Thieves of Fire Rimbaud, Adns, and Arab Poetics

Chris Simpson
NEH Seminar The Arab Novel in Translation Roger Allen
July 2008

Revolutionary writing is not fuel but fire,

a fire that burns only in the depths of humans filled with the sun.
-- Adns

In his 1988 article1 Rimbaud, Orientalist, Sufi, Adns claims the French symbolist poet
Arthur Rimbaud as a full-fledged member of the Arab spiritual and poetic tradition. How he does
this, and why he does it, says a great deal about modern Arabic poetry, and in particular the poetic
project which Adns himself has undertaken.
Adns is the pen-name of Ali Ahmad Said, born in 1930 in Latakia, in Northern Syria,
to an Alawite family.2 He received a degree in philosophy in 1954, and took on the pseudonym by
which he is widely known. In 1955, he was imprisoned for six months for being a member of the
Syrian Social Nationalist Party, after which he emigrated to Beirut, Lebanon. In 1957, he founded
the influential magazine Shi'r ("Poetry") with fellow Syrian-Lebanese poet Yusuf al-Khal. Since
the early 1980s he has lived in Paris. He is one of the most important poets in the Arabic
language, though the praise for him is sometimes hyperbolic, as with poet Samuel Hazos Christ-
ish equation that there is Arabic poetry before Adonis, and there is Arabic poetry after Adonis.
From 2005-2007, Adns was among the finalists for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Rimbaud is sui generis. Unlike music and mathematics, prodigies of literature are rare.
Rarer still is the meteoric case of Rimbaud, who as a child and youth excelled at poetry and who
ran away from his provincial home at 17 to join a circle of bohemian Parisian poets subsequently
described as Symbolists a group of modernist poets deeply influenced by Charles Baudelaire
whose number included Stphane Mallarm and Paul Verlaine who revered the arts and rejected
the bourgeois conventions of the day. The young Rimbaud eventually fell into an affair with
Verlaine, who abandoned his wife and child. Their affair lasted almost two years, until July 1873,
when Verlaine drunkenly shot Rimbaud in the left wrist. Rimbaud returned to his childhood home
in Charleville, in the Ardennes, where he wrote Une Saison en Enfer the only book he published
in his lifetime.
In 1874, after he finished Illuminations, his remarkable series of hallucinatory prose-
poems, he abandoned poetry completely, as if he had stretched the capacity of language to its
limit and could go no further with it. He was 19 years old. Subsequently, he traveled east and
1
Adns, Sufism and Surrealism, translated by Judith Cumberbatch, London (2005), pp. 193-212.
2
The Alawite sect of 12-er Sha Islam. Gnostic and secretive are adjectives frequently associated with
the sect, as described by those outside of it, as initiation is the key to membership.

1
worked as a coffee broker in Yemen and in Ethiopia as a coffee trader, a sometime engineer, and
as an unsuccessful gun-runner. His mind, says Arthur Symons
was not the mind of the artist but the mind of the man of action. He was a
dreamer, but all his dreams were discoveries. To him it was an identical
act of his temperament to write [poetry] and to trade in ivory and frankincense
with the Arabs.3

In May of 1891 a debilitating knee inflammation resulted in the amputation of his right
leg, but it was discovered that he had cancer. Rimbaud died in Marseilles in November of 1891.
He had just turned 37.
Though his career as a poet was short, he wrote some of the most vibrant poems in
French literature, and was a major influence on the Surrealist movement as well as on rock stars
like Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith. But his effect on modern Arabic poetry is
interesting, given that he spent more time working as an agent of empire than as a poet.
When Rimbaud mentions the East in his poetry, it is as an essentially orientalist trope
fakirs, genies, minarets figure as marks of the exotic, the dreamlike, markers of the much-desired
other exactly the sort of stuff that Edward Said famously critiqued. When he lived in Aden, his
letters home convey no poetry at all; they are filled with requests for books like Construction in
Metal, Military and Civil Engineering, and Dictionary of Commerce and Navigation; they detail
petty concerns about money down to the last sou; and they are filled with endless complaint:
Aden is a frightful rock, without a single blade of grass or a drop of good waterI am like a
prisoner here.4 Elsewhere he calls it a filthy town filled with savages and imbeciles,
complains of the constant 95 heat, and expresses an interest in working on the Panama Canal
project.
This is a Sufi? Adns says yes, even in this.
Raving from pain and the cancer (or prophesying as his sister described it), Rimbauds
final words were Allah Kerim! Allah Kerim! 5 (God is generous). Unlike other European
orientalists, Rimbaud voyaged to the actual East real enough to complain about it and learned
the language, possibly even converting to Islam. His father, who abandoned his family when
Rimbaud was very young, also knew a bit of Arabic. He had helped France conquer Algeria, and
was awarded the Lgion d'honneur for his efforts.

3
The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Arthur Symons, New York (1919), p. 286.
4
Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters, translated by Wallace Fowlie, revised by Seth Whidden,
Chicago (1966/2005), p. 409. Letter dated 25 August 1880. In the early 1990s Rimbauds house in Yemen
was located and for a brief time celebrated as a historical site there not without significant cultural
concerns. Lucine Taminian, Rimbauds House in Aden, Yemen: Giving Voices to the Silent Poet,
Cultural Anthropology, vol. 13, no. 4 (Nov. 1998) pp. 464-490.
5
Symons, p. 285.

2
 But this is all window-dressing. Though he respects the silence of Rimbaud because
there is no speech except between self and other, and in order for there to be words, there must
be a distinction the subject and the object,6 Adns finds the Sufi in Rimbauds poetry, not in the
man himself, who is ultimately a mystery.
Rimbauds poetry is occasionally tender and lyrical, but for the most part it burns with
the intensity of the adolescent he was. Love was not his primary concern, but vision was, and
his poetry seems driven by a deep passion to experience the most violent extremes of passion in
the interest of what can only be described as a spiritual quest: Gluttonously, I am waiting for
God.7 This was to be achieved methodically, and he described the process in letters:

Now I am going in for debauch. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to

make myself a visionary [voyant]: you wont possibly understand, and I dont
know how to explain it to you. To arrive at the unknown through the disordering
of all the senses, thats the point. The sufferings will be tremendous, but one must
be strong, be born a poet.8

The poet makes himself a visionary through a long, a prodigious and rational
disordering of all the senses. Every form of love, of suffering, of madness; he
searches himself, he consumes all the poisons in him, keeping only their
quintessences. Ineffable tortures in which he will need all his faith and
superhuman strength, the great criminal, the great sickman, the accursed, and
the supreme savant!9

What is important to remember here is that Rimbaud was not a Romantic. He sought a
passage beyond illusion, into the black heart of the real, like his contemporary Nietzsche.
For Adns, Rimbaud approaches knowledge in the same way that Sufis challenge the
legalistic, formalistic and rational approach to religion, in favor of the intuitive, the esoteric and
the visionary. Rimbaud bypasses the rationalist dualism of Descartes, which had paved the way
for Western objectivism and scientific knowledge.10 Adns observes that Rimbaud explicitly
seeks to replace cogito ergo sum with the cogito of the Sufi: It is in no way my fault. It is wrong
to say: I think. One should say: I am thought.11
The outcome of this derangement of the senses will be the dissociative goal of Sufi ritual,
in Rimbauds famous phrase je est un autre: I is someone else. So much the worse for the wood
that discovers its a violin The I is an other. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it isnt to blame.
6
Adns, Rimbaud, Orientalist, Sufi, p. 210.
7
Rimbaud: Complete Works p. 269
8
Rimbaud, Illuminations, translated by Louise Varse, New York (1946/1957), p. xxvii, letter to Georges
Izambard (Charleville, 13 May 1871)
9
ibid., pp. xxx-xxxi, letter to Paul Demeny (Charleville, 15 May 1871)
10
Adns, Rimbaud, Orientalist, Sufi, p. 200.
11
See 5 above.

3
In this disintegration of the self, says Adns, we discover that I has been
formed by traditions, or social, historical, religious and cultural usage, through
its surrender to the world of phenomena. This I is in reality no more than a store
in which the fantasies of society, the world of laws or the world of orthodox
religious laws, as Sufis regard it, are kept.12

The derangement will frequently be accomplished in a way similar to Sufi wine poetrys
equation of spirits with the spiritual by following Baudelaires dictum, get drunk!
I have swallowed a monstrous mouthful of poison. Thrice blessed be the idea
that came to me! My entrails are burning.13

Little drunken vigil, holy! if only because of the mask you have bestowed on us.
We pronounce you, method! We have faith in the poison. We know how to
give our whole life every day.
Now is the time of the Assassins.14

Or it will be accomplished by an amour fou for the beloved; here Rimbaud describes
himself through the eyes of The Foolish Virgin (Verlaine) in A Season in Hell:
I forgot all my human duty to follow him. What a life! Real life is absent. We
are not in the world. I go where he goes. I have to. And often he flies into a rage
at me, poor me. The Demon! He is a demon you know. He is not a man.
He said: I do not like women: Love is to be reinvented, that is clear. 15

And in the end, a moment of ecstasy, a communion with the eternal, a holy clown:

At last, O happiness, O reason, I removed from the sky the azure, which is
black, and I lived, a spark of gold of pure light. Out of joy, I assumed an
expression as buffoonish and strange as possible:
It has been found again!
What has? eternity.
It is the sea mixed
With the sun.16

I have stretched ropes from steeple to steeple; garlands from window to

window; golden chains from star to star, and I dance17

Adns observes that Rimbaud repeatedly chooses words that have rich resonance in the
Sufi tradition, words like thirst, drink, quench, hunger, eat, nourish, tears, weeping, laughter,
dance, love and madness. These are words, he says, that translate the poets desire to become
one with existence or submit to nature.18 Rimbaud is trying to describe in words what is beyond
12
Adns, Rimbaud, Orientalist, Sufi, p. 207
13
Rimbaud: Complete Works p. 275
14
Rimbaud, Illuminations, p. 43
15
Rimbaud, Complete Works, p. 281
16
ibid. p. 293
17
Rimbaud, Illuminations, p. 47
18
Adns, Rimbaud, Orientalist, Sufi, p. 208

4
words. Can I describe the vision? Rimbaud asks. The air of hell does not permit hymns. But
that is exactly the task of the poet. A language must be found; as a matter of fact, all speech
being an idea, the time of universal language will come! 19
This desire, to use language afresh to be able to re-make the world itself, is in its essence
a Promethean goal, and one which Rimbaud and Adns both share. So then, says Rimbaud,
the poet is truly a thief of fire.
In order to understand the necessity of Adnss appropriation of Rimbaud, it is necessary
to examine the rise of modern Arab poetry. To do that, it is necessary to examine both the concept
of modernism as well as the rich and deep tradition of poetry in Arabic.
Anthologies of modern poetry in English generally begin with Walt Whitman and Emily
Dickinson, whose approach to a line of poetry had less to do with traditional forms, rhyme and
metre, and more to do with the human breath his untucked, hers corseted; both fresh,
expressive, and inspiring to later poets in the true sense of that word. In Europe, Baudelaire
adopted the new medium of the prose-poem and harnessed it to address the consciousness (and
un-consciousness) of modern man.
Modern is a difficult word and concept to use. Problems arise as judgments attempt to
place value on modernity: to be modern is better than to be old-fashioned, and to be politically
and economically modern is to be a full participant in the world, while those who have failed to
modernize are not (in this sense, synonymous with development, as in the developed world).
Other problems arise with the presumed equation between the fact of modernity and the regions
that achieved it to be modern in this sense is also to be western, to adopt the western value
system (liberal, democratic, secular) as the default setting. Furthermore, the experience of
modernity for Europe, where it evolved internally, was significantly different than the experience
of modernity for the rest of the world, where it was imposed from without. Consequently, even a
discussion of modernization in the Middle East is problematic.
Modernism, as an aesthetic response to modernity, expresses the historical moment of a
break with the past and past tradition, either as a liberation from inherited patterns or, at another
extreme, deprivation and disinheritance20 (both qualities are present in the work of Adns).
In Europe and America, modernism as a cultural movement was characterized by a
dismissal of the merely decorative (for instance, in Adolf Loos architecture manifesto Ornament
and Crime), an inclination to experiment with new forms, and a desire to challenge 19 th century
conventions of realism in writing and art.

19
Rimbaud, Illuminations, p. xxxii
20
The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature, Richard Ellman, editor, Oxford (1965), p. vi.

5
 The shock of World War I made modernism a dominant mode of culture, and the early
years of the 20th century saw sensational breakthroughs in the arts. Two in particular are worth
mentioning.
1922 saw the publication of both James Joyces Ulysses and T.S. Eliots The Waste Land.
Writing about Joyces book in 1923, Eliot praised the use of myth:
in manipulating a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity,
Mr. Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him instead of
narrative method, we may now use the mythical method ... It is simply a way of
controlling, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of
futility and anarchy which is contemporary history. 21

Both Joyce and Eliot were influenced by The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and
Religion by James Frazer, the twelfth and final volume of which was published in 1915. In it,
Frazer compared world religions including Christianity in a thoroughly modern manner,
approaching them as anthropological phenomena, and comparing their features taxonomically.
Central to Frazers thesis was the presence, in almost all of the worlds mythologies, of a fertility
god who repeatedly dies and is then reborn.
In 1929 French poet Andr Breton and a group of like-minded artists, appalled by the
slaughter that civilized Europeans had perpetrated upon themselves, staked out a bold artistic
vision: survival was impossible as long as a human psychology was divided into a rational
conscious and an irrational unconscious; the solution was a merger of the two into a new super-
reality. I believe, said Breton, in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality,
which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.22 This was a
sort of mystical atheism, as Salma Khadra Jayyusi called it, or even a pagan form of Sufism
in the estimation of Adns.
Terms like sanity and insanity no longer applied. Reason, truth, and logical thought
were suspect (the sense of reality after all had produced the Great War). Boundaries of sense
and good taste were to be ignored. Disorder, chance, hysteria, and magic were celebrated.
Beauty Breton remarked in Nadja must be convulsive or not at all. It was preposterous, but it
inspired an innovative poetics as well as interesting works of art. And, of course, Breton claimed
Rimbaud as a fellow-traveler: Rimbaud is surrealist in the way he lived, and elsewhere. 23
There had been in Arabic an exploration of poetics prompted by European movements
such as Romanticism and Symbolism, but Arabic poetry remained for the first half of the 20 th

21
T.S. Eliot, Ulysses, Order, and Myth, The Dial, vol. LXXV, no. 5 (November, 1923), p. 483
22
Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, Ann Arbor (1972). First Manifesto, p. 14
23
ibid, p. 27

6
century relatively unchanged, for the most part adhering to forms that had been established for
1500 years.
No art form is closer to the heart of Arab culture and identity than poetry. The role of
poetry in Arabic, says Dwight Reynolds, is as a powerful form of social action that is a far cry
from the comparatively limited role poetry plays in most modern Western societies. To
improvise poetry in the right style and in the right form on public occasions is an important mark
of ones level of education, intelligence, or even manhood and tribal solidarity. 24
Nomadic Bedouin societies relied on oral traditions to transmit culture; poetry is the
dwn [the record, the registry] of the Arabs.25 In pre-Islamic societies, the qasida (ode) and the
epic poems are essential to what Ibn Khaldn called group feeling, the glue that held the
nomadic community together, as well as an outlet for the expression of the deepest emotions.
Prose is called klm manthr (scattered words, like scattered pearls) while poetry is
called klm manzm (organized words, like pearls on a necklace). 26 In testimony in tribal courts,
poetry is considered more reliable and more truthful than normal speech because its structure
allows information to be memorized and transmitted across time and space with minimal
variation.27 Poetry is also necessary in the negotiation of tribal disputes because its formality
keeps the dialogue calm and controlled since the participants must stop to mold their thoughts
into well-formed verse (anything less would be seen as a shameful lack of self-control). 28
The revelation of the Quran to Muhammad changed everything, says Adns. The
language of the Bedouin became the language of God. When the language became divine, poetry
was no longer the word of truth, as the pre-Islamic poets had claimed it was. 29 The problem was
also one of inspiration.
Because Islam the last message sent by God to mankind has placed the final
seal on the Divine Word, successive words are incapable of bringing humankind
anything new. A new message would imply that the Islamic message did not say
everything, that it is imperfect.30

The problem for poetry was compounded, says Adns, when the pre-Islamic poetic
forms were preserved and enshrined as ideals in the years following the Prophets death, mostly
in the interest of identity politics during an age when Arabs were mingling with Persians and
Greeks. In this climate the rules of language were laid down for fear that solecisms and
24
Dwight Reynolds, Arab Folklore: A Handbook, Westport (2007), p. 29
25
ibid. p. 31
26
ibid. p. 30
27
ibid.
28
ibid. p. 36
29
Adns, Poetry and Apoetical Culture, translated by Esther Allen, in The Pages of Day and Night,
translated by Samuel Hazo, Marlboro (1994), p. 102
30
ibid. p. 103

7
corruptions would creep into the Quran and the hadths.31 Thus absolute, normative, and
natural rules for poetry were established as part of a 10 th century agenda of Arab nationalism.
And thus the principle of bidah (innovation) a sin in religious matters leaked into the realm
of poetics. The problem for poetic expression is severe, says Adns, because:
Legislation and codification go against the nature of poetic language, for this
language, since it is mans expression of his explosive moods, his impetuousness,
his difference, is incandescent, constantly renewing itself, heterogeneous, kinetic
and explosive, always a disrupter of codes and systems. It is the search for the
self by means of a perpetual exodus away from the self. 32

The result was a kind of stasis, punctuated by moments of innovation. One such moment
occurred in 1948, when the creation of the state of Israel presented Arab intellectuals with the
impotence and bankruptcy of their political leadership. It bears worth remembering that moments
of political crisis often spark innovation in the arts: Rimbaud came of age at the moment of the
Franco-Prussian War, a disastrous and humiliating defeat for France, and he may have
participated in the ill-fated Commune, which ruled the city of Paris from March to May of 1871,
in the wake of that war; World War I had a similar effect on artists in the West. After 1948, young
Arab poets expressed a unanimous reaction of anger, alienation, and horror, and their response
was the most radical and successful formal revolution in the history of Arabic poetry. 33 Salma
Khadra Jayyusi says this involved the
rejection of old established ties with the inherited culture, and to a renunciation
of loyalty to both the remote past, and the immediate past, which had brought so
much shame and frustration.34

The poetic had become political, with Marxism and pan-Arabism also part of the
intellectual ferment of the moment, and those writers who needed models turned to European and
American examples, at least initially, for guidance in the construction of a new poetic outlook in
terms of both sensibility and technique.
Eliots Waste Land and Frazers Golden Bough were both translated into Arabic in 1947,
and the influence of both was considerable. Ali Ahmad Said changed his name to Adns (je est
un autre), inspired by the ancient mythology discussed by Frazer.35 To take the moniker of a god
31
Adns, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, translated by Catherine Cobham, London (1990), p. 20
32
ibid. p. 32
33
Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Modernist Poetry in Arabic, Modern Arabic Literature, edited by M.M.
Badawi, Cambridge (1992), p. 141
34
ibid. p/ 146
35
The Springs of Adonis (now also known as the River Ibrahim) run through the Byblos region of
Lebanon down through steep gorges to the Mediterranean. Iron ore deposits stain its waters red at times of
flood. The cult of Adonis used to be celebrated in a temple close by. The beautiful youth Adonis, who was
loved by the goddess Astarte, went out hunting despite her warnings and was gored to death by a boar. But
after long supplications, Astarte succeeded in securing his release from the underworld for half the year.

8
(especially Adonis, with all its connotations) as a pen-name is almost comically extravagant,
something a rock star might do. But hes not being ironic hes dead serious about the Tammuz
myth and its relevance to the poetry and the culture of the Middle East. And hes not being funny
either his poetry is almost devoid of humor. Then, too, he chose an ancient pagan deity for
himself, a provocative choice in an Islamic context.
In poetic form, experimentation became the rule. Arab poets used idiosyncratic syntaxes
and explored prose-poem and free verse forms and especially in the latter, there was little
adherence to traditional metres or regular patterns, but with an emphasis on euphony, rhythm,
imagery and occasional rhyme. When western poets such as Walt Whitman had been translated
into Arabic in the 1930s, this mode was utilized, and it became a popular form an example of a
style of translation affecting a broader poetic trend. 36 Eliots diction was influential. The
traditional line of poetry, the bait, of two hemistiches of equal length or metrical weight, was
replaced by more flexible lines of unequal length. 37
Another feature of the new poetry was a change in the use of metaphor and image.
According to Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Adns laid the cornerstone for the modernist treatment of
the image in Arabic poetry. 38 He was inspired by Rimbaud, and by Surrealist poetics, which
argued that the image should surprise the reader:
The image is a pure creation of the mind.
It cannot be born from a comparison but from a juxtaposition of two more or less
distant realities.
The more the relationship between the two juxtaposed realities is distant and
true, the stronger the image will be the greater its emotional power and poetic
reality [Pierre Reverdy] 39

Adns has deployed images that are complex, layered, and frequently non-
representational: the neck of a cloud, those threads woven by roots, or loss fastens the face of
the sea to our dreaming. When he speaks of footsteps, they may be his, across the sand, or they
may be poetic feet, across a page or both. Each image has meaning intrinsic to the total
reality of the poem, some of which can be teased out by the reader, and much of which is opaque,
often requiring repeated readings. Jayyusi calls him a horseman of language in whose hands

The rituals of Adonis, of resurrection and the return of spring, were observed in Greater Syria for millennia.
It seems that even in medieval Islamic times the return of Adonis to this world was still being celebrated in
remote villages. Legends concerning Adonis and other figures from pagan Syrian lore were to figure largely
in the quasi-mystical rhetoric of Syrian nationalism in the 1940s and '50s. An Arab Surrealist, by Robert
Irwin, The Nation, January 3, 2005, http://www.thenation.com/doc/20050103/irwin
36
M.M. Badawi, A Short History of Modern Arabic Literature, Oxford (1993), p. 57
37
M.M. Badawi, A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry, Cambridge (1975), p. 225
38
Jayyusi, Modernist Poetry in Arabic, p. 170
39
Breton, p. 20

9
the basic meanings of words almost disappearin favor of their derived meanings and
associations.40
It can get unbelievably complex. In the long poem Unintended Worship Ritual, a sexual
lover comes to be a metaphor for the poets literal copulation with language (she was musk /
being crushed between two lips), and then, by extension, the city of Damascus (the lovers city),
and ultimately the entirety of Arabic civilization all at once. 41
One image he uses recurrently is that of The Wound:
Leaves, asleep under the wind:
a ship for the wound.
The wound
glories in these ruinous times,
Trees growing in our own eyelashes
a lake for the wound.
The wound shows up in bridges
as graves reach out
as patience wears thin on the opposite banks
between our love and our death.
And the wound, a beckoning gesture,
inflicts us as we cross42

The leaves (of paper? poetry?) are sleeping, and they are a ship (transport?) for the wound. The
wound is that which destroys, that which kills but killing Tammuz is only a prelude to rebirth.
So the wound, as Kamal Abu Deeb puts it, is a state of being and becoming 43 A death but also a
cutting of the past reality, and, of course, an opening (bridges, graves, beckoning) into a warm,
vital, redness. The wound is in a permanent state of bleeding, and it is essential that it never heal,
as this would bring completeness, fossilization, and death 44
In his poetry, Adns is frequently between a threshold state, a permanent exile and
his poetry is rife with paradox and contradiction, as in Dialogue:
Neither God nor Satan will I choose.
Both are impenetrable walls.
Both shut my eyes to the light.
Shall I just trade one wall for another?
For mine is the perplexity of the all-knowing,
and my confusion is the confusion

40
Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, Vol. 2, Leiden (1977), p. 667
41
Issa J. Boullata, Textual Intentions: A Reading of Adonis Poem Unintended Worship Ritual,
International Journal of Middle East Studies, vol. 21, no. 4 (Nov. 1989), pp. 541-562. This is an excellent
translation of this poem, along with a very helpful and lengthy, line-by-line analysis.
42
Adns, Mihyar of Damascus, His Songs, translated by Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, Rochester
(2008), p. 38
43
Kamal Abu Deeb, The Perplexity of the All-Knowing: A Study of Adonis, Mundus Artium Special
Arabic Issue, edited by Samuel Hazo, vol. X, no. 1 (1977), p. 166.
44
ibid.

10
 of one who gives off light45

Why must one choose between the thing and its opposite? Why must contradictions be
resolved? To understand, to explain away all ambiguity, is to diminish, to drain the sea of
possibilities. Or, as Whitman says in Song of Myself:
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then, I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes).

This may all sound like madness, but there is a method to it (though where it leads is a
sort of heroic megalomania). Adns seeks to remake the world by remaking culture, and to do
that by remaking language itself.
The dominant cultural trend in Arab society is a devotion to the culture of the past, he
writes. It is presumed that if traditions are preserved, so is the existence of society itself.
And, conversely, if the traditions are not preserved, the society will perish. But for Adns it is
exactly the opposite; in his eyes, to un-critically inherit the past and perpetuate it is to live in a
dangerous state of stagnation. Without change, without innovation, there is no future, and
innovation must consist of a radical revision of inherited concepts and valuesOur language
has lost the vitality of innovation and the intensity of lifethe Arab masses continue to live in a
cultural era which has died. 46
Adns argues that because the Arab language is sacred, it has enslaved itself to the
eternal, and this has made it passive. Complacency towards language facilitates political
complacency as well. Because the tradition has been naturalized, any deviation from the
conventions of writing will be viewed as unnatural. So a poet expressing the absurdity, disorder
and chaos of modern existence the situation Eliot described in 1923 will necessarily be
engaged in a revolutionary act. Moreover, a revolutionary Arab culture will not even be possible
except by means of a revolutionary language, one that finally places the Arab in an atmosphere of
critical inquiry. Poetry is a question that begets another question. 47
Questioning, rejecting and transcending are viewed not only as transgressions of
culture, but also as attacks on society itself, to the point that anything which is
out of the ordinary is not considered original, but, seen as something arising from
some type of madness, it is looked at with curiosity and astonishment. 48

45
Mihyar of Damascus, p. 42-3
46
Adonis, Language Culture and Reality (1972), translated by Nancy Berg and Nur Elmessiri, Alif:
Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 7 (Spring 1987), pp. 113-4
47
Adam Shatz, An Arab Poet Who Dares to Differ, The New York Times (July 13, 2002)
48
ibid. p. 113

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 All writing is political, but the writer is not revolutionary except in so far as he shakes
his familiar, inherited world in order to create a new and pure one. 49 Or, as Rimbaud put it,
Poetry will no longer accompany action but will lead it. 50
At the core of this project is the concern that the Arab culture of the word is being
overrun by the global culture of the image. In Adns estimation, the Arab predicament is this:
after generations of decline under the Ottomans, a new decline has set in, caused by the progress
imposed on us by modern civilization the civilization of the Image (cinema, television, photo
magazines) wherein culture is transformed into a passive process. Consumption in this
manner means a surrender of thought, because images address the senses, while words address
the mind.51
What is needed is an explosion of language from within where the language is emptied
of its traditional meaning and becomes a mass radiating with unfamiliar associations. 52
But this results in a poetry of exceptional difficulty; but this is a good thing. In Poetry
and Apoetical Culture, Adns describes the imagery of difficulty in the Arab oral poetic
tradition: steep mountains, recalcitrant camels, dangerous thunderclouds, inaccessible fruit;
likewise ease is described as a level path, docile camel, a light cloud, fruit within reach. From
these images he derives a sense of what the Arab listener sought from poetry itself: an easiness
that would allow a listener to take possession of the poem with the cognitive tools at his
disposal.53
But, ideally, reading should be an act of creation, not an act of consumption. The reader
should enter the poem not as he would a garden whose fruits are within easy reach of his hand,
but rather as he would an abyss. In this way, difficult poetry becomes subversive: expressing
the unheard-of and suggesting the unsaid, it has blurred the images both of certitude. Opening
doors onto the unsayable, it insists on the absence of any correspondence between things and
words, which entails a questioning of the truth of any discourse whatsoever, be it human or
divine. It presents a text that is open and unfinished, the opposite of the sealed eternal text of
religion.54
Ultimately, difficult poetry is subversive as well because it subverts ideas of identity,
which in Arab society is attached to both language and religion. Poetry is so central to Arab
identity that a complex poetry, one that is pluralist, open, agnostic and secular, poses a genuine

49
ibid. p. 116
50
Rimbaud, Illuminations, p. xxxii
51
Adonis, Language Culture and Reality, p. 117
52
ibid. p. 115
53
Adonis Poetry and Apoetical Culture, p. 101
54
ibid. p. 106

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threat. The problem here is the closed system model of Arab culture. Identity doesnt only come
from within; it is a living and continuous interaction between interior and exterioridentity, in
poetic language, is an eternal questioning, always mobile, existing in openness and interaction
rather than in enclosure and withdrawal.55 He seems to be suggesting that Arab culture try to
remember its nomadic roots and get out of its rut!
In his desire to change human consciousness, Adns has certainly been inspired by the
Surrealists; in his desire to change the language he resembles Rimbaud, who wrote:
I invented the color of the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I
regulated the form and movement of each consonant, and, with instinctive
rhythms, I prided myself on inventing a poetic language accessible, some day, to
all the senses. I reserved translation rights.56

Like Rimbaud, says Jayyusi, Adns appears to wish to alter the world by sheer
violence of impact.57 And, like Rimbaud, he is a poet of loud tones.58 Most damningly, says
M.M. Badawi, because Adns, too, withholds translation rights, he runs the risk of being too
incomprehensible:
It is a sad irony that a poet who is motivated by a an overwhelming desire to
change Arab reality and recreate Arab society should, by the very means he
adopts towards that end, namely to recreate the Arab language, simply end in
such solipsism.59

But one mans solipsism is another mans prophecy.

There is no question that these European poetic traditions have been useful to Adns.
They invigorated his sense of his own language. More than that, they sent him back to find
predecessors from more that a millennium ago who could serve as tradition, for the
foundation of the new poetry he sought to create. The bulk of An Introduction to Arab Poetics is
devoted to the modern poets who wrote from the 9th to the 12th century, and who rejected the
conventions of Arab poetry as set in stone, and who were in turn rejected by the tradition as it
turned more conservative. In particular, Ab-Naws (757-814), of whom Adns writes:
For him, joy did not come from the practice of the permissible but, on the
contrary, from the pursuit of the forbidden and the illicit. He considers that the
violation of the taboos gives rise to a disordered state of bliss which is the
equivalent of destroying the existing cultural and ethical systems[Ab-Naws]
aspires to sins equal in stature to the liberation which he is striving for, grand sins
which will eclipse all others, as he puts it.60
55
ibid. p. 108
56
Rimbaud: Complete Works, p. 285
57
Jayyusi, Trends and Movements, p. 684
58
Jayyusi, Modernist Poetry in Arabic, p. 166
59
M.M. Badawi, A Critical Introduction, p. 240
60
Adns, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, p. 60-61

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 OK. Is his version of Ab-Naws informed by Rimbaud? We must take his word for it. If
Ab-Naws had lived a thousand years later, in Paris, he might have chuckled at one of
Rimbauds lines, so reminiscent of his own: Oh! the drunken gnat in the inns urinal, in love
with diuretic borage and dissolved by a sunbeam! 61 At the very least, Adns has uncovered a
parallel between the two traditions. Turning Rimbaud into a Sufi, and turning Ab-Naws into
Rimbaud all serves the same purpose, by allowing Adns to create his own poetics, and by
allowing him to create an equivalent for the European modernist innovations from within his own
language and culture. As Eliot put it, the past should be altered by the present as much as the
present is directed by the past.62
Adns ideas of the centrality of language, his passionate insistence on the need for its
regeneration, and the almost egomaniacal place he makes for himself as the Promethean /
alchemical / vegetation god who can pull of the stunt and rejuvenate the language and hence the
culture these things all sound a bit quaint to us now, immersed in our cynical world weariness.
To our sophisticated American taste, his passion seems out of date, and his earnestness and lack
of humor a little off-putting. A whiff of the idealism from the 1960s, perhaps? Or perhaps a
darker brew, the utopian impulse at the heart of the movements dedicated to fixing the world in
the wake of the Enlightenment.
On the other hand, setting the world right beginning with poetry doesnt sound like an
entirely bad idea. And perhaps it takes someone from a culture and a tradition that truly, deeply
treasures the word both spoken and written as a value superior to the pictorial image, to bring
that message to us. In that regard, even in translation, where only a glimpse of his
accomplishment is perceivable, what he brings us is precious. Maybe even enough to get us to
take poetry a little more seriously even if it doesnt repair the broken world. And in that way,
Adns might bring the dynamic of influence (or cultural transfer) between the Arab world and
the West to a full circle. Again.

61
Rimbaud: Complete Works, p. 291
62
T.S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent (1919), Selected Essays, New York (1950), p. 5

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