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The following text was first published in Mutannabi Street Starts Here, edt. Beau Beausoleil and Deema Shehabi/ PM Press, 2012
The first semester of my senior year in high school, I was enrolled in an honors English course, “Literature Around the World.” It was 1996, five years after the first Gulf War had ended. During the course of the class, we studied literature from Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa. When it came time to cover the literature of the Middle East, the class was told that because of strict Islamic guidelines, nothing had been published in the Middle East since the advent of Islam. Our teacher related an anec- dote that involved a friend of hers who went to Saudi Arabia and found no books; this presumably served as evidence of the complete absence of literature in the whole of the Middle East. As our Middle East curriculum, we were given short pre-Islamic fables to read.
At the time, I was not all familiar with the literature of the Middle East, but I was aware that reading and writing was not a banned activity there. My father, an Iraqi, had a library lined with books in Arabic and read voraciously. Apart from this, it was simply an incredible statement from a teacher in a very liberal Northern California high school. There may be no greater erasure of history than the absence of a written form of knowledge, and in effect, what our teacher was saying is that there was absolutely nothing to know of the Middle East in centuries.
I didn’t say anything in class that day, though. I was slightly shocked. After all, she was my teacher and what if somehow she was right? I lived in a small university town, and that weekend I rode my bike to the cam- pus’s library. A quick library search at the ground floor’s banks of comput- ers brought up hundreds of books by Middle Eastern scholars, writers, and poets. I looked at the green rows of results that filled the screen as I scrolled down and clicked forward through the pages of results. I was relieved. Relieved and disappointed. I had always liked this particular teacher. She’d been handicapped as a result of an accident, but retained an almost manic energy. She was always a little scattered, which generally added to her humor. She’d throw her hands in the air and talk to herself while rushing into the classroom. It was fun and exotic to see an adult, a teacher, this way: a glimpse into what we’d discover later. We would all turn into adults and possibly never be prepared for it. More than this, she’d always simply been an encouraging educator, facilitating debate, assigning independent projects, and taking genuine interest in our work.
If it was that simple to find the literature in question, why didn’t my teacher, entrusted with instructing an honors English course, take the time to find it before coming to such an inconceivable conclusion, pre- sented to the class as fact? I never discovered what her reasons were, but perhaps more important than her reasons is the idea that her conclusion was conceivable, both to her and the rest of the class.
It was while looking through rows of modern Arabic poetry that I found something that amplified the importance of knowing that this literature existed. Flipping through an anthology in search of something I could present to the class, I came across the work of renowned Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. I read his poem “Rain Song” and wept. For the words, for its tragic timelessness, for the recognition I saw in his work that would not have existed in that classroom.
- RIjin Sahakian
Rain Song
by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab
Your eyes are two palm tree forests in early light,
Or two balconies from which the moonlight recedes
When they smile, your eyes, the vines put forth their leaves,
And lights dance . . . like moons in a river
Rippled by the blade of an oar at break of day;
As if stars were throbbing in the depths of them . . .
And they drown in a mist of sorrow translucent
Like the sea stroked by the hand of nightfall;
The warmth of winter is in it, the shudder of autumn,
And death and birth, darkness and light;
A sobbing flares up to tremble in my soul
And a savage elation embracing the sky,
Frenzy of a child frightened by the moon.
It is as if archways of mist drank the clouds
And drop by drop dissolved in the rain . . .
As if children snickered in the vineyard bowers,
The song of the rain
Rippled the silence of birds in the trees . . .
Drop, drop, the rain . . .
Drip . . .
Drop . . . the rain . . .
Evening yawned, from low clouds
Heavy tears are streaming still.
It is as if a child before sleep were rambling on
About his mother (a year ago he went to wake her, did not find her,
Then was told, for he kept on asking,
“After tomorrow, she’ll come back again . . .”
That she must come back again,
Yet his playmates whisper that she is there
In the hillside, sleeping her death for ever,
Eating the earth around her, drinking the rain;
As if a forlorn fisherman gathering nets
Cursed the waters and fate
And scattered a song at moonset,
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Do you know what sorrow the rain can inspire?
Do you know how gutters weep when it pours down?
Do you know how lost a solitary person feels in the rain?
Endless, like spilt blood, like hungry people, like love,
Like children, like the dead, endless the rain.
Your two eyes take me wandering with the rain,
Lightning’s from across the Gulf sweep the shores of Iraq
With stars and shells,
As if a dawn were about to break from them,
But night pulls over them a coverlet of blood.
I cry out to the Gulf: “O Gulf,
Giver of pearls, shells and death!”
And the echo replies,
As if lamenting:
“O Gulf,
Giver of shells and death . . .”
I can almost hear Iraq husbanding the thunder,
Storing lightning in the mountains and plains,
So that if the seal were broken by men
The winds would leave in the valley not a trace of Thamūd.
I can almost hear the palm trees drinking the rain,
Hear the villages moaning and emigrants
With oar and sail fighting the Gulf
Winds of storm and thunder, singing
“Rain . . .
Rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .”
And there is hunger in Iraq,
The harvest time scatters the grain in it,
That crows and locusts may gobble their fill,
Granaries and stones grind on and on,
Mills turn in the fields, with them men turning . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip . . .
Drop . . .
When came the night for leaving, how many tears we shed,
We made the rain a pretext, not wishing to be blamed
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Since we had been children, the sky
Would be clouded in wintertime,
And down would pour the rain,
And every year when earth turned green the hunger struck us.
Not a year has passed without hunger in Iraq.
Rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip, drop . . .
In every drop of rain
A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers,
Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people,
And every spilt drop of slaves’ blood,
Is a smile aimed at a new dawn,
A nipple turning rosy in an infant’s lips,
In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip . . .
Drop . . . the rain . . .
Iraq will blossom one day
I cry out to the Gulf: “O Gulf,
Giver of pearls, shells and death!”
The echo replies
As if lamenting:
“O Gulf,
Giver of shells and death.”
And across the sands from among its lavish gifts
The Gulf scatters fuming froth and shells
And the skeletons of miserable drowned emigrants
Who drank death forever
From the depths of the Gulf, from the ground of its silence,
And in Iraq a thousand serpents drink the nectar
From a flower the Euphrates has nourished with dew.
I hear the echo
Ringing in the Gulf:
“Rain . . .
Drip, drop, the rain . . .
Drip, drop.”
In every drop of rain
A red or yellow color buds from the seeds of flowers.
Every tear wept by the hungry and naked people
And every spilt drop of slaves’ blood
Is a smile aimed at a new dawn,
A nipple turning rosy in an infant’s lips
In the young world of tomorrow, bringer of life.
And still the rain pours down.
*Translated from the Arabic by Lena Jayyusi and Christopher Middleton.