Connecting Two Shores with Sound:

  Wadi' Sa'adah's World of Loss[1]

[Clarissa C. Burt - AUCairo]

Wadi` Sa`adah, the remarkable Lebanese poet-émigré to Australia, with his distilled poetry, is a stunning example of an innovative poetic voice in Arabic in our era. He has published over eight diwans;[2] but two of the most recent, entitled Bisababi ghaymatin `ala l-’arjah (1992) and Muhawalat Wasl al-Diffatayn biSawt (1997) have propelled his poetic voice to the world, and require our acknowledgement. In this paper I consider selections from the second of these two diwans, and frame them in the context of Sa`adah’s larger corpus, and the broader contexts of contemporary Lebanese and Arabic poetry.
One of the most provocative aspects of these poems is the representational and elegiac nature of the discourse. For the longer poems with which I am concerned, entitled Isti`adat ShakhS Dha’ib, “Bringing back a Melted Person,” and Muhawalat Wasl al-Diffatayn biSawt “Attempt to Connect Two shores with Sound” have few if any textual hooks on which to hang reference to particular events, places and persons. Rather, the poems build an independent emotional world with Boschian[3] dimensions and physics. The representation, then, is one of a constellation of emotional images which the poet perfects and codifies in the larger piece, the diwan itself. It is the success of these texts in convicting and possessing the reader which requires analysis.
Some may suggest that Wadi` Sa`adah’s poems process loss in the civil war of Beirut, although the texts do not require such a reading by a long shot. From a literary historical perspective, these poems must be placed in the context of the poetic production emerging from the civil war’s diaspora, in which the savagery of the local is cathartically processed in an existential thrust toward a universal contemplation. So while we find no specifications to locate us in the world, the texts do encode the experience of loss and grief. Mind-boggling loss, unexpected loss, loss which discolors the remaining world, and cuts off the ability or desire to breathe, walk and live. Thus Wadi` Sa`adah’s work steps out of the parochial and ethnocentric toward the realm of the universally, archetypically human, using remarkable stylistic tools in his prose poetry, which distinguish him from his poet colleagues, and, in my opinion, place him in a position of being a world class Arabic poet. Sa`adah’s voice emerges from and through his stunning use of Arabic to confound definitions of what Arabic poetry is, and to prove the power of prose poetry in the formation of a new poetics of Arabic today. His poetic discourse exemplifies the disjunctive gap of poetic representation from possible mimetic poles as explored in post-modern discourse analysis, which relates directly with Stefania Pandolfo’s hermeneutics of fitna.[4]
This poetic text, then, represents a particular leap for elegiac discourse, mourning, and existential questioning in Arabic into post-modern maturity and disintegration. The poetic universe encoded in these poems disrupts and reaffirms the nature of poetic mourning. By participating in elegiac traditions, Wadi` Sa`adah pushes into a now post modern elegy through his fatalistic wordplay, pushing us to pursue the object of loss into the mists of unbeing, an exploration of representational and ontological brinkmanship.
Despite the troubling representational status of the poetic world, the psychological validity of these texts bear us over into the disturbing awareness of alternate worlds created solely by discourse, in which hope is inevitably swept away into swirling irredeemable dissolution. It is unclear whether or not these texts encode the suicidal feelings of a survivor of death in mourning, wishing to pursue the lost object into death. Are they/are they not text of the loss of Other, loss of twin/brOther/poetic mirror-identity, the loss of self, or all of the above? Are they texts of suicide, or texts of survival? Don’t the texts themselves dissolve and disintegrate even as we handle/read/receive them. Do they not accomplish what they describe?! -and constitute the poetically orchestrated and conducted tour of a nightmarish Gilgamesh-like epic sojourn/crossing of the horrible borderlands of death in life? The only emergence from the text's disintegration unto death, however, is in the final gasping emergence from the text that has conducted the reader into such a nether realm, leaving the reader panting with apoplectic prostration. That emergence, however, resonates with the power and truth of a modern-day of Gilgamesh, with its treatments of mourning, friendship, the futile but inescapable quest for renewal, rejuvenation and permanence, and the ultimate inevitability of our own dissolution.
 

"Attempt to Connect Two Shores with Sound"[5]

In “Attempt to Connect Two Shores with Sound,” Wadi` Sa`adah’s first and second person discourse projects the reader’s identification doubly onto the poetic monologue of the poetic persona’s first person voice and the second person addressee. Throughout the text, the first person poetic persona establishes and calls across a bipolar breach of metaphorical space to the second person, whose death and burial are traced in the text. At the same time, the first person of the poetic persona bridges that very gap by the span of discourse, an identification which increasingly obscures the edges and borders of I and thou, voice and silence, life and death.

“Let me speak to you, then; Listen to my voice, my voice from this place, which is your voice from the other place.”

At the recounting of the burial, the poetic persona continues the build up of reciprocal identity, writing for and with the dead second person in a twinned consciousness joined in the first person plural:

“The hour they knew, some of them wailed in mourning and some of them remained silent as they accompanied us to our final place. They took us in a box, both borne on eight hands and many glances. You were looking at me, the one living in you, as I looked at you, the dead one in me. You want to smile at me, and I want to bewail you, but we were silent and we left them bury us there.

We are the two speaking to themselves now, you from there, and I from here, the one we: the living speaking with his dead self; what have we hereafter besides memory?”

The poetic persona continues to pair or twin itself with the second person object of the vocative and consequently participates in its silence, inertia and death:

“This is time, then. This is eternity: forty-eight years!
And before that nothing, and after that nothing
Here we are, two nothingnesses talking, two emptinesses trying to fill up with sound
Join your voice to mine; join your silence to my silence. Perhaps they will become a voice.
Nothingness is what we are now. That’s us, nothing else.
Talk to me about your first sound, your first game, about the tiny arm around your mother’s neck, about your shoes in the fields. Speak, make sounds; Fill this nothingness.

This nihilistic discourse is expanded, contemplating the absurdity of attempting to communicate both in the direction of the dead, and in the direction of the living, despairing even of discourse as a self-centered enterprise, a universe composed of one - a nothingness in and of itself.  The attempt to bridge unto the dead is attempting to bridge unto oneself, to know oneself, to confirm the existence of self, and ultimately to despair of that existence as identified as death.

“I have nothing to say. I just want to talk, to make a bridge of sounds to bring me unto myself. Two far off shores I am trying to join by sound.
The words are sounds, sounds, nothing else. So it is now, so it always was. Sounds we direct at no one. We are bespeaking others. We are just talking to ourselves. Others are a strange and far off thing, which we don't see or know, and which practically don’t exist.
Speech is nothing but isolation, nothing but silence
Nonetheless I want to talk now, I want to repeat my isolation
But what does one who is dead say to himself?”

This discourse of identity confusion[6] becomes more and more profound until
the poet takes on in his first person persona the very discourse which had been assigned at the beginning of the poem to the second person, so the identity between the dead and the mourner is complete, and we now may question if the death is the first person persona’s poetic suicide: In the first line of the text we had found: “You wanted something flying, something coming out of the window, so you threw yourself through the glass.” And on page three of the text, the second person transforms into first: “I wanted something flying, something to come out of the window.”
The first-person persona wrestles with his responsibility for the death. Edging into the metatextual, he insists, as a writer, on his responsibility to bring back the dead to life. This establishes a source of conflict with the dead, who must respond to the will of the writer:

“You are the hero of this text, even if you are a dead hero. But when I want you
alive, you must live. Writers move their characters as they wish, and you must move as I want, even if you are dead. Don’t say that the bier is too narrow and you’ve become dust. It’s up to the writers to move dust and widen biers. They have to bring the dead back to life too.”

The attempt not only to bridge but bring back the dead over the gap between life and death, causes a breach between the first person persona and his intimate second person addressee, establishing an enmity, which embodies an urge to kill expressed in some form of suicide:

“And We were, you and I, on two fronts. We have to fight ferociously and negotiate submissively. We won’t arrive at a peace, nor at a truce.
You are dead before me now, and I want you to admit you were my enemy, and our enmity to ourselves was more ferocious than our enmity to others. Others are something else. You can forget them if you are incapable of killing them; but how do forget yourself? One solution before you: to kill it! and you killed it!”

The creative role of the writer is derided for the logos creation of writing alternative worlds, alternative creations, all of which absurdly and inevitably are bound to death and delusions of life. The poet offers several creation narratives intimately related to, and intertextually perverting the creation narratives of Genesis and John towards a post modern nihilism:

In the beginning there were adjectives, and it was up to us to devise things to apply them to.
It was up to us to create a universe from mere attributes!
We created a universe, and we put life in it. But what we collected was not life, but death. Life was for differentiation. We were reconciled for the first time when we died.”

“In the beginning was the delusion. Delusion became an earth on which we came down.
The delusion of earth begot to the delusion of desire. And the delusion of desire begot the delusion of love. The delusion of love begot the delusion of birth.
And the delusion of birth begot the delusion of life. The delusion of life begot the delusion of forgetfulness. The delusion of forgetfulness begot isolation.
From the illusion of earth to the illusion of love is fourteen illusions. And from the illusion of love to the illusion of life is fourteen illusions and from the illusion of life to isolation is fourteen illusions....
In the beginning was the delusion and the delusion became flesh and came down among us”

The text ushers us deep into the territory of existential mourning as the dread accompaniment of creative effort and will. One need not point out the relationship of this elegiac text with psychological stages of mourning as outlined starting with Kuebler-Ross.[7]  The text is at once an expression of survival guilt, rage at the dead for their abandonment of the living, and the attempted evocation of the presence of the lost object. This evocation engages in projection, resurrecting, however temporarily, the ghost of the dead as the muse calling forth the text itself from within the space of the dead one’s absence. At the same time, the text encodes an identification with the suicide urge as a wish to join the lost loved one, to punish oneself for survival, to blame oneself for the suicide choice of the lost one, to recognize one’s own mortality in one’s experience of devastating loss, to wish for one’s own demise. By linking this mourning with logos-creation texts, Wadi` Sa`adah closes the circle, linking beginnings with ends, in an beautiful, absurd and inevitable ongoing cycle. The creative word forms a bubble reality that already has it’s bursting encoded in it, with only the word as witness to its passing. Exquisite beauty exploding in its own futility! As such, Sa`adah's text is also commentary on creation as a whole, not merely the world he creates and dismembers with his words.
Wadi` Sa`adah’s poetic texts form a universalist post modern elegy, an existential assertion of the predations of existence upon itself, the dragon swallowing its own tail. We cycle through his poem imaginatively into death, emerging only by disintegrating in turn.


Bringing Back a Melted Person[8]

In the second and shorter poem considered here (which actually precedes the poem discussed above in the diwan), the issue of restoring the dead to life mentioned briefly above is more thoroughly explored. The poetic identification which occurred above between the first person poetic persona and the lost person occurs here too, in a dreadfully disturbing fashion, in a transformation akin to the transformations of water in its three forms – solid, liquid and vapor.
The poetic voice begins by contemplating a liquid, which, he declares, had just been a person who disintegrated before him, and whom he wishes to reconstitute:

This lake is not water. It is a person to whom I spoke at length, then he dissolved.
And I am trying now not to look at water, but rather I'm trying to recover a dissolved person. How do people become lakes like this which tree-leaves and algae top?

Like a latter-day Isis,[9] the poetic persona wishes to gather the scattered, melted bits of the one he knew and rebuild the person he loved. As in the poetic text presented above, the poetic persona of the first person summons the dead in order to restore them, as if to enliven their reassembled body in some kind of botanic Frankensteinish operation:

On the surface of the lake is a leaf. It was an eye. On the bank was a bough, which was a human rib.
I try now to gather the leaves and boughs. I try to gather a person I loved.
But many have passed by here. They gathered leaves and firewood to kindle their hearths.
Gathering together a person will never happen. Gathering a complete set of limbs won’t happen. Many of them were burned.
Nonetheless I must restore a person I loved. Loved ones must come back if you call them. They must come back even if they were water. If they were dead. If they were algae. Algae must become a human being when you summon it. And he will come, even if wet, if bloated, if rotten. It must come back a friend even if he died one thousand years ago.
There must be some way to gather people from the banks, a way to turn the
leaves and boughs floating on lakes into human beings

The resonances with the myth of Isis and Osiris are very powerful, for in one version of the myth, Osiris's dead body is encased in a gold leaf wooden casket which, when thrown into the river, later comes ashore to be grafted into the trunk of a tree. Later the tree trunk/Osiris is chopped into pieces, which are scattered far and wide to prevent their rearticulation, which the loving survivor (Isis) nonetheless pursues. Indeed, according to the myth, one part of Osiris was never recoverd. As in Sa`adah's previous poem, however, the text asserts that one may summon the dead, and that they must attend to the summons. But in stark contrast to the Isis Osiris myth, as the poetic persona vainly tries to speedily gather the constituent elements of the dead, like a person in a dream who must flee but finds himself going in slow motion, the poetic persona so finds himself dripping and creeping and falling apart in that very pursuit, disintegrating into the scattered constituent elements he had sought to gather. The poetic persona, in an Escheresque[10] transformation, dissolves into the pool it had hoped to restore from the first.

Around me is grass and pebbles and dirt. Birds peck at part of me. Ants eat part of me. And part of me belongs to the grass and pebbles and dirt.
I run slowly, and above me rises a thread of me, and below me descends a thread of me. I run slowly between two needles stitching my nothingness.
I came down the last drop. I was in the cloud and came down. Am I looking for a person who dissolved or am I the one dissolving? Or have I, from searching so much for his dissolution, dissolved like him?

The poetic persona questions his own state of dissolution, and proposes that he must be in some integral state to have any hope of reconstituting his lost friend. The poetic persona traces the steps of the lost by passing through stages of metamorphosis himself:
I’m late, creeping, and I’m evaporating. How then will I bring back a person who has dissolved? Mustn’t I, more precisely, bring back myself first? Come back at least as a whole drop of water coming down on a leaf, on an eye, on a rib, on a shore?
Mustn’t I, in order to extract a person from algae, be at least of lake water?

This metamorphosis from human to plant, then into elements of earth and fluid has stunning resonances with contemporary Moroccan oral lore as spun for us in Impasse of the Angels by Stefania Pandolfo:[11]

 “Trees are talking to one another. One tree is saying, ‘If one of yours died, collect his bones and join them up again. Take one of my branches, beat the bones with it, and that person will come back to life.’
Another tree is saying, ‘If one of yours is murdered (tedbah), dismember his body piece by piece (fessslu terf b-terf), cut him up, and undo his articulations the way it is done with a butchered animal. Then pound a few of my leaves, assemble his body back together as it was (jma`), and when you gathered those joints and that flesh, stitch them up (kheyyet) and smear them with the dust of my leaves. He’ll come back to life, God permitting.’”

In the Moroccan material Pandalfo offers us, the hoped-for recipe for restoration is described in the botanical terms of treelimbs and leaves, just as in Sa`adah's disintegrated friend. Like Sa`adah's text, moreover, Pandalfo relays that this may not be totally efficacious, as dismembered parts may inevitably be lost. Life itself is that very disintegration and loss:[12]

 “’Look[…] people just go adrift like those fragments of bark floating on the water of the canal… carried away by the current they go this way and that way… this is what the world, what life is.’’

The seemingly universal themes of the longing for wholeness and restoration, and one's own dissolution and disintegration in that pursuit propel Sa`adah's text onto the level of the universally human. In the last section of the poem, Sa`adah's poetic persona has given up the quest to revive or reconstitute the one dissolved, for his own state of dissolution prevents him. The poetic voice itself disintegrates before our eyes, becoming skeletal, disjointed and scattered, and welcoming and opening to that very disintegration and dissolution:

Perhaps in the past I was a person searching for a person who had dissolved, or perhaps I was the one dissolving. Now not even a drop. and in my frightening identification between the water and vapor and the person, I search for a name with which to introduce myself when I meet up with the ants and grass and birds.
You are creeping like me. You will necessarily stop on a protrusion. Send me out a cry from there, and I’ll name myself with it.
Identifying between water and solid and vapor. Even so I have joints!
And there are empty places between my joints.
Waters crash into them. Winds crash into them, and people crash into them.
Many people now traverse my joints. I don’t know whence they come or whither they go. But they crash against my bones.
People I encountered once; people I encountered many times; people I have never encountered... but they gush out now, and bang on my bones.
I must open these bones so they may enter.

As the poetic voice breaks up, as if opening to dispersal, the voice is eclipsed by the space expanding between articulations, between joints; and the text ends a few lines later. The fragmentation of the text, like the disarticulation of the bones of the poetic persona, still echo still other aspects of the Isis and Osiris myth, in which the scattered bones of dead gods[13] were recognized in geological mineral deposits of the earth. It is this disintegration, in its fineness and perfect serendipity, which marks Sa`adah's original post-modern contribution to literary sojourning in the borderlands of death. In this Sa`adah has gone far beyond the resigned, chastened but nonetheless vigorous return of Gilgamesh unsuccessful from his quest, and the cyclic reinvigoration of the Isis and Osiris myth.[14] Sa`adah's text escorts us into the nether realm, and like Enkidu in his less well-known descent to the Netherworld,[15] we cannot escape. Remaining in the text means remaining in the pool of death; it means disintegrating with it and into it. The power of the poetry in its irreproducible Arabic is the strength with which the text achieves and enacts even as it represents.
In Sa`adah's poetry, the inevitability of dissolution betrays the creative promise of poetry; the poetry represents the text's possible betrayal of the world, the world's betrayal of the promise of culturally sacred texts, and the betrayal of the Logos word even in its identification with it. This pessimism extends in Sa`adah's later work to swallow the text itself, celebrating the denial of its own validity. This trajectory of nihilism seems to have led to the disruption of the creative project itself, for Sa`adah has proclaimed his cessation from writing since his latest work.[16]
Sa`adah's writing published since the poems treated here[17] has become increasingly philosophical, commenting metatextually on the status of writing, and the alternative literary creations which disappoint and cheat, disruptively never achieving the ontological status to suffice desire, which in turn disintegrates along with the poetic persona's discourse. The spiritual and existential struggle articulated in the elegiac tradition of ancient myth and epics of mourning and quests for restoration is uniquely embodied in Sa`adah's contemporary Arabic prose poetry. As a contribution to this realm of world literature, Sa`adah's texts can be profitably compared and studied along with the elegiac texts of Derrida,[18] and the recent interdisciplinary exploration of treatments of death in Angelaki.[19]  Sa`adah's poetry sets a new standard for Arabic post-modern processing of the universal problem of death and mourning, in all its psychological complexity, in confrontation with universal forces of destruction and dissolution, remarkably enacting the disintegration it also documents, creating and destroying in the same poetic fell swoop, describing Sa`adah's world of loss, crying out from his side of the representational gap to the side of the reader, establishing the link and its disruption in his remarkable fitna of universal elegy.


Full Translations:
I.

Attempt to Connect Two Shores with Sound

You wanted something flying. You requested tobacco and added siblings to the doves in the empty space of the room. You wanted something flying, something coming out of the window, so you threw yourself through the glass. But a spot of blood which came out of you stayed on the inside.
You are the one who now is in another place, and three ducks sleep in front of your house; you would stare at length at the walls in order to hear the voices of your parents commenting. Let me speak to you, then, listen to my voice, my voice from this place, which is your voice from the other place.

The hour they knew, some of them wailed in mourning and some of them remained silent as they accompanied us to our final place. They took us in a box, both borne on eight hands and many glances. You were looking at me, the one living in you, as I looked at you, the dead one in me. You want to smile at me, and I want to bewail you, but we were silent and we left them bury us there.

We are the two speaking to themselves now, you from there, and I from here, the one we: the living speaking with his dead self; what have we hereafter besides memory?
Our family doesn’t have ducks; except that, from the frequency with which we dreamt of them, they finally came and slept on our door.
But you were leaving
They arrived and saw no blood. The blood stayed on the inside. It isn’t on the inside completely, nor on the outside completely. On the edge of them both. On the glass. On the edge which was neither on the outside nor on the inside.
You’re the one sleeping now, and you are not concerned with blood. The one sleeping far off, while three ducks sleep in front of your house. Don’t worry - I will feed them. There is grain on the cupboard, which you purchased one evening, when you were walking alone in the city dreaming of them.
And they’ve come.
But they, too, haven’t seen your blood.
Other creatures came too. People and trees and birds; and they didn’t see your blood. They escorted you to your grave and came back.
They carried you because you were unable to reach there yourself.
They rained down dirt on top of you so you’d disappear.

Between these walls you spent your life. You were born in the corner, and the furthest journey was from wall to wall.
You wanted something else. Your scream was nothing but a call to this thing outside, so you can get out, even if only one drop of blood got out the window.
Since your birth you have been invoking nothing but death.
Give me a glass of water. Thirsty, I want to drink. Just give me some indication that you still see me.
Your eyes are closed, there’s dirt on top of them. Your eyes are empty.
You see me with two emptinesses, and hear me with two emptinesses. Your emptiness is my full listener and seer. Neither sound nor light passes through what is full. Hear me then and look at me.
You see me with two emptinesses , and hear me with two emptinesses. Two emptinesses which remained inside empty walls, and whose first emergence was unto death.
Death? We knew, then: Outside - that’s death.
Where are the angels? Tell the angels to come - here, we’ve arrived. We don’t want a death with no angels. We have ashes with which to entertain ourselves for all eternity. An angel’s wing flutters and scattered particles fly, the spirits of doves fly, siblings of doves which were in that room. An angel alights and we feed it whispers, we feed it glances and entertain ourselves. So let the angels come; we have arrived.
We have ashes, we’ll entertain ourselves for all eternity
We’ve arrived... but the angels too were dead!
Forty-eight years - this was the time, then.
This was the bottleneck of eternity, which we thought was a long embrace, the mouth we kissed under a quick-moving cloud.
When we were born, rain poured down from our mother’s skin. Rain stayed in the corner near the threshold - it too stayed inside. Those outside didn’t see it, nor did those who came in. It was a rain peculiar to her alone, watering her interior field which no one sees.
And when we were leaving, a rain came pouring down too. On the people on the wood and trees, on stone.. but it was a rain very far, far off.
It came pouring down there far away in the place which they call life.
This is time, then. This is eternity: forty-eight years!
And before that nothing, and after that nothing
Here we are, two nothingnesses talking, two emptinesses trying to fill up with sound
Join your voice to mine; join your silence to my silence. Perhaps they will become a voice.
Nothingness is what we are now. That’s us, nothing else.
Talk to me about your first sound, your first game, about the tiny arm around your mother’s neck, about your shoes in the fields. Speak, make sounds; Fill this nothingness.
Our mother says our first sound was a scream. She tossed the burden of firewood from her back before the oven door and minutes later she heard the first of our sounds/voices.
Those around her said Congratulations! Their speech reached her from among her body’s drizzle, like a rainbow she would see in winter.
We were born in July, at the height of summer, and nonetheless it was raining!
But is was a rain peculiar to her alone, promising her flowers and fruit... as for us, we were crying!
At that time I gave you my first look, as someone looks at morning in a mirror and walks away.

I have nothing to say. I just want to talk, to make a bridge of sounds to bring me unto myself. Two far off shores I am trying to join by sound.
The words are sounds, sounds nothing else. So it is now, so it always was. Sounds we direct at no one. We are not bespeaking others. We are just talking to ourselves. Others are a strange and far off thing, which we don’t see or know, and practically don't exist.
Speech is nothing but isolation, nothing but silence.
Nonetheless I want to talk now; I want to repeat my isolation
But what does one who is dead say to himself?
They’re both here now - Memory which closed the door behind it
and Forgetfulness standing at the threshold. Here they’re hovering around the figment of a spirit. The spirit fell from the window and its figment came to meet it as far as the door. And I write in order to remember the body of this spirit, in order to remember that I had a body. That there was body hair on my body I don’t know what happened to. In order to remember more precisely that what I had was body hair, not a body; and that I did nothing all my days but search for my body.
There sometimes would pervade me the feeling that humankind lives with no body. They keep on in life as long as they are searching for their bodies, and when they give up on coming across them, they die.
I myself lived with no body. I was overflowing with spirit but I was with no body. My spirit looked for my body at length. It went limping, lost, mad. And it remained alone, it remained floating particles, a desiccated spirit searching for a drop. and when it cast itself from he window it was only to see a drop of blood. Blood, they said, is to run in bodies! But the drop of blood stayed up, on the edge, between the inside and outside, on the borders which don’t belong to anyone.
I wanted something to fly, something to come out of the window.
I had no body. But something strange was stuck to me.
Was that strange thing my body?
So let’s laugh; let’s open our two mandibles and laugh. Your laugh coming forth from two empty bones will be more beautiful than what is in this text, believe me.
You are the hero of this text, even if you are a dead hero. But when I want you alive, you must live. Writers move their characters as they wish and you must move as I want, even if you are dead. Don’t say that the bier is narrow and you’ve become dust. It’s up to writers to move the dust and widen biers. They have to bring the dead back to life too.
You were always rebellious. You cut off your life zealously, like one who cuts the branch over his head with a sword.
And we were, you and I, on two fronts. We have to fight ferociously and negotiate submissively. We won’t arrive at a peace nor a truce.
You are dead before me now, and I want you to admit that you were my enemy, and our enmity to ourselves was more ferocious than our enmity to others. Others are something else. You can forget them if you are incapable of killing them, but how do you forget yourself? One solution if before you: to kill it! and you killed it!
So let’s laugh, then, before this victory. Before the hidden drop of blood. And let’s remember our body which was wrapped in closed skin.
Our body, our frightening inner darkness! and I remember now how the blood looked at its way in the veins! and how these innards lived for years without seeing anything!
Our body was murdered. Murdered by its blindness. Murdered by the desire to see. Its darkness and its light are its murderers. The darkness and light which both call a knife to open an aperture.
From this aperture I see you now. The aperture which you opened yourself. You couldn’t bear your inner darkness. You wanted light for the blood and sight for the innards. You kindled a light for the skin and blood and innards, and for death too.
Our comrades would describe Hope as light. They say “the light of hope.” You, though, chose the light of death.
They came up with adjectives for everything, and they wanted them utterly sweet and having a reverberation. Like one insisting on devising a sound for the footsteps of people who have become absent. .
In the beginning there were adjectives, and it was up to us to devise things to apply them to.
It was up to us to create a universe from mere attributes!
We created a universe, and we put life in it. But what we had collected was not life but death. Life was for differentiation. We were reconciled for the first time when we died.
I am not searching now for the light of life. No. but for a warming fire.
In heaven are spirits shivering from cold. I want to kindle a fire for them. I want to button up their shirtbuttons.
We possessed a little screaming. and with this scream we said to life one day, we love you.
We went looking for friends, for people, for plants, for stones, to madly extol our love to them. We went in order to tear our heart apart.
We saw places for everything. For ants, for trees, for birds, for the earth, for the stars. Where is the place of our love?
Where do we put this love? where do we house this animal? Our shoulders have hunched over.
We walked all the streets, all the places, and all of them were full. The earth was full before our arrival, and what we bear came to have no place. We became the one place for our burden. We became the illusion of its place. Its place is our illusion and our place is its illusion. It and we and the place became an illusion.
In the beginning was the illusion. Illusion became an earth on which we came down.
The illusion of earth gave birth to the illusion of desire. And the illusion of desire gave birth to the illusion of love. And the illusion of love gave birth to the illusion of birth.
And the illusion of birth gave birth to the illusion of life. And the illusion of life gave birth to the illusion of forgetfulness. And the illusion of forgetfulness gave birth to isolation.
From the illusion of earth to the illusion of love is fourteen illusions. and from the illusion of love to the illusion of life is fourteen illusions. and from the illusion of life to isolation is fourteen illusions....
In the beginning was the illusion. and illusion became body and came down among us.
Ah Monique, o one giving illusions a beautiful body. You were sleeping on the ground so it not be said that you rose one cubit towards the illusions, but rather so they could descend unto you.
And they would descend. They wash your eyes, your mouth, your neck, your chest, your pubes, your legs, so you may go to sleep clean.
O Monique who was sleeping on the ground, where are you now? I am two meters underground, and under my bones is a stone bothering me. Tell someone to knock away this stone, I want to sleep.
We walked a lot, searching for a little love. We walked with short statures on long roads, and we were almost to be seen.
We want love, we screamed. Love lengthens our stature.
Dalal gave us her sacred lock, Hoda the key of her gate, Ghada her bolt, and Auror children.
O mistress of the sacred lock, o guardian of the gate, o lady of the bolt, o mother of children, we want love, we want a place.
So let the water rise so the deluge surges, so alarm overwhelms the high rivers. I want a little water. Just so that these fish in my bowl don’t die.

I am dead enough, and I have time to weave dreams. Dead enough to devise the life I wanted.
It isn’t beautiful, Wadi`, to lie down for all eternity without dreaming. It isn’t beautiful, in death too, to not live the life which you had longed for.
Death is wide, broad enough for everything. Forget the narrow planet earth. Sway in your wide void, in your nothingness, and laugh long.
Nothingness is wide open, you can protract your laugh in it forever.


II.

Bringing Back a Melted Person

This lake is not water. It was a person to whom I spoke at length, then he dissolved.
And I am not trying now to look at water, but rather I’m trying to recover a dissolved person. How do people become lakes like this which tree leaves and algae top?
Drop by drop, the dead descend on my door.
A boat stops for me under the sun.
And a wretched fit of trembling returns to sand
I didn’t shiver, but I went mad. The water is cold, but I didn’t shiver.
I just trembled a little. Then I went mad.
On the surface of the lake is a leaf. It was an eye. On the bank was a bough, which was a human rib.
I try now to gather the leaves and boughs. I try to gather a person I loved.
But many have passed by here. They gathered leaves and firewood to kindle their hearths.
Gathering together a person will never happen. Gathering a complete set of limbs won’t happen. Many of them were burned.
Nonetheless I must restore a person I loved. Loved ones must come back if you call them. They must come back even if they were water. If they were dead. If they were algae. Algae must become a human being when you summon it. And he will come, even if wet, if bloated, if rotten. It must come back a friend even if he died one thousand years ago.
There must be some way to gather people from the banks, a way to turn the
leaves and boughs floating on lakes into human beings
I didn’t shiver. The limbs shivered. I had to plug the space between their joints in order to stop their shivers so they would still.
But how very protracted is the distance between joints!

I run slowly like the last drop of water which came down, and was too late to flow.
I run slowly scrambling to catch up with the running, and evaporate by and by.
I won’t make it. Part of me will come to be in space and part of me will sink into the earth.
I’m late for my comrades and won’t make it. I creep on but I won’t make it.
Pieces of me I lose, pieces accompany me exhausted, and pieces become free-floating particles.
Even if I make it, which thing of me will make it?

Around me is grass and pebbles and dirt. Birds peck at part of me. Ants eat part of me. And part of me belongs to the grass and pebbles and dirt.
I run slowly, and above me rises a thread of me, and below me descends a thread of me. I run slowly between two needles stitching my nothingness.
I came down the last drop. I was in the cloud and came down. Am I looking for a person who dissolved or am I the one dissolving? Or have I, from searching so much for his dissolution, dissolved like him?
And I’ve come, instead of searching for him, to search for me!
I see on the way persons going by. Part of what remains of me sees persons.
These, most likely, haven’t lost a person they love. Or they lost him and despite that are completing the way?!
I don’t know how our legs don’t stop walking when we lose a person we love. Weren’t we walking, not on our feet, but on his? Wasn’t the whole excursion for his sake? Wasn’t he the excursion?
How can one walk if he’s lost a person? I stopped. He was the one walking and I his follower. I was the one walking in him. When he stopped, I no longer had feet.

I’m late, creeping, and I’m evaporating. How then will I bring back a person who has dissolved? Mustn’t I, more precisely, bring back myself first? Come back at least as a whole drop of water coming down on a leaf, on an eye, on a rib, on a shore?
Mustn’t I, in order to extract a person from algae, be at least of lake water?
I’m late and I won’t make it. All that I can do is see. I see from far off. Distorted vision from the eye of a thing that is not cloud nor water nor solid nor vapor.
Then I don’t see.
All of this is merely imagining. A glooming dark imploring glooming dark. I will not see and I won’t make it and I won’t restore a person and I won’t bring him back...
I just am trying to creep along. I’m trying to catch up to my comrades.
But they’ve come to be far off, very far off.

Perhaps in the past I was a person searching for a person who had dissolved, or perhaps I was the one dissolving. Now not even a drop. and in my frightening identification between the water and vapor and the person, I search for a name with which to introduce myself when I meet up with the ants and grass and birds.
You are creeping like me. You will necessarily stop on a protrusion. Send me out a cry from there, and I’ll name myself with it.
Identifying between water and solid and vapor. Even so I have joints!
And there are empty places between my joints.
Waters crash into them. Winds crash into them and people crash into them.
Many people now traverse my joints. I don’t know whence they come or whither they go. But they crash against my bones.
People I encountered once; people I encountered many times; people I have never encountered... but they gush out now, and bang on my bones.
I must open these bones so they may enter.
If only these bones were a door.
Whence have they come?!
I think that those we look at, enter our bodies via our eyes and become flesh and blood.
Some of them become some of those straying past between our joints
and we continue thus hearing the raps on our bones.

I now hear water knockings
I must open.
 

[1] An earlier version of this paper was first presented at MESA 2000 in Orlando, Florida.
[2] Wadi` Sa`adah's books include Laysa lil-Masa' Ikhwah (1981); al-Miyah al-Miyah (1983); QabD al-RiyH (1983); Rajul fi hawa' musta`mal yaq`ud wayufakkir fi l-Hayawanat (1985); Maq`ad rakib ghadar al-BaS (1987);  Bisababi Ghaymatin `ala l-ArjaH (1992); MuHawalat WaSl al-Diffatayn biSawt (1997); NaSS al-Ghayab (1999); al-Ghubar (2001). Full bibliographic information, as well as texts of the poetry, and some translations are accessible at the poet's website: (accessed Feb. 17, 2003).
[3]  In the remarkable paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, human figures transform into rock, wood, plant, bird, beast, as symbols of stages of life, and punishment for vices and rewards for virtue. See his famous "Garden of Earthly Delights" (triptych, c. 1504), and "Paradise and Hell" (two panels of a triptych, 1510).
[4] Stefania Pandolfo, Impasse of the Angels: Scenes from a Moroccan space of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) p. 89: "FITNA: the danger is the fictional/illusory play of images and words that don't correspond to an object world but create their own object inside the narrative. And then, with a hyperreal effect, the narrative becomes life. A mital [classical mithal, pl. Muthul] is a likeness, an image, a rhetorical figure . Al-`alam al-mithal is the parallel Wolr dof Images, which does not just mirror, but produces realities. A khayal is a shadow, an illusion or a simulacrum A word, then, as well. Kankhayyal means "I am imagining," but also "Iam hallucinating." A representation that feeds upon itself ("false," in Hadda's terms) is a place in which to get lost, for it is a play of images that generates a world instead of referring back to it as its truthful mimesis. In the khayal, the "untrue" image or shadow, the mirror reflection, there is a power of seduction and a sentence to death. And yet l-waqi`, "the object world," can be grasped only through images, can be spoken only through words. Thus, as Hadda paradoxically phrases it – asl d-dunya men l-klam: the world, the material world, itself originates in words." This idea about fitna is explored at length on pages 80-103, with particular attention to the effect of "scattering, splitting and disintegration," as I find both in the content and form of the Sa`adah's text.
[5]  Wadi` Sa`adah, MuHawalat WaSl al-Diffatayni biSawt. (Beirut: Dar al-Nahar, 1997) 65-75.
[6]  Kyoo E. Lee, "A Meditation on Knell, Funeral Melancholia and the Question of Self Reflexivity," Angelaki 7 no. 2 (August 2002) 93-105 is an excellent exploration of this identity confusion in mourning in contemporary critical texts, with an extremely helpful bibliography.
[7] Elizabeth Kuebler-Ross initiated the study of the stages of death and mourning, starting with her seminal work: On death and dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969), reprinted with a substantial bibliography (New York: Scribner Classics, 1997). Additional related works by Kuebler-Ross include Death: The final stage of growth (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1975); Kuebler-Ross and David Kessler, Life Lessons: Two experts on death and dying teach us about the mysteries of life and living (New York: Scribner, 2000). The psychological aspects of bereavement and mourning have been explored more thoroughly in many recent works, e.g. Peter Shabad, Despair and the Return of Hope: echoes of mourning in psychotherapy (Northvale, N.J. J. Aronson, 2001); Sidney Zisook, ed. Biopsychological Aspects of bereavement (Washington, D.C.: American Psychiatric Press, 1987); Bernard, Schoenberg, eds., Bereavement, its psychosocial aspects (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975); Two very interesting treatments for our purposes are in Susan Kavaler-Adler, Mourning, spirituality and psychic change: a new object relations view of psychoanalysis (Hove, East Sussex; New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2003) with its phenomenological theory of developmental mourning; and Alessia Ricciardi, The ends of mourning: psychoanalysis, literature, film (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2003).
[8] Sa`adah, MuHawalat WaSl al-Diffatayni biSawt. (1997) 53-57.
[9]  According to the myth of Isis and Orisis, Isis in her mourning over her dead love, gathers the scattered parts of his body reassembles them, as best she could and brings forth renewing offspring from some union beyond the grave. Cf. Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride edited with an introduction translation and commentary by J. Gwyn Griffith, (University of Wales Press, 1970) especially p. 137-147 for the basic outlines of the myth. Two websites, related to radically different fields, have proved interesting web sources for reference to this myth:  www.ctio.noao.edu/instruments/ir_instruments/osiris/tale.html (accessed Feb 10, 2003), and www.philae.nu/philae/IsisOsiris.html (accessed Feb 10, 2003).
[10] M.C. Escher's remarkable woodcuts and lithographs often present transformation of the patterned images of animals or architectural space by gradual steps across the surface of the image, changing from image to ground, from ground to image, positive to negative, object to its inverse. See particularly his "Day to Night," "Waterfall," and "Drawing Hands."
[11] Impasse of the Angels p. 48.
[12] Ibid. p.58. The resonances with the Isis and Osiris myth in the Moroccan material are also remarkable. While I make no claims concerning any possible source relation between these various texts, the similarities among them begs the question of the psycho-social functioning such ideas record and articulate.
[13] Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride (1970) 217.
[14]  For one of the resolutions and understandings of the myth is the seasonal cycle of destruction, decay and reinvigoration of the flood cycle and the coming of spring. Cf.Plutarch, Op. Cit. particularly p. 205 Paragraph 54 for many echoes with Sa`adah's texts at hand, with mention of logos production.
[15]  It is only the action of Gilgamesh who punches a hole down into the netherworld, which extracts Enkidu so he may offer his report of his encounter with the dead. For sources on and related to Gilgamesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld, cf. Bendt Alster, "The Mythology of Mourning," Acta Sumerologica 5 (1983) 1-16 (which links between the descent of Enkidu and mourning rituals as exhibited in another Sumerian poem concerned with Inanna's Descent to the Nether World); Andrew George, The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem and Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian (The Penguin Press, 1999) 175-195; Aase Koefoed, "Gilgmesh, Enkidu and the Netherworld," Acta Sumerologica 5 (1983) 17-23. Andrew Piquer Otero and Mark Smith kindly have pointed out to me similar aspects of the processing of death in the Ugaritic epic Baal cycle, in which Baal confronts and defeats Mot/Death, who is processed in agricultural, botanic terms. Cf. Dennis Pardee in The Context of Scripture, Vol. 1, Canonical Compositions from the Biblical World, edited by W. W. Hallo and K. L. Younger, Jr. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997) 241-73 (especially p. 270, 272); Mark S. Smith with E. L. Greenstein, T. J. Lewis, D. Marcus and S. B. Parker, Ugaritic Narrative Poetry (ed. S. Parker; Writings from the Ancient World series 9; Atlanta, GA: Scholars, 1997) 81-176, especially 156, 160-1; and J.F. Healey, "Burning the Corn: New Light on the Killing of Motu," Orientalia 34 (1984) 248-51.
[16] In a recent visit to Egypt (November 2002), Wadi` Sa`adah announced his cessation of writing, to the consternation of many who sought out his poetry. Cf. Muhammad Shu`ayr, "Wadi` Sa`adah: NaHnu Jami`an Manfiyuna," Akhbar al-Adab no. 485 (Oct. 27, 2002) p. 6-7; `Ablah al-Ruwayni, "al-`Adami… yaskunu wardatan," Akhbar al-Adab no.487 (Nov. 10, 2002) 6; Muhammad al-Kafrawi, "Na`am.. ana sha`irun ka'ibun.. wala yuwjadu sha`irun laysa kadhalika!" al-Qahirah no. 139 (Dec. 10, 2003) 5.
[17]  Sa`adah, NaSS al-Ghayab (Beirut: al-Masar lil-Nashr wa-l-AbHath wa-l-Tawthiq, 1999) constitutes a kind of uncanny elegy to writing. And Sa`adah, al-Ghubar (Beirut: al-Masar lil-Nashr wal-AbHath wa-l-Tawthiq, 2001) is increasingly philosophical writing.
[18] Cf. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death trans. By David Willis. (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1995); _________, Aporias: Dying – Awaiting (One another at) the Limits of Truth trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993); __________, The Work of Mourning edited by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. (Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Note the similarity between the themes of Sa`adah's text, and the first paragraph of the editors' introduction to this work (p. 1): "One friend must always go before the other; one friend must always die first. There is no friendship without the possibility that one friend will die before the other, perhaps right before the other's eyes. For even when friends die together, or rather, at the same time, their friendship will have been structured from the very beginning by the possibility that one of the two would see the other die, and so surviving, be left to burn to commemorate, and to mourn." The editors then explore the construction of a politics of mourning. See also Martin Heidegger's Language and Death: The Place of Negativity trans. Karen E. Pinkus with Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1991).
[19] Angelaki vol. 7 no. 2: Inventions of Death: literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis (August 2002) ed. by Roger Starling, includes several articles pertinent to our topic: "A Love That is Stronger than Death," by Robert Bernascon (p. 9-16); ""On the Border of Language and Death: Derrida and the Question of the Animal," by Matthew Calarco (p. 17-26); "A Meditation on Knell, Funeral Melancholia and the Question of Self-Reflexivity: To whom would the Reflexive be Returned?" by Kyoo Lee (p.93-106); "Addressing the Dead: Of Friendship, Community, and the Work of Mourning," by Roger Starling (p. 107-124); and "Art, Death and the Perfection of Error," by Robert Smith, (p. 143-160).