Robyn Creswell wonders if the enfant terrible of Arab poetry is now content to dispense hollow verities.
Conversations with My Father, Adonis
Ninar Esber
Seagull Books
Dh110
Mihyar of Damascus: His Songs
Adonis (translated by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard)
BOA Editions
Dh58
Conversations with My Father, Adonis, springs from a curious premise. The book is a series of interviews conducted by Ninar Esber, a 30-something performance artist living in Paris, with her father, the Syrian modernist poet, Adonis. What is curious is that Esber has never read her father's work - her Arabic is only so-so and anyway literature is not her thing - while Adonis' only true passion and area of expertise is poetry (more precisely, his poetry). As a result, there is something arbitrary and unfocused about this encounter between intimates. Lacking any direct experience of his writings, but obviously aware of his reputation, Esber often approaches her father as though he were a kind of oracle, a man with some especially deep philosophy or holistic insight. And Adonis, much to this reader's dismay, is generally willing to play along.
Indeed, it is tempting to conclude, after reading the first chapters of Conversations with My Father, that the enfant terrible of Arabic literature - a composer of difficult, sometimes incomprehensible poetry, radical manifestos and uncompromising criticisms of organised Islam - has now settled for the armchair pose of Wise Man from the East, the white-haired and serene dispenser of eternal verities. In response to a question about the relation between youth and old age, Adonis tells his daughter, "We come full circle. In being born man emerges from nothingness, from death, as it were; as he grows older he nears death once more and the nearer he approaches to death, the nearer he comes to his origin ... Death is another facet of life, and old age, another form of childhood". There are precedents for this kind of thing. Gibran Khalil Gibran (one of the fixed stars in Adonis' constellation of influences) got away with it for years, along with a host of later-day gurus and mystic masseurs. But those were days when it was a commonplace to believe the Spirit had abandoned the West to its materialism and set up a last redoubt in the souls of men with sad eyes and strange names.
Those days are over. Whatever East the Spirit has flown to, it is not Shanghai, nor Bombay; certainly it is not Beirut. Adonis knows as much. "The concept of the 'Orient' itself is fading away," he tells his daughter later in the book. "There is no more history of orientalism, for Arab society now forms part of the West. It no longer produces anything; it lives off the West, consuming the production of others." But, deprived of an Orient, what is a would-be Wise Man to do? On the evidence of this book - and public statements over the last few years confirm the pattern - Adonis' solution is to become a Frenchman; or, because he is truly at home only in extremis (this is part of Adonis' charm and his fascination), it is to become more French than the French. The ideals, or stereotypes, of the Enlightenment and Revolution are taken by him as the absolute measures of modernity, as the sum of civilizational wisdom: "French society has been through its revolutions," he explains to his daughter. "It has accomplished the separation of Church and State, codified the law, and established a democracy. Lebanon, by contrast, is still a tribal, feudal society, a faith society. It hasn't had a revolution in the rational sense of the word, and there's no democracy ... How can you compare the two?"
Adonis' Frenchness is not a matter of cultural reference. He is profoundly rooted in the classical tradition of Arabic poetry and his conversation is peppered with allusions to that pantheon of Arab dissenters and free thinkers he has been erecting over the past five decades. Rather, it is a matter of his analysis of the present. One of the few passions shared by Adonis and his daughter, as it emerges over the course of these conversations, is a conviction that there is something deeply, even pathologically wrong, with Islam. (Adonis is, in general, ambiguous as to whether by "Islam" he means "Islam in itself" or "Islam as interpreted by its orthodoxy": in fact, his writings tend to make a distinction between these two meanings impossible.) For Esber, who strikes one as a fiercely opinionated if not especially well-informed observer, Islam is first of all a culture of political and sexual repression: "Let's say that religion exacerbates frustration," she argues, in a typical exchange. "Men are sexually frustrated in the Arab world, you can see it by the way they look at you! So they get what they can, but sneakily, of course."
For Adonis, the problems are somewhat more complicated, though only somewhat. The great flaw in Islamic culture, according to his account, is its lack of that hoary French principle, laïcité: "Here precisely lies the problem with Islam," Adonis tells Esber. "The Muslims refuse to effect this separation [between Church and State]. Hence, the despotic character of their religion. Islam seeks to foist its laws on everyone." A further problem is Islam's lack of any concept of "the individual" - another fêted achievement of the Enlightenment - which Islam subsumes, to the point of disappearance, in the community of believers (umma).
Conversations with My Father was first published by the distinguished Parisian house, Editions Gallimard, in 2004, but Adonis cannot be accused of pandering to his audience. He has in fact been criticizing Islam's suppression of "individualism" for many years - witness his celebration of the "brigand poets" of pre-Islamic Arabia in his 1974 critical opus, al-Thabit wa al-Mutahawwil [The Fixed and the Transformative]. Still, Adonis' comments on the state of the Arab world, its internal crises and external conflicts, here and throughout the book, are remarkably stale, especially coming from such a self-styled nonconformist. Even the most old-fashioned orientalist would think twice before hazarding claims like this one (which is repeated several times, for emphasis): "Today, Arab society runs on ? parallel tracks. One hidden and permissive, the other ostentatiously religious. It could be argued that the Arab personality is equally two-faced, being founded on lies and hypocrisy." As analysis, this does not rise very much above the vague spiritualism of his thoughts on youth and old age, but it is considerably less benign.
More welcome are Adonis' and Esber's moving recollections of Beirut during the Civil War. In Esber's telling, and by Adonis' own admission, the poet was often away from home, or at home only in a nominal sense, because tucked away in a book. He was determined not to be a stereotypical father ("The father in Arab culture is a scaled-down image of God Almighty," he claims), and was in any case devoted first of all to his poetry. But despite his absence, in Esber's memory he looms very large. One recollection in particular captures this compound of absence and presence, of a child's vulnerability and her need for the illusion of fatherly protection: "I hated books when I was a little girl. At home in Beirut, every wall had become a library . . . Whenever you were at home with us, you had a book in your hands. Whenever you weren't there, the books reminded me of your absence. Then my experience of them changed. During the war, when we were being bombed, we'd huddle for shelter in the corridor, pressed against the packed shelves that lined it from floor to ceiling. Then I started feeling different about them?These books were our barricade, they protected us from the bombs! I spent whole days and evenings in that passage next to Pablo Neruda (I Confess That I Have Lived), Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil), Maxime Rodinson (The Arabs)."
The poet as eclectic reader and inveterate traveler, a solipsist fenced in by his own language ? Esber's memory of the war years takes us back to Adonis' most celebrated collection of poems, Mihyar of Damascus [Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi], published in 1961 and now translated into English for the first time by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard. Taken as a whole, the poems of Mihyar form the most comprehensive and convincing statement of Arabic modernism ever produced; they are the culmination of the "Tammuzi" poetry of the 1950s - that rediscovery of Greek and Near Eastern myth by poets from Iraq to Egypt - as well as a heralding of things to come. The protagonist at the centre of the book, Mihyar al-Dimashqi, is a kind of modern myth in his own right, a figure that combines, in violently reduced fashion, the entire tarot pack of Romantic and post-Romantic personae: the Luciferian rebel, the quester, the hermetic solitary, the Zarathustra-like prophet, the connoisseur of ennui, the hero of a disenchanted world. It is a heady mix, made more powerful by a poetic line that is typically flat and declarative, as if the words were engraved on stone rather than written on paper. Here are some lines from the opening "Psalm," an evocation of King Mihyar: "He creates his own kind. Starting with himself. He has no ancestors. His roots are in his footsteps. He stalks the abyss, his stature like the wind."
Haydar and Beard have produced a highly readable version of the poems, though their translation does not match, does not really try to match, the coiled tensions and gloomy magnificence of the original. Their renderings tend to be literal, both in terms of word choice and in their adherence to the original's line breaks, which are nearly always maintained. This literalism is sometimes effective, as in the above lines from "Psalm," but at others it is a recipe for merely prosaic verse. Rather than attempt to retain some of the Arabic's syntactical compression - no easy task - Haydar and Beard are in general careful to straighten out the grammar and clarify its obscurities. This produces a more digestible text, but one that is less likely to surprise and excite the reader.
And yet the density of these poems does come through, often in the form of an arresting or paradoxical image: "He has no ancestors. His roots are in his footsteps." Here, the most ephemeral sort of trace, the briefest mark of passage, is yoked to an indice of permanence and long-standing settlement. It is a gesture repeated throughout the collection. Sometimes it is a matter of simple declaration. In "Dialogue," Mihyar speaks for himself: "My confusion is the confusion / of one who gives off light, / the perplexity of the all-knowing." But these contradictions also characterize the volume as a whole: Mihyar is figure of innovation and great exuberance, yet the volume ends with a series of somber elegies (marthiyat); the language of the poems, its rhythms and its themes, is heavily indebted to Quranic Arabic, and yet Mihyar is also a post-religious figure, bereft of any divine message, a prophet of the profane.
This determination to have everything both ways at once and also to strike out on one's own?"Neither God nor Satan will I choose. / Both are impenetrable walls," Mihyar declares - is partly a symptom of modernism's need to synthesize everything, to collect the many strands of historical experience into one defining Book (Ezra Pound's Cantos, for example, or Stephan Mallarmé's unfinished "Great Work"). At the same time, the "confusions" of Mihyar, his eagerness to be many things at once and thereby to become something utterly unique, might also be taken as symptomatic of Arabic modernism in particular. For this was a movement, embarked on in Beirut during the late 1950s, that sought to achieve a certain independence from the many conflicting ideologies and aesthetics of the period, from Nasserism to Maronite nationalism to Marxism, while also borrowing many of its ideas and keywords from them. It was a remarkably successful movement?to judge, at any rate, by Adonis' influence on later poets and Arab intellectual life in general?but the consequences of that success have yet to be measured. It is worth asking, for example, whether the modernist project had to lead to the sort of political and artistic positions that Adonis takes in Conversations with My Father. This is a difficult question. Mihyar of Damascus is the place to start looking for answers.
Robyn Creswell is a doctoral candidtate in comparative literature at New York University.
