A Crack in the Wall: New Arab Poetry.
Simawe, Saadi A.
Margaret Obank, Samuel Shimon, ads. London. Saqi Books. 2001. 285
pages ISBN 0-86356-984-6 (329-5 paper)
IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to review a book of translated verse
without having the poems in the original as well. Luckily, I have access
to the Arabic originals of several of the selections contained in A
Crack in the Wall. It is also reassuring that most of the poetry in this
volume has been rendered into English by such well-known and experienced
translators as Anton Shammas, Khaled Mattawa, Adnan Haydar, Abdullah
al-Harrasi, and Ibrahim Muhawi. In addition, many of the poems were
translated with the poets' assistance.
The title is poetically and politically very interesting. But to
which specific crack in which wall does the title refer? Is it in the
wall of censorship that permeates most of the Arab world? Or is it a
crack in the traditional rigid formality of Arabic poetry? Or is it a
crack in the thick cultural and intellectual embargo imposed by Western
societies on Arabic literature? Since the Arab poet has long been
combating all three walls simultaneously, I see the title as referring
to all three walls.
The editors' brief introduction, which I wish were long enough
to establish the historical and literary context, states that the book
is a collection of verse written in the last two decades and translated
and published in Banipal (London). Most of the poems are from the
Arabic, but a number are translated from the French. A few poems are not
translated at all, because they were written in English by Arab poets
who either were born in the English-speaking world or have been living
there for years. The volume contains selections by sixty poets from
throughout the Arab world and from diverse religious and ethnic
backgrounds. This web of poetic sensibility becomes even more complex
with the realization that, of the sixty poets, forty reside in exile.
Hence, the collection is a tapestry of diasporic verse.
Given these diverse realities of geography, ethnicity, religion,
and language, a reader wonders what it is in this poetry that makes it
distinctly Arabic. Also, how and where does one locate a common Arabness
in this poetry? About fifteen years ago, Salma Khadra Jayyusi's
Modern Arabic Poetry (1987) was published as the first comprehensive
anthology of modern Arabic verse in English translation. Jayyusi
concluded her exhaustive introduction by emphasizing that "this
volume is a testament to the basic unity of Arabic culture, and of the
Arab spirit, and a witness to the force which a common heritage can
exert." In Obank and Shimon's anthology, one finds that this
common heritage and this Arab spirit are defined and delineated not so
much by Arabic culture as by the anxiety of exile abroad and oppression
at home.
The general undercurrent of the poetry here is alienation
aggravated by hybridization of the self, a sentience quintessentially
captured by Mahmoud Darwish's "What Are We to Do Without
Exile?" Here, exile, not heritage, assumes the only identity
possible for an Arab poet. But exile becomes bearable only through
writing, which functions as the sole trusted compass in a collapsed
world. Sargon Boulus's speaker screams in the face of nothingness,
"My Tribe. This Page. This Pen. This Wall," for the dilemma of
the modern Arab poet originates in the fact that he or she must choose
between two hells: exile or oppression at home. Abbass Beydhouni, one of
the few courageous souls who decides to live at home, writes: "I
sit surrounded / by those / who made me / alone."
A Crack in the Wall would be very illuminating for students and
scholars of the diaspora phenomenon and of the colonized self as it is
reflected in modern Arabic poetry written in exile and at home.
Saadi A. Simawe
Grinnell College
