A Child Analyzes a Poetic Scene in Two Books!

Nasima has only just stepped into her twelfth year, and at a very early age she showed an overwhelming inclination for reading. "And weighing and comparing is, for her, something she cannot do without," says her mother, the writer Jihan Gazawi Aony. How will this big child arrive, here, at a comparison between love poetry as woman writes it... and as man writes it?

Slowly, stealthily, she drew Bawh from my side as though she were a practiced thief, and with a movement that mingled a girl's coquetry and a child's sudden leap, with all its overpowering curiosity... she managed to carry it off by force.

Her laughter rang out as she took refuge beside her father, holding the book behind her back.

— For shame, Nasima! Did I not tell you to read nothing but what I myself allow you to read?!

So I said, stretching out my hand and asking her for the book.

She said, as she handed it to me, her feigned mischief betraying a visible hurt:

— You are cruel, Mama... and... mistaken, sometimes...

Tears welled up in the two olive eyes, then mingled with a pale little laugh, and she went on, without looking at me:

— I don't think I do any wrong if I read a few passages from this book by Edvick Shayboub, for its words, as far as I can see, are sweet, warm, pure — as though she had meant to say: possessed of a graceful artistic style, a warm feminine breath, and a rare and lofty love poetry —

I was taken, in my turn, with that critical phrasing I love in her for its naive expression and its artless construction, so I held back from checking her attempt, and she went on chattering, reassured, confessing without hesitation and without any bid to appease:

— I loved these chants very much. I read them all, and learned some passages of them by heart. How sweet they are, Mama, and how delicious... I love to read them always... and I don't know why they forever remind me of Fairuz's songs — free and floating, with their enchanting melody, their tender ring, their pride and their faithfulness.

— It is as though Nasima had meant to say, in that for which expression failed her: that these verses make her feel in them the spiritual worth of woman — as in Fairuz's songs — and her chaste freedom, with its gentle pride, its proud longing, its hallowed fragrance. This pride, and that longing and that fragrance, all of which speak of a soul brimming over with values, rich in ideals — how could they ever issue from a man, so long as there lies in his depths, and in them, his clamorous instinct, seething with the blood of sex... —

I was thinking of this when I heard Nasima murmuring, her two dainty lips parting over these words which she had memorized from Bawh — among all she had memorized — with no condition and no restriction, because she had found in them a lofty meaning among the meanings of the chaste love poetry she holds dear, in one of the most wonderful scenes of innocent childhood:

"And yesterday's little girl comes back today,
wrapped round in a sash of sorrow;
the path knows the fall of her slow steps,
and the grains of dust stir in welcome,
and the valley is on the point of asking her about her companion,
who used to make her taller by a finger,
but the echo holds back, remembering the ring of the doubled laughter —
that laughter which once, in a time gone by, tickled the valley at every dawn.
Is it true that it has passed, never to return?"

And Nasima left off her sweet murmurings to run on, reciting in a heedless rapture, into another piece, before I asked her to hurry back to her close-ranked, waiting lessons.

But did Nasima heed — did she grasp — what was passing through my mind? And was it in my power, after that, to silence her, when she had begun to say to me, carried away, protesting, pressing her point:

— When I read these passages, I feel as though there were some gentle angel toward whom my soul keeps gazing, never ceasing and never tiring; and I read a passage once and once again and feel in it the sanctity of the word, the melody, and the expression; and I go on to compare it with the other things they have loaded into the schoolbooks for us, and I find a difference — and what a difference...

Her dreamy eyes wandered off into the distance, and after a moment she said to me:

— To tell you the truth, Mama, I read a few pieces from Tufulat Nahd by Nizar Qabbani. I read them because I did not know they were unfit for me; and they fixed me in my opinion of man — this creature of whom you say that we ought not to fear him or be bashful before him. I came to fear him, and to blush at his insolent glances: for when he describes a girl he does not describe a worthy idea, or treat one, or bring one out in any fashion — he describes a body and nothing more, as though woman's body were the one thing to which he must turn his attention and parade before people as art...

— Let me show you, Mama, a scene to match — of a little boy remembering, just as in the piece "Lahwat al-Tufula" that I read you just now, of a little girl remembering. Read the piece "Dawwarna al-Qamar" from the book Tufulat Nahd; it will spare you the trouble of a long comparison.

So said my daughter, and turned and fled before I could find my tongue to answer this flood of precocious accusations, precocious reading, and precocious conclusions — a deliberate discomfiture not without childhood's mischief and adolescence's recklessness.

And instead of going after her to make her understand things which, it seems, I ought to have made her understand long before this age, I found myself before the modest bookcase, pulling down Tufulat Nahd to read in it what my little one had bound me to:

"I hungered, and the slope hungered, and still I wait,
watching the blue windows with a hamlet's longing;
and she came on, trailing in green, the stone beneath it,
hiding a little breast... one half of it rounded, and a half... not yet.
She said: Morning of roses! So it is you, you of the whistle —
are you still, as you were, a dangerous boy?
You would make of me, upon the earth, games... and chopped-up verse,
and when we rose, there was in our faces the seething...
A time when we embroidered the hills with kisses... and other games,
wading in the dew, plunged deep among the trees.
I said to her: God! how precious they are, those memories...
days when we were like the sparrows, all song and evening talk,
and I would snatch the kiss from a lip... an innocent one..."

Abridged

"A story — ours... and at every rose there is news...
If ever you are asked, say: it was we who rounded the moon."

*

Nasima has made me alive to the fact that love poetry in woman's hands is other than it is in man's. For though both of them — the poet and the poetess — keep the alluring idea and the refined vitality in this color of living literature, woman's love poetry is purer in atmosphere and clearer of surface than man's; while this clarity and that purity do not rob it of its enchanting horizon, shaded with colors and brimming with melodies. Nor does the sanctity of the chaste idea in woman blunt its esthetic edge; for in that atmosphere which only eyes can reach by gazing, and only hearts by throbbing, there are bewitching worlds, searing gusts, and moist breaths, through which the man-poet's imagination is powerless to roam, to create and to invent.

For woman, by her very nature — delicate of sense, wide of imagination, chaste of inclination, loyal to the furthest limits of loyalty — can outstrip man in this field; and in Fadwa Tuqan, Nazik al-Mala'ika, and Salma Khadra Jayyusi we have the greatest proof of woman's love poetry, with its lofty eloquence and its brilliant freshness, in which there is so much of the magic of femininity, the depth of vitality, and the manifoldness of subject.

And who knows — perhaps my little Nasima, this girl who makes a critic of me in spite of myself, will one day be a poetess — for all her hatred of meters and of the single rhyme — but after the pattern of our unfettered poetesses. And who knows, again? Perhaps she will never one day be overcome in her own affairs, as her mother was overcome, and so invented for herself an ideal existence... because — so it appears — she will have invented herself within this existence long since, and will not have ceased inventing.

And then — what shall I be to her, and how shall I stand in her regard? The answer to that lies, without a doubt, with the days, in that immense sea of values and measures, of new conceptions, and the clash of ideas.