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| Adonis at the Mosaic Rooms, London - Feb. 04, 2012 |
On Augut 28, 2011 Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said Asbar, well
known to the world as Adonis, was gifted with the Goethe prize in Frankfurt. First Arab poet, Adonis was granted
for being “the most important Arab poet
of our time” and claimed for his "eminent
literary talent, his cosmopolitanism and his contribution to world
literature". Born in Syria
If at the age of 12 the poet Edward Said referred to as ‘the
most eloquent spokesman and explorer of Arab modernity’ encountered the then
Syria’s first president - Syria gained independence from a French mandate in 1946, just to enter the Arabi-Israeli war in 1948 and subsequently pass through a period of instability until 1970's Hafez Al-Assad coup - to make him the gift of a poem; in this occasion the young poet asked him for the
possibility to go to school, and once settled in Lebanon in 1956 Adonis helped
establish the literary magazine Shi’r.
“When I first came to
Beirut I really started to live freely, I regarded the city as my second home,
as far as my intellectual development. Me and my friends founded a cultural
magazine so to discuss about a poetic and intellectual revolution to make it spread
through the Arab world”.
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| Adonis collages at the Mosaic Rooms exhibition until March 30, 2012 |
The idea of
questioning Islamic tradition and its close relationship between culture,
politics and religion passed through the inspiration coming from European
philosophers like Nietzsche and Heraclitus and poets Charles Beaudelaire and Ezra Pound,
just to find out how much similarities there were between the French symbolist
poet and the Persian poet Abu Nuwas (756-814): “In Baudelaire the idea of life and of city change, leading to the modern Western world, and it was the same
with Abu Nuwas centuries before.”
While Shi’r ceased his publications in 1964,
Adonis started issuing his poems since 1968 with Lebanese literary periodical Mawaqif settling, before his scholarship
in Paris
“Arabic culture was revolting against
linearity, because linearity started to become associated with power, while
uprightness was linked to the revolutionary thinking. […] As far as I’m
concerned, a poem is a revolutionary presence. To see the world artistically
means to see the world culturally, intellectually, integrally. There’s unity
between culture, thinking, art.”
This
striving for unity explains also Adonis interest in Sufi mysticism. While in
2005 the poet issued the book “Sufism and
Surrealism”, claiming that if “in
Christianism the Jewish God was changed in that, that he can become a man and
the man can become a God”, while in Judaim and Islamism the
human and the divine are split up forever, Sufi mystics were injecting this
aspect of transformation into the Islamic tradition.
So, even if
Dervisces were marginalized by Arabic society, Adonis claim mystics as the
only, true revolutionary thinking coming out of the Islamic culture: “God usually is seen as a force external to
the world, while in mysticism God embodies himself in the human”. If you
think about what does it mean living under a religious dictatorship claiming
that Mohamed’s is the last truth, and that so “man can only obey and pray”, you can easily understand the
consequences of this choice.
“I fight in order to set up a society in which
religion has been split up from society, where the woman has the same rights of
a man, and society gives shape to his own identity. The problem doesn’t
underlie only in power. Everybody talks about changing the power, but nobody
talks about changing society. That’s why I chose Nietzsche, and Heraclitus”. This is the reason why Adonis says
often that the tools of a revolutionary poet are not the same of a
revolutionary politician.
And even if
Adonis personally is “with Gandhi,
against Che Guevara”, the issue of identity leads directly to the
relationship between Sufism and Surrealism: “For
Surrealists you can’t find reality on the surface, in the appearances, but in
what’s invisible, in what’s underlying, it what’s hidden. Identity in mysticism
is a perpetual creation, and men will become men in the future; their own
identity doesn’t come from their own past.” And so the individual is
central, in opposition to the collective.
For the
unaware reader, the influence of Adonis in contemporary culture is wide, huge
and sometimes unexpected. In 2003, the contemporary avant garde performer and singer Diamanda Galàs brought in his Defixiones: Will and Testament,
dedicated to the Armenian genocide, Adonis’ poem “The Desert – Diary of Beirut Under Seige
You can
find traces and quotations from Adonis poems through plays as Wajidi Mouawad's Encendies, but the presence of his work is massive even in theatrical representations coming from North and central Africa , creating an interesting
mélange with the poetics of metamorphosis and psychological notations on the disruption between politics and society à la Durenmatt.
While the
extremely beautiful exhibition at Earl’s Court Mosaic Rooms shows the interest Adonis
developed in Arabic writing – “my
collages helped me in understanding the visual aspect of the art world, they
are an extention of my poetry, and I think that sooner or later someone would
have to start to write the history of the silent geniuses of Arabic manual
ability”, one of Adonis last statements, about the proximity of Israel to the Islamic dictatorships, remembers the notes of another ‘exiled’ intellectual,
Israeli-born documentarist Eyal Sivan,
on the idea of memory and modernity, when he says, quoting his friend and Italian poet Andrea Zanzotto, that:
“In every society lies a conservative spirit
and a innovator spirit. They both coexist. The conservative spirit is tied to
money, power and religion. [...] Memory is a process, not something existing in
someone’s mind. You have to connect everything but you have also to forget”.
This is the
schedule for the remaining events at the Mosaic Rooms:
07.02.12
Islam, Sufism & Arabic Literature - in conversation with Omar Al-Qattan
08.02.12 Reflections on the Role of the Intellectual in Society - With the
award-winning Chinese dissident poet Yang Lian
01.03.12 20th
century Baghdad
The Mosaic Rooms
A.M. Qattan Foundation
Tower House, 226 Cromwell Road
London SW5 0SW
Related
features:
Maya Jaggi interview
with Adonis from The Guardian
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