5 - 11 April 2001
Issue No.528
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 5 - 11 April 2001 Issue No.528 |
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Elevating the quotidian
A far from everyday encounter between the Swiss poet Raphael Urweider and the Egyptian Girgis Shoukry is hailed by Somaya Ramadan
As I parked my car a few minutes walk from downtown's Goethe Institute, heading for a poetry reading sponsored by Pro Helvetia for poets from Cairo, Zurich, and Berne, accompanied by music, my mind kept reconstructing an image of Seamus Heaney picking his way with a guitarist friend to the BBC studios in Belfast to record Heaney's poetry accompanied by his friend's guitar back in the late 1970s. As Heaney and his friend were approaching the studios, an IRA bomb detonated. Heaney describes the incident in the opening essay of his prose book Preoccupations. He said that after the initial shock subsided, they both stood still for a moment, and looking into each others' eyes, they found the same question mirrored: To what avail poetry, what serves music to a burning Rome? I was side-stepping a woman in rags, holding a half starved child whom she had probably rented to beg away the evening.
Once inside the hall, a piano perched on a make shift stage, and a xylophone, Heaney's question came back to me more forcefully, and with a distinctive twist in this particular locale: Swiss and Egyptian poets, German and Arabic? And the audience? A multilingual little group of poetry lovers. To what avail? The question rang in my ears mercilessly as I tried to shoo away the sallow face, and the tools of an infamous profession: a mere baby. The sight was still before me when the readings started. German and Arabic alternated, punctuated by Raphael's decisive notes on the piano, and Nessma Abdel-Aziz's aerial touches of the xylophone. The Arabic speaking poets Ahmed Yamani, and Girgis Shoukry read the translated German of Raphael Urweider. Raphael Urweider read the translated Arabic of Yamani and Shoukry. On the wall, the English translation of both was projected. Then each read their own poetry in their own tongue. The effect was uncanny. German, Arabic and English fused by music, that universal of all languages, was rendering real something I only faintly dared to half formulate: are the borders narrowing, is this what the future can look like? Are the young at last doing their thing quietly, healing the wounds, bridging the gaps?
These questions were rooted not only in the subject matter of what was being read but in the very cadences and voice in which it was being read: something beyond the language of creation, an undercurrent of harmony (a paradoxical term in this instance, since the poetry seemed to be anything but melodious), at any rate, something that made it obvious that in this setting and despite the differences in languages (with all the burdensome history such differences carry) intimated barriers were being surmounted, the "cultural divide" was being bridged. Rome continues to burn, the little beggar woman was still carrying her rented bundle, but here was a glimpse of the future in nebulae, who will believe. Pursued by such thoughts, I decided to interview two of the poets who brought on thoughts I would have dismissed as hopeful nonsense had those involved been less young, less laconic, less ruthless in what they wrote, and in the voice in which they read that poetry.
In two different sittings I interviewed Raphael Urweider and Girgis Shoukry. Surely their world view would be different, surely their attitude to poetry would be different. How many miles are the Alps from the Pyramids? What could there be in common between rich, non-aligned Switzerland, and poverty stricken, strife ridden, war tormented Egypt. They both said that what brought them together was the music. They both underlined the importance of philosophy to their poetry. They both were reacting to a "sonorous" tradition, one that dictated a heaviness, a weightiness, that detracted and euphemised the human tragedies being enacted in our "hard times."
They both knew that the only form poetry can take at this particular moment was one that hovered, high up on wings, taking in the awful picture of the terror, deconstructing it in language that could only be its natural counterpart: simple, unhampered by false erudition, straightforward, and that concerned itself with bridging the gap between the fickle absurdity of what passes for the more important aspects of life -- poverty, war, oppression of all sorts -- and the feather like lightness of song. When reality is so unbearably heavy, what questions does poetry pose?
The central question for both poets, Shoukry and Urweider, seemed to be embedded in the endeavour of bringing poetry to the level of the ordinary. To test it not against their individual poetic heritage, which they have successfully refuted, but against the manifestations of popular culture, expedient politics and metaphysics with a capital M.
"I wanted to write poetry that looked like the people in the street, I wanted to deconstruct the 'big' questions of philosophy and see them operate in the daily lives of the people I wrote about," said Shoukry.
"Of course I do not negate the large questions of philosophy, love, death, etc, but poetry is about actuality, it is steeped in its own time and place, the language of expression may differ, but what is being expressed remains the same," says Urweider.
In almost the same words, Shoukry says: "Poetry does not invent a new language, it stems from the age in which it is being written, and in the end only good remains poetry, what is not good disappears. That is the challenge of poetry: how to make permanent the ephemeral that means that there is a constant at the core."
Naturally, in deploying this vision, the two poets resort to their respective geographies -- the Pyramids, after all, are not the Alps. Still, when I asked Raphael about a poem that at first glance seemed to depict at face value the activities of the sort of Swiss peasant that appears on the wrappings of Suchard chocolates, he filled me in on the background: "Those people, who are preserved as picturesque relics dared one day to ask for a raise from the government who subsidises their living. Hence the lines:
in comparison to the white sheep the brown ones are
Black and stand around in the fog wet like sponges
The white sheep are yellowish in comparison to the fog
and they cower in the comparatively green grass they ruminate
the children of the small farmers do not want to shear the sheep
they do not like wet wool in green clothes made of coarse (fabric)Similarly, if we read Girgis Shoukry's lines about the bricklayer, we may at first allow ourselves to be deceived by the stark simplicity with which the whole matter of the architectural oppressiveness in a city like Cairo is delineated:
He was a bricklayer who filled space with stones
and decorated it with windows
He put in every house a staircase that led to the roof
and thus to the sky.One evening he climbed to the mountain and
when he looked down, there was no space
and he heard his houses whispering among
themselves, of a plague that people had not heard of yet.
His wife said that when he returned he was delirious
and spoke of buildings that grew faster than their owners.If the mode of expression in these poems verges at times on the laconic, or assumes the tone of "reportage," or takes on a childlike acceptance of fact, or presents itself like a picture postcard, there is still no way that one can read them as facile or vacuous. That sort of attack can only come from those who expect poetry to behave in a tried and true fashion. So even while Urweider seems to be taking picture postcards of picturesque peasants, or when Shoukry seems to be narrating a simple parable, the whole is disconcerting and shocking in its effect on the senses of those able to relate the lines with a lived reality.
One last point worth making concerns music. Poetry has always been, and continues to be, closely linked to music: what is amazing about poems written so far apart both in terms of space and heritage is that their music very much resembles what is now listened to the world over -- trance. As in trance music, here, too, we are sometimes confronted with a regular repetitive beat or, more often, Break Beat. Melody and rhythm are not out, but what is in is what makes all the difference.
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