Samuel Hazo

A woman and a man

“Who are you?”

                            “Say I’m a clown in exile,
                    a son from the tribe of time and the devil.”

“Was it you who solved my body?”

                           “Only in passing.”

“What did you find?”

                            “My death”.

“Is that why you hurried to bathe and dress?”
When you lay nude, I read my face in yours.
I was the sun and shadow in your eyes,
the shadow and the sun. I let you memorize me like a man from hiding.”

                                  “You knew I watched”

“But what did you learn about me?
Do you understand me now?”

                              “No.”

“Did I please you, leave you less afraid?”

                               “Yes.”

“Don’t you know me then?”

                                “No. Do you?”

The pages of day and night

1.

I write in a language that exiles me. The relationship of an Arab poet to his language is like that of a mother who gives away her son after the first stirrings in her body. If we accept the biblical story of Hagar and Ishmael, as repeated in the Koran, we realize that maternity, paternity and even language itself were all born in exile for the Arab poet. Exile in his mother-country, according to this story. For him it can be said: in the beginning was the exile, not the word. In his struggle against the hell of daily life, the Arab poet’s only shelter is the hell of exile.

2.

What I have just said returns us to origins – to myth and to language. Based on these origins, Islam offered a new beginning. It dislodged language from its worldly exile and oriented it to the country of Revelation – to heaven. Through language Revelation reveals the metaphysical while work organizes the, physical. This organization has been entrusted to man as the new caliph – the successor of the Prophet. Revelation was instituted at the moment man accepted the charge of putting it into practice. Then it be came a law, a system.

Yet in every system there exists another form of exile because every system is both a limitation and a route planned in advance. Every system forces man out of his being and identifies him with his appearance.

Thus, Arab life from its inception has been an exile from language and the religious system. In the past as well as in the present, the Arab poet has known many other forms of exile as well: censorship, interdiction, expulsion, imprisonment and murder.

In this scenario the Other seems to be the salvation of the I. The Other is neither past nor future, nor is it a mirror that is capable of returning the I to childhood. Rather it helps to set the poet in motion toward the unknown, toward everything strange.

3.

From such perspective, poetry is certainly not a “paradise lost” nor is it a “golden age”. On the contrary it is a question that begets another question. Considered as a question, the Other concurs with the I who is actually living the exile of the answer. Therefore, the Other is a constitutive part of the answer – the element of knowledge and Revelation. It is as if the Other is the impulse of the question within the I.

The Other has been omnipresent in the creative experience of Arabic poetry. Because the language the Arab poet uses contains many languages, old and new, Arabic, poetically speaking, is plural but in singular form.

But whether in practice or in its contact with the aforementioned systems, the Arabic language has nothing more to tell us. Rather it has become a language of silence, or rather it tends to reduce expression to silence. Its orbit is muteness, not diction. The relationship to the Arab poet into a limitation and a chain, at least in reference to the system. He may be content with his own freedom within his own limits. Perhaps he may see nothing in the Arabic past but the answer to a question he knows in advance since he devised the question out of his own imagination, need and interest.

This may explain why the Arab poet embodies a double absence – an absence from himself as an absence from the Other. He lives between these two exiles: the internal one and the external one. To paraphrase Sartre, he lives between two hells: the I and the Other.

The I is not I, nor is the Other.

Absence and exile constitute the only presence.

4.

Being a poet means that I have already written but that I have actually written nothing. Poetry is an act without a beginning or an end. It is really a promise of a beginning, a perpetual beginning.

To be means to mean something. Meanings are only apprehended through words. I speak; therefore, I am. My existence thus and then assumes meaning. It is through this distance and hope that the Arab poet attempts to speak, i.e., to write, to begin.

But, between the two exiles I have mentioned, is a beginning really possible?

And, before all else, what is such a beginning?

I ask this question so I can answer it indirectly by saying that the Arabic language was and is a constant attempt to establish a beginning which cannot be established because its establishment seems impossible.

And since poetry by definition is on the side of presence, the Arab poet cannot live nor can he write within the illusion of a possible foundation. In his life and language, the Arab poet thus speaks ever of freedom and democracy as illusions.

I say illusion because life itself comes before freedom and democracy. How can I possibly talk about life when I am prevented from being myself, when I am not living, neither within myself nor for myself, when I am not even living for the Other?

The problem of freedom for the Arab poet (unlike his Other, his western counterpart) does not reside in the awakening of individuality or in the partial or total absence of democracy and human rights. Rather the problem resides in what is deeper, more remote and complex because, ironically, it is simpler. It resides in the primitive and primordial. It resides in man’s original exile, in what constitutes and its constituted, in the No of what orders and prohibits. This is the No that not only creates culture but also creates man and life itself.

5.

Institutionalized language overflows the I and the Other and shakes the very foundations of freedom and democracy. It is the language of death and massacre where both the I and the Other discover their deaths.

Death sees nothing but death. The I that is already dead cannot accept the Other but will only see him in his own image, which is the image of death. Our poetry at present seems to be moving within this kind of death.