Versions of the poet

Salah Abdel-Sabour wrote some of the earliest "free poetry" in Arabic, and his subtle grace and cultivated simplicity made him an indispensable voice of hadatha (modernism). On the 20th anniversary of his death, one of his most famous poems captures the aspect of his work, while Youssef Rakha surveys the analyses of a range of Arab poets in an attempt to demarcate his territory
Versions of the poet
A fortunate, or perhaps not so fortunate confluence of accident and design made Salah Abdel-Sabour (1931-1981) T S Eliot's closest counterpart in the history of Arabic literature. Like Eliot, his initial departure from the poetic canon was conditioned by a yearning for architecture that compelled him, in time, to seek out a classicism of his own. Though he always upheld a radically Modernist notion of attenuating rhyme while being faithful to the accent of personal conversation, the Lebanese critic and poet Abdou Wazen writes, Abdel-Sabour benefited as much from Sufi poets and canonical giants (Al- Hallaj and Al-Mutanabi, for two respective examples) as he did from European Modernism, the forms of which provided him with a paradigm. "Thanks to writers influenced by the West," the poet Abdel-Moneim Ramadan insists, "we learned how to take hold of the pen and write words that had form and meaning; in which, though the former may be taken from the West, the latter emanates directly from ourselves." The intellectually humbled, almost Christian retreat of the self that informs Abdel-Sabour's poems, Wazen adds, evokes the demolition of the ana ("I") in Sufi discourse. "This self destruction, which spares neither structure nor diction, reinvigorates the spirit with which the 'damned' [pre-Modernist] poets went about illuminating language." As Ramadan notes, Abdel- Sabour conveyed a philosopher-poet's indifference to the world of things even as he advanced himself materially through his career, achieving the status of a major cultural figure within a remarkably short life span. This fact, for some, placed him irredeemably close to the establishment. Such critics arbitrarily invoke Eliot's Catholicism and reactionary politics in connection with Abdel- Sabour's work. After all the latter too was a builder of desultory cathedrals: his work, which revolved around the definition of poetry as "the sound of a human being speaking," invariably communicated an image of existential despair as he juggled feelings of defeat, death, disillusion and dissolution.
His was a flowing, subdued lyricism that came, as often as not, with a twist of Enlightenment. The Syrian poet Mamdouh Adwan explains that he found in Abdel-Sabour "a rationalism reminiscent of Mathew Arnold as well as an architectural structuralism reminiscent of Eliot, both of whom were in vogue during the rise of hadatha and neither of whom I particularly liked." Abdel-Sabour was Egypt's pioneer of the taf'ila, a poetic method central to the "free poetry" movement of the late 1940s and 1950s, in which the poet applies traditional rhymed metres to lines of indeterminate length instead of filling the predetermined metric grid of a canonical poem. Now Wazen may rightly think the simplicity and spontaneity of Abdel-Sabour's writing were such that, in the context of the Arab world at large, "he suffered from critical injustice and did not receive his dues," remaining "the prisoner of his Egyptian identity." Yet, in the aforementioned context, at least, the Iraqi taf'ila pioneer Nazik Al- Malaeka was not alone in taking issue with Abdel- Sabour's loose rhythms and prosaic style. "The [eventual] appearance of Unshoudat Al-Mattar (Rain Song) [by another Iraqi trailblazer, Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab] and [the Syrian poet Mohamed] Al-Maghout's anguished prose poems," Adwan recounts, "drew me forcefully to these two -- different -- brands of lyricism... Abdel-Sabour, it turned out, did not possess the kind of lyricism I needed." Again, Wazen may revel in the Biblical echoes of the clause Aqoul Lakum (I say to you), with which Abdel-Sabour began almost every line of an early long poem with that title, stressing the fact that the poet was consciously invoking Jesus and thus assuming the guise of a Sufi prophet. But this did not prevent many besides Al-Malaeka from objecting to the repetition of what they saw as an unnecessary rhetorical device. As the Bahraini poet Qassem Haddad contends, the form in which Abdel-Sabour's rationalist leanings and his wise man's proclivity for philosophy frequently found expression -- the poem as a prophet's song -- has remained a seminal contribution. Otherwise, Haddad argues, the best young poets of every generation would not have testified to finding, "in their most essential sources, an obscure tie with Abdel-Sabour's experiment." Yet it is precisely this, Abdel-Sabour's laboriously polished answer to the questions posed by free poetry, that makes the path he treaded a dead end. Contrary to Wazen's assertion that he is "the poet of the future, not the past," many feel that Abdel-Sabour fast exhausted the possibilities of the form in which he operated, leaving behind little of use to the angry prose poets of the present.
In 1994, 13 years after his death, the first issue of Al-Garad: Al-Shi'r Al-Misri Al-Gadid (The Locusts: New Egyptian Poetry) -- a short-lived magazine of contemporary poetics and the self-proclaimed vehicle for "the everyday poem" and other forms of literary transgression -- opened with a professedly epoch- making, twofold attack on Abdel-Sabour, written by the poets Abdel-Maqsoud Abdel-Kerim and Ahmed Taha, the principal animator of the pseudo-movement Al-Garad supported. In common with most poetry lovers prior to the 1990s, Wazen credits Abdel- Sabour not only with creating the largely Eliot- inspired "image of the ideal poet who embodies the model of the victim" but "poeticising life in its small details and secondary concerns." As Adwan points out, however, there is a sense in which Abdel- Sabour's "attempts to employ the elements of everyday life" failed, giving way to his fascination with carefully constructed patterns. Carried to its logical conclusion, this line of thinking undermines Abdel- Sabour's position as a modernist: what makes his poems work, it implies, is a process of formulation and construction, not one of fragmentation and dissipation. Abdel- Sabour was not, Taha offhandedly proclaimed, the poet of the everyday. "In the course of oral discussions with poets and critics," he writes, "I noticed a general tendency to rediscover [Abdel- Sabour's poems] as pioneering examples of the predominant trend in current Egyptian poetry: "the oral poetic," as we came to call it. This is why we will here juxtapose a new text by a new poet [Mohamed Metwalli] with the poem at hand, with the object of exploring the relation between two texts that employ everyday details as the fundamental elements of their construction." In contrast with Metwalli's "triumphant" individualism, which makes concrete and specific references to the contents of the poet's real world, the result of this compressed and abortive comparative study reveal Abdel-Sabour's poem to be "an example of glaring inconsistency between the totality of the text and the laws of its construction, and between the modern character of the state of mind the poet is trying to create and the elements that go into the creation of that state of mind... The platitudinous rhetorical devices he employs belong not to Abdel- Sabour but to the [canonical] genre he is practicing. The poet forcefully plants himself in each line of the poem, and yet he is ultimately absent." This is because a traditionally grounded poet is unable to transcend "abstract images and general locutions."
His by now tentative position as an influential modernist and a lyrical prophet aside, if Abdel- Sabour is not the poet of the everyday, what is he? In his more expansive though no less partisan thesis, "The Dream and Creativity," Abdel-Kerim suggests he may be a late-in-the-day Romantic. "Romanticism in the work of the [1930s Egyptian] Apollo group is different from European Romanticism; and when we talk about Romanticism in connection with Salah Abdel-Sabour, we are not talking about the literary orientation of [earlier Romantic poets like Ibrahim] Nagui and Mahmoud Hassan Ismail... Salah is an extension of Egyptian Romanticism, one that fell [as much] under the influence of Eliot, that Catholic-classicist-royalist... as that of [the Abbasid poets] Abul Abul-Alaa Al-Me'arri and Abul-Tayeb Al-Mutanabbi... or parts of the Sufi heritage of Islamic literature... It was as such a private Romanticism imbued with the tendency towards psychological meditation. And even though Romantic writers believe more than anything in the power of the imagination, in Salah Abdel-Sabour the power of the imagination is held fast by a leash of rationality [due, in large part, to the legacy of Al- Me'arri], which is in turn dominated by a philosophy of the death and defeat of the individual... On contact with death, Salah experiences a melancholy that he thoroughly enjoys reiterating... "
Whether this melancholy can properly be described as Romantic is irrelevant. Suffice it to say that it is in this rather than any other aspect of his work that Abdel-Sabour's connection with the Generation of the Sixties is revealed. Despite the marginal nature of his involvement with politics -- and he did profess a Sartrian engagement that at times seeped through the surface of his work -- Abdel- Sabour is most often read in the framework of post- national liberation literature, which almost invariably employed a subdued lyricism and a Modernist form to tell an essentially Romantic story of redemption and (after 1967) the Fall. "How harmonious were [Abdel-Sabour's experiments in realism]," Adwan writes, "with the then prevalent literary tide, which relied heavily on translations of the literature of French existentialism that emphasised the alienation of the individual (outsider) and the distance between genders." In the Egyptian context especially, it also emphasised the left-wing dream of social transformation; and it is here that Abdel-Sabour stands out as a unique declension in the Sixties project. Unlike Amal Donqol, for one glorious example, Abdel-Sabour never quite descended the stairs of his (crumbling) ivory tower. Along these lines, one might argue that it is its Romanticism, and its being a central part of the Sixties project, that makes Abdel-Sabour's many-sided achievement seem irrelevant to the apolitical, body- oriented and subversive Generation of the Nineties. Yet, due to its own merit and that of the many other currents that fed into it, however, even these poets cannot afford to ignore the achievement in question without impunity. As to the question of whether poetry readers will remain interested in Abdel- Sabour for long, however, only time can tell.
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