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Salah Niazi in his New Poetry Selection
Expressions of inner turmoil (using the tussle between home and exile as a poetic theme)
By Ghareeb Iskander
Wallace Stevens says "the nobility of poetry is violence from within that protects us from violence without". I have found both the ‘within’ and ‘without’ violence in Salah Niazi’s Mukhtarat / Selection(in Arabic) (Nakhil – Iraq – 2010). The poet physically lives in exile (Britain), but his soul is still fiercely related to his original home (Iraq). But is there a ‘real’ home for the poet? Or does their ‘real’ home exist in the poetic world they create? This world is a world of the words employed, an imaginary universe based, of course, on reality. Here, freedom plays an important role that affects the way the poet expresses himself and, more importantly, writing about his personal experience.
It is said that there is ‘No writing without freedom’ this is not a cliché and you do not have to be physically free to fulfill that obligation. You have to make it and live it even you are locked up in isolation. On the basis of that, can we say ‘no freedom without writing’? At least for those where writing encapsulates their whole life. This selection is a good example of the foregoing, since the author has lived in both home and exile situations and, furthermore, has inhabited a world strictly composed of freedom/non-freedom and writing/non-writing. There are also other themes (sub-themes) related to the main themes (home/exile) in this poetry selection which need to be considered.
Consciously or maybe subconsciously, the poet in this selection mixed these themes, and it’s difficult, as readers, to know which comes first, poetically, home or exile. The idea of home is presented, sometimes, as a dreamland created by the poet, while exile is shown as a new ‘window’ or, if you like, a wide open ‘door’ but with a strange breeze flowing through. This meaning exists on two levels; either encapsulating a whole poem or spreading through different poems in varying contexts. In this selection, Naizi presents his experience from the angle of home or exile by a variety of different poetic forms: short and long in modern or classic terms, which, in turn, reflect the different situations and conditions that the poet has undergone. The poetic forms are shaped, therefore, according to their individual moment of creative inspiration. The author expresses that clearly. By that I mean the comparison between two different types of experiences and his attempts to combine them in both form and meaning. Niazi chooses to express this dichotomy and serves to dispel the confusion which may reign in his mind. It’s a new Hamlet decision: home or exile, to write or not to write, to be free or in shackles, ‘To be or not to be’. For example, he continues to state this meaning even when he talks to his daughter in a poem titled Altifla Alumm (the Motherly Child):
Why you don’t sleep
O bunch of softness
The night for the old ones
Why you don’t sleep (81)
This image which signifies the confusion, fear, sleeplessness and so on is replaced in the next stanza by the image of harmony created by the world of innocent childhood. In other words, it comes as compensation for what has been lost in the world of the ones who have already lived their lives:
The black cottony cat and sparrow in harmony
The monkey who beats drums during the sweetness of the wedding….
A rabbit overhearing whilst a fox repents at the end of the day (81)
In general, writing about exile means writing about cities you left, cities you visited or cities you settle in. The poet associates all cities he sees with the women he meets, and his relationship to the women covers the entire equation of exile/home as a major theme or subject in this selection. To analyze the said theme, we have to deconstruct the techniques he uses to form this relationship. One of these techniques is the replacement of a woman he loves by a city he adores, which results in a deep poetic and heartfelt divine image. In this next stanza the woman and the city are presented at the same level and, sometimes, you do not know who the original is and who is the alter ego, or who, indeed, is replaced by whom, as he states in a poem titled Aljadhr (theRoot):
The woman is your Christmas tree
You are born again in each new city
Between those branches is your nest, and in her fruits your elixir
Be a child and learn to climb on her breast, O stranger
….
Woman is an obelisk; her calligraphy unreadable except by touch (93)
The vocabulary used in this stanza, such as (Christmas tree, new city, nest, child stranger, calligraphy, and so on) show us how the associations of the main theme (home/exile) are linked deeply by them.
However, the theme of home/exile dominates almost the whole work (taking into consideration other sub-themes), the poems in this selection are written in different styles and reflect differing periods. These styles require varied forms, which are shaped according to the poetic atmosphere of the time. Since this selection covers a period from 1950s to 2000s this means we face an extended period, when the history of Iraq has changed dramatically, politically, socially and poetically. Nevertheless, the poems from this selection are divided stylistically into three categories:
It’s like a beautiful sun wading into a brook
On the banks of a forest floating on the shadows (57)
The style of these two lines represents the prevailing literary mood dominant at that time. The poet is one of that generation of poets who invariably influenced each other. Unsurprisingly, they shared a melancholic vocabulary such as hunger, migration, death, despair, fear, fright, destitution, and so on. Salah Niazi is a genuine representative of his generation writing at that time. He says in one of his most successful poems titled Kaboos fi Fidhat al-Shams (A Nightmare Appearing in the Silver of the Sun) published in 1962:
Earth does not spin
Or revolve
east is west
north becomes south
People are leaving
As the dead migrate
on the backs of ants and flies
The house is a coffin
No door
No aperture in the wall (33)
Immediately, we are struck by how fragile and inappropriate are the vehicles the poet uses here (‘ants & flies’) and how disastrous he views his life as it stands (‘the house is a coffin’). The poem explains itself clearly, no need to go further. It analyzes itself by the emotional words he uses that form his personal poetic expression.
Did you mention civilizations?
My home is where ancient histories meet
The Gardens of Babylon are hanging above the wall
In which water flows, and the birds swim in the sky. (27)
I closed in on myself saying
What do we benefit from the miracle
Half of your child in your hands
And the other half locked within monster’s jaws. (134)
The poet uses expressions, such as machine- guns, bullets, helmets, rockets, rampaging soldiers and so on, to raise awareness about the ugliness of the conflict. The rest of the poem describes the battlefield in detail:
As we know, poetry written in the exile, usually, tends to be more than an imagined response to conditions prevailing in the country of the writer’s birth. It lies between the dreamy and illusory aspects as viewed from afar. However, Niazi in this selection is often closer to his ground roots; the real lives, since the lives of humble people need to be told without contagion or prejudice. This selection also illustrates the diversity and complex imagery contained within the poems over varying periods of his life both at home and exile. Memory and nostalgia form important elements that Niazi regularly draws upon throughout this selection of his outstanding, strongly - stated and, sometimes, conflicting poems.
Biography
Salah Niazi was born 1935 in Iraq and has lived in Britain since 1963. He is a poet, critic and translator and was founder-editor of the Arabic literary journal Al-Ightirab al-Adabi (‘Literary Alienation’) a four- monthly magazine for Arab writers in exile issued from 1984 - 2003. He has published several books of poetry and criticism, and has translated into Arabic Shakespeare's Hamlet and Macbeth, and James Joyce's Ulysses, as well as other novels and plays.
Three Poems by Salah Niazi
The most dangerous love is what you suck
if you disperse, love gathers you
If you expatriate, love returns you
The most dangerous love is what
says farewell to you
and then walks with you.
London 9.9. 1978
Who do you think mummified the lark?
Shackled her wings by fear of the school ruler
Who do you think enfolded
that girl behind the veil
like slamming the door.
London 1988
The night fell heavily
if for once eyes don’t see me
I would come to your door
take a confession from one who cannot sleep
I am broken up in front of you
I was what you desired
the death permeated me like mad
you are the only plant of light.
London 2.10.1987
translated from Arabic by Ghareeb Iskander with thanks to John Clarke.
River Daughter
Poems by Fathieh Saudi. Exiled Writers Ink . (Review by Alia' Kawalit)
Stanley Roger Green once wrote in a review, ‘the poet is a psychiatrist by profession,
and therefore into the business of the search for self-knowledge and a personal truth’. In
reading Fathieh Saudi’s River Daughter (2009), one gets a similar feeling.
This is the second collection of poems for the Jordanian poet who started writing poetry
after moving to the UK. This book is thematically akin to her first one The Prophets
(2007); whereas the earlier poems take on a more religious significance through
iconic figures derived from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam who undergo
experiences of victimization and exile River Daughter the voice has a more personal
orientation and is used as a means of creativity and a way to spin the poet’s own identity into
existence.
Saudi understands the importance of taking the journey to her past in order to establish
an identity. She manifests heroism by recalling the unwelcoming androcentric culture of the Orient
that stripped her right of self-expression. In ‘Exhausting the memory’, the poet travels
into the abyss by taking the interior path of her consciousness, as she explains,
My teacher said, “Relive the past, dive deep,
Let it bombard you, drown you,
Let it flood you, then you can dive out…”
Through this daring inner-self journey , she discovers there is a way out of darkness as
she manifests in ‘Meeting with the king’ where the poet shows the anxiety of
an identity about submitting to terrifying circumstances. She is imprisoned in a perpetual
death as we can see from the following lines:
I saw my death screaming in his eyes he
had already killed me
yet I continued to be alive!
Nonetheless, this anxiety creates an exhaustion of itself. Here, she realizes that
since she has nothing to lose, she is liberated, and this freedom comes in the form of
‘words’ that flow ‘like clouds opening into many shapes’.
More than once, we find Saudi referring to patriarchal culture and its deleterious
nature. In ‘Shattering’ , she compares the man who ‘breaks the dignity of his
lover many times’ to a child who ‘breaks a toy every day, for fun’. These lines bring to mind
‘Amnesiac’ where Sylvia Plath’s ‘ little toy wife-/ [is] Erased’. Saudi acknowledges the Plathian
influence on her writings , as she says in ‘Vertical’: ‘She wasn’t my mother/ Yet she gave me life
again.’ Saudi is responding to Plath’s poem ‘I Am Vertical’ in which the latter poet feels that nothing
seems to lend meaning to her existence, and so she wishes to be ‘ horizontal’, in a death –like
position. However, Saudi attempts to affirm the opposite. She wants to assure Plath that her work
inspired the ‘Vertical’ poem , and not only this but also that she taught Saudi how to ‘survive a
storm/ [and] how to remain vertical. ’
The poetry of Saudi not only express her own subjectivity but also invite a historical reading. The
locations explored in her poetry ramify from the Middle East to Europe since the late twentieth
century. Saudi attempts to define her identity by remembering her past, but
at the same time she is representing the history of a particular time and place. For
instance, her poem ‘Childhood’ shows a clash of cultures in the Arabic community.
The poem introduces us to ‘Ali the local sheikh’ and to Fathie, the educated brother who
tries to save his sick baby sister by taking her to the hospital instead of leaving her between
the hands of Ali who is chanting ‘incomprehensible words, slapping her cheeks/ to frighten
the demons’. This poem uses a tone of suspicion towards local traditions, but it also
questions the medical or scientific explanation. We are told, ‘It was only a virus. She might/
survive, she might not.’ Here , the juxtaposition between the reason
and the result, the obvious and the ambiguous , is employed to amplify the impossibility of a clear-
cut outcome .This fever of uncertainty seems to be inescapable; fifty years later ‘a cancer invaded
her body’ and that is ‘ the dormant/ insecurity which had accompanied her life.’ Nonetheless, what
gives this poem a bite is not its condemnation of the futility of both tradition and science, but rather
the sense of will to love and value oneself, as the poem shows , ‘She will take care of herself. / This is
her promise to her soul.’
The theme of accepting and loving oneself against all odds is a recurrent subject in
Saudi’s poems. In ‘Timelessness’, there is a sense of criticizing the dark underbelly of a
contemporary industrial society. Here, we are again introduced to someone who is
suffering from a disease, specifically cancer. The sense of losing hair and having a wig
on comes at the expense of the poet’s emotional feelings. The wig stands
for the artificial endurance of a contemporary industrial society which is incapable of solving the
cancer riddle. Nevertheless, the poet does not seem to take refuge in synthetic solutions. This time,
she traces the element that estranges her from herself which is triggered by a wig. She realizes that
she can choose to see freedom in cancer because now she adores her ‘fresh bald head’ which
reminds her of her finite life in a world full of disease and deception. This awareness of the shortness
of her days makes ‘the layers of fear dissipate’ and ‘ the burden of the future dissolves.’
To conclude, the poetry of Saudi is not only a journey into the inner self but as well a
history of a modern culture. Her voice is worthy to be appreciated for its endurance despite
the corrosion of patriarchy, exile, and disease.
Stanley Green. ‘For All I Know.’ Lines Reviews 81 (Edinburgh: M. Macdonald, 1982) p. 46.
Sylvia Plath, Sylvia Plath Collected Poems, ed. by Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 234.
ibid. p. 162.
Awad Nasir in his new poetry selection Ahadith Almarah: Seriousness, Struggle, exile, nostalgia and displacement Paradoxically presented in (the conversations of the Passers-by) By Ghareeb Iskander When I read Awad Nasir’s new book, Ahadith Almarah (the conversations of the Passers-by) (in Arabic) (Al- Mada P.C, Damascus, 2011,) I have felt the difference between the poetic time and the real time, and how, in poetry, the real time paradoxically becomes a delusional one; time you cannot capture, that is because the past is a past, the present is a transient moment and the future is an anonymous existence. On the other hand, the poetic time becomes an actual, tangible one; time you can capture to read, analyse, write on and so on. The poetic text gives an authority to the words to exist. Historically, this selection covers a very long period. In fact, as I have poetically divided it, this selection deals with more than one period. In addition, the publication of Ahadith Almarah is a good opportunity for the Arabic poetry audience to read a poet who has not published any book since 1991, although he has published many poems and articles in the Arabic newspapers, magazines and websites. As a poet, Nasir is one of what is called in the modern Iraqi poetry 1970s generation. This decade was dominated by the nationalist and communist ideas, and the poets of that period were accordingly divided into two groups. This is a very short political description I have to mention, especially when we would like to study this generation. Stylistically, the poets of that period were mainly divided into two groups too. The first group, who adopted, formally, the poem of prose to express themselves, was concerned with abstract and philosophical thoughts, while the second group, who chiefly adopted the free verse as a poetic form, was concerned with people, in particular poor, oppressed and depressed ones. I think Nasir belongs to the second group; the group that concerns with actual events; event related directly to the life of people. He is also concerned with the political incidents in a partisan sense, no wonder if we knew that he clearly states in this book, page 238, that he was a member of the Iraqi Communist Party. Reading the poems of this selection chronologically and stylistically reveal that these pomes were mostly written in three certain periods, and accordingly they can be thematically divided into three categories:
It’s worth to mention that there is no poem in this book was written in his homeland (Iraq) except some poems written in the Iraqi Kurdistan in the early 1980s where the whole province was like a battlefield, and can you imagine an exile most painful than that! Therefore, we can describe the poems of this selection as poems of exile, or, if you like, they are exiled poems.
The Poems of the Kurdish Mountain A village stands This short poem briefs a very long history that we, as Iraqis, experienced it painfully for many years. Here, the history plays a poetic role; it is an intensive moment that describes not only one incident (horizon mixes with warplanes), but the whole life of the village including water, trees, birds which all were sadly destroyed during the military campaigns waged by the forces of the former Iraqi dictator in 1980s. The history also becomes a source of the poetry, because this poem captures not only the tragic destiny of Rosty, but the whole atmosphere of that terrible time. The metonymy, as a stylistic technique, helps the poetic narrator to describe, in detail, the incident of the destroyed village, in a small, but very effective panoramic scene from the bottom to the top. On the other hand, the poem as a whole can be considered as one big metaphor that indicates the misery of all Iraqis. As I mentioned before, the history plays thematically a poetic role in this poem, and vase versa the poetry plays a historical role to capture this moving moment. The mixture of poetry and history creates the poetics of this poem. Stylistically, I should mention that this poem uses the repetition as a poetic technique, as we have seen in the repetition of word ‘village’, which is presented here as main theme. Absence/waiting as a poetic theme The story is distinctly amusing In this poem, the poet tries to alleviate the main theme (the mother waiting for the father), which is a very moving theme especially at the war, by using a sort of a (happy) language in the first three lines: The mother alone = the father in the frontline of the war = heavy rain falls on naked bodies. I must mention early that the same paradoxical and ironical techniques used cleverly by Nasir in the title of this selection. The title Ahadith Almarah (the conversations of the Passers-by) states that our life including the difficult moments will disappear like any conversations of the passers-by. But is this true? Personally I doubt it, at least in the poetry time (before the real time), and the evidence of the eternity of the poetry time is the moving themes of the poems of this selection, and, of course, any other poems that reflect the human’s pain. That is what appeared: Unlike the poetic images of first two periods, which are built mainly by the use of the metonymy as a narrative technique, the images of the last period are built up by using metaphor as a poetic technique. Hence, the images of the last period have mostly indirect, complex and intensive structures, and therefore they are more aesthetic than the images of the previous periods: The images of these two lines are exquisitely resulted by the use of the new syntax that occurs clearly in the uncommon relations between the elements of the poetic sentence. In addition, the last two lines of this poem, which I negatively like, suggest a new definition for the poetry; a definition that refers not to the technical side of the poetic process, but referring painfully to the emotional side of the poet’s soul: Poetry is a disease The three periods of the poet’s experience show us that at the first period the revolutionary faith was vitally important for the poet. It also indicates that the political principles were essential in his experience at that time, because his political interest inspired him to write poems considered to be a cry for the social justice. However, his poems at that period did not fall in an average linguistic form. The poems of second period were written in reviewing these principles, which can be considered a transitional stage between the first and the third periods. The poems of the last period were primarily written in a new poetic perspective; a perspective that left the exile and displacement of the body to write about the exile and displacement of the soul!
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