14 - 20 February 2002
Issue No.573
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 14 - 20 February 2002 Issue No.573 |
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The world in prose
Zahr Al-Rumman (Pomegranate Flowers), Mourid Al-Barghouthi, Beirut: Dar Al-Adaab, 2002. pp116Mourid Al-Barghouthi, an acclaimed Palestinian poet, is the author of the recently translated I Saw Ramallah, a beautifully constructed and moving memoir of returning to Palestine many years after being forced to leave it. Egypt, however, is his adopted homeland, and I Saw Ramallah includes an account of the agony of living away from his wife, the novelist Radwa Ashour and their young son, as well as of being deported from the country in the 1977 under the Sadat regime. In the end, Al-Barghouthi's poetry transcends the question of being either Egyptian or Palestinian: instead, it focuses on the admirably calm and composed expression of inner conflict, and it is by turns elegiac and angry, premeditated and abrupt. Technically, Al-Barghouthi writes the kind of poems to which his contemporaries can often only aspire: firmly rooted in the canon, politically engaged, carefully (almost fastidiously) composed using a commendable economy of means, and soberly self-aware and intellectual in their imagery and thematic concerns.
One of the longest and most widely acclaimed of his poems, Ila Ayn Tadhhab Fi Mithl Layl Kahadha ("Where do you go on a night like this?"), for example, demonstrates many of these qualities, employing a refrain, "I almost cry out," to address a disturbingly concrete Death, whose deeds against both "us" and "our children" are not only objectively enumerated but also emotionally reflected on. Al-Barghouthi addresses Death almost as a friend, or as a familiar, if resented, presence -- due perhaps to his intimate connection with the Palestinian struggle. He seems almost concerned about Death's well-being: "Go! / But where will you go on a night like this? / And who will protect you against the scorpion of the cold / Or the regard of clever aircraft / And the invisible / Snipers in corners, / Who hit even fluttering butterflies?" And the plight of the Palestinians is identified with that of this figure, allowing for a large perspective on the day-to-day sufferings of the poet's compatriots: "I almost cry out: / Adopt another friend! / Then I am silenced: we will also be sad / If you bombard a new shoot in the fields / If you kidnap a newborn goat from the valley / If you break glass over those who are sleeping."
The references in Al-Barghouthi's poetry range from Greek mythology ("A Prayer to Zeus") to Troubadour love poetry ("Then, all of a sudden, you enter"), the everyday and the sublime being probed at a variety of levels even as they are linked back to an overriding concern with the Palestinian struggle. In Ghurfa Mu'aqata ("A Temporary Room"), for example, an anonymous voice speaks of military action as if recounting a dream, uniting personal loneliness and alienation to political dispossession in a manner sometimes reminiscent of TS Eliot. "He said: / 'In my rented room, / Among the few seats / I saw ostriches / Carrying military decorations on clouds, / And tigers: as they approach their mates, the lines above their thighs wrinkle.'" In Al-Sundouq ("The Box"), the same predicament takes on symbolic significance: "On my back all the time? / My mother never said, / Nor did time tell me / Its lightness would be so elusive."
As critic Aref Hamza has noted, "Al- Barghouthi in these poems, and in the ones that preceded them, has raised his lyricism ever higher. In every sentence, there seems to be a summary of the poetry recited elsewhere... his poetry has become painful in its dialogue with death, loss, the waste of youth and the lassitude of life."
However, despite its lucid classicism and verbal integrity, "Pomegranate Flowers" can leave the reader desiring something further -- perhaps a certain immediacy, or a sense of freedom. For, though technically far less assured, Al-Barghouthi's contemporaries sometimes produce work that is more accessible. Indeed, one has the feeling that, like the box on his back (in "The Box"), poetry weighs down on Al-Barghouthi in a way that constricts his inspiration.
Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer, in a note entitled "You Can Say," once attempted to describe the difference between poetry and prose. "Although you can find many a novel writer who churns it out, like Trollope, with the regularity of clockwork, you can never predict or induce a Kubla Khan," she wrote, referring to the hallucinatory poem by ST Coleridge. Prose, which is premeditated and planned, is contrasted with poetry, which relies on inspiration and is more abrupt. For this reader, the poetic qualities that made the author's memoir I Saw Ramallah such a marvelous experience are somehow lacking here. "Pomegranate Flowers" seems too predetermined, too weighed out in advance. There is something regular and intellectual about much of the writing here, paradoxically making the volume less moving than the same poet's work in prose.
Reviewed by Youssef Rakha
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