Talal Salem, 29, is an engineer and former Prince of Poets contestant. He is one of the Arab world's youngest established classical poets, and the Emirates' foremost representative of the Iraqi-initiated verse poem movement.
I am revising my second collection of poems, entitled Kharir ad Daow (Trickles of Light), which includes, I think, my more mature verses. It should be published by the Union of Writers and Authors of the Emirates some time in the next few months.
I have my own programme on the radio, a kind of cultural forum, and that has its own little following. My last contribution was at the Arab Youth Festival in Alexandria in July. I also wrote several anthems about Sharjah and the UAE, which were set to music and became popular. And I've been recognised for these. I was also in charge of Sharjah's Bait ash Shi'r (or House of Poetry) until I left in 2007 when it became impossible to do too many things at once. As a result, all the poets and writers are friends of mine. But I am not totally happy with the poetic and cultural scene, which I feel requires greater maturity, with more stringent standards for admission into literary circles. The criticism movement is just not active enough.
Even as a child I had a love of language. Maybe this had to do with the atmosphere in the family house, where people loved to practise their oratorical skill. Maybe it had to do with watching cartoons, which used to be screened in excellent standard Arabic, and this gave me word power - I quickly learnt synonyms. Some of my Arabic teachers discovered the tendency, and so I entered into conversations with them and eventually became involved in various language-related activities and such. I was asked to recite classical poems when the occasion required it. That was good training, too.
Towards the end of prep school I started to appreciate music, especially classic love songs, which strengthened my attachment to language and lent it an emotional association. It is not something I like to talk about, but in the past I used to play the oud, and I concentrated on older, especially Gulf tunes. I was never professional, though, and I haven't had a chance to pursue this hobby much. That is how I started writing khawatir (or "thoughts", a recognised literary form), which had to do with romantic love mostly. In my second year at university, in 1998, I made the acquaintance of the poet Abdallah al Hadiyya, who had a poetry programme called Hams al Khawater (or The Mind's Whispers) on the radio. It was then that I realised I had an interest in verse.
Well, it hadn't been two days since we met when he invited me on his programme, and for a long time he insisted that I should make contributions, always using my khawatir and (until they improved sufficiently) telling me to set my verses aside. He was also my introduction to reading poetry, starting with the pre-Islamic poets and progressing through the Abbasids to the (late 19th and early 20th century, mostly US-based) Mahjar poets and the Iraqi innovator Badr Shakir al Sayyab. In 2000, I published my first collection with the Sharjah City of Humanitarian Services, entitled Hatta Taoud (or Until You Come Back), and it was a miscellany of poems, romantic and patriotic and intellectual. But I did not find my voice, a way to use the traditional metres innovatively, until later. As you can see, it took over eight years to collect enough material for another book.
The engineering faculty produces a human being who might as well be a machine, it qualifies him to perform a function like that of a machine. To appreciate poetry is to remain in touch with your humanity, in defiance of a lifestyle that would otherwise deprive you of that.
yrakha@thenational.ae
