'The Blind River': self and anxiety in Aziz al-Samawi's poetry - Modern Iraqi Literature in English Translation

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Fall, 1997 by Alex Bellem

INTRODUCTION

A well-known and respected poet among the Iraqis, and particularly familiar to those who are, like him, exiled, Aziz al-Samawi is best known for his use of the vernacular and his images of southern Iraq. Those familiar with his work will know the vibrant images between which he flits in his poetry, and will have grown accustomed to the symbols that he uses repeatedly. Al-Samawi himself likens his poetry to fruit growing on trees: he calls it "cluster poetry" ('unqudiyya, literally, a bunch or cluster of grapes and the like).

It is unfortunate that the work of poets such as Aziz al-Samawi are not readily accessible to the English reader. In general, with the exception of a few well-known works such as A Thousand and One Nights or Kahlil Gibran's The Prophet, the wealth of Arabic literature remains relatively unexplored by readers of English, other than those who have a special interest in the Middle East. In recent years, however, there has been an upsurge in works being translated into English, and so Arabic literature is now more generally accessible to the English reader. Nevertheless, for those without access to untranslated texts and to the Arabic media, it remains hard to gain a good idea of very contemporary literature, and, in particular, of contemporary Arabic poetry, which is so often made known through the medium of public poetry readings - a genre much less popular in the West.

Returning to our subject, however, it seems that little has been written about Aziz al-Samawi in terms of critique, although interviews with him may be found in various Arabic journals and Arab community newspapers (see bibliography), not just those published in the Middle East itself, but also as far afield as England (e.g., al-Hayat), Australia (e.g., al-Tilighraf) and North Africa (e.g., the French-language paper "Horizons"). Nevertheless, literary criticism of Arabic literature in the English-speaking world seems to have concentrated on the poets who are best known amongst Arabs themselves, and on those writing in classical, or standard, Arabic, leaving unexplored a great wealth of those who are only slightly less well known, and those who use as their medium what are usually considered to be colloquial forms of Arabic.

Al-Samawi has behind him a long literary tradition, upon which he has drawn to develop his own literary ideas and his own style of writing. His genre, however, is the poet in exile, and this is what gives his poetry its impetus and poignancy. It can be seen, therefore, that in preparing a critique of his work, the two areas which necessitate particular attention are style and themes.

Born in the town of Samawa(2) in southern Iraq in 1941, Aziz al-Samawi moved with his family to Diwaniyya(3) when he was a child. A civil engineer, he has a B.A. degree in Arabic language (for which he studied at night, while working as an engineer), graduating from Mustansariyya University's Faculty of Literature in 1975. Outside the sphere of his university degree, he has been studying the Arabic language and literature for many years, gaining a very good knowledge of the Classical language, to which he occasionally resorts in his poetry, although he writes mostly in the Iraqi dialect. He worked as an engineer in Iraq until his departure for Algeria in 1978, where he worked as a teacher of Arabic and as a journalist. Since then he has moved to England, where he has been living in London since 1990. Al-Samawi was imprisoned on several occasions during the 1960s in various prisons in Iraq. Although not a political activist himself, he was "close to Marxism" and many of his colleagues and friends were members of the Iraqi Communist Party, which led to the authorities labelling him as a communist and to his consequent imprisonment.(4)

Aziz al-Samawi shared his first published collection of poetry, Stepping on Water,(5) with his two close friends, the fellow poets Tariq Yasin and Ali Shaybani. His first own collection, Songs of the Dervish,(6) was published in 1973, and his second, The Color of Snow and Roses at Night,(7) was published in 1980. Finally, we have the collection on which we concentrate here, The Blind River (which is an ironic reference to the poet himself), as this is what places him firmly within the genre of the poet in exile.

The poet's literary influences are international and have made him a product of his time. He has a great knowledge of classical Arabic literature and has also studied the works of poets such as the pioneers of the free verse movement, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Nazik al-Mala'ika, the poet Salah Shahin, and other Iraqi poets like Abdul Wahhab al-Bayati, Sa'adi Yusuf and Buland al-Haydari.(8) A huge influence on him has been the Social Realism Movement, pioneered by Chekhov and other writers of that era, and subsequently taken up in the Arab World initially by Neguib Mahfouz. Edwar al-Kharrat concludes that "most of the works written in the [Social Realism] vein leaned heavily on the vernacular, which was taken as a sacrosanct hallmark of the working people,"(9) an important point when looking at al-Samawi's use of language. In translation, he has read Marx, Freud, Sartre and T. S. Eliot, who have all left him with developing ideas and caused deep reflection. Another influence on him has been his interest in fine art, as symbolized by his close relationship with the Iraqi painter Faisal al-Laibi. He cites art as having inspired him considerably because art and poetry work closely together, both being concerned with images, colors and contrasts.(10)