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We Call to the Eye & The Night: Love Poems by Writers of Arab Heritage, Eds. Hala Alyan & Zeina Hashem Beck, Persea Books, Paperback pp.240
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Yes, the Arab love poem emerged out of the very essence of daily life. It is a matter of heritage. Its first prosodic meter was born more than a millennium ago out of a long desert journey. Arab nomads would move from one camping ground to the next with the change of seasons to find food, water, and shelter from the weather. They would ride their camels and form a long caravan march. As the days and nights drew on, the camels would pace and pace, alternating their four-legged steps to produce a rhythm in long and short syllables. In response, the travellers would put words to that rhythmic pace; or in other words, they would recite poetry. The long journeys entailed leaving their tribes, loved ones and lovers behind. The poetry, in turn, reflected that longing. Poetry formed a delicate gauze against the stretched out days. It spoke of pride in genealogy and called on courage to endure the arduous journey, but most of all, it chimed for love..

The Arab prosodic meter was first codified in Basra, Iraq, as early as the eighth century. Seated in one of its bazaars, philologist al-Khalil Ibn Ahmed al-Farahadi would listen closely to the workmen hammering away on their anvils, every strike alternating a cadenced stroke. He would listen, write it all, and hand it down to generations.
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As for the first poems committed to writing, those were the ghazals of Jahiliyya, or the amatory poems of pagan Arabia. They had a codified meter and expressed love, youthful dalliance, and indulged in physical beauty and the pleasures of the body. The qasidah, a laudatory and elegiac poetic form, lamented forsaken camping grounds and remembered those left behind, before touching on matters of love. The mawwal, a folkloric music genre that permeates Arab culture to this day, has its roots in the Fatimid Dynasty in the tenth century, and also sings of love and bridging distance.
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It is fitting then that when poets of Arab heritage come together today, they would reprise the love poem. It is a matter of heritage, but what is more, it is a matter of urgency. In a world gripped by intense polarisation, mistrust and mistranslation, love, more than ever, is a vital language. It is one of intersections despite distance, displacement, dispossession and death.
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We Call to the Eye & the Night is a new anthology of love poems by poets of Arab heritage, edited by acclaimed authors Hala Alyan and Zeina Hashem Beck and published by Persea Books. Although it encompasses old themes, it also reworks them in order to reflect new realities; a testament to how far the poets have traversed, and how those journeys have formed and informed their writing. The anthology is expansive and yet manages to create a centre beyond the border; it is experimental in its wide-ranging search for love; and yet, its greatest feat seems to be its heart, how it intimates a people. ‘We begin beyond the need to subvert or explain,’ the editors write in the introduction, ‘we begin with, here is a book about love.’
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Or we begin with the title, Ya ‘Ain, Ya Leil, that pervasive motif of the mawwal, which is an integral part of Arab identity, in translation: a call to the eye and the night. The We in the title, in first person plural, signals toward an Arab collective; Call to, a harking back to lost roots; the Eye, as it attempts to behold a lover or a beloved; & the Night, that dark and open expanse above land that allows love to run, free.
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Now the lovers, or poets: a polyphony of voices with roots in the Arab world and routes often elsewhere. They come from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, Tunisia and Iraq. There are Syrian-Canadian poets, Palestinian- Cuban, Lebanese-French and Jordanian-Americans. There is a significant number of Arab American poets as well. They write from home, from a version of ‘home,’ from displacement, diaspora, dispossession, from a troubling distance; love being the common language capable of bridging the different degrees of seperation; love being a depolarising language, a disarmament, a conscious choice, an exercise in agency, and a restoration of a collective, authorial voice that defines itself in its own terms.
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Now the poems: ‘Here, a mawwal. Let’s prolong our vowels, let’s become the hours dying/ with the melting wick,’ writes Nur Turkmani; ‘here’ being the mawwal, a heritage site if you will, to which an Arab can always ‘return’; ‘let’s’ a call to an Arab collective to join in on a timeless lyric and to find joy in a shared space; ‘prolong our vowels’ to sing to an Arab rhythm through the night. At a time of severe disenfranchisement, the poet here calls for a suspension of time, so ownership can be reclaimed.
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Time is of the essence. To suspend it is to pause and regroup; to hold onto what is essential for nourishment and survival. Indeed, revival as survival is a main theme that runs through the entire anthology. On that Hayan Charara voices a real concern:
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…………Sons and daughters will become men
…………and women whose sons and daughters
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…………have children whose children
…………do not know them. Or something else,
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…………or something worse.
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There is an anxious relationship with time here, with the future being elsewhere. To live away from one’s homeland is to also contend with future generations twice and thrice removed from their roots. To be acculturated in an adopted home is to be caught in the modern geopolitics that dictate East and West dichotomies, to be caught between two narratives constructed in opposition, the one dominant, the other repressed, and to increasingly feel split, unable to integrate or belong to one version of home or another. ‘Or something worse,’ he writes. What is worse is to contend with the prospect of roots disappearing altogether.
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The signs of this dispersion-anxiety are palpable in every poem. There are lonely hotel rooms, unsuccessful Skype calls, scents of the old world in Brick Lane, and even poems that are stuck at the intersection of five countries. ‘The reel carries us through Finland, Argentina and/ England. An Atlas like a jigsaw puzzle,’ writes Lara Atallah. A jigsaw puzzle is certainly what it is, one that tries to hold a whole world within its frame. The scope is large; the task of connecting all the pieces is daunting.
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There is a concerted effort to disengage from politics. ‘Our bodies not political/ there are no politics/ our bodies not targets/ there are no bullets,’ writes Fargo Tbakhi. The words suggest both surrender and confrontation. The poet seems to lift his hands up, willingly and bravely, despite being targeted. He calls for disarmament, in full knowledge of his body’s context, as one that is pre-determined and embedded in skin. The context here relates to the word ‘Arab’, the word having been somehow transmuted over the course of modern history to become a pawn in the game of power politics. It has been mangled, tarnished, mistranslated, omitted, and the skin bears witness to all of history’s fault lines. Given this, the poets endlessly wrestle not only with the body, but with their voice as well. Tala Abu Rahmeh writes:
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…………I have trouble
…………with love poems.
…………In them the war
…………inside me is over,
…………and I don’t know exactly who I am
…………without it.
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To voice love, the Arab poet must constantly alternate between a language of surrender and confrontation. To straddle two conflicting world systems, to code-switch, and decentralise language are the only ways available for the poet to speak of love. Peter Metres writes:
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…………let me kind you in two/
…………tongues. Habibti, two decades ago,
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…………we fell off a cliff, each holding a wing,
…………each holding a hand, and have yet to land.
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The foreignisation of the English language here is a way to domesticate Arab love; to find a space for it among the cracks, to surrender to the fault lines and represent them just as they are. But the process violates language in its quest to reconcile with meaning. Talk ‘3arabi into my ear,’ writes Hind Shoufani, ‘when you can’t breathe.’ Indeed, the Arabic is everywhere in this anthology, inescapable, between and above the words. As it reworks its etymology, it yields a new language, a third space, one that can restructure around love. Zein Sa’dedin for example, writes from right to left, the way Arabs write:
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…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….love of labour a be this let
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….keep you shame the all of go let
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There is a collective effort here to suspend all political and linguistic considerations for the sake of love. However, the body proves more stubborn. To untangle it would require a disentanglement from all the laws that govern it, the gaze that disparages it, and the performances that misrepresent it. The urge to surpass all these barriers is the body’s ultimate desire. Still, the cultivation of pleasure requires that masks and walls first fall off, and that in itself is a precarious task. The Arab amatory poem once comfortable indulging in physical beauty and the pleasures of the body is now, justifiably, covered in inhibitive layers. ‘An erotica slipping into a body of questions,’ is what Nathalie Handal calls it. One can imagine what such questions could be: Can I silence the mind for a moment to give and receive pleasure? Can I be vulnerable when I don’t feel safe? Is this body really my home? Do you love me or do you love your idea of me? What about shame, exoticisation?
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Despite all inhibitions, the poets remarkably resist, forcibly desisting all enquiries. Marlin M. Jenkins, for example, writes an ode to his body. He celebrates it:
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…………so praise be to the hairiness my Lebanese
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…………family shares.
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Jessica Abughattas disturbs the silence, the questioning, the shame. She unsettles the patriarchal gaze, ‘what you don’t know is that I could moan,’ she writes. Ruth Awad surrenders with a white flag, ‘I say let’s call this touching/ a truce.’ Nusaiba Imady grounds herself in her body and allows it to perform wonders. She ‘folds (it) into camatkarasana’ a word derived from the Sanskrit, camatkara, suggesting miracle and surprise. George Abrahams finds pleasure in the site of the poem itself: ‘i know heaven/ is a poem i survive.’
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Which brings us once more to the beginning, why an anthology of love poems by poets of Arab heritage, in English? Because to write about love is to consciously break away from hardened patterns of stimulus and response; to pause and recalibrate. In writing love, the poets here refuse to read themselves against another’s perception; instead they choose to be read on their own terms, in their truth. ‘We begin beyond the need to subvert or explain,’ the editors declare in the introduction. And they do. However, in speaking their truth, in allowing themselves to be vulnerable, they must inevitably also confront a misrepresentation. They must confront the fact that love, in today’s world, is inevitably caught in a politic. They must disarm their mistranslation and strip it of its themes and etymologies. More than a language, English for an Arab is also context. It is a political, economic and cultural context. It is a colonised context where different semantics carry varying degrees of hegemonic weight. In navigating the English language back to roots, to love, the poets must first trace mileage and digressive routes; they must locate decentralisations and disarm a violence. The poets call to the eye and the night, in English, but listen closely to the sound of the words – the Arabic for love is everywhere, inescapable.
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Mai Serhan is a writer, editor and translator. She is the author of CAIRO: the undelivered letters, winner of the Center for Book Arts Poetry Chapbook Award 2022 and the forthcoming memoir, Return is a Thing of Amber, a finalist for the Narratively Memoir Prize 2022. Mai is a graduate of the University of Oxford’s Creative Writing Master’s degree programme.