In the person of Ali Ahmad Sa’id, known also by his pen name “Adunis”, we find a social critic and truth seeker in the midst of the world of Arab thought from the second half of the twentieth century till today. Adunis was born in Damascus, Syria in 1930, and has made a life out of poetry, for him, poetry and life are synonymous. Very early in his career, with the proclamation Hadha Huwa Ismi’ (This is My Name) he took the pen name Adunis1, reminiscent of Tammuz, (Adunis) the god of the Syrian countryside whose story is an allegory for nature’s death and rebirth every spring.2
Greatly influenced by the writings of the English poet T.S.Eliot, as were many of the Arab poets of the 40s through the 60s3, and also inspired by the thought and activism of the National Syrian Party founder, Antoun Saadi, who advocated a secular nationalism for Syria4, Adunis was seeking that which was genuine to the Arab sensibility.5 Because of his political activism he was forced to leave Syria and settle in Lebanon. Today he lives in Paris, perhaps still in need of sanctuary because of his thought.6
The ambiance of the Lebanon of the 40s, 50s and 60s proved helpful to Adunis, as well as a number of other poets and thinkers. There, the questions of “turath” (heritage) and “tarikh” (history) could be openly sounded in depth, all the while withstanding the shifting winds of philosophical and political currents of the day. It was no easy task to advocate a change in the Arabic mindset, as did Adunis and others of his ilk7. Nor was it easy to probe the depths of Islamic and Christian cultures so well established in the Middle East of that day. Nonetheless, with his characteristic courage, Adunis enthusiastically explored Arab life in a series of several articles, books, and poems.
Like Eliot, he found the world in an awful mess.8 He saw the role of the poet as one who is uniquely charged to destroy the prevalent powers that oppressed man, no matter if they be religious, political or philosophical, and point the way to build a culture that could sustain life and creativity. Eliot found this “culture” in the Greek and Roman societies and their heirs, especially since this culture formed the matrix for the Christian message and Church9. Adunis found it in the pre-Islamic cultures of Syria and the Mediterranean, at first accepting Saadi’s philosophy accrediting Syrian culture as being superior to and predating Greek and Roman cultures.10
After his penetrating yet disturbing analysis of Arab culture, which he published as his doctoral thesis in 1970 at St Joseph University in Beirut, under the direction of a Jesuit priest Fr Paul Nouie, entitled Al Thabit wa’l Mutahawwil (The Established and the Changing) Adunis began to loose some of his intellectual and moral support in an Arab World. In his Thabit Adunis’ pointed out that the new and creative with regard to Arabic poetry were always “defeated” by that which was established and approved. He summarized it in this way:
“In the light of what has been presented, I conclude by saying that prevailing Arab thought is subservient thought. But that is not all, it also rejects creativity and condemns it. Thus it stands in the way of real progress. In other words, Arab life cannot have a renaissance unless the prevailing mental structure is destroyed.
The duty of the Arab is to liberate himself form all references to the past, to remove all sacred character from the past, to consider it a part of experience or knowledge with no binding force, an to believe, in consequence, that the essence of man is not in his being a passive heir, but in his being a creator and innovator.” 11
These words of Adunis, spoken in 1974 at a conference of Arab thinkers sponsored by the Kuwait University, challenged Arab thinkers not to revel in past glories, nor remain fixed to poetic patterns or shy away from social taboos inherited from the past, but rather to forge new roads for a new culture. One cannot help but reflect on the courage that it must have taken to critique one’s own culture in such a way as did Adunis, who even went a step further in questioning some of the presuppositions of Islam, even of faith in God itself. Among poets, this openness to question and seek is common in the West, where a poet oftentimes raises more questions than he answers. However, this process is not so common in the Arab world of today.
It has been said that Adunis’ critique of Arab thought as “subservient” was a direct assault on Sunni Islam’s acceptance of leaders who claim to be “Islamic” yet are far from the Islamic ideal. This may be true since Adunis comes from a Shiite Muslim sect called the “Alawites”12, who are more prone to criticize “Islamic” leadership. Adunis himself made it clear that he favored a more flexible and creative Islam, less sure of itself, more open to the world. In 1979, when the Shiite Islamic Revolution swept the oppressive Shah of Iran from power, Adunis spoke in praise of this creative and dynamic Islam. It has been 22 years since then, and one wonders what Adunis thinks now, when that which he imagined for Iran does not seem to have yet taken place.
Adunis, twice nominated for a Nobel Prize, continues to craft his poetic vision with regards to culture, love, and humanity. His work on Arabic poetics, published in 1980, continues to be one of the most respected in the field.13 His most recent work is entitled Pages of Night and Day, and it includes a preface, several poems, and an article entitled “Poetry and Apoetical Culture”. 14 In the preface he describes the “exile” that the Arab poet feels, first from his own language, which instead of being the language of Revelation, has become the language of “a law, a system”.15 A second “exile”, according to Adunis, is due to the Arab attitude toward poetry itself. As he describes more fully in the article “Poetry and Apoetical Culture”, before Revelation, poetry was the common means to create, to communicate meaning, to build culture. After Revelation, poetry in the Arab would henceforth be used only to promote the message of Islam. In his own words:
“When this divine Revelation came to take the place of poetic inspiration, it claimed to be the sole source of knowledge, and banished poetry and poets from their kingdom. Poetry was no longer the word of truth, as the pre-Islamic poets had claimed it was…Islam thus deprived poetry of its earliest characteristics…and made it into a media tool.”16
Adunis wants to re-establish the primacy of the individual’s identity and personal search for truth over and against the claims of any other identity. He wants to restore the individual to his proper place. Thus, a culture that is open to questioning is of utmost importance to the poet. Again, in his own words,
“In Arab society, poetry is the first criterion by which a poet’s identity and the extent of his belonging within the society is measured; we can thus understand the challenge faced by a poetry that establishes another concept of identity – one that is pluralistic, open, agnostic and secular”17
Adunis claims the right to say what he believes, even at the cost of his belonging to the Arab world. The individual conscience to him is more important than the security of identity. One fashions one’s identity, says Adunis, in the midst of a world where the “I” and the “Other” are able to both speak their word to one another in freedom. He writes,
“…I see this separation between men as a darkness which science cannot dispel despiteits transformative power. Only poetry can illuminate this darkness.”18
This summer Adunis is teaching at Dartmouth College, where he recently addressed the issue of the “globalization of culture” in a lecture entitled “Beyond the East/West: Towards a Culture of the Future”19. In his lecture he proposed Andalusia, a mosaic of different cultures, as a model for the unity in diversity that is needed in today’s world to avoid the rapidly expanding creation of one human culture that is dominated by market interests rather than human interests. Adunis describes it as “interest-oriented globalism” verses the “values-oriented universalism”.
Adunis, in his person, as well as his political, cultural and humanitarian interests that began with his writing career in the 1950s, continues to be a reflection of the deepest questions and concerns, hopes and fears of the Arab world. He continues to find in the “other” a source for poetry and life. It has been said that poets in the Arab world can be likened to the media of the West since both have a tremendous sway over culture. The contribution made by Adunis, albeit “in exile”, that of a social critic and truth seeker in the midst of Arabic poetry and literature ought not be overlooked.
1: Roger Allen, An Introduction to Arabic Literature (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000) p 51.
2: Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991) p 397.
3: Afif Y. Faddul, The Poetics of T.S. Eliot and Adunis: A Comparative Study (Beirut: Al Hambra Publishers, 1992); this was Faddul’s doctoral dissertation at the School of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania; see chapter one.
4: Allen, An Introduction, p 48.
5: Faddul, The Poetics, p 144.
6: Recently he was honored at the Institute for Studies of the Arab World in Paris, where he had a major exposition, and a book of his work in Arabic, French and English was published. He lives at 1 Rue Fosses St Bernard, 75236 Paris, phone no. 011 01 40 51 38 38.
7: One thinks of the pioneering work of Yusuf Al Khan and his periodical Sh’ir, which served as the medium for much of the liberal thought of the Arab world during the 50s.
8: Faddul, The Poetics, p 37ff.
9: Ibid. p 316ff.
10: Ibid. p 94ff.
11: This talk was translated by Dr Shereen Khairallah and published in the 1974 CEMAM Reports entitled Vision and Revision in Arab Society (Beirut: St Joseph’s University, Center for the Study of the Modern World, 1974) p 34.
12: Faddul, The Poetics, p 31.
13: Adunis, An Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans. Catherine Cobham (London: Saqi Books, 1990).
14: Adunis, The Pages of Day and Night, trans. Samuel Hazo (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1994).
15: Ibid. p xiii.
16: Ibid. p 102.
17: Ibid p 107.
18: Adonis, Transformations of the Lover, trans. Samuel Hazo (Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, International Poetry Series v VII, 1982, preface.
19: Unpublished manuscript available on the internet (source unknown) of a talk delivered at Dartmouth College, May 9, 2001.