12 - 18 July 2001
Issue No.542
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 12 - 18 July 2001 Issue No.542 |
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Vital presence
Hayah Adiya (Ordinary Life), Mohamed Saleh, Cairo: General Organisation for Cultural Palaces, Aswat Adabiya (Literary Voices), 2001. pp85Hayah Adiya, "Ordinary Life," is the fourth collection of poems by Mohamed Saleh, a remarkably unprolific writer who has kept a correspondingly low literary profile. His reticence, however, has allowed his dogged pursuit of an adequate poetic idiom, first by walking in the footsteps of the pioneers of taf'ila, and then by his own, economical and prosaic means, resulting in Sayd Al- Farashat [Catching Butterflies], a collection of very short, very precise prose pieces published in Cairo five years ago. In this collection Saleh shed not only the rhythmic constraints of taf'ila poetry, found in his first two collections Al- Watan Al-Jamr and Khatt Al-Zawal, but also all vestiges of metaphor. "Before the invention of the word 'tree', every tree in the forest had its own vital presence and its own private name," Saleh commented in a recent interview. "After finishing my second collection, I was beset by the strong feeling that metaphor was mere ornament weighing on the spirit of the poem and frustrating its form." As a result, the prose poems contained in the last section of Khatt Al-Zawal, effectively dethrone poetic metaphor, achieving an impressive bare, stripped-down quality.
Now we are able to see the results of this process of experimentation more fully. Sayd Al-Farashat, containing a series of specific, denuded impressions, was made up of poems that by virtue of their extreme economy were intriguingly ambiguous and displayed an impressive degree of grammatical and stylistic prowess. In his new volume Hayah Adiya, by contrast, Saleh has been willing to reveal a little more than just the tip of the iceberg, but he seems also to be less concerned with formal matters of language, allowing his intimate and eclectic familiarity with the canon to come through. What he achieves in these poems is "a direct expression of the self" unmediated by the obstacles of figurative language. Displaying less surface polish, these are poems that have the vitality and individuality of trees before the invention of the word "tree."
"I believe that in this book I am presenting a different human, poetic and life experience [to that presented in Sayd Al- Farashat]," Saleh has said. "The external world, for one somewhat obvious example, was far more present in Sayd Al- Farashat, while Hayah Adiya celebrates the inner world. There is, too, the fact that the language is simpler, and the dynamics of sculpting a scene, extracting meaning and exciting the reader's imagination have all been changed." Saleh's tone is conversational throughout, and the first two sections of the book -- on a variety of childhood themes -- seek out specific, mundane memories and feelings that act as anchors for self definition.
The book's seven sections are thematically arranged, each comprising a sequence. Together, they progress through a network of subjects invariably revolving around the self. Such subjects range from reflections on the creative process and comments on political and social conditions to confessions of the poet's deepest hopes and fears and narratives that sound like entries from a dream journal. In many poems, such subjects overlap, generating layers of meaning: "Leo," for example, is both a comment on the commercialism of Gulf Arab societies and a dream narrative about arriving in a strange, heartless city and being taken to the local market. The book's sections also seem to have been placed in a specific order. First, Saleh vividly evokes his grandmother's life and death in her village, extending his scope to his own childhood and including memories of a cholera epidemic and of a box inherited from his mother, before moving to adult life and the dream of stumbling on an unexpected fortune. There is a section on love and marital life. The book's last two sections, "One Man Show" and "Take-away" respectively, contain Saleh's most articulate and up-to-date artistic manifesto.
Throughout the book Saleh is consistently brief and restrained: not a word is extraneous or misplaced, and every line means exactly what it says. Yet the evocative power of even the most mundane descriptions is sufficient to sustain a consistent poetic charge. The shorter poems in particular are constructed with a lucidity that seems to capture some essential truths of our time using only a few, indispensable references. "Another Tale" is a good example: "It was a tale of two cities / Exactly as written by Dickens / But with one small difference: / That the masters / were more despicable / And less strict." In "The Bed," the poet captures a vision of domestic stasis that, for all its apparent banality, sounds like the statement of a generation: "The Bed, always by the wall / He sleeps on the inside / She, next to him at the edge / Twenty- seven years / They have slept / In their wedding bed."
The book's final poem, "Side Effects," concentrates on a small detail of the poet's experience of political detention and says much about his character. "I remember I am in jail / I don't remember how often / I remember the knife that I feel / After they all leave / I feel as if I have lost everything / And possessed everything / I listen to their footsteps / On the floor of the ward / And I hear the doors / Shut one after the other / And I do what I like."
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
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