22 - 28 November 2001
Issue No.561
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 22 - 28 November 2001 Issue No.561 |
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Making poetry, making life
The SCC honoured Salah Abdel-Sabour in a three-day conference, Amina Elbendary reports
The Supreme Council for Culture (SCC) hosted another one of its regular mega conferences from 12 to 14 November. This time the three-day event was held in honour of the late Egyptian poet Salah Abdel-Sabour, 2001 being the seventieth anniversary of his birth, the twentieth of his death. Although the conference opened on a celebratory note, it was wide enough to encompass many aspects of Abdel- Sabour's ouevre and legacy.
The three days were packed with activities and functions. The mornings divided between several panels and symposia, the evenings including poetry readings, a film screening and a dramatic performance. And it is to the credit of the organisers that they managed to lure an impressive number of participants (almost 100) from several Arab countries as well as intellectuals of all generations and belonging to divergent intellectual schools.
The opening ceremony began with words by Ahmed Abdel-Moeti Hegazi, representing Egyptian poets, Mohamed Barada representing Arab scholars, Robin Ostle representing foreign scholars, as well as Abdel-Qadir El-Qott, the conference's chairman and Gaber Asfour, secretary-general of the SCC.
In their statements and papers several of the speakers attempted to contextuatlise Abdel- Sabour and his poetic experience by relating it to developments in Egyptian and Arab literature and poetry, tracing his intellectual lineage within that literary tradition. Hegazi remarked "As we celebrate today the poet who carried the lantern to us here in Egypt, we also celebrate the poets who carried it to him, the poets who carried it with him, and the poets who carried it after him. [For] Salah Abdel-Sabour is a pioneer among the vanguard who followed one another like the runners in a great marathon. Would Arabic poetry have reached where it has in the modern period without the achievements of poets like El-Baroudi and Shawqi at the dawn of the [Arab] renaissance, and Shukri, El-Aqqad, Ali Mahmoud Taha, Ibrahim Nagui, Mahmoud Hassan Ismail, Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi, and fnally Salah Abdel-Sabour? We turn to him, are inspired by his soul, and continue our journey."
An absorbing and potentially exhausting celebration, the conference's evenings also included cultural functions. There were poetry readings each night featuring poets such as Ahmed Abdel- Moeti Hegazi, Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi, Abdel- Moneim Ramadan, Helmi Salem, Hassan Teleb, Farouk Shousha, Mohamed Ibrahim Abu Sinna among others. Readings included Abdel- Sabour's poetry as well as selections from their own collections. Filmmaker Nagui Riad's Sadiq Al-Haya (Friend of Life) -- based on Abdel-Sabour's poem Shanq Zahran (The Hanging of Zahran) -- was also shown.
The dramatic works of Abdel-Sabour were the focus of several papers including a panel devoted exclusively to the poet's plays. Here Mohamed Mustafa Badawi, professor at St. Anthony's College, Oxford, and playwright Alfred Farag both analysed Abdel-Sabour's verse plays and attempted to contextualise them within the history of Arab theatre. Both emphasised the degree of craftsmanship and concentration that Abdel-Sabour achieved in his plays, which were not about verses of poetry recited on stage but quintessentially "verse-dramas." The poetry is not just a form in these dramas, it is part and parcel of the content as well. As actor Saad Ardash explained when describing the language in Abdel-Sabour's plays, the intense and often symbolic vocabulary is itself part of the dramatic scene so that a word is in itself an event in these plays.
Novelist Bahaa Taher's discussion of Abdel-Sabour's plays focused in part on his Ma'sat Al-Hallag (Murder in Baghdad). Taher had directed this play for the radio and played small parts of a recording of this production at the conference.
Despite the historicity of Abdel- Sabour's plays -- the specific socio- political contexts they were written under and meant to comment on -- the issues they are concerned with, freedom, justice and human rights, are universal. This is a theatre for all time, Ardash insisted, just as the plays of Shakespeare, Ibsen and Chekhov are.
It is a point well demonstrated through a production of Abdel-Sabour's black comedy Musafir Layl (Night Traveller) by the Saadeddin Wahba Company (an offshoot of the Maadi Cultural Club) staged on the last day of the conference.
Set in a compartment of a train travelling through the night, on an unspecified journey, it deals with such issues as the death of God and the suffering of the individual under a corrupt, dictatorial rule. There are three characters in this play, the narrator (here made into a clown), the passenger and the conductor. The conductor keeps metamorphosing into various historical figures. He subjects the poor passenger to senseless acts of torture and then turns into a despot who accuses the disoriented passenger of the murder of God. Yet before stabbing him to death the conductor cum dictator reveals that it is he who has killed God, leaving the passenger a victim to his usurpation of God's place on earth.
While it is encouraging that the SCC included the play as part of the conference, one would have hoped for a more professional, well thought-out production. As it was the Saadeddin Wahba Company performance at the Open Air Theatre of the Cairo Opera House was reminiscent of CIFET performances. There was no set to speak of, simply seven chairs arranged on a stage, but that minimalist setting is in itself consistent with Abdel-Sabour's theatre. What was perhaps disappointing was the lack of charge in the acting and the fact that actors fumbled with their lines was also frustrating. Sound and lighting were crude to say the least.
It is indeed embarrassing that the Egyptian dramatic scene has no established repertoire and that Abdel-Sabour's plays are never performed by professional theatrical groups so that many of us have never actually experienced attending an Abdel-Sabour play at, say, the National Theatre. These verse-dramas remain alive in books when their true place is on stage. In fact, as Ardash lamented, Abdel- Sabour's plays have each only been performed once by what he termed "serious theatre."
One of the recurring motifs in many of the papers and testimonies -- indeed an enveloping air that surrounded the conference in general -- was how relevant the issues Abdel-Sabour was concerned with are to our postmodern predicament. The papers are due to be published shortly by the SCC in book form but one hopes that the conference will have a more durable outcome; bringing back Salah Abdel- Sabour into the fore of Arab culture and his plays onto Arab stages.
Whatever the literary outcome of the conference however, it was a reassuring reminder that making poetry is about making life.
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