Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 26 Oct. - 1 Nov. 2000 Issue No. 505
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

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Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

The Pharaohs had their pyramids, their temples and tombs; the Greeks had their Parthenon; the Arab's had poetry.

For Arabs poetry is more than a vocation or a hobby, it is a way of life. And this poetic tradition has survived until now. If there were to be some kind of literary census I am convinced that poets in the Arab world would far outnumber novelists, playwrights and essayists.

It is not surprising that the majority of the books I am presented with are collections of poems. The latest such collection is Araka Ala Kheir, by Terry Bebawi. This is, I believe, her 13th collection. It seems that the well of Terry's emotions never dries. Her first collection came out in December 1981, her latest just a week ago. This means that she has been writing poetry for almost 20 years. What is really interesting is that her poetry over this period does not reflect any change of attitude resulting from the passing of years. She is still as youthful and fresh, though she is now a grandmother.

In her poetry Terry Bebawi is romantic to the marrow. She is living proof that Schopenhauer was wrong when he said that poetry is the vocation of the young, prose the tool of the old.

In "On the Aesthetics of Poetry" he famously wrote that "the gift of poetry only flourishes in youth; and also the susceptibility of poetry is often passionate in youth; the youth delights in verses as such... this inclination gradually diminishes with years, and in old age one prefers prose."

In a way the German thinker is right. Most people, if not all, must have tried their hands at writing verse, during our school and university years. Now, with age, many of us have switched to prose. It is not that we have lost the romantic in us, for the romantic does not die easily. It is simply that prose is, perhaps, more precise and does not stand different interpretations. A poem can evoke different images in different readers.

This collection by Terry Bebawi is a succession of deep feelings of love, yearning, loneliness and, at times, self assertion. They are mostly confessional. In a snippet of a poem, Terry says

To love
To the only fire
That does not
Accept insurance
And again
His love entered my years
He upset my equilibrium
His love educated me
Changed me and transformed
My evils into goodness
But with these dozens of poems on love, we find some rather philosophical ideas.
A poet must always sing
I swear with my heart
I swear with my belief
I swear with the greenness of life
I swear with my friends
to give my life its verdure
Never, never to cry
Never to burn
But always to sing, always to smile
I sing to life, to heaven
I love my life
For which I am thankful to God
From time to time she expresses a political opinion:
Whatever different colours the humans have beneath our skins we are all the same
We are all human.
Then her poem:
I am an Arab woman
My roots are the most beautiful in me
My history is the most beautiful in me
With my head held high
My feet deeply rooted
In my land
When I was young my mother said
My daughter
You are a young Arab woman
Clad in traditions
Only known by an Arab woman
Thus I grew up
With my head always held high
My Arab traditions
Shield me from the dust of the years
I cling to them
I fly and travel
To all cities of the world
But always with my head held high
And my Arab traditions.

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