Ramadan evening with lyrics of liberation

By Rushda RAFEEK

Tea in hand, I remember watching from above my hotel room, the moon thick and sharp like a grass blade but broken in the ink of night, as the wind caressed her name warmly. The street flocked in its stumble of stalls spilling over with prayer carpets, Qurans, hand woven bags and shoes. The elegant waterfalls of minarets solve the puzzle to know which architecture is a mosque. Pyramids of apples, oranges and nuts wait intact.

The perfume seller’s arms crammed with Aladdin’s lamp-like bottles of attar incense. As you pass he sprays it on a piece of card and gives it to smell. Strangely amused by the absence of dogs, children skip on their feet. These were Arabian Nights spent. These were my nights of Umrah a year ago during the month of Ramadan.

For the longest time I wondered why I couldn’t get around some Arabian poetry there. My notebook with that intention of coming along was yet empty of any verse. Arabia, I thought, was now far from being poetic— they carried just only the Quran by day that with dates descending on tongues by dusk while the sky stirred sherbet.

Approaching the archives of poetry I’ve read back home, first female Saudi poet Nimah Nawwab’s ‘Arabian Nights’ come to mind as with the marking of this year’s Ramadan beginning in July to present an exploration of a few other poets as well in the name of Islamic culture.

Disappointment

So, I gathered therefore in mercy dash, a chunk of my findings and anthologised them together to lift that very ill fog of disappointment I encountered back in Arabia. What then is disappointment when there is poetry to turn and soothe, as always, the fields of sorrow left uncut back in the yard? Perhaps let me begin with Nawwab’s delightful Arabic theme of unveiling the Saudi society, with nods to a sense of fearless literature in itself. The simple yet vibrant pleasures are exhilarating:

When the call of the hudud,
echoes through the palm fronds
carrying in their mists,
visions, memories:
caravans of high spirited steads,
crisscrossing the endless seas of sand,
Rushing through the oasis,free,
yet under control.

This is nonetheless an effective spirit, bringing readers later into the hot, convivial streets of Arabia “carrying the fresh coffee aroma” and offers a compassionate insight into “the dawn of a new century”. What is largely gathered here is the memory-filled cultural expression that goes to end with a note of despair “by the winds of change.”

Chiming in sympathy through a sense of irony, the Western Carol Rumens brings a child-soft argument by touching on the day in the life of child labour. The poet snuggles in the common atmosphere breathed by an under-privileged society in some depth that by tradition. Subjective to social pressure and as beautiful as these carpets “spread by the servants of the mosque”, these children in ‘Carpet-weavers, Morocco’ naively watch their blooming freedom being swept under the hard rug of contrast:

The children are at the loom of another world.
Their braids are oiled and black, their dresses bright.
Their assorted heights would make a melodious chime.
They watch their flickering knots like television.
As the garden of Islam grows, the bench will be raised.
Then they will lace the dark-rose veins of the tree-tops.
The carpet will travel in the merchant’s truck.
It will be spread by the servants of the mosque.
Deep and soft, it will give when heaped with prayer.
The children are hard at work in the school of days.
From their fingers the colours of all-that-will-be fly
and freeze into the frame of all-that-was.

Poetic recitals

Islamically Indian is none other than Agha Shahid Ali himself. How do we know? By losing ourselves into his poetic recitals sometimes imbued with the political divide stretching as far as a soul can see amid the Kashmir chaos. Romantically undertaken they seem to sigh with longing at the same time conscientiously under the impact of ghazals in tradition.

In the words of AK. Mehrotra: “Ali’s poems seem to be whispered to himself, and to read them is as if to overhear.” ‘The Jama Masjid Butcher’ embarks on an ethnical statement busy with life in Delhi while keeping its tone of cool still craft and demand are intact. This poem’s elements can be seen as representing certain reciprocity between the speaker and the Muslim Butcher in the “soiled lane of Jama Masjid”.

Be they boundaries fringed in between the Indo-Muslim heritage and culture, the bloodstream of human slaughtering, the azans and the Ahameds of Delhi, Ali achieves this tension without snapping the wire. ‘The Jama Masjid Butcher’ reads like a ruin:

Urdu, bloody at his lipsand fingertips, in this soiled lane of Jama Masjid,
is still fine, polished smooth by the generations.
He doesn’t smile but accepts my moneywith a rare delicacy
as he hacks the rib of History.His courtesy grazes

my well-fed skin

(he hangs this warm January morningon the iron hook of prayer).
We establish the bond of phrases,dressed in the couplets of Ghalib.
His life is this moment,a century’s careful image.

Spoken word poet Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian living in Brooklyn. She has won several awards for her writing, including the Audre Lorde Poetry Award, The Morris Centre for Healing Award, a Van Lier Fellowship, and a New York Mills Artist Residency Award with four collections of poetry under her name and other poems included in several anthologies.

Perhaps smattered with the syntax which is broken but very often with steady progress stems from the rhythm of hip-hop telling in the lines as you speak them, yet able to convey a fusillade of emotion and subtlety in the act of lamenting it.

‘Jerusalem Sunday’ begins, shedding cultural topics between the Muslims and Jews which runs very much today like oil and water:

Jerusalem Sunday/three muezzins call idan/where one's Allah begins another's/Akbar ends/inviting the last to witness/Mohammad's prophecies church bells ring the sky/an ocean shade of blue above/Christ's tomb and the stones/of this city witness man's weakness/boys run by the torah/strapped to their third eye ready to rock their prayers/the roofs of this city busy as the streets/the gods of this city crowded and proud/two blind and graying/Arab men lead each other through/the old city surer of step than sight/tourists pick olives from the cracks/in the faces of young and graying/women selling mint onions and this/year's oil slicking the ground/this city is wind breathe its harp/this history is blood/swallow it/warm this Sunday is holy/be it god

Reading her other strong-willed poems, experimented with similar voice and form, Hammad not only is universal in her reach but it is fitting to say the intense exposure on how an ominous bullet riddles into a mother and her baby as they watched is evident.

In the same time while these futile ideas of reality swim into the brain it is dilatory. It is as Hammad already declared: “Do not fear what has blown up. If you must, fear the unexploded.”

When I received an email offering a free copy of his latest book, Fever Dreams and two other books, I was amid excitement, struck. Egyptian Pushcart-nominated poet, aphorist and essayist Yahia Lababidi meditates aphorism whose poems are, all the more, challenging primarily by its content with discreetness given to style pronounced over the scream; then letting it swallow the dictionary of soul searching.

Modernism

Under the impact of modernism and of the Arab Spring, Lababidi is not a political poet and doesn’t want to be one but undoubtedly, is a fine example of a haunting quality—making the work more innovative, more consequential to explore a new territory, most importantly with an artistic, in another sense, aphoristic dimension. Here are the lines that read in ‘What is To Give Light’ a poem from his collection ‘Fever Dreams’:

What is to give light must endure
burning, a man once said
Another man became the matchstick
that set a nation aflame

There is that element of modern conflict which is lengthening throughout the Islamic world, also applies to a scenic construction of the Tunisian youth who sparked himself to knock a reality out of his people, blackening the nation in excess and finally building their scars around him. Sunk deep are questions of political concern slightly titillating. We climb on:

But fire, and its appetite, cannot be
calculated, like freedom
Injustice and desperation make men
combustible, like dry wood
When words lose their meaning
and an entire people their voice —
so they can neither laugh nor scream —
death and life begin to taste the same
From Tunis, to Egypt, to Libya to Yemen
the light from a burning man proved catching
And those with nothing to lose, or offer, but bodies
fanned the embers of their hopes into a blazing dream.

What remains in the readers’ mind longer after the poem smokes out that if one burnt truth is enough or is it? There is a way literature cuts through the ashes collected when the fire has taken away. Far more embarking is whether humanity has lost or found its voice, its body by fanning the embers. The aphorist feeds food for thought than just the under-loved flames.

Unity

Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘Arabic Coffee’ is thick until the bottom going on to explore a unity cry maintaining the traditional act of generosity. Fully embracing the distinctive qualities of a demonstration of an experience in life, the correlation between great poetry and personal identity is well caught. On the spotlight is Shihab Nye’s father who holds on the fragments of his Palestinian culture “high and balanced in his hands” yet fails to bring his family financial security.

We realise the juxtaposition of poetic symbolism brought on the spotlight through an unforgotten childhood memory ringing in Nye’s ears and in the lines:

Disappointments

“The hundred disappointments, / fire swallowing olive-wood beads / at the warehouse and the dreams / tucked like pocket handkerchiefs / into each day . . . .” Her turn to images of food, domestic language, and narrative structure threads a sacred meaning both personal and political that connects a larger truth and a blended imagination elevating prayer and power of Arab-American poetry.

It was never too strong for us:
make it blacker, Papa,
thick in the bottom,
tell again how the years will gather
in small white cups,
how luck lives in a spot of grounds.
Leaning over the stove, he let it
boil to the top, and down again.
Two times. No sugar in his pot.
And the place where men and women
break off from one another
was not present in that room.
The hundred disappointments,
fire swallowing olive-wood beads
at the warehouse, and the dreams
tucked like pocket handkerchiefs
into each day, took their places
on the table, near the half-empty
dish of corn. And none was
more important than the others,
and all were guests. When
he carried the tray into the room,
high and balanced in his hands,
it was an offering to all of them,
stay, be seated, follow the talk
wherever it goes. The coffee was
the centre of the flower.
Like clothes on a line saying
you will live long enough to wear me,
a motion of faith. There is this,
and there is more.

As literature skilfully evolves to be the ‘handmaiden of politics’, the Arab world nevertheless is a desert of forgotten, abandoned song of loss. In fact, it has its own twisted history and pathos, and the prime duty of her children is to remind us of that.

Insofar the crucial weaving by the Western into webs of the Islamic Arab is sad like the crescent I gazed from my hotel room window. While one culture ponders of another, the unsure future of those struggling behind Gaza strips and suicide stripes clutching tight their country flag in such a moment seems only mere news becoming old as we come to pass through media. To point out is a fooled finger. To forget is a memory holding hands again. There is more but enough is this.