Howell Anthony - Incomprehensible Lesson: in versions by Anthony Howell

In the poem The Empty Quarter, I tried to confront the time of my exile in London, while I tried before that to regain the experience of a homeland in my earlier poem Plague Lands. My sense of my own homeland faded with Baghdad, which has itself gradually faded during the war years, since the early eighties until now.

My sense of it has faded with the demise of my neighbourhood al Abbassiyya, faded with my boat in the Tigris river, and with the palm trees next to the house; faded with the berries and oleander inside the house, with the house itself. I felt all this when I returned to Baghdad, after the 2003 war, and after the end of the dictatorship. It dawned on me vividly that my time there had completely faded, leaving hardly a mark. Plague Lands was an attempt to restore it, through memory fused with the imagination. Thus my memory was expanded, enhanced, in order to transcend time, to transcend history and enter myth, enter the domain of poetry. The time of my exile in London, in the poem Empty Quarter, moves at a different pace to my circulation.

I tried, since I came to this great city in early 1979, to adapt to the fast pace of life here, but it feels like a very fast pace, which does not respond to the slow pace of my inner time, poetic time, the time of the Eastern cafe, in which I feel that I swim, in the slow current of the Tigris, without having to look at my wristwatch, or waiting for something to happen. There is a hint in the Empty Quarter, that may easily be missed, about the threshold where Tigris Time crosses over into the time of exile: Why would the passers-by bother to notice a tramp out of time with all tourists? He stands there, gaunt as a telephone pole, hoping, but for what? No one sees the huge locked door that looms there, right in front of him; A weathered door that stops him from breaking into the hubbub of London. First reaction? Back into the head. Time is not counted in seconds here, but in the ripples as they pass. The desire to vanish, which is present in all my poems, is an expression of the desire to belong to this internal time, this poetic time. To transform history into myth, the time of memory into the time of the imagination, is to transcend the time of hours and days, and enter the myth that exists without time.

I think that this transcendence is the most important fruit of the tree of exile, which thus took on a metaphysical dimension. Traditional Arabic poetry did not help me much in this, with the exception of the unusual voices of Abu Nuwas, and al-Maarri, because Arab poetry is generally either restricted to the five senses, and driven by sensual obsession, or taken up with generalised abstract ideas. The poem in which passion might ascend to the plane of thought has remained in the shadows. An older Eastern poetry (Persian, Indian, Chinese), rather than Arabic poetry, has become a haven for me. Sensory dominance and abstract ideas inform our modern Arab poetry as well as the tradition. All too often, the poet relies on great ideas: political, social, religious or ideological.

Even modernity, where an Arab voice may simulate the literature of the West, has became a doctrine, spoiled by a touch of sanctity. Therefore our modern poet is characterized as a prophet with a bloated ego and a sense of certainty. You can see such a tendency in al Mutanabbi in the past, and in Adonis in our time. This brand of poet knows, when he writes his poem, what he wants before he begins the first line, because he writes his poem under a banner, informed by some great idea. The most prominent poets of our time are poets of the banner, poets of conviction. The poem that enters the maze with its first line is rare.

The poets of the maze are few, and they live in the shadows, in the way that al Maarri used to live in the past, or as al Sayyab, al Brekan and Abdul Saboor exist in the present. Use of the verbal magic in the Arabic language is an instinctive trait among Arab poets since the pre-Islamic period, and has only been strengthened by the Koran, which made Arabic a sacred language. Ancient and modern poets have trod carefully and even perhaps too cautiously in also allowing poetry to be thought-provoking, and capable of taking its readers well beyond the surface of the word, beyond the power in its sound, and beyond the sheer eloquence of the sentence. In the past, our poets demonstrated an enthusiasm for al Jahiz (the great critic of the eighth century) when he expressed his preference for the form/ shape/sound of the word to its meaning, and they get excited today with regard to a deconstructive criticism that analyses the signifier at the cost of the signified. Taking their cue from al Jahiz, a lot of Arab poets and critics have become enchanted by the modernist denial of content, which they found abundant in contemporary French poetry and criticism. The spark of this abstract tendency began in Morocco and Beirut, where the French language was really the prevailing language among intellectuals of literature.

It then widened its influence to cover the best part of the Arab world, so books which even had titles that could not be understood became best-sellers. English, in comparison, had less impact on the poetry and criticism of the sixties generation, and that neglect of English poetry persists to this day. To despotic regimes in the Arab world, this absence of meaning has been a gift engendering a silence about matters that they never imagined could be achieved at such a low cost.

A poem called Song of Rain by al Sayyab has the following line: Do you know what sort of grief the rain sends? Critics observed that al Sayyab was influenced here by Edith Sitwell, and regretted this, because the rain in our climate is a testament to goodness. How then can it arouse grief to the heart of the poet! Our critics invariably approach the poem via theory. They do not realize that the feelings of the poet here come from a source which is a mystery.

I can have such feelings towards the rain (perhaps because I live in Greenford!) and towards the sadness of its falling which also has a natural and divine beauty I call it the metaphysical dimension of poetry. I think that this metaphysical dimension is fundamental. In western poetry, part of the reaction against the romantic strain, is to deny any significant relationship between poetry and mystery. Archibald McLeish has a phrase: A poem should not mean but be, which expresses the desire of a number of poets, to be thought of as skilled makers creating an artefact, rather than perceived as Seers. I prefer to be a Seer. I would like to mention here that some of the theories of intellectuals in the West about poetry and its criticism cannot escape being considered as corrupted by the phenomenon of a society revelling in its prosperity.

There is a dearth of adventurous ideas, and in their place a reliance on techniques and displays associated with the field of pure form. Freedom of choice is being misused today by Western writers, writes the Polish poet Czesaw Milosz, for the purpose of creating dehumanized literature perhaps, it is true, under the pretext of rebelling against a dehumanized world. But are the western writers themselves conscious of the difference between genuine concern and what is just subservience to fashion or a marketing device? When encountering the wave of East European poetry translated into the languages of the capitalist West in the fifties and after, English poets were enthusiastic about this fresh humanitarian voice in poetry coming from the heart of suffering, from the heart of life. The desire to take advantage of this has changed a lot of their abstract tendencies. Recent Arab poets and critics of poetry (with access, as I see it, to a poetic voice that comes from the heart of suffering) nevertheless deceive themselves on a permanent basis: they seem willing to mimic poets and critics in the West in their subservience to fashion or to a marketing device. They neglect to take note of the poets in Eastern Europe, who have suffered, like them, from the scourge of totalitarianism, and from the worship of some great idea at the expense of a more humane expression.