The Arabic Legend in the Poetry of Chafic Maalouf

Any discussion of the poet Chafic Maalouf has the right to go further than a short talk, for in this artistic field "The Woman's Voice" allows only a fixed and limited space; I shall therefore do my best and make of these swift strokes a faithful picture — however short it may fall — of one of Lebanon's glories beyond the seas.

Khalil Mutran once described a woman of bewitching genius, and gathered into half a verse everything that passes through the minds of the lovers of charm and splendor when he said:

". . . . . . .
Scattered fragments of beauty gathered into a single mold"

And you would say the very same thing if fate one day gave you a hearing and you moved in the orbit in which Chafic Maalouf moves: scattered fragments of nobility, gallantry, magnanimity, and proud self-respect gathered into a single man.

A great character, from whose radiance comes a marvelous refinement which, you feel, goes beyond what people have agreed to call "the manners of good company." You meet him and feel that a tender soul of deep stillness accompanies the lively glance, the offered hand, and the welcoming word. And there is his jealous devotion to the Arabic language, Lebanon's treasure and the object of its pride: to keep it alive across the seas he neither rests nor wearies. Arabic letters are his passion and his intimate converse, claiming the greatest share of all that God has given him — of his effort, his strength, and his money.

And the people of letters are his brothers and the members of his clan! Here is a sick poet, coming to the capital from afar: no sooner has he set down his bags than this brother of chivalries appears, takes the place of the distant mother, and follows the course of the treatment day by day — say rather, hour by hour. But why should I not let him show you his transparent soul in his great poetry? He said — and perhaps this is the finest thing ever said of fidelity:

My grief for our nights whose cup was shattered before I had drunk my fill;
I was born to fidelity — how many a dear one shall I weep in my heart as long as I live.
So many have been my bereavements that I wished I could exchange those I remember for those I have forgotten.
The houses round about reopen my heart's wound, and the scattered company wakens my tears.
I saw in my life's companion a part of my life, and by what remains I measured what is slipping away;
And now, whenever a faithful friend dies, I feel as though a part of me were dying.

★

Our poet set down his baggage at the door of legend, flung open in the face of the writers of Arabic — for legends were never an art standing by itself like the other literary arts; they are scattered fragments, and what is known of them is rare and scanty and satisfies no hunger. Thus Chafic Maalouf created for us the Arabic legend in verse, as Salah Labaki created for us the Lebanese legend in prose. And here I present to my women readers in "The Woman's Voice" the legend of "Anahid."

Have you heard this name, ladies, before today? As for me, I heard it for the first time in the city of São Paulo, the day I was introduced to a lady called "Alayid," who told me at once that she was Spanish in origin and that her name was Arabic. I doubted then that it was Arabic — and the riddle was unlocked the day Chafic Maalouf took up a line handed down by al-Jahiz about Anahid and built upon it an enchanted palace.

By this, then, "Alayid" is "Anahid," the nun having been turned into a lam and the ha into a ya. How great is our ignorance of what is beautiful in our literature, and how great was our crime against that literature the day we confined it to boasting, love poetry, panegyric, satire, and elegy.

"Anahid," then, according to al-Jahiz's account, is the "Venus" of the Arabs: to them she was the succoring goddess. Why then — on al-Jahiz's view — was she transformed into a star, and who performed this wonder?

Let us follow the imagination of Chafic Maalouf, who has opened for us in Arabic literature, ever since "Abqar," a new door from which we shall profit much and take much delight.

Here is Khurafa (1), the dweller in caves: he mutters, then comes forward to tell us the tale of Anahid. He said:

(1) Khurafa was a man of the 'Udhra tribe. They claimed that the jinn carried him off; then he returned to his people and told what he had seen, and they called him a liar, until people said, "Even Khurafa's tale is not to be believed."

"And the Arabs made Venus a harlot woman who was transformed into a star, and her name was Anahid."
(al-Jahiz)

My grief for our nights whose cup was shattered before I had drunk my fill;
I was born to fidelity — how many a dear one shall I weep in my heart as long as I live.
So many have been my bereavements that I wished I could exchange those I remember for those I have forgotten.
The houses round about reopen my heart's wound, and the scattered company wakens my tears.
I saw in my life's companion a part of my life, and by what remains I measured what is slipping away;
And now, whenever a faithful friend dies, I feel as though a part of me were dying.

In times long past there went, pressing on through the night,
a caravan of Arabs of the desert,
until, as it drove deep into the plains,
behold — it saw the horses all around it
striking the breast of the earth with their hooves,
tails arched, ears pricked,
snapping their tethers
and backing away.
The she-camels bellowed in terror and rumbled,
necks stretched high, then fell back
and bolted into the wilderness — what a bolting!
And in the desert there blazed up
a tempest of fire and light, stretching
its neck through the darkness toward the sky.

Then it rose little by little, circling in the dome of the boundless worlds,
until it became a sun, then a sinking moon, then a planet, then a blazing star.

Is it a mountain of fire splitting open, or is the earth burning? Do I see the world coming to an end, the universe returning to darkness? The whirlwind has stilled, and everything has gone back to what it was.

And the old man of the caves completes the legend, saying:

The desert Arabs gathered their scattered company, and the wastes regained their calm,
and they set out for the dune to which the ray of that star was fastened,
and they beheld upon the ground a maiden whose beauty no slender beauties ever rivaled,
with a face that is the ornament of youth, cut from the very heart of morning,
still of sense: her breast did not flutter, nor did her black lashes stir,
her bosom withered, as though the clusters had withered upon their vines,
a dark girl beguiled by doom — parting, at the hand of death, sat upon her neck.
Her eyelid stares up at the star on high, as though it were knotted to the star.
They cried, "Anahid!" — and the echo went shrieking: "Anahid! Anahid!"

And on earth there was a funeral for her, and in the chambers of the heights, a feast.

*

Thus was "Anahid" transformed into a star — but what lies behind it?

She was one of the sorceresses of love: no youth ever slumbered in her tresses but went away drunken, never sobering, never coming to himself... until there passed by her tent a horseman whose glances scattered youth and perfume. Anahid looked out and saw:

As though his colt's two eyes disclosed to her what the horseman kept hidden,
her depths quivered with love, and the fruit-laden bough of her trembled,
and the dark girl wished that no garment had ever been rent for passion at her hands,
and that she had never gone on beguiling one youth after another before that dark horseman appeared.

She, the sorceress who felled men, is felled in her turn: bound, skin and soul, to the one who poured love into her heart like deadly poison! And now Cupid's arrow drives home and travels deep into her bones:

Three nights passed as if they were the shadow of a lance — or longer;
neither does the dark horseman disclose to Anahid's heart what he feels,
nor does Anahid, who has tried on him every incantation of sorcery, prevail.

And at the close of the third day, sleep touched her eyelids after the long wakefulness... a few seconds... then... the beat of a horse's hooves, which she felt striking upon her very heart: her fleeting dream had fled, and the dark horseman had wrapped himself in a fog of dust raised by a steed that outruns the wind! There she is, the love-maddened one, striking out across the wilderness, worn down by running, by hunger, and by the biting heat; and she went on running and falling and running again, until near the bend she saw a pillar of fire — the greatest god, guardian of the people of purity and cleanness, standing in her path — she, the daughter of error and temptation:

There appeared to her, from the side of the bend,
a surge of light whose brilliance dazzles,
and a lord — as though her beloved
were looking out from his eye, gazing.
He shouted at her: Enough from you — turn back!
I am none other than Hubal the Greatest.
This is harlotry's punishment: let whoever sins take warning,
should he taste the taste of love.

*

Anahid loosed her hair before him
and flung herself down, weeping and begging forgiveness,
asking the god, in abasement,
that her tomorrow might be made pure of her yesterday.

She is his jinniyya — as he calls her — the name being an Arabization of the word "muse" in his 'Amiri lexicon. He says — in one of his poems — that she gathers the stars for him and tucks them under his pillow.

God sends to every budding poet a jinniyya who soars with him in the hour he rises toward the heaven of art, to gather for him the moons and the planets.

*

It remains for us to dispute with al-Jahiz his claim that Anahid "was transformed into a star" as punishment; the poet has anticipated us, placing in the mouth of Hubal this verse:

Your love, O woman, such as you have willed it —
the breast of the heavens is worthier of it!

Had the god of mythology truly been angry, Anahid would today be a viper or an owl — not a star blazing in the breast of the heavens!

Nor, for that matter, were the Greeks alone in possessing the legend of Venus, or the Arabs the legend of Anahid: the goddess of love among the Armenians is named "Anahid," and perhaps they took her from the Arabs. The legend may be, for all peoples, the story of every "Magdalene" — that is, the story of the spirit on the day it triumphs over matter, and of the life of good on the day it conquers evil. Were there not in the Magdalene's body seven demons taking their orders from carnal love? Was she not degraded, despised, and stoned beneath the eyes of the lovers of her ideal body? Then the spirituality of the Nazarene swept through her animal life, and she rose soaring as none of his followers ever soared: she defied the temporal and the religious authorities, accompanied him even to Golgotha, stood — her heartstrings tearing — before the spectacle of that great martyrdom until he gave up the spirit, and became, after Saint Paul, the greatest apostle of the delights of the spirit.

In the Christian world there is a religious order called "the Order of the Good Shepherd," among whose most glorious works is the gathering up of penitent women and their restoration to the world of dignity, in obedience to Jesus on the day he forgave the sinning woman and said, "Go free, and sin no more." These penitents are known as the Magdalenes.

Is not every "Magdalene" an "Anahid"?

Love becomes everlasting upon her eyelid,
and what is abominable is folded away in her heart.
Then Hubal inclined toward her, saying —
while gentleness dripped from his brow —
"Your love, O woman, such as you have willed it:
the heart of the heavens is worthier of it."
And a fire flared out, and with it there twisted
across the breadth of the deserts a howling gale,
and it plunged into the breast of the heights, bearing
the soul of Anahid as a kindled blaze,
and there shone in the sky, before the forenoon,
over all creatures, a luminous star!
That is Anahid: from on high she keeps
an eye that watches over the people of love.

*

And now, my reader: this is a fertile poetic genius and a delightful literature — a poetic genius open upon lofty horizons, weaving, upon the poet's skill, a legend unique of its kind, with music in it, and coloring, and melody; a literature that struts in freshness and youth; and a philosophy of far-reaching aims.

And this Chafic Maalouf, son of Lebanon and dweller in the city of Saint Paul, is dean of a band of letters, all of whom are:

Bright of face, noble their lineage,
proud of nose, of the first mold.

One word remains, which I whisper into the ears of the young ladies who will be charmed by "Anahid" and by her composer... it is that Chafic Maalouf has a partner in life... who has smoothed for him a life of ease and created around him an atmosphere in which it is sweet to give oneself over to letters and to soar in the heaven of art.