
[…]
A gray horizon scattered in the distance
Circle path of mother-of-pearl, not roads
And from Hell to the Atlantic
From the gulf to Hell right left and center
I saw nothing but a scaffold
With single rope for two million necks
[…]
Is Beirut a mirror that we can break
to enter into the fragments
Or are we mirrors for the drizzle to shatter?
[…]
A moon shattered over the bench of darkness
Beirut is lily of rubble
A first kiss […]
Stone poem
Collision between two nightingales hidden in the
heart
A bereft sky
Thinking on a stone
A rose that can be heard, Beirut
A voice that separates the victim from the sword
A little boy, who flung away the regulation and
commands
And the mirrors―
Then fell asleep.
This complex ambivalence towards the city is perhaps best expressed in the works of Adūnīs. Born in the small Alawite village of al-Qassabin in northern Syria, Adūnīs migrated to Damascus to study philosophy at its University. His oeuvre, compromising poetry, discursive essays and literary criticism, is imbued with both his individuality and his pioneering and futuristic vision. True to his modernist poetics, Adūnīs skillfully interweaves in his “cities’ poems” innovative metaphors with original poetic diction to create modernist images, which capture his ambivalent approach to urban life. In his earlier poem, Adūnīs depicts the city of Damascus as a deformed and rigid entity which has yet to be revived. In two different poems, both entitled The City and included in his celebrated volume The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene (1961), Adonis conveys his ambivalent poetic vision of