Salim Barakat: poetry as linguistic transgression

Salim Barakat is a Kurdish-Syrian poet and novelist, born in 1951 in Qamishli, an ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse city in northern Syria. He lived in exile for years before settling in Sweden where he has resided since 1999. He has thus far published over forty-six works of poetry and prose, including three autobiographies, a memoir of wartime, and several children’s books. He enjoys a peculiar celebrity and following in the Arab world, among critics, scholars, and other poets. They are in awe of his language and are fascinated by his personality but few of his admirers can claim to “enjoy” or “relate” to his work.

Barakat achieves the “poetic,” both in his poetry and prose, through a deliberate occlusion of meaning behind the veil of language; language intentionally textured and thickened beyond recognition. We are always at the cusp of understanding, exceedingly conscious of ourselves not as readers/speakers of Arabic but as explorers of what has thus far eluded us.

His “difficult” relationship with the Arabic language is often tied to what critics have called “Kurdish themes.” He insists on presenting himself as a Kurd who writes in Arabic. He is always seeking to expel our familiarity with the language we think we know and to disrupt our learned methods of arriving at meaning.

Barakat’s poetry is a confrontation between “language” and “meaning.” Meaning is vision; it is an organizing of language into a coherent finality, and language in Barakat’s poetry is a resistance of precisely that.

In the following poem aptly titled “Revenge,” Barakat invites us to look for confrontations. The poem includes a vocabulary list through which Barakat performs his idea of language as disruption or avoidance of meaning.

Revenge

The coats are all there,

the winds all there,

footprints deep in the snow all there,

the lamps, houses, last apparitions, all there.

So gather in your tame hands all that they can hold of perfection

and strive so that the scene may be a tamed echo.

b.
An unease, like morning, preoccupies those approaching my end, and I — struggling under a great net — hang place — like a prisoner’s pants — on the line, that delicate line, running from the origin of comedy to your moaning.

c.
The abundance of naught is I and will is my suspicion.

Rage is the sign of night and water a thought ahead of its own completion.

Like a shoe polished,

like a nickel doorknob,

thus is your scream.

Vocabulary:

Day: anger masked in air

Wind: the steps of a word toward its secret

Sound: the ruin of form

Longing: gold scattered on the velvet of the end

Space: the shaper of light

Nothingness: the humor of shadows languishing in their seats

Writing: violence testing the forgotten

Number: the yield of futility

Fruit: the tree’s proof of a past that eludes all proofs

Mask: the moaning of the manifest

Distance: repeated panting

Certainty: a murmuring on the other side

Resurrection: a childhood confirming reason

Gold: a bar fight

Life: a golden bullet

As for you, dweller in endings, don’t wander too long, lest dinner get cold.

(translated by Huda Fakhreddine and Jayson Iwen from By the Same Traps, By the Foxes Riding the Wind, 1983)

February 25, 2019

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“Can there be an Arabic prose poem?” is a specific instantiation of the more universal question “Can there be a prose poem?” In the case of Arabic, however, the question takes on a specific character and an added urgency because it threatens to transform the long-standing definition of Arabic poetry in a way that no other poetic form has previously. This is due to the fact that the Arabic notion of the poem is highly formal. Qasida, the only Arabic word for poem, at the same time indicates a specific strict metrical and rhythmic structure. Although the modernist movement launched in the late 1940s (also referred to as the Free Verse Movement) loosened the formal strictures placed on Arabic poems, they continued to be composed within formal, metrical and structural parameters until the emergence of the prose poem in 1960.

Described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle, and denigrated as a bastard form, a lack, a gap, a deformation, and even a conspiracy, the Arabic prose poem has persisted. It represents a subversive oppositional and uncompromising strand of the Arabic modernist movement, an “other tradition” as I am calling it here. In this series of commentaries, I will offer some observations on the works of early prose poets who launched this project in the early 1960 as well as contemporary poets writing today. These poets are not a homogenous trend or a movement or a school. They oppose, echo, build on, and converse with each other in a manner that reveals the prose poem to be an experimental critical space in which Arabic poetry and its possibilities are interrogated.

Huda J. Fakhreddine is an assistant professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and the cotranslator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017). Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Banipal, World Literature Today, and Middle Eastern Literatures. She is currently completing a book project tentatively titled, The Edge of Poetry: The Arabic Prose Poem as Theory and Practice.

Posts

A poem in Arabic, not an Arabic Poem

The language of poetry: not a body but a wound

Muhammad al-Maghut's poetics of nonchalance

Wadiʿ Saʿada: poetry out in the open

Salim Barakat: poetry as linguistic transgression

Qassim Haddad: poetry in conversation with its others

Bassam Hajjar: poetry, a reading of silence

Poets of the nineties: poetry against poetry

Poets of the twenty-first century: 'moving out' of Arabic

Arabic Modernism's Other Tradition

Salim Barakat: poetry as linguistic transgression