Togo symposium: Environmental issues in modern Arabic poetry of North Africa

 

By Ashraf Aboul-Yazid, Egypt

Lomé: This morning, the first session of the International Literary Symposium (SYLITO) will start in Togo, hosted by the Togolese capital, Lomé, on April 22 and 23 April, on the topic: “The Contribution of African Literature to Achieving the Sustainable Development Goals.”

The Symposium is organized by the Pan African Writers Association (PAWA) and the Association of Togolese Writers (AET) and held in the University of Lomé.

I am contributing the following paper on Environmental Issues in Modern Arabic Poetry for North Africa” with citations for the works of poets Youssef Al-Azraq, Reda Ahmed, Ahmed Anis, Miftah Al-Ammari, Nusaiba Atta Allah, Bakhti Dhaif Allah, Radwan Ajroudi and Hamid Bakhit:

While many critics believe that modern Arabic poetry has left public affairs to express their private lives, I find this judgment lacking in relevance; we live in an age in which the private and the public come into contact, and are identifiable, until they almost coincide.

If symbols are used to express the parallel of what is implicit, hidden and concealed, the decline of symbols’ use means that the contemporary Arab poet has left the fear of declaring what is implicit, and has become more attached to free expression that is not framed or restricted.

Therefore, today, we cannot consider a poet in the Arab countries is in isolation from the issues of the whole world, and these past issues have come to trial, to shape present, and affect tomorrow.

Therefore, global warming has become – for example – not a scientific issue, or an issue related to a specific geographical area, but rather a matter that affects the masses, and calls for their attention, and their reactions, and poets are not far from all of that.

If we talk about environmental issues, we gradually deal with them according to several stages:

Awareness of the elements of the environment and their presence in the contemporary Arabic poem

Representing the environmental problems and their embodiment of the contemporary Arab poets

These two points have been represented by a group of contemporary poetic compositions, for several generations and the countries of North Africa, and I found them to be the best selected sample for reading the presence of environmental issues in contemporary Arab poetry in North Africa.

Reda Ahmed: Confession is a Common Mistake

Egyptian poetess Reda Ahmed chose several geographical environments, including (the forest) to wander in, evoking the vocabulary, the map and the objects of the forest, especially in her poem (This Forest Belongs to Me): sea / feather / claws / thorns / hedgehog / butterfly / crocodile / shallow water / rabbits / tusks / mud / flowers / trees / loggers / birds…

This rich lexicon of forest scenes, with their familiarity and loneliness together, puts the poetess’s heart and mind to the test:

“With her bones calcified in a poem

And the ire of critics as rough as men

As light as crystal covering a flower greenhouse”

It is a modern image par excellence. We need greenhouses to protect flowers, threatened by the climate, as if life is in need for such a collective greenhouse to survive.

Reda Ahmed says in her same volume of poetry (Confession is a Common Mistake):

“The way home is far

And that desert beckons me to go,

It notes something down in her hands and sprays it in my eyes;

A disappointed hope climbed my old fears,

Fell and melted in the sun”

This poetic state is nothing but an objective correlative equivalent to desertification. It does not only threaten the poetess in her poem, but it also threatens life and loses its hope.

(Reda Ahmed | Confession is a Common Mistake | General Egyptian Book Organization, Cairo, 2021)

Meftah Al-Ammari: Wooding residents of the Wind

Libyan poet Meftah Al-Ammari says:

“The trees that petrify their perfume / How do we call it a garden? / I had to gather firewood / not waiting for the wind.”

Here, the poet brings us directly, with the opening of his poetry volume (Wooding residents of the Wind), to the relationship between green; represented in trees and gardens, to the sweeping environmental factors of it, i.e. desertification and erosion brought by the wind.

Even the only orange tree in my yard “imagines rain” and throws out a “misleading fruit”. The “crowded forest” is “shadows that break, with no trace of an axe.”

As poetic as the picture is, its cruelty indicates that nature has successfully performed its cruel task; which calls for images of altars of trees, and turns into inanimate life around us.

Al-Ammari says:

“Because his mother is a forest with three fighting sides  

The shadow of the door of the yard

Like a child fiddling with a shell; restless wind

That’s why the door was

A history full of stories,

Digesting a semi-truck of tree remains

To be righteous in his labyrinth.”

Today we have all opened a wooden door and we will remember, with the Libyan poet, how many trees have died, in order to give life to these silent doors. It is as if the poet calls us to protect the trees so that we do not open the doors to endless labyrinths that desertification throws us in.

(Meftah Al-Ammari | Wooding residents of the Wind | The General Authority for Culture | Benghazi | 2021)

Ahmed Anees: From the Grandparents’ Balcony

But an environmental phenomenon witnessed by many North African cities was caused by migrations that changed the nature of these cities, especially the cities overlooking the rivers, as the poet Ahmed Anees, Egypt, describes in his poetry volume (From the Grandparents’ Balcony), he says:

“Here, where a small town, ignoring the bordering fields, has succeeded in stealing the qualities of the old / cosmopolitan life on the banks of the river / As befits a river-born / Here, I grew up on the fringes; / The river was the line / It was the border/ We weeds on the banks / We belong to all the fringes of the river; / those who die / without going to war.”

This was how the farming hands had migrated their lands and farms, to assassinate the fields on both valleys of the river, to create random cities, no doubt bringing destruction to the marginalized living there, so “death comes to them – without going to war.”

The erection of residential towers, after demolishing everything that is heritage, completes a scene filled with pests:

“They said: Today was my grandfather’s memory

They also said they would demolish my mother’s house

Some tower would rise upon its ruins!“

(Ahmed Anees / From the Grandparents’ Balcony/ Rawafed for Publishing and Distribution / Cairo / 2018)

Bakhti Dhaif-Allah: What the Butterfly Didn’t Say

There is almost an agreement that the wind is the enemy of all that is green, it is the messenger of desertification. But the reason is clear as the sun; we cut down the trees that were standing in its face, so the wind is like a genie rushing out to uproot every trace of life.

Algerian poet Bakhti Dhaif-Allah says in his poetry collection (What the Butterfly Didn’t Say):

“O stubborn wind / Calm down … / To complete the last chapter / Then get angry to draw your thought above the ground / And dig / Deep your old hatred … / To kill whatever plant you want / Under the dirt they crawl like a baby / Leave me a grain of wheat / For today the earth does not recognize / Only her child! / He smells it / Holds it / The sun flaunts him / Alone / Embraces the sky.”

We are running, almost decimating the earth under our feet, our first and last mother. “There is no truth but the earth.” Shall we protect it today?

(Bakhti Dhaif-Allah / What the Butterfly Didn’t Say / Shams Publishing / Mauritius / 2020)

Youssef Al-Azraq: Kept in a Cool Place

This comprehensive devastation of the environment drives men to flee, displaced from their homeland, even if the sea swallowed them in their illegal immigration, Moroccan poet Youssef Al-Azraq says, in his collection (Kept in a Cool Place):

“The raging waves are tired

of rescuing wretched boats”

Those responsible for this devastation are “prepared to pluck more tears / which grow shyly in the grass of the cemetery / Those crowned with ingratitude and determined to amputate the stature of roses…throw everything into deep pits under their scattering.”

(Youssef Al-Azraq / Keep in a cool place / Al-Waveh Cultural Foundation / Essaouira / 2020)

Nassiba Atta-Allah: Hosted by Godot

In the Holy Qur’an, “And We made of water every living thing), and we do not believe on earth an element more important than water for life, human life, cultivation and udder, so I liked what the poet Nusaiba Atta-Allah said: “When the forest breaks into a metaphorical bowl, and the earth roars… all the facts embrace the water

(Nassiba Atta Allah / Hosted by Godot / Khayal Publishing and Translation House / Algeria / 2020)

Radwan Ajroudi: Happiness Disappears in the Mirror

This planet of “forest” vocabulary is found in the world of Tunisian poet Radwan Ajroudi in his poetic book (Happiness Disappears in the Mirror). Perhaps it is a galaxy from the poetic dictionary of the forest:

“My mom put me in a yellow basket

under an almond tree

It was the harvest

She cut my cord with her teeth

I was shorter than a spike, but now I’m taller than a tree

The almond

You fed me dirt so that my stomach might be smoothed like a grandfather

And she taught me to light a fire, milk a sheep, and slaughter a chicken.

What am I going to tell her, with my grown beard like a male goat,

I rescued a knife from rubbish, so it slaughtered me.

I rescued a rope from a well, it became a snake and bit me.

The child you released into nothingness has become an old mother, mother

Carrying a stick

He dreams that he had  will fall into a hole, to sprout, much like an ear

as soft as an almond drop.

The child puts his head on your knee and falls asleep.”

The multiplication of vocabulary from nature through the book itself represents a kind of nostalgia for a world that is almost extinct, a world in which the poet longs for valleys, forests, rivers, and birds…

In his poem (The Flood) we read how the dream receded:

“I was a small stream crossing between two trees;

Keep calm

My brothers are thin drivers that trace mint and grape vines

Paper boats floating on my surface

So smoothly as a mother’s smile

I dreamed of growing up and becoming a river

To jump from a waterfall

To carry a wooden boat between two banks

For lovers to swim in my chest

Or even to hide a corpse in my bottom

Now I’m a stinging puddle

Close to a dirty city

Frogs jump on the rooftops

And inside are the corpses of workers digging a waterwheel up to a grapes’ field.”

The fate of the poet is nothing but a reading of what has befallen the world. It is a poem that summarizes how the (pollution) that transformed a dreamy river into a “stank pool”, made his city “filthy”, and stopped the waterways, literally and figuratively, becoming mere pits in which workers perished while striving for the vineyard!

(Radwan Al-Agroudi / Happiness Disappears in the Mirror / Dar Al-Firdous for Publishing and Distribution / Tunisia / 2020)

I may conclude with this piece, which I dedicate to all mankind, and it came in the book of Sudanese poet Hamid Bakhit (Secrets of Exodus):

“Earth

at the beginning of time,

When the question was pressing you,

The sky seduced you with its blue… so you ran

You ran towards the end of the corners,

you was running…

 but didn’t find it

You stopped when you started

Then there was no truth

Except for the Earth.”

 (Hamid Bakhit / Secrets of the Exodus / Dar Al Reem / Khartoum / 2018)