11 - 17 January 2001
Issue No.516
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 11 - 17 January 2001 Issue No.516 |
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Within the shadow
Ghariyb 'Ala Al-'Aa'ila (Stranger in the Family), Abdel-Moniem Ramadan, Casablanca: Tobqal Press, 2000. pp139;
Ba'idan 'an Al-Ka'inat (Away from Beings),
Abdel-Moniem Ramadan, Damascus: Al-Mada Press, 2000. pp87Abdel-Moniem Ramadan (b.1951) belongs to the generation of seventies poets, a vanguard generation that experimented with an alternative writing contesting the "centralised" vision of the '50s and '60s. His first poems were published in 1972, and his first collection, Al-Hulm Zil Al-Waqt, Al-Hulm Zil Al-Makan (Dream is Time's Shadow; Dream is Space's Shadow) was published in 1981 by Aswat (Voices), a poetry journal published by young poets not represented in the state-sponsored literary magazines. Ramadan's second collection, Qabl Al-Ma', Qabl Al-Hafah (Before Water, Beyond the Edge), appeared in 1994, to be followed by Limaza Ayuha Al-Madi Tanam fi Hadiqati? (Why Does the Past Lie in My Garden?) in 1995. In his latest collections, Stranger in the Family, and Away from Beings, existential preoccupations have acquired historical and mythical dimensions.
The voice of a single poetic persona may seem to prevail in Ramadan's poems, but this is never a monological voice. Rather, Ramadan's poems produce the impression of a "configured" subject, one resonating with multiple voices. Thus, there is always dialogue with and between external and internal elements, and there are always strong links between reason and intuition. In Away from Beings, the subject's distance from what he describes is not one of 'ivory-tower' alienation; rather, it is a necessary distance that individualises communal experience and gives a mythical dimension to experience otherwise firmly grounded in the present.
The constant interchange in Ramadan's poems between past and present is felt in an identity problematic that preoccupies many at present. For the poems included in Stranger in the Family work to interrogate the location of "self" in its relation to "other", indicating that, for Ramadan, the question of identity has to be considered dialogically, as part of a dialogue with the other, and not from a purely monological point of view. This interrogation of identity in Ramadan's poems takes an Eastern, liturgical form, many of them including an interchange between self and other, or between human and divine. Borrowings from religious texts and classic works of literature, as well as from folk tales, permeate the poems, blurring divisions between high and low culture. By citing and re-citing ancient texts, Ramadan "re-sites" these within current experience.
Ramadan's language stands midway between classical Arabic and Egyptian vernacular. His images fuse the religious and the secular. In Stranger in the Family, for example, the poem "Incantation" re-invents the biblical one of The Song of Solomon, a text that has inspired a great many contemporary Egyptian poets. Ancient texts attract Ramadan for their elements of pastoral, yet he 'de-pastoralises' them by locating them in an urban present, rewriting the ancient texts with a "modernist" sensibility.
"Incantation" takes the form of a liturgical interchange between King Solomon and a chorus. This chorus may be intended to represent a "collective unconsciousness", a cynical narrator, or an audience that has a secular consciousness. The king, who appears as a central, dominant figure, is portrayed as being torn between conflicting loyalties, something that becomes apparent in his relationship with the queen and in his love affair with a young shepherdess. These conflicts express the character's shifting roles between pursuer and pursued, oppressor and oppressed, and, in thus presenting the king's divided roles, the ancient text is re-located in the present to foreground a current dilemma.
"As the dream comes to an end/ The king dozes/ While ants creep upon his knees," the poet writes in lines that allude not only to the fall of an ancient despot, but also to the perennial failure of secular power to realise its dreams. The archetypal character of this failure thus makes of "Incantation" something more than a ritual whose performance is restricted within the bounds of a single culture; rather, in Ramadan's hands it becomes part of a collective performance that celebrates both the sacred and the profane and without which the transcendental cannot be experienced. "Existence bears the spell" ("An Appeal" in Why Does the Past Lie in my Garden?).
In a sense, the world of Ramadan's poems is impregnated with banalities that help provide for a multiple existence, and only when the subjects shift their roles can they pluck the "fruit" of that existence. Thus, multiplicity is a sign not of fragmentation, but of potential self-proliferation. What might have seemed the expression of internal division in the subject, of "the poet and his shadow", thus turns out to be a space within which the reader too can experience different subject roles and positions.
By celebrating the everyday in seemingly liturgical context, Ramadan aims to represent the common person, not the religious prophet. He is not legislating a text, but inscribing an experience. In "Before Cold Winters" (Away from Beings), for example, God ordains the poet "to be outside the scene", although he too has been "made of clay". Thus the poetic subject is distanced not from the community, as had been the case in previous experience, but from himself. The poem's antiphonal structure configures this dialogic, self-interrogatory process, questioning the rights of flesh and spirit, both in "fleeting joys" and in the experience of the transcendental. This is described as being "close to the window facing the sea."
As a result, the subject is made aware that living is itself infused with this complex experience, having been conferred a presence, or sign, that this is the case. Yet it is only through the subject interrogating the divine will for himself that he is able to discover, and will, his own compliance with it. This act of interrogation draws the subject outside the limits of self and of spatio-temporal location, beyond the limits of his actual room, in order to perceive "the distant coast/the houses/the trees... parting the house of God from that of his people." Obedience involves protest, since it is difficult to let go of the circumstances of everyday life; yet it does not really involve such a letting go, for, as the subject envisions the distant landscape, he is already involved in direct, physical experience, well aware that "the hand arranging the hair/Was ready to arrange the space." In this way, material presence re-organises abstract knowledge.
One could thus say that for Ramadan, identity formation is neither a single choice nor a predetermined fate; rather, it is the result of an interchange between freedom and obligation. Divided love does not represent a division between righteousness and iniquity; rather, it is an act of initiation, a rite of passage into manhood. The male poet becomes the body on which the word is inscribed, the divine being apprehended through man's "breaches". Adam's fall is re-presented to replace loss with regaining. Ramadan does not trace continuities to ancient sources, but unleashes knowledge derived from recurrent experiences. Thus what might have appeared to be divided experience, or a splitting of identity, reappears as stages in the accumulation of knowledge. Knowledge is as boundless as "the sea", in which there is always a "stranded boat".
Ramadan, who has always had a fascination with difficult language, writes difficult poetry that challenges the reader in writing that, as it reveals one layer of meaning, reveals other layers that are still out of reach. He says that the experience of words is similar to the male poet's experience of women: "The most of women's mystery/Is that which she grants" ("An Appeal").
He is not a poet committed to any single cause, dreaming instead of "unveiled night". Even if all the stars can be seen, he feels, night remains as the expression of the greatest mystery granted by existence. This feeling simultaneously confirms the poet's yearning for knowledge and his desire for that which cannot be captured by knowledge. It also intimates how touch can sense the untouchable. Though Ramadan lives in time and space, the objects of his pursuit lie within their shadow.
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