A River Dies of Thirst (9 page)

then slays us with a cool hand

It is a killer, and innocent.

As if I had a dream: I saw you fair, dark

golden brown, your own definition of colour

You sit on my knee, as if you are you. As if I

am I. And we have the night ahead of us

to stroll in lilac-scented gardens. Everything there

is here. It is all ours. You are mine, I am yours

and the shadow, your shadow, laughs like an orange. The dream

did its job and, like a postman, hurried on

to someone else. So we have to be

worthy, this evening, of ourselves, and of a river

that runs along beside us, and that we flow into as it flows into us.

The poem is born at night from the water’s womb

It weeps, crawls, walks, and runs in the dream

blue white green. Then it grows up and makes its escape

at dawn

This happens while the poet is asleep, unaware of his poem

and his surroundings. He does not see it taking its chance and flying off

to someone else

In the morning he says: ‘It’s as if I dreamt of it,

of the poem. Where is it now?’

He drinks his coffee distractedly, envious of someone else

then in the end he says: ‘Good health to him, my poet/my other!’

A clear sky is a thought without an idea, like a garden that is completely green. A poem whose only fault is its excessive clarity. The sky lacks even a passing cloud to arouse the imagination from the stupor of blue, and the green garden lacks a different colour, red or yellow or lilac, and jackals, to create some inner confusion. For the ready-made is the enemy of initiative. A poem needs some kind of cunning flaw so that we believe the poet when he lies and writes about the spiritual confusion provoked by a clear sky and a green garden. For why do we need poetry if the poet says the sky is clear and the garden is green?

The whisper of a word in the unseen is the music of meaning made new in a poem whose reader thinks, because it is so private, that he wrote it.

One word only, shining like a diamond or a firefly in the night of many species, is what makes prose into poetry.

An ordinary word that one person says casually to another, at the corner of the street or in the shops, is what makes a poem possible.

A sentence of prose, without metre or rhythm, if the poet accommodates it skilfully in the right context, helps him determine the rhythm, and lights the way to meaning through the murkiness of words.

The thing missing from the poem – and I don’t know what it is – is its glowing secret, what I call the essence of the poem.

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When the poem is clear in the poet’s mind before he writes it, from the first line to the last, he becomes a postman, and the imagination a bicycle!

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The road to meaning, however long and branching, is the poet’s journey. When the shadows lead him astray, he finds his way back.

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What is meaning? I don’t know, but I may know what its opposite is: thinking that nothingness is easy to bear.

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Suffering is not a talent. It is a test of talent, and it either defeats talent or is defeated by it.

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All beautiful poetry is an act of resistance.

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A living heritage is what is written today, and tomorrow.

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A great poet is one who makes me small when I write, and great when I read.

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I walk among the verses of Homer, al-Mutanabbi and Shakespeare, and stumble like a trainee waiter at a royal feast.

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A cloud in a poet’s imagination is an idea.

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Poetry – what is it? It is the words we say when we hear it or read it. This is poetry! We don’t need any proof.

The only proper way to eulogise a sultan’s wife is in a poem of two hemistichs throughout: the first one devoted to her breasts and the second to her bottom.

The sultan’s elegy is a eulogy delayed for reasons of protocol: the gatekeeper would not allow the poet to enter the palace and carry out his job, but he allowed him to visit the grave.

I do not hate a poet who hates me, but apologise for the pain I have caused him.

Oratory, or most oratory these days, is the art of trivialising the skill. A drum confiding with another drum in a public square and filling the echoing space, regardless of its size, with empty noise, an emptiness which the orator seizes on to fill with more insignificance. The voice, not the words, is master, raised high on an echo which applauding hands protect from the danger of stumbling upon the truth. Oratory is not a question of what the orator-clown wants to say, since the voice precedes the absent content, and the speech itself is the object of the exercise, fired by an instinctive desire to destroy the opponent, the thrusts of a gutless picador to delight sadistic spectators at a bullfight. Oratory is the execution of meaning in a public square. The subject comes after the voice has a short break for a mouthful of water, but the deferred predicate is left to a swaggering improvisation, backed up by a Quranic verse taken out of context, or a line of poetry composed in praise of an Umayyad prince, whom the orator thinks was an Abbasid, which earns a round of applause. Applause is what he is aiming for, and in the course of it he retrieves the next lot of non-ideas from the scene before him, and smiles as if rewarding his audience for their faith in their own intelligence, acquired from his excessive intelligence, and makes a silly joke, and they laugh and he laughs. Oratory is the act of inciting discontent against discontent, employing the rhetoric of complaint about the risks posed to the nation by discontent. The orator removes his coat to indicate to the audience the location of his active conscience, puts his hand in his trouser pocket searching for an idea and moves to the right and the left
because he is uncertain where the people’s affiliations lie. So whether they are on the right or the left, they will trust him. Then he returns to the middle ground and continues to repeat the phrase: Trust me! Oratory is supremely capable of raising lies to the level of rapturous music. In oratory, truthfulness is a slip of the tongue.

You live by halves

You are not you, or

someone else

Where is ‘I’ in the darkness of resemblance?

As if I am a ghost

walking towards a ghost

when all I am is a person who has walked past the ghost

I emerged from my first image

to catch up with the ghost

and it shouted as it disappeared:

‘Watch out, my other self!’

I think

and there is no crime in what I think

and no delusion

that I

with a thread of silk can cut through iron

that I

with a thread of wool

can build tents in remote places

and escape from them

and from me

because I . . . as if I!

The first line is a gift to talent from the invisible world. But the second line might be poetry or it might be Frost’s disappointment. The second line is the battle of the known and the unknown, when the roads are empty of signs and the possible is full of contradictions, for everything possible is possible, and the second line is the uncertainty of the creature imitating the creator. Does a word guide its speaker or the speaker the word? The second line is not a gift, rather it is constructed by a skilful taming of the unseen, for you see and do not see because the light is so mixed up with the darkness. You are the one to whom inspiration has given the starting signal, and then it abandons you to carry on alone without a compass. You are like someone setting off into a forest without knowing what awaits you: an ambush, a shot, a bolt of lightning, or a woman asking you the time. You say to her: ‘Time has stopped, so you may pass by’ (Pessoa). The possible is a forest, so which tree trunk will you rest your imagination on and which wild beast will you escape from? If you find your way to the second line in the labyrinth of the possible, then you will know the easy route to an appointment with the impossible.

Moist is the sea air

sweet the song of a bird at the window

This was all that remained of the words of the dream

when I woke up at dawn, I said:

‘Perhaps my innocent unconscious favours the rhythm

when it says to me:

“Moist is the sea air

sweet the song of a bird at the window”’

But my consciousness was guiding the meaning towards the rhythm

(or vice versa)

when it said to me:

‘It’s hard to climb the hill, so climb

higher and further.’

Close to what will be

we listened to the canary’s words

to me and you:

‘Singing in a cage is possible

and so is happiness’

The canary when it sings

brings closer what will be

Tomorrow you will look at today-yesterday

You will say: ‘It was beautiful

and did not last long’

and you will be neither happy nor sad

Tomorrow, we will remember that we left the canary

in a cage, alone

not singing to us

but to passing snipers.

A boat on the Nile. Tuesday. Coffee, tea, cigarette smoke, talk about the world that is all we know, although thoughts of what lies beyond it, like the birds hovering over the eternal river, privately disturb each one of those gathered around Naguib Mahfouz. Meanwhile, he is listening with a selective ear, as the words take their time to reach him, not wanting his disciples to over-interpret his modest pronouncements. He knows enough about being eulogised to counter foolish acclaim with reticence, and doesn’t want anyone gazing at idols or graven images. But we make a pilgrimage to him, not to get to know him, as we have already immersed ourselves in his novels and identified with his characters, but to salute him for what he has written, and salute ourselves as we sit in the presence of a living legend, straight out of a Pharaonic manuscript. I have seen women coming from the most far-flung parts of the Arabic-speaking world to kiss his hand, and he is embarrassed and doesn’t know why, as if he is himself and not himself at the same time. Then he laughs loudly and asks for a cigarette, as it is time for the aura of sanctity, regarded with scepticism by a shrewd man like him, to be dispersed in a cloud of smoke, and it is for other people to interpret his work. He lived to write, and after he was stabbed in the neck he gave up narrating details with ant-like persistence and chose instead to distil honey like a bee. From the day of the attack, we were coming to him to say goodbye, as his life was no longer what it had been and death was tired of waiting, except we tried not to let him know this as we surrounded him on a boat on the Nile on Tuesdays. But now the Tuesday meetings are over.

I listen to Umm Kulthum every night, since the time when Thursday was the highlight of the week, a rare jewel, and the other days a necklace of incomparable beauty. She is an addiction for the solitary, and her voice arouses faraway places from their lethargy like the call of a wild horse in the open country. When we listen to her together we get to our feet in raptures, and the same when we’re alone, until the queen signals to us to be seated, so we sit down on a metre of air. She divides us up phrase by phrase with a magic string which has no need of oud or violin, for her throat contains a band, a whole orchestra, and a divine mystery. She is heaven visiting us outside prayer times, and we pray for her special style of revelation. She is earth, light as a butterfly, present or absent in a drop of light or the wave of a lover’s hand. Her sigh, shimmering like a broken diamond, can lead an army into battle, and her cry bring us back from perdition unscathed. Her whisper can slow down the night, which only speeds up again when she opens the gates of dawn. This is why she keeps her eyes open while she sings, to make sure the night cannot doze. She is intoxicating wine that never runs out. The one and only, happy in her kingdom of night, she banishes our misery with song, makes us fall in love with a granddaughter of the Pharaohs, and brings us close to the eternity of the moment that she carves out on a temple wall, where dust yields to something palpable. In our night she belongs to everybody and nobody. Her handkerchief, keeping the rhythm, is banner to a legion of lovers competing for the love of a person they don’t know, but her heart is none of our concern, because it is as hard and closed as a dried-up walnut.

In the city of Rabat, high above the Atlantic waves, the poet walks along the street searching for a chance meaning and the meaning of chance. He is quite familiar with palm trees, so he asks passers-by for the names of the other trees, whose branches bear blossoms like live coals, but doesn’t receive a single answer, as if trees were a point of view or a metaphor. But the passers-by ask him about the meaning of a metaphor in some poem he has forgotten writing, and he cannot come up with a single answer, as if the metaphor is a tree whose name he doesn’t know. From one greeting to another the poet walks down the street, as if walking in an invisible poem, which opens with an old Moroccan bending down to pick up a crust of bread, knocking the dust off it, kissing it and stowing it away in a hole in the wall for the birds to eat. I have my own special place in Rabat: the Muhammad V Theatre. There my soul is filled to overflowing. Although I do not know much about myself, I know enough to feel at one with this temple, which is receptive to unpredictable flashes of inspiration. It is as if, when I am there, I am not reading or reciting, but improvising on what the silence, the faint light and the eloquent eyes dictate to me, forming it into phrases and returning it to hands that take hold of it as if it were transparent, created from air. As if I am reading someone else’s poetry, and delighting in it for that reason, and am not me, except insofar as the poetry is the poet. But I steal a glance at a girl laughing and crying in the far corner of the poem, and cry and laugh with her, conspiring with her to open the theatre doors to interpretation. Moroccans can rightly say: ‘We are the ones who inspired him.’