A River Dies of Thirst Read online

  The lonely man’s addiction

  I listen to Umm Kulthum every night, since the time when Thursday was the highlight of the week, a rare jewel, and the other days a necklace of incomparable beauty. She is an addiction for the solitary, and her voice arouses faraway places from their lethargy like the call of a wild horse in the open country. When we listen to her together we get to our feet in raptures, and the same when we’re alone, until the queen signals to us to be seated, so we sit down on a metre of air. She divides us up phrase by phrase with a magic string which has no need of oud or violin, for her throat contains a band, a whole orchestra, and a divine mystery. She is heaven visiting us outside prayer times, and we pray for her special style of revelation. She is earth, light as a butterfly, present or absent in a drop of light or the wave of a lover’s hand. Her sigh, shimmering like a broken diamond, can lead an army into battle, and her cry bring us back from perdition unscathed. Her whisper can slow down the night, which only speeds up again when she opens the gates of dawn. This is why she keeps her eyes open while she sings, to make sure the night cannot doze. She is intoxicating wine that never runs out. The one and only, happy in her kingdom of night, she banishes our misery with song, makes us fall in love with a granddaughter of the Pharaohs, and brings us close to the eternity of the moment that she carves out on a temple wall, where dust yields to something palpable. In our night she belongs to everybody and nobody. Her handkerchief, keeping the rhythm, is banner to a legion of lovers competing for the love of a person they don’t know, but her heart is none of our concern, because it is as hard and closed as a dried-up walnut.

  In Rabat

  In the city of Rabat, high above the Atlantic waves, the poet walks along the street searching for a chance meaning and the meaning of chance. He is quite familiar with palm trees, so he asks passers-by for the names of the other trees, whose branches bear blossoms like live coals, but doesn’t receive a single answer, as if trees were a point of view or a metaphor. But the passers-by ask him about the meaning of a metaphor in some poem he has forgotten writing, and he cannot come up with a single answer, as if the metaphor is a tree whose name he doesn’t know. From one greeting to another the poet walks down the street, as if walking in an invisible poem, which opens with an old Moroccan bending down to pick up a crust of bread, knocking the dust off it, kissing it and stowing it away in a hole in the wall for the birds to eat. I have my own special place in Rabat: the Muhammad V Theatre. There my soul is filled to overflowing. Although I do not know much about myself, I know enough to feel at one with this temple, which is receptive to unpredictable flashes of inspiration. It is as if, when I am there, I am not reading or reciting, but improvising on what the silence, the faint light and the eloquent eyes dictate to me, forming it into phrases and returning it to hands that take hold of it as if it were transparent, created from air. As if I am reading someone else’s poetry, and delighting in it for that reason, and am not me, except insofar as the poetry is the poet. But I steal a glance at a girl laughing and crying in the far corner of the poem, and cry and laugh with her, conspiring with her to open the theatre doors to interpretation. Moroccans can rightly say: ‘We are the ones who inspired him.’

  Description

  She passed like an event

  with a hawk aloft on each shoulder

  and her chest rising and falling like the act of love

  bearing twins nudging and jostling one another on the marble

  her knees emitting lightning flashes visible to the blind

  and her legs two pillars of a marble temple

  wondrous in the wind

  And the feet two wicked little birds, aerial-terrestial

  and the hair streaming out behind her

  a military banner conquering the desert

  The eyes not regarding her victims

  so nobody saw her eyes and nobody could tell the story

  of violets she had mown down

  that woman-jinn-fate

  who passed like an event

  But I escaped, and no harm came to me

  save the weakness of the description in this poem.

  In Skogås

  Skogås is on the outskirts of Stockholm, a forest of birches, pines, poplars, cherries and cypresses. Salim Barakat, in the isolation chosen for him by the artful winds of fate, has not emerged from it since he became part of the scene, surrounded by the birds of the north: magpies, crows, nutcrackers, woodpeckers, jays, blue tits, blackbirds, pheasants and waxwings. He has made friends with them, and knows them by their plumage, beaks, tails and migratory habits, and he has bestowed Kurdish adjectives upon them, derived from an anxiety, not to disrupt his isolation, but to make it more comfortable living far from home, away from writers jealous of the exile’s eloquence, and close to the squirrels, rabbits, deer and foxes that greet him through the window, and run away and play while he conducts his linguistic exercises. He wakes up to the sound of birds quarrelling at the windows of his house of brick and timber, and drags his little cart to the meat market – responding to its call to his senses. There he makes his choice, unashamedly eager for the training of the wild in the art of cooking. To kindle the desire between the eater and the eaten, he selects hot, pungent spices, special mushrooms to enhance the word play, and Shiraz wine to stimulate the poet’s inclination to rejoice and sing in the autumn of exile. He drags his little cart through the forest, accompanied by the birds of the north who recognise him from his rain and sweat-soaked vest. Nobody but a Kurd like him would brave the Baltic climate. If he’s having ideas now, they are just about cooking – his day’s visible poem. Cooking is the talent of knowing what goes with what, of using poetic imagination to achieve smell and taste, and of creating sensuous meaning out of primitive form. Cooking is the poetry of the senses when they are combined in the hand, an edible poem which cannot tolerate mistakes in the balance of the ingredients. And Salim Barakat cannot tolerate praise since he became prone to tears.

  The exile finds his way

  The exile looks around to see which way to go

  and words-memories escape him

  In front is not in front of him

  behind is not behind

  On the right a lit-up sign

  on the left another

  He asks himself:

  Where does life begin?

  I need a narcissus

  so I can be master of my own image!

  And he says: ‘The free man is he who chooses his exile

  for some reason or other’

  I am free so

  I’ll walk on, then the way will become clear.

  Boulevard St Germain

  George Steiner says to me: ‘The poet should be a guest.’

  I say: ‘And a host!’

  ·

  The faded leaves falling from the trees are words in search of a skilful poet to put them back on the branches.

  ·

  When there is rhythm concealed in an image it becomes the musical accompaniment to an idea.

  ·

  As I sit with Peter Brook, the birds of Aristophanes and Farid al-Din al-Attar fly above us on a common journey to the limits of meaning.

  ·

  Exile? The visitor longs for it, because it is like being a bird flying happily around with nobody asking it: ‘What’s your name? What do you want?’

  ·

  On the bus, I study the pavement and see myself sitting at the bus stop waiting for the bus.

  ·

  Pretending to be neutral, in a poem or a novel, is the only forgivable crime against morality.

  ·

  Interrupting the rhythm from time to time is necessary for the rhythm.

  ·

  I leave the other side of my life where it wants to stay, and follow the remainder of my life in search of the other side of it.

  ·

  My feeling leaps out of me carrying an umbrella and walks along in the rain. My feeling is an external activity like the rain.

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  The autumn winds sweep the street and teach me the skill of deleting. Deleting is writing.

  Things would be different

  ‘No. Things would not be different as

  we used to think if we had waited another hour’

  he says to her, and leaves

  ‘Perhaps if a bird had alighted on my shoulder

  things would be different’

  she says to him, and leaves

  They leave together. And separate at the metro station

  like two halves of a peach, and say goodbye to summer

  A guitarist passes between them, and he laughs

  when he cries. And he cries as he laughs saying:

  ‘No. Things might have been different if they had listened

  to the guitar at the right time’

  I said: ‘No! Things might have been

  different if they had turned to look at their shadows embracing

  and sweating and falling on the pavement

  like autumn leaves.’

  A life beginning

  At a bread shop, on the corner of a narrow Paris street, I sip my first coffee. The smell of bread mixes with the smell of coffee in the mornings, awakening in me the desire for a fresh life, a life just beginning, and a spontaneous peace with small things, and with pigeons who prefer strutting around among cars and passers-by to flying. I don’t see anyone else sitting there with only his journals for company, but I feel I am sharing in the elderly ladies’ enthusiasm for the detailed information they are relating about other people’s lives, and the politely neutral responses of the pretty shop assistants and waitresses when male customers older than me flirt with them. I linger over my coffee to preserve an acquired sense of companionship with my surroundings, for a stranger has no alternative but to construct some kind of intimacy with some random place, and I have chosen this corner of the bread shop to form a daily routine, as if I have an appointment with hardworking memories that rely on themselves to grow and evolve. I abandon myself to thoughts about the history of bread: how was the first grain of wheat discovered in a green ear braided like a pigtail? And how did someone observe it ripening and turning golden? And how did it occur to him to grind it, knead it and bake it until he arrived at this miracle? I see fields far away in time and place and wonder how long this act of creation took. The smell of fresh bread rises into the air and I look at my watch, then come back from thousands of years away to a life just beginning.

  The hand of the statue

  The hand of the statue, a statue of a general or an artist, is held out, not to greet the sun and rain, or old soldiers and new admirers, but like the hand of a noble beggar asking for donations from passers-by, not to help him walk again, but to cover the costs of eternity. The best this granite hand receives is a bunch of roses bought by a man for a woman who has left him waiting alone by the statue.

  In Beirut

  Beirut. Sun and rain. Sea blue/green and all the colours in between. But Beirut is not herself this time. She looks at her reflection in the mirror and asks: ‘Why do you want to look like someone else, my beautiful?’ She deposits her beauty on a wave of anxiety and hides her makeup in a drawer, does her hair hurriedly and waits, not knowing what for, like a rose on the public highway. But the atmosphere is seething with the secrets of the clouds approaching from both directions, the desert and the sea, and imagination has no control over the anarchy of the unexpected. She puts her imagination to one side, and surrenders herself to a song that praises meaninglessness without aspiring to the glory of the absurd. Beirut is deprived of the chance to forget her wounds or remember her tomorrow, which has been abandoned to the throw of a dice in a game of backgammon played without rules, like the experimentation of postmodernist poets in her empty cafés. Nobody wins, everyone’s a loser, even if my friend Unsi al-Hajj says: ‘The winner loses and the loser wins.’ Sorrowing Beirut anaesthetises her sadness with an old song about old times: countryside and cedar trees and innocence and a duel between two lovers competing for the same girl. The sorrow sleeps for a few hours, but not the fear. Beirut is frightened for herself and of herself, and of what familiar things the storm is preparing for her in the guise of the unfamiliar.

  The return of June

  Forty Junes: a tank on the road to

  the house. A military control tower to watch the birds

  doves hovering in a half circle. A barren palm tree

  Anger explodes and brother kills brother, and flees

  from his mother. A slogan lights up the streets: We

  love life and hate its enemies. A narrow street

  where no girls walk. A demonstration by school students

  against the maps. ‘There is no God coming down from

  his throne.’ A passer-by says mockingly to me: ‘I have no heroes

  since June arrived so casually

  I swear to God we are on our own. What time is it

  now?’ ‘My watch has gone wrong,’ I say

  He says: ‘And mine is always wrong.’ Lorries pass

  transporting goods with Hebrew names

  crates of water. Fruit. Wheat and wine. He says:

  ‘It’s as if we’ve forgotten our springs, our vines, our names,

  and a mask is our identity: in order not to be

  clearly seen we see those hidden here all too clearly’

  Forty Junes here. The land shrinks and its inhabitants

  multiply, surplus to the need of grass for the poor

  and of the Ashkenazi for Arab labour

  But they hold out, even if reluctantly, and do not move

  to Canada. This is our land, and the sky is real

  not a metaphor, and high as our hopes. He says to me:

  ‘Is June a memory?’ and I say: ‘It is a wound

  bleeding acutely still, even though its victim says: “I have

  forgotten the pain.”’

  If only people envied us

  That hurrying woman, crowned with a wool blanket and a pitcher of water, dragging a boy in her right hand and his sister in her left, followed by a herd of frightened goats, that woman fleeing from a cramped war zone to a non-existent refuge – I have known her for sixty years. She is my mother who left me behind at a crossroads with a basket of dry bread, a candle, and a box of matches ruined by the damp.

  The woman I’m seeing now in the same image on a colour TV screen, I have known well for forty years. She is my sister, following in the footsteps of our mother journeying in the wilderness: fleeing from a cramped war zone to a non-existent refuge.

  The woman I will see tomorrow in the same setting, I also know. She is my daughter whom I left in the middle of the poems so that she could learn to walk, then fly, beyond this setting, and perhaps earn the admiration of the viewers and disappoint the snipers. For a clever friend said to me: ‘It’s time for us to move on, if we can, from a subject that makes people pity us to one that makes them envy us.’

  From now on you are somebody else

  Did we have to fall from a great height, and see our own blood on our hands, to realise that we are not angels, as we used to believe?

  ·

  Did we have to expose ourselves in public so our reality could lose its virginity?

  ·

  How we lied when we said: ‘We are an exception!’

  ·

  Believing yourself is worse than lying to someone else.

  ·

  To be kind to those who hate us and cruel to those who love us is the baseness of the arrogant, and the self-importance of the dishonourable.

  ·

  Oh past! Don’t change us as we move away from you.

  ·

  Oh future! Don’t ask us who we are and what we want from you, for we don’t know either.

  ·

  Oh present! Be a little patient with us, for we are only passers-by with heavy shadows.

  ·

  Identity is what we bequeath, not what we inherit, what we invent, not
what we remember. Identity is the distorted image in the mirror that we must break the minute we grow fond of it.

  ·

  He put on a mask and felt bold and brave, and he killed his mother because it was her fault he was easy prey, and because a female soldier stopped him and exposed her breasts to him, saying: ‘Has your mother got ones like these, you son of a whore?’

  ·

  If Muhammad were not the Seal of the Prophets then every gang would have a prophet, and all the companions of the prophet would have militias.

  ·

  We like remembering June on its fortieth anniversary. If we don’t find somebody to defeat us again we’ll defeat ourselves with our own hands so that we don’t forget.

  ·

  However much you look into my eyes you won’t find my expression there. I snatched it away in shame.

  ·

  My heart does not belong to me, nor to anyone else. It declared its independence from me before it turned into a stone.

  ·

  Does the man who shouts ‘God is great’ over the body of his victim-brother know he is an unbeliever, since he sees God in his own image: smaller than a fully-formed human being?

  ·

  The prisoner, eager to partake of the legacy of prison, hid the smile of victory from the camera but did not succeed in suppressing the happiness flowing from his eyes. Perhaps because the hastily prepared text was more powerful than the actor.

  ·

  What do we need the narcissus for, since we are Palestinians?

  ·

  As we don’t know the difference between a mosque and a university, because they are both from the same root in Arabic, why do we need the state, since states pass just as surely as time?