Reading Syrian Poetry: A Conversation with Daniel Behar

Reading Syrian Poetry: A Conversation with Daniel Behar

By Tugrul Mende

In his new book Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity Daniel Behar looks at a poetic movement that rose from under official state discourse in 1970s Syria.  The text examines unknown poetic texts from Syria from the 1970s onward, as well as well-known poetry from Nizar Qabbani and Muhammad al-Maghut. In this conversation, Behar looks back on the work of his new book and how Monzer al-Masri gradually became its protagonist.

Tugrul Mende: How did Syrian Poets and Vernacular Modernity first come into being? Can you talk a little about your journey with Syrian poetry, and with the 1970s in particular? What’s significant about this period, poetically?

Daniel Behar: The book was concieved nine years ago during a 5-day vacation in Paris. I was doctoral student trying to design a research plan that would reflect my double commitment to comparative literary study and to modern Arabic poetry, the prose poem especially. I met intensively with the Syrian poet Saleh Diab whose rambling monologues on Syrian poetry carried us through long walks in Parisian neighborhoods entirely oblivious to the surroundings. As names and book titles kept dropping, I was shocked to realize how little I knew about poetic culture in Syria beyond Adonis and Muhammad al-Maghut. It was then that I picked up three key references from which my book ultimately emerged: Jamal Barut’s critical work Al-Shiʿr Yaktubu Ismah (Poetry Writes its Name, 1981), ʿAbbas Beidoun’s essay “Al-Sulala al-Maghutiyya” (The Maghutian Lineage, 1990) and the Syrian journal of world literature Al-Adab al-Ajnabiyya (Foreign Literatures Quarterly, 1970-) which provided me with the translation material which I interpret as quasi-originals. Thereafter came the idea of an intertwined vernacular or shafawiyya composed of both local and transnational elements, an apparent contradiction which Syrian poetic culture embodies.

The journey began four years prior to this when I read a Hebrew translation of Diab’s poem Attaṣilu bi-l-riwāʾī (“I Call Up the Novelist”). I loved the vulnerable, disarming persona, the jumpy dynamic lines, and the bumpy texture. I have always been drawn to rougher poetic idioms that, so to speak, take the silk gloves off and are undeterred from adopting the mundane. So I did just as the poem suggests: I called up the poet to learn what enabled him to write as he did. The existence of a tradition of antipoetic poetry within Arabic modernism was invisible to me at the time. Then I learned how hugely formative was Muhammad al-Maghut – rather than Adonis – for the bohemian generation of the seventies with his saʾimtuka ayyuha al-shiʿr ayyuha al-jīfatu al-khalida (“I’m fed up with you, poetry, you eternal carcass”) and ṣākhibun anā, ayyuhā al-rajul al-ḥarīrī (I’m boisterous, you Silky Man). The Syrian seventies saw a barely noticeable and yet momentous shift from committed national poetry to a civilian poetic ethos of comradery, conversational intimacy, tightly knit group solidary counterposed to the bland ideologies of solidarity on offer in official discourse. Shafawiyya is “lip” poetry in the most literal and immediate sense that the site of belonging was relocated to one’s body and other nearby bodies in the company of which one rolls around through the inscrutable fate which Asadism brought on the country. When collective erasure of the individual person takes over, poetry is compelled to engrave a definitive shape to ephemeral memories, thoughts, joys, petty peeves of passing experience. These forms of memory and feeling are what these poets – like few Arab poets before them –  passionately pursue with the help of emulative models such as al-Maghut’s “boisterous” texts.

TM: How did you choose the poets and poems you wanted to focus on? Throughout, you seem to savor apparent contradictions (cosmopolitan nationalism, a trans-national vernacularism). With global artists such as Nizar Qabbani and Muhammad al-Maghut, for instance, how would you describe what is particularly local and “Syrian” about their poetic style?

DB: As to Qabbani, I reckon that because he has become such an all-Arab icon, celebrated everywhere from Algeria to Saudi Arabia, people tend to forget the extent to which he is Syrian. For instance, the task of crafting a unifying and inclusive idiom in fuṣḥā – a felicitous modern style of love-talk which will go straight to the heart – is a giveaway sign of Arabic language ideology in Syria, as Yasir Suleiman has shown. This is because of the enormous diversity of Syrian ethnic and religious communities. Syria today still lives in the shadow of the failure of this project. It is clear how high the stakes were to shape Arabic as a democratic mediating vehicle between the various communities. Qabbani’s semi-hidden cosmopolitanism was achieved while he was on diplomatic duty on behalf of the Syrian republic, a mission on which he was sent because he was deemed a potential troublemaker to the iron-fisted regime of the army officers. His career is riddled with contradictory impulses in both aesthetics and politics. He was later in attendance on dubious occasions of lauding the Baath regime like the inauguration of the Tabqa Dam in 1973. His poem on that occasion became part of the mandatory indoctrination curriculum in Syrian schools but was not included in his self-curated complete works. This shows how much he wanted to erase his Syrian identity – like Adonis had successfully done – once it became associated with Asadism. And as much as he is a global artist today, also thanks to hip hop adaptations like Omar Offendum’s, and boasts of communicability, Qabbani insisted that his poetry is untranslatable. This discloses a type of Syrian language exceptionalism and cultural pride, as I read it. It is a glaring contradiction, not unlike the one I study in the book: Qabbani embraces a socialist vocabulary for his self-presentation while depicting a bourgeois consumerist lifestyle in his love poems. He doesn’t necessarily reflect on these contradictions very deeply, but he embodies them exquisitely. They drive him unconsciously in powerful ways.

I discuss Qabbani even though he is markedly different from the poets to whom I devote most of the research. The reason is that the book needed – for the ambitious magnitude of the intervention – a towering figure of Syrian modernity, a role which Adonis could not fill due to his ideological effacing of Damascus. The ways in which Jacques Prévert’s lyric informs Qabbani’s urban in-situ poems, I suggest, make for a very persuasive link with the shafawiyya group.

I chose the poets and poems by a combination of two main factors: the ones critics singled out as generating the Maghutian lineage and the dictates of my own taste, that is, which texts and poets gave me the most pleasure in reading. This is how Monzer Masri gradually rose as the protagonist of the book. Jamal Barut mentions him on par with the others, but the deeper I studied his corpus, the more I admired the refinement in lowkey modes of poetic thinking while working in highly adverse political conditions. And the innovative project of devising a collaborative collage in Monzer Masri and His Associates (2011) –  poems composed only with lines from the texts of his Syrian peers –  is unmatched in world poetry and deserves to be studied for its own merit.

TM: They’re also quite different poets. Can you talk a bit about what was “good poetry” in this space and time? What (as you understand it) were readers, poets, and critics looking for in a poem?

 

Absolutely, and I realize that there is some injustice in lumping poets of such different sensibilities together. I am open to criticism on this point and invite contending constellations of Syrian poets to appear as response. And yet I think there is an arresting commonality in the change of parameters for “good poetry” at this historical conjuncture. We can see this by juxtaposing two poetic manifestoes that appeared within the span of ten years. In 1968, the Syrian-Palestinian poet Yusuf al-Khatib (originally from Hebron) declared in his preface to Diwan al-Watan al-Muḥtall (Anthology of the Occupied Homeland), that no serious art can emerge without addressing the Palestinian cause, that there is no route to universality in Arabic poetry except by passing via the Nakba. Ten years later, Nazih Abu ʿAfash claims in a preface to his 1978 collection Ayyuha al-Zaman al-Ḑ̣ayyiq, Ayyatuha al-Arḍ al-Wasiʿa (O, Narrow Time, O, Wide Land) that poetry is a mode of survival in a historically traumatized societies, a return to spiritual innocence and beauty in a brutal political world set on decimating the individual soul. That is, the truth of an individual witness, the beauty of poetry as a form of humanization through expressive subjectivity, has eclipsed the demand for political involvement. Although Abu ʿAfash is also an ideological poet and is wildly histrionic in formulating his thoughts on poetry as a metaphysical cure to human violence, he sets a different standard of truth and beauty to the poetic enterprise, one in which poets must first follow their own hawa, their wayward passions, before committing to anything but themselves. The poetic subject and the national subject are decoupled. This signals a change from an all-Arab agenda still operating as a façade in Syrian official culture to impassioned advocacy for civil society. The idea of civil society is minoritarian, beleaguered and must be cultivated in underground cliques as the shafawiyya poets do. It presents a major change in Syrian culture, and in Arabic poetry as I see it. The poem that most succinctly encapsulates this change is Bandar Abd al-Hamid’s “Kalima” (Word), a superficially austere poem that reads like a secret password or parole which simultaneously reverberates within the subjective interior and calls out to engage in a forbidden ritual of sedition:

كالنَّار على الشفةِ

كَلِمَةٌ

لن أقولَها مرةً واحدة

سترتمي حرفًا حرفًا

كالحبّاتِ الناعمة

في الساعةِ الرملية

لأنها قاسيةٌ وجميلة

لأنها كلمة

كالنار على الشفة.

 

Like fire on the lip

a word

I will not utter it whole

but let it fall gently, letter by letter

like soft grains

in an hourglass

because it is stern and beautiful

because it is a word

like fire on the lip.

 

This type of poem would pass muster neither with al-Khatib nor with Adonis, since it is not modernistically complex and appears tautological. But by the late 1970s, the standards of poetic beauty have changed, and the so-called “innocence” of plain words lingering on the lip is celebrated in Damascus and Aleppo.

TM: What particular challenges are there in translating shafawiyya? And can you talk a bit about the aesthetics of shafawiyya poetry, and what you mean by vernacular and the vernacularization movement?

The figurative sparseness of the poems presented two challenges: making the poems seem “poetic” in English, a language whose default setting in poetry has been much more accommodating to ordinariness. This means that the singularity of shafawiyya is in risk of appearing unremarkable. What I view as “translatability” in Syrian poetry is culturally incommensurable with contemporary idioms of Anglo-American poetry. Poetry in English today is strongly governed by a wish to buffer poetry from the excessive materialism of a capitalist neo-liberal economy of the everyday.

Second, the plainness is often contrived, only a surface coating whose deep structure entails complex artistic thought. I see this especially in the meta-poetic texts. Even though shafawiyya resists metaphoric opulence for political and socio-cultural reasons, the poets keep searching for luminous images to clarify their antipoetical play with the language. In this search, they come up with “untranslatables.” For instance, here are some lines by Monzer Masri:

أعلم أنه تبجح ممجوج

هذا الذي جئت

وهذرت به أمامكم

الحلل المزركشة التي أرتديها

والألقاب الثقيلة

التي أسبغتها على نفسي

 

The phrase tabajjuḥ mamjūj used as a disparaging phrase for the poetic vocation is tricky. The phonetic sound of the triple jīm and the double mīm with guttural ḥāʾ in the middle is impossible to reconstruct. It forces an over-active oral movement from the back to the front of the mouth. There are unique shades of meaning in the maṣdar and the ism mafʿūl – tabajjaḥa is a precious word which denotes both bragging and rejoicing, while mamjūj connotes something off-putting. Majja is to discharge a bodily fluid. The self-deprecation of the poet, the physicality and sticky quality are all metaphoric extensions of what shafawiyya is. Vernacularization in the book often means harnessing language to a “gestural” rhetoric that makes the male body present in its sweat, blood and tears. These aspects are hard to convey in English. I ended up translating this phrase as “spitting out blithe vanities” to activate the oral associations of the phrase. But I still couldn’t find a pleasing solution that conveys both the joy, the ironic bravura and the sense of gooey filth communicated in the Arabic.

TM: And what about the “afterlives” of shafawiyya and how the poetry of ‘70s Syria continues to resonate with contemporary poets & readers (and beyond, in other speech and literary forms)?

DB: Because of its heightened historical sense, shafawiyya was made to both travel light and provide truthful personal witness accounts of disaster. The movement recognized prematurely that Syria was a site of potential humanitarian emergency that would force its citizens to either live in scarcity or migrate elsewhere for bare-bones survival. In contemporary transmutations of this sensibility, we find both modes of writing – light migrant writing, morally heavy witness writing – in alternation.

One is articulated as an idiom nearly stripped of recognizable Syrian or Arab features. It represents a global migrant identity whose Arabness is diluted to an instrumental writing language. Saleh Diab and Ghayath al-Madhoun have become global artists who skip between genres, languages and media with great alacrity and desacralize poetic writing in Arabic. Both are speech poets whose elevation is not measured by what Adonis called kitaba or écriture. The words leap out from the written page onto the lip. Their bid for authority rests on international standards, the accumulation of arresting details from life in Europe and deft modulation between expansive and contracted prose rhythms. They both partially fall in the category of what Lukman Derky has called nafarāt – the pejorative name smugglers give to Syrian refugees – untethered boat people, creative chameleons whose need for survival overshadows belonging to a piece of land or a nation.

Th other we find in poets like Fouad M. Fouad and Nazih Abu ʿAfash whose force resides in creative testimonials from war-torn Syria. Both refined an elegiac style of documentation in extremes of pared down language. The depletion of collective meaning and the weight of the dead have increased the need to simply notice and document in small language parcels rather than “poeticize” reality with sensations of horror and moral disgusts. Abu ʿAfash calls his grief-ridden rithāʾ performances “teardrops”, a formal designation; Fouad has painstakingly calibrated his language to Aleppo’s soundscape emptying out of ṭarab and overfilled with the silence of death. Both present poetic experiences more readily accommodated by qaṣīdat al-nathr in the shafawī vein.

TM: What were some of the particular challenges in finding and reading Syrian poetry from the 1970s? What sort of archives are available (and not available)?

The archives of Syrian literary culture in the seventies are made up of several components.  First, the three major periodicals, Al-Mawqif al-Adabi, Al-Maʿrifa, Al-Adab al-Ajnabiyya. The latter two have been almost entirely digitized and are accessible from anywhere in the world. The first one requires physical access, and I was fortunate to use the Widener collections at Harvard, since not all libraries contain back issues of Al-Mawqif al-Adabi. Unfortunately, there were short-lived yet significant literary venues which have by all accounts vanished such as al-Kurras al-Adabi (1978-1979) a scrappy little magazine which stopped after nine issues and landed Riyad al-Salih al-Husayn in jail.

Then, there are the individual poetry collection: my corpus included about sixteen collections most of which were widely available (yet seemed untouched) in US university libraries; some already went through recent reprintings as collected works. This applies to the more well-known poets. Riyad al-Salih al-Husayn’s four volumes, for example, are gracefully reprinted by al-Mutawassit press in Milan. The real problem in terms of archives was Arabic translations of East European poetry which were nowhere to be found outside the digitized periodicals. Libraries outside the Arab world rarely hold translations into Arabic. From what I could find out, even public libraries in Syria did not keep these poetry translations since their circulation was so “niche”. In one instance, I had to rely on a citation in a scholarly book by a Palestinian critic to quote a poem translated from Bulgarian to Arabic in Syria. Izz al-Din al-Manasira’s Al-Naqd al-Thaqafi al-Muqarin was a precious source for me in this respect. These translations would have been found in private libraries, many of which were destroyed in the war. Jamal Barut told me that in the 1970s he had access to Shiʿr magazine only by perusing back issues in Walid Ikhlasi’s flat in Aleppo. He also told me that many of his volumes of Syrian literature were left behind when he moved to Doha. I assume that this is the case for many migrant writers. The unfathomable loss of private libraries is a great tragedy for literary and cultural historians of Syria. When there was a gap in the archive, my conversation partners tried to fill in the details. Diab, Barut, Masri – all three were invaluable interlocutors but I could not always verify their oral accounts through scientific protocol.

TM: What do you think needs to be studied and researched further? Are there “black holes” in our reading(s) of twentieth-century Syrian poetry that you’d like to see brought to better light?

DB: Women poets, for one. The group I study is blatantly homosocial, a vulgar guy gang. Saniya Saleh, Daʿd Haddad, Rasha Omran, Nada Manzalji need a good reader’s advocacy to claim their place in the repertoire of Syrian and Arabic poetry. Manar Shabouk – who is a poet herself – wrote a good dissertation about the female lineage in Syrian poetry which would make a great place to start. As is Iman Mersal’s rich essay on Saniya Saleh. Monzer Masri’s textual assemblages from women poets in the first section of Monzer Masri and His Associates invites us to look for nuances of style and individual contours in contemporary voices of qaṣīdat al-nathr by women.

There is also the committed tafʿila poetry of the sixties – Mamduh ʿAdwan, ʿAli al-Jundi and others – which has been falsely dismissed as derivative and parochial. I find this corpus fascinating because it savagely oscillates between immediate political reference and highbrow reference to ancient myth. It has suffered from unjust neglect in both English and Arabic poetry criticism. I recently published an article in Middle Eastern Literatures about metrical indecision within this corpus, but I believe that there is much more to learn about the nexus between aesthetics and cultural politics in Syria from these poets, especially a versatile and pivotal figure like ʿAdwan.

Want to hear more? Listen in on this New Books Network discussion between Tugrul Mende and Daniel Behar.