Fouad Suleiman: Man of Letters and Poet

On the occasion of the passing of a full year since the death of the writer and poet Fouad Suleiman on December 14, the committee for the commemoration of the departed circulated to his friends and admirers a bulletin containing a summary of the committee's work during the year, a historical sketch of the departed's life, and press excerpts about him.

Mr. Marun Abboud delivered over Radio Lebanon the talk printed below, and Halim al-Roumi followed it with a concert of song in which he presented, from the departed's poetry, the two poems "Perfume" and "Straying."

Fouad Suleiman, in my view, is a poetic unity that cannot be divided: he is a poet in everything his pen set down, verse and prose alike. His verse may be like the verse of others, but his prose bears a stamp all its own, and his book The Moon's Path is a diwan of poetry with constituents and properties you will find in no one else. Perhaps this book, small as it is, is the best thing our young men produced in the period in which Fouad Suleiman lived. It is as if this writer-poet were an independent system in the universe of letters, with his own sun, his planets, and his stars, each swimming in its orbit. Wherever you come upon him, two traits declare themselves to you: a passion of devouring fire, and a word of heated iron.

He is the poet of pain and its writer. Everything we see on the tables of sorrows takes flesh in sentences written by his fiery pen. I never once saw him without picturing quivering quicksilver. He never settles into any state of rest; he is always poised to spring, as though inside him a coil turned horizontally. Half a smile — rather a smile like a sob — and a laugh that opens you no door of release. I have not forgotten the day I met him at Dar al-Makshouf and said to him: What is the whip of fire like, with which, as you said, Abu Shabaka drives the poets?

He bowed his head like a tiger readying to pounce, then said: Like the whip you use on them in your criticism.

How quickly Fouad Suleiman became — alas! — words we repeat. The writer's greatest care is to become, on the morrow, words to which reciters and repeaters give body. Yes, this is the writer's kingdom, in hope of which geniuses die and with which they promise themselves. Fouad was among those who believed in the divinity of the letter. And he would speak the truth though the word burned his mouth, as the Lebanese proverb says. The word is the mainstay of life and the pillar of the edifice of humanity — indeed an unseen power which life teaches to those able to carry the message of truth.

That human mass whose name was Fouad Suleiman was a revolution in its own right. It was a storm hiding beneath its wings the smile of lightning and the guffaw of thunder. He and his fellow Abu Shabaka are twins, however far apart in lineage: form, temperament, and passion join them. Each of them sang his own heart first, and these turnings and summits second. Both were nurslings of the Lebanese village, which had a great share of their verse and prose. Fouad Suleiman's ears opened to the ringing of the bell swinging in the dome, and the playground of his boyhood was those flat threshing floors beside his house in Fiaa — that town crouching on the bald crown of the mountain. The poet played and frolicked in those sweet spots, and their images were stamped on his soul, later to be transmuted within it into splendid poetry, as the bee's kisses to the mouths of flowers are transmuted into honey.

And now: Fouad Suleiman left four works: a diwan of poetry; The Moon's Path; what he wrote over the signature "Tammuz"; and a book of literary criticism. These works, though they differ in subject, are one in spirit, in love, and in hatred. Fouad turned early to longing for the days of childhood and the haunts of boyhood, as if he sensed the approach of that unwelcome guest.

This writer was a fighter in The Moon's Path and in his Tammuziyyat. Every crookedness angered him, even his own; he would seethe with rage, and the word would come out from under his pen like a piece of iron out of the forge, dripping blood and radiating light and fire. If we leaf through his diwan we see him repenting early: in a single year — the year 1934 — he published his first poem ("Whither?") and closed it with this line:

The valley claps for our weddings
when the valley hears the echo of the two kisses.

And in the same year he composed "The Psalm of Salvation," in which he says:

I repent of a past braziered in flame,
and wash away my defilements with a vial of perfume.

It is as though he had no sooner come of age than he turned gray. Yet despite the repentance in his poetry he remained sharp of appetite, and he imagined the lily — mankind's symbol of purity — as though it felt what we feel, saying of the smile of the innocent lilies:

What ails the lilies above the spring, casting off their maiden veils, while the youth of the spring seduces them?

I think it an image that never passed through a poet's mind before — and how many are the offspring of poets' wits!

As for Fouad's words and his poetic images, I find many of them torn from his own surroundings — such is the effect of upbringing upon us. Hear how he addresses a woman in the poem "A Passerby":

You are not she who kneaded me, nor of my leaven,
so leave me to walk alone — and go your way.

As for death — God keep it far from the listeners — I used to see it in his poetry wherever I turned in his diwan, as when he says:

Should you find in my eyes a sorrow,
and in my face the yellowings of sunset

And as he says in a poem entitled "A Graveyard":

I am the face of the grave: on my sallow brow you meet the phantoms of death;
a choking grief has worked into every rib, and funerals sway through the inmost bends.

Have you seen this poetry of passing away? Truly, a man's thought is his guide.

And if we fold up the page of mortality, we see some samples of the colors of sweeping love. In the poem "The Hidden Passion" he addresses a beloved concerning a mouth of hers which he feared she would make into an endowment for posterity, and said to her:

Keep it for me alone in its purity: I am the blaze, and mankind is water and clay.

And in the poem "A Virgin" he says:

In your tender voice there are wounds —
a thousand sighs surge within it, and a sigh.
I love upon your lips a thing
that sank into the parting of the lips and strayed.

Have you looked at his words? The words ghalla, fatha, 'ajanatni, and khamiri are Lebanese village words one hundred percent — and how much pure Arabic there is in our mongrel speech! Would that he had used nothing but the purely classical.

Fouad Suleiman's poetry is not ornate, well-laid words; it is speech that lives by the heat of love in its speaker's heart. He is not one of the symbolists, though he said in the poem "The Black Wedding":

O my fair-haired dream, O tenderness
that drifted through a mute and darkened heart.

And if we leaf through The Moon's Path, we see that his prose in it is as poetic as his diwan. If you come face to face with "Mirrors That No Longer Shine," your flesh creeps at those expressions describing the house in the absence of its master. Everything went dark in the eyes of the dutiful son; then that darkness soon lifted when the father returned to his nest, and blessings filled the house.

As for the essay "My Childhood," I say — and I do not think I exaggerate — that it is the most splendid essay I have read on this subject. The abstraction he achieved there made childhood a living being, as if of flesh and blood.

I said that Fouad Suleiman was a son dutiful to his parents — and could any but one possessed of his love express it as he did? Hear what he says in describing his mother's face: "My mother... of the colors of the peony-wood is my mother's face."

(It is as if he who wove it wove it once, then cut off his own hand lest he weave its like.)

In "Mantles of Purple" is the utmost freedom of thought; there Fouad the writer turned psychologist, analyzing the poet's soul and its needs...

As for the essay "The Moon's Path," it is the Song of Songs — "how lovely she is!" — of the Lebanese village. And in "Mirrors That No Longer Shine" there is a breath of Tagore. Read his depiction there of the deserted house and mother: there you find the picture of the old Lebanese house complete in every line, so that you seem to see with your own eye what this writer-poet tells you of.

And read "A Grain of Sand," and set what our writer said of the Prophet Muhammad, the greatest Messenger, beside what Goethe, Germany's great poet, wrote — and you will see that death cuts the strings and shows no mercy. It is only "A Grain of Sand," but it is a mountain of poetry.

And in the essay "In the Procession of the Sleepers" we hear a bohemian poet say:

"Here I am in a rioting, fevered, reckless drunkenness — an animal walking with animals, a beast living with beasts, one accursed among the world's accursed. I drag my plucked wing behind me along the paths and through the streets.
Here I am, not yet released...
When shall I be able, my friend, to slip free of the bonds of woman, and of dust, and of the illusions of flesh and blood, and the measures of time, and become a complete man?"

You were wrong, Fouad: had it come about as you wished, you would have been nothing. For were it not for flesh and blood, and all the temptations and relishes on this table, we should not have had the Fouad Suleiman whose memory we honor tonight.

And in a passing word I say: The Moon's Path is a genuine Lebanese anthem, for which God has decreed immortality. Its poet shines brightest when he aims his pen at the springs and the vineyards and everything connected with the village.

As for what this writer wrote over the signature "Tammuz," I leafed through it from beginning to end until I came to blank pages which death did not give Tammuz time to blacken — and thereby to whiten the face of letters. I do not know why a shiver ran over me when my eye fell on those little white pages. I felt a tear dance among my lashes — though in times of trial my tears come dear.

Yes, nothing remains to us of Fouad Suleiman but these clippings from that newspaper and that magazine; but they are clippings containing a spirit that once coursed in Fouad's flesh and blood, and they have left posterity this living heritage.

In the Tammuziyyat, Fouad rises up against every crookedness that fell beneath his eye. He rises up for tormented humanity, as in the piece entitled "A Worm-Eaten Man." And in everything he wrote, in truth, he never gave up his eloquence nor stripped himself of his imagination... He addresses people from on high, however high they stand; he pelts them with words like bombshells; he scorns them and does not care. And sometimes a bitter irony comes to him unbidden and shows beautiful, as when he says:

"We have begun to fear for the Lebanese house, lest it collapse — woman is busy with her cause. Give her her right and rid us of the matter; try her: she may mend what we ourselves have spoiled."

And how telling a word — rather, how truthful its speaker — when he spoke of the robbery of the poet Michel Trad, author of Gulnar. He said: "We did not know that the venerable poet Michel Trad possessed anything precious worth stealing — except this venerable poetry, from which no poet in Lebanon has failed to steal a word, a fragrance, and a color."

But that is a word with more behind it, honored listener; I mentioned it to you on purpose, and our appointment with the details is near.

And finally, this is the picture of the poet and writer from whose eyes fire would blaze, whose nerves electricity kindled. This is the picture of him we used to call Fouad Suleiman in the days when he was among us; today I find no title for him, for names and titles are all worn cheap — so let the daughters of Lebanese poetry renew the feast of wailing for "Tammuz!"