Poetry In The Midst Of Peril

Shaj Mathew considers the work of renowned Syrian poet Adunis and its connection to the nation’s ongoing bloodbath:

Although Adunis, who has lived in exile in Paris since the 1980s, may not be inclined to opine further on this conflict, his oeuvre contains a rich array of political poetry for those dissatisfied with his current silence. In particular, his 1963 poem “The Homeland,” translated into English by M.M. Badawi in the 1971 Journal of Arabic Literature, seems particularly apposite today. Throughout the poem, Adunis variously describes his homeland as a father, a stone, a house, a child, faces, and the streets: “all of these are my homeland, not Damascus,” Adunis writes.

At its core, “The Homeland” is a lament for Syrians and an acknowledgement of their sufferings, one that sadly still rings true some fifty years after its initial publication. “To the father who died, green as a cloud/ With a sail on his face, I bow,” Adunis writes. These lines, with their wonderful simile, “green as a cloud,” capture the wartime fates of so many who died too young, with so much potential lost, the direction of their lives halted. An acidly sarcastic parenthetical aside—“(in our land we all pray and clean shoes)”—briefly interrupts the poem’s elegiac tone and warns against orientalist stereotypes. But Adunis waxes melancholic again in the poem’s final lines as he attempts to preserve the “dust” of a former home, his memories of hardship.

Meanwhile, a new wave of raw, vulnerable poetry is pouring out of the warn-torn nation:

Rather than relying on metaphors and allegorical images, these new poems rely on literal, visceral descriptions, with a newfound emphasis on a united Syrian identity instead of religious symbols. For instance, a poem she translated by Najat Abdul Samad, called “When I am overcome by weakness”, reads:

“I bandage my heart with the determination of that boy / they hit with an electric stick on his only kidney until he urinated blood. / Yet he returned and walked in the next demonstration… / I bandage it with the outcry: ‘Death and not humiliation.’”

Another by Youssef Bou Yihea titled “I am a Syrian”, declares: “My sect is the scent of my homeland, the soil after the rain, and my Syria is my only religion.”

“A lot of poetry and beautiful lyrics are rising up from the ashes in Syria,” says expatriate Syrian writer Ghias al-Jundi, who is responsible for PEN International’s research on attacks against free expression in the Middle East. “There is a cultural side to the revolution, and it’s brilliant.”