Nazik al-Malaika in "The Bottom of the Wave" — A Revolution on the Way to Explosion

In my memory of Nazik al-Malaika there are three verses by which I came to know her and to love her. They accompany me today with the memories of my school years. They settled in my mind together with the classroom and the pupils and my teacher Marun Abboud, who said of her what al-Nabigha said of al-Khansa — as if Omar Abu Risha were Marun Abboud's Hassan.

As for the three verses, they are:

Since you went, I have remained bewildered in the darkness —
sorrow bears witness that I have kept to my place;
my fancy pictures for me your steps and their fall,
and when I listen closely I wake from my illusions:
nothing... but the wind raging in the darkness,
nothing... but my sighing and my weeping...

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Darkness, the wind, sighs, imagining and fancy, tears...

These are the greatest common factor in everything Nazik al-Malaika has said until now.

Never once have I tried to read a poet or a man of letters or a writer without working to fathom his soul — its inner depths and its surfaces, the bottoms of its waves and their foam — through what he writes; for I believe that the writer who does not live his literature, whose literature is not a genuine outpouring of an experience he has lived and a setting-forth from the foundations of the soul — mind and thought, feelings and sensations — is not a writer who deserves to be read.

From this point of view I attempt to survey the poetry of Nazik al-Malaika in "The Bottom of the Wave."

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There is no doubt that the poetess has developed from "The Lover of Night" to "The Bottom of the Wave"... but she has developed along the line she began, and has never once departed from it.

Darkness, for example: Nazik al-Malaika no longer merely loves it — she has come to dread the morning:

Let us part now, while a melody remains on our lips,
too proud to disclose the secret, so it chose the silence of nothingness;
while in the dewdrops a lip remains, singing,
and while your face, like the darkness, still holds a thousand meanings,
clothed in shadows —
the beauty of the impossible —
which the rigidity of an idol may yet come over
if night lifts its two hands from us..

The sighs set forth, followed one upon another, and thickened until they became a sadness that clings to the poetess's soul and that she cannot part with; rather she cries out to it for help and finds her rest in it:

We prepared for it love and sanctification and confidences,
and made ourselves ready to meet it, eyes and lips,
and we shall meet it in prayer as we meet a god,
and we shall offer it the bursting of sweet tears as solace,
and we shall grant it a sorrow stronger and ever stronger,
and we shall give it eyes and brows...

As for the illusions and imaginings, they have become specters and terrifying images that awaken in her soul foreboding and apprehension and suspicion and fear and terror of something she does not know, or pretends not to know — she tries to hide it, and it shows itself between the words and in the folds of the letters.

Perhaps I am not philosophizing if I say that Nazik al-Malaika, in this collection, is trying to overstep the restraints that the condition of her society has imposed upon her and upon many women like her, but she collides with the traditions... You see her, in the splendor of her poetry's flight, suddenly stop — and you feel, as you read her, the jolt of this sudden halt, and you sense that this flight did not continue to the range the poetess wanted...

Thus have I understood these quiescent rhymes in most of what she has written about herself and out of herself:

But while we were dreaming
we sensed something like an obscure echo;
in the waves dark with silence we heard
something like a throbbing echo:
the avenging jinn-maidens
mounting toward us in chariots —
and my companion answered: "They are at play;
that is the voice of the rippling waves..."

This sudden halt we do not find, for instance, in "The Martyr" and "The Sleeper in History" and "The Legend of Two Eyes"... and we feel it falling less heavily in "An Invitation to Life."

Most of Nazik al-Malaika's poetry in this collection is living, free-flowing meters, and living feelings trying to break free, and an expression that is, to my mind, easy and simple. There is no hunting after the word, no diving after the term; and the obscurity is in the meaning, in the aims, and in a failed attempt to portray a soul shackled by everything around it. And the poetess consoles herself for this obscurity:

If the lily unveiled its riddles,
no meaning would remain for its delicate fragrance!!

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The poems of this collection, as a whole — I imagine the shepherds and the sailors and the strollers on the banks and among the palms singing them, for they are all quiet, deep, sad, sweet melodies.. even the poem "The Second Person," in which the reader feels the flame of a suppressed jealousy and a deep buried pain — its meter dances and its meaning quivers...

History is dear to the poetess's heart, and perhaps the obscurity in it answers to the obscurity she tries to cast over herself and the obscurity that is forced upon her. Babylon and Hammurabi, the temple, the incense, and the priests are things that stir her and rouse her poetic gift:

What does the river say?

A hymn of praise

from Babylon drunk with the perfume of incense,
and the procession of priests in a temple;
the Tigris folds away its secret, and the rocks,
and the memories of night and of sun about
the city of the sun beyond the ages,
and about Hammurabi and about his love,
and what the treacherous book of time has folded away..

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And the present likewise — the present of her country: she sees it and feels it, land and water and palms and shepherds and beggars and martyrs and hills and slopes. The martyr — she feels him in the earth fragrant with his blood and in the river that raises fertility out of every barrenness:

Let them reap, if they wish —
have at him... and let them kill him a thousand killings,
for tomorrow the waters of the Tigris will raise him up,
and our villages, and the harvest...

This same river, which rises to the degree of sanctity — we see her burst out in a revolt that does not take flight, blaspheming against it under the pressure of the shock:

And let the river not send out, from tedium, an unbearable tune
to which we hearken in contempt,
because the road is the road of return...

The spider, the dead fish, the monotonous ticking of the clock... look out upon Ibn al-Rumi's superstitious dread from a wide window... but they remain within an independent structure, of soul and of poetry, and go no further than the glance...

Whoever follows the dates of the poems can tell the poetess's story. I hope that "An Invitation to Life" is the last poem she composed, and that this revolution may compose itself into a search for creation, far from the tears and the sighs, the night and the specters.

I was not certain that Nazik al-Malaika lives the experience she describes in verse until I read "The Martyr" and "The Sleeper in the Street" and "Elegy for a Worthless Woman." In all but these poems she carries the brush and paints canvases that express nothing but Nazik al-Malaika — it is she who tempers the colors and blends them, she who shapes the images and the shadows, and so the poetry reaches the summit of inwardness. But in these poems she throws down the brush and takes up the camera, presenting a moving picture — yet it is no more than a picture she displays to us:

And the night surrendered itself, with no care for the morning,
and how the light came — with the voice of the milk-seller, and with fasting,
with the howling of a hungry cat of which nothing but bones remained,
with the quarrels of the vendors, with bitterness and struggle,
with boys pelting one another with stones across the road,
with the runnels of foul water in the alleys, with the winds
toying with the rooftop doors, companionless,
in a kind of deep forgetfulness...

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When I spoke of form I said it does not concern her; but it does not concern her to the point of resorting to repeated, hackneyed images and similes and expressions that may not touch her and that she may never have lived — the cup, for example, and they are many in Nazik al-Malaika. And sometimes the melody so beguiles her that she is dragged along in the verse, as when she says:

His phantom is more steadfast than a stubborn army,
crouching, never retreating...

This "crouching, never retreating" killed the meaning.. Perhaps I am searching for Nazik al-Malaika's soul and trying to understand it more than I am criticizing her poetry and studying it — and that is what I intend in this quick passage through this collection, for the time to study Nazik al-Malaika's poetry has not yet come.. I believe I have laid hold of the entrance through which I can penetrate to an understanding of her.

Nazik al-Malaika has lived the life of her people, bound and shackled, and she has lived among other

— Continuation of the article on page 33 —

peoples that know no restraints and no barriers, and she came back trying to carry that free flight over to the place she came from — and she collided; hence this obscure atmosphere in her poetry. Suppression, and a revolution trying to explode. I have seen the suppression and the fear of everything in all the poems of her heart. And the vanguard of the revolution appeared in "Washing Away the Shame":

O neighbor women of the quarter, O girls of the village,
we shall knead the bread with the tears of our eyes,
we shall cut off our braids and flay our hands
so that their clothes may stay white and pure.
No smile, no joy, no curse — for the knife
watches for us in the grip of our father and our brother,
and tomorrow, who knows what waste
will hide us away, "to wash away the shame"!

It is an open call to revolution — to the revolution that burst out and set forth, thundering and pealing, in "An Invitation to Life":

Be angry — I love you angry, in rebellion,
in a blazing revolt, in laceration.
I have loathed the sleep of the fire within you, so be a blaze,
be a vein of longing, crying out and burning.

And the patience that lasted so long has become a curse upon her lips:

Patience? That is the virtue of the dead
in the cold of the graves, under the rule of the worms...

I am certain that Nazik al-Malaika wrote this poem for no one but herself; and again I wonder why she did not set down the date of this piece's birth — hoping that it may be the last thing the poetess composed... and that it may be the starting point for a victory over pain and sadness and night...