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 —