‘Afterloss’

Afterloss

By James E. Montgomery

For Grief is proud and makes his owner stoop

Shakespeare, King John

 

Emotions are like Heraclitus’s river—you can’t step into the same one twice, for although the river remains the same, its water is ever-changing, and there is no going back, no return to the feeling that once engulfed you.

Some seven and a half years ago, in September 2017, I wrote an essay about the aftermath of a catastrophic accident my seventeen-year-old son had suffered in 2014. It was a story of how, as I cared for him, I found myself drawn to a body of poetry that had hitherto left me unmoved, of how, almost unbeknownst to me and as if in a trance, I found myself translating the threnodies composed by al-Khansāʾ (fl. seventh century CE) for her dead brothers.

I called the piece Loss Sings, and it was published in 2018 by Sylph Editions as part of the groundbreaking Cahiers series so expertly edited by Dan Gunn. Dan paired my words with the haunting images of Alison Watt and her draped folds and spaces, empty yet full, amplified the resonance of my words, clothing them in an ambiguous universality.

When I was invited to contribute to this issue of ArabLit Quarterly, I revisited Loss Sings for the first time in seven years. It was a bit like finding an old photograph of a younger self. I was surprised, a bit disconcerted, and then overwhelmed to reread the anguished desperation of my attempt to make sense. There is so much that I recognize, yet also so much that sounds like me, but I don’t recognize as me. Our memory is so mercurial, fickle, and unreliable, yet also protective, nurturing and cosseting.

As I reread Loss Sings, I happened upon the following poem by ʿAbd al-Samad ibn al-Muʿadhdhal (d. ca. 240/854), composed after the death of his son Hubaysh. It resonated with memories of my determination in 2017 to be unflinching in my efforts to voice what was happening.

I am deeply disturbed if not intimidated by the poet’s angry and morbid obsession with describing the scorpion, the agent of Fate that stole his son’s life.

In Loss Sings, the task I set myself was to be as dignified, honest and uncompromising as possible, and to be as coherent and consistent as I could without sacrificing the mutability and lability of my thoughts, reactions, and emotions. I composed the work as a series of diary entries, whose date stamps accurately represented the moment of writing. At that stage of the aftermath, I was managing my son’s prosecution of an insurance company for compensation and was required by the court to keep a recovery diary. This recovery diary had begun to so colonize my being that it seemed I was on the verge of losing both my identity and my voice.

Loss Sings became for me, therefore, an essay in psychological reconstruction, just as my efforts to translate al-Khansāʾ had been several years earlier. In the wake of the publication of Loss Sings, I received several offers to translate her collected poems, which I declined. I don’t think that, at that stage of our recovery, I was ready to face the rawness of the emotions that motivated the original translation work.

Now, nearly eleven years after my son’s accident, I exist in a state I refer to as “afterloss,” a condition that exposes us to what Beckett calls “the pitiless light of that which hope hides.” Time and events are ever tempering hope, necessitating a frank acceptance of how things have turned out, of the ordinariness of our individualities, of the random inexplicability and of the meaninglessness of accidents. Afterloss requires an unmaking as well as, often at the same time as, an intensification of the person.

I discern just such a process in a poem composed by Abū l-Tayyib al-Mutanabbī (d. 354/955) on the death of his grandmother, who raised him after his mother died when the poet was still young. The version of the poem I have translated is taken from Abū l-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s (d. 449/1095) glorious commentary on al-Mutanabbī’s diwan, a commentary he called somewhat controversially Ahmad’s Miracle (Muʿjiz Ahmad), punning on the notion of iʿjāz al-Qurʾān, the miraculous inimitability of the Qurʾān, and al-Mutanabbī’s claim to prophecy. Al-Mutanabbī probably edited his own diwan and organized it chronologically—I like to presume that he also authorized the life stories that introduce and contextualize the majority of his poems.

Al-Mutanabbī received a letter from his maternal grandmother in Kufa, chiding him for the length of his absence and complaining of how much she missed him. He left for Iraq but was unable to enter Kufa when he arrived, so he went to Baghdad instead. He wrote a letter to his grandmother, who had given up all hope of ever seeing him again and invited her to come to him. She kissed the letter, but such was her joy at receiving it that she developed a fever: the excitement was too much for her heart and killed her. He composed this threnody for her, bemoaning her death in his absence and availing himself of the opportunity to vaunt.

At first, this fierce poem seems like a failed marthiyah, a death lament. About half the poem is devoted not to a beloved grandmother now lost but to the poet’s own maniacal boasts, his attempt to banish grief and keep it at bay. But the poem also attempts an unmaking and intensification of the ego in the face of a traumatic loss the poet’s psyche struggles and fails to accommodate. The poet’s tender and loving description of his grandmother unmasks a terrifying insight—the poet’s letter has killed her just as surely as if he had struck a blow with his sword. He does not flinch from accepting responsibility, from professing his guilt. Being unable to exact revenge on her assassin, a fever, al-Mutanabbī declares his intention to exact it on the world, a world he will conquer and subject to his fame and glory. Only God the Creator lies beyond his ambition.

Such bravado and bravura are typical of the poet’s style. But beyond (or rather, behind) the vaunting, lies something more. An echo of that something more can be heard in a scene from Shakespeare’s The Second Part of King Henry VI, Act 4, Scene 4. The Queen, Margaret of Anjou, enters her husband Henry’s presence carrying the head of her lover the Duke of Suffolk, who has just been killed on the coast as he tries to flee to France. In an aside, while Henry and the Duke of Buckingham deliberate on how to respond to a rebellion, she rages:

Oft have I heard that grief softens the mind

And makes it fearful and degenerate;

Think therefore on revenge and cease to weep.

But who can cease to weep and look on this?

Here may his head lie on my throbbing breast:

But where’s the body that I should embrace?

The Queen seeks the means at her disposal (revenge) to begin the unmaking and intensification of the person; that is, she has entered the condition of afterloss. By the time of the events of The Third Part of King Henry VI, Act 1, Scene 4, she has metamorphosed into more than human. Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York, reviles her as

She-wolf of France but worse than wolves of France

Whose tongue more poisons than the adder’s tooth!

The story of al-Mutanabbī’s elegy for his grandmother has a conclusion. Al-Maʿarrī’s commentary notes that some folk were impressed by his words at the end of the last qasida. This was his response:

I roared. They were impressed

by these small verses. Why envy

the lion his roar? If they

had any sense, their envy would run

in terror at what my words express.

The poet does not simply describe his condition after the death of his grandmother: the very act of giving voice to afterloss deprives him of what Giorgio Agamben refers to as his “impotentiality,” i.e., his potential not to wreak his revenge on the world. His poem and its declamation effect an irreversible change within his person, the sort of change we might think of, after Wittgenstein, as a non-reversible transformation. To return to Heraclitus’s river—there is no stepping into it a second time.

I shared a draft of this piece with a friend who wrote, “I find myself wondering why these male (angry and defiant) voices now speak to you more as you translate your changing experience of loss.” Was it the masculinity of these poems that attracted me to them, as it was al-Khansāʾ’s almost solipsistic resolve that attracted me to her laments a decade ago? I am not sure. Of course, I recognise the anger of the poems. It is all too human, a complex of responses I hope never to have to relive, and defiance has become crucial to my identity. But the real fascination of al-Mutanabbī’s dirge for his grandmother is its testimony to the unmaking and intensification of the self, because afterloss unmakes the body, not just the person.

Three years ago, on March 1, 2022, I survived a stroke. My medical team attributed it and its attendant complications, neurological and physiological, to the previous eight years spent caring for my son and fighting his legal case. The intervening three years have required a continuous process of corporeal remaking, during which I have often found myself reflecting on Sūrat Yūsuf, Qurʾān 12, and how it depicts the physicality and emotionality of a father’s experience of afterloss.

When Yaʿqūb is told by his sons that Yūsuf has been killed by a wolf, he defies them and refuses to believe: “He turned away from them, saying ‘How I mourn for Yūsuf!’ His eyes became white with grief for he was unable to voice his torment” (verse 84). Sorrow, pain, anger, and defiance, as well as blindness and an inability to verbalise—all are present. When later Yūsuf’s identity is revealed, his brothers are instructed to bring a garment to his father and cast it on his face, at which point his sight will be returned: “The caravan set off and his father said, ‘I feel Yūsuf’s scent, though you will think me senile’ (verse 94).”

Yaʿqūb’s afterloss is so extreme that it alters him not only emotionally (anger, defiance, a refusal to believe) but physically, effecting changes to voice, sight, and smell. Throughout these unmakings of his self, Yaʿqūb twice utters a phrase (Q 12:18 and 83) that I find the most eloquent expression of my own states of afterloss: sabrun jamīlun, “dignified,” if defiant, “acceptance.”

James E. Montgomery is Sir Thomas Adams’s Professor of Arabic and Fellow of Trinity Hall at the University of Cambridge. In 2024 he was elected Fellow of the British Academy for distinction in research. His latest books are Abū Nuwās, A Demon Spirit (NYU Press, 2024) and Ibn al-Muʿtazz, In Deadly Embrace (NYU Press, 2025), with a foreword by A. E. Stallings.