Summer Musings

... Here in the mountain, many of the traditions that the people of Beirut — or some of them — have cast off still hold sway. Not a letter has been dropped from the dictionary of titles: His Excellency the Bey, His Excellency the Minister, His Honor the Sheikh, and the Effendi. Tarboushes and prayer beads reign everywhere. The list of salutations, compliments, and benedictions — those ornaments of speech which Wali al-Din Yakan rightly called the list of "lies." The exaggerated welcoming of guests, the fawning upon strangers, the endless meddling and curiosity... the manifestations of traditional social life rampant in most of our circles.

But in Beirut... in Beirut itself... where the beaches teem with bathers, men and women, who have shed the appearances of false modesty, and where the clubs and gatherings ring with the manifestations of modern life — music, cinema, dancing... in Beirut itself there is a movement to revive undesirable relics left over from the past. Were I to enumerate them, space would fail me. Do you not see the passion of the "henchmen" and their masters for gaudy titles and resounding speeches? And the holidays clamorous with every kind of firecracker and every sort of commotion? And the funerals that have become exhibitions of pomp and vainglory, in which the living exploit their dead — and instead of death spurring them to meditate on the passing of this world and to despise its goods, they take it, on the contrary, as an occasion for boasting and display, as though inviting people to measure their greatness by the number of the wreaths and the priests and the length of the funeral procession.

With us, death is one of the instruments of publicity — and so are oratorical ceremonies and the annual celebrations in the schools.

Summer comes, blazing and oppressive, with the students in the thick of preparing for examinations and the teaching family in the worst state of fatigue and frayed nerves — and still the annual celebration must be attended to, and the year's harvest displayed to the parents and friends who come in throngs "for a free show" or to glory in their children's feats. And what do they see? Playlets thrown together in haste, devoid of all art and taste; songs badly performed; handwork exhibitions crammed with every sort of ornament until the walls and tables all but sag under them. The students deliver speeches copied out of books, or an orator stands before the audience improvising the conventional phrases, or reading to them from a paper in his hand an essay elegant in diction and trite in meaning. And what could he possibly say on such an occasion? It is enough for him that he consented to the drudgery and volunteered to speak on an occasion that inspires him with nothing.

Such is the fever of publicity. Everything must be pressed into the service of this strange art — even the art of oratory must be raised from its grave and made an instrument of publicity.

And where do we stand with oratory, in an age dominated by the literature of the press, the radio, and the cinema, when the means of expression have multiplied — painting, music, acting — and are no longer, as in the ages of primitive nature, confined to the tongue?

When Aristotle composed his famous book on "Rhetoric," this art had reached its zenith among the Greeks, and the Sophists had appeared, who captivated the minds of their hearers with eloquence of diction, elegance of expression, and force of argument. Nor was this art of lesser standing among the Arabs in the eras of natural eloquence that distinguished the orators of the Jahiliyya and of early Islam, from Sahban Wa'il to al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf and Ziyad ibn Abihi.

But from the dawn of the Abbasid age, with the mingling of the Arabs with foreign peoples and their removal from the homeland of the pure tongue, they lost the eloquence of authentic Arab speech, and their orators became like the orators of the present day: either repeating conventional phrases memorized by rote, or reading from a paper held in their hands. And if they improvise, they stumble and grow confused, for their diction wavers between the literary and the colloquial and suffers from weakness and flabbiness — neither the language of talk nor the language of writing.

The age of oratory has passed away in our time, and the spellbinding orator who stirred his hearers with his stance, his glances, his gestures, the expression of his face, and the flow of his words has turned into a poor reader reciting his text to his listeners, like a modern professor dictating a lecture to his students from his notebook, while they listen with wandering minds or move their pens to write down whatever of it sticks in their heads.

If the only obstacles facing this art were the other arts that crowd against it, the matter would be slight. But obstacle enough, and a steep one, is this divorce between the literary and the colloquial tongue. For oratory is an oral art, and mastery in it is drawn from long practice in the idiom that is its instrument. And since Arabic oratory rests upon a written language that is not spoken, it is strange and far-fetched to expect that inspired orators should arise among us, capable of improvising the words — to say nothing of the meaning.

Speaking of oratory, I am reminded of poetry, which held among the Arabs a place surpassing that of oratory and flourished side by side with it, so that the poet was an orator and the orator a poet. Poetry, too, entered its period of decline long ago, and the first signs of weakness and imitation appeared on it as early as the days of Abu Tammam, who said:

Behold, the very soul of poetry has died — and if
death's doom has passed it by, it lies in its last throes.

And poetry's position grew still more precarious with the appearance of al-Jahiz, who succeeded in setting prose above poetry and giving it the first place in his own age and in the ages that followed.

I say that poetry's standing had already dwindled before our time. And despite some happy attempts at renewal made by our poets under the influence of Romanticism and Symbolism, we can only acknowledge that this was a momentary renaissance which was not destined to endure. For poetry is shrinking, not in the Arab countries alone but in the whole world — and in the West, which sweeps us along in its current. Scholars are agreed that the present age "knows no great poet." Important poetic genres — the epic, tragedy, comedy — have withered away, and prose drama and its offshoots have taken their place; lyric poetry now appears in short-breathed pieces, or has dissolved into a poetic prose marked by facility and slackness, in a diction locked in obscurity and strangeness, from which one catches the scent of vexation and discontent, or of the desire to attract notice. The cinema has crowded the stage hard; the literature of speed reigns, with the ascendancy of the short story and journalistic writing; and rarely today will you find a poet who confines his production to poetry without straying into some of the prevailing prose arts.

In view of all that has been said, the author of the articles "With Women Writers from America" should not be surprised that there are no women poets in Lebanon. Except that his statement needs one correction: Lebanon has at least one woman poet — Joumana Ahdab, who published her French collection "VIVRE" this year.

As for the three women poets whose existence he noted outside Lebanon, only one of them do we acknowledge to possess the poetic gift.