By Ahmed Adam
Aviva Butt’s Salim Barakat, Mahmud Darwish, and the Kurdish and Palestinian Similitude: Qamishli Extended
Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2021, 270 pages, ISBN: 1-5275-7283-8
In his acclaimed book Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature, Gilles Deleuze argues that: “A minor literature does not come from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language.”[1] Minorities have a desire to decode, in order to remain minorities and affirm perspectives that are not those of the culture they inhabit. What Czech writer Kafka, did in context of the German language, Kurdish poet and novelist Salim Barakat puts into practice in the Arabic language. Barakat’s language is dauntingly complex, flaunting an enormous and intimidating vocabulary. He forges the means for another consciousness and another sensibility within the Arabic language.
Aviva Butt’s Salim Barakat, Mahmud Darwish, and the Kurdish and Palestinian Similitude: Qamishli Extended signals a breakthrough in the study of modern Arabic poetry, as seen through the creativity of its leading exponents, Barakat and Mahmud Darwish. The book is in two parts, Introduction and Anthology. It offers readers compelling, synthetic tools with which to understand where these complex and talented poets come from linguistically. Butt’s presentation also helps readers to understand the importance of Barakat’s work to his friend, the Palestinian National Poet at a time when they were in contact with each other and matured as poets. Butt maintains that Barakat introduced poetry from the Kurdish traditional genres of orality, such as the traditions of Kurdish Shahnama (the epic) and the Ballade into Arabic modern literature. Because his modern poems had both synchronic and diachronic dimensions, Barakat writes mainstream literature. Reaching into antiquity, he searches for a common linguistic origin; the method behind Kurdish language structures converges with Arabic.
His thirty-page poem The Obscure is complex and multivalent. The poet uses archaic structures that echo what could be unearthed from an awareness knowledge of Central Kurdish, a dialect that reflects interaction at some stage with Gurani Kurdish. Moreover, adopted Central Kurdish, known as Sorani Kurdish, has in one way or other preserved archaic structure whether as substratum or as prestige borrowing.
Butt also explains that Barakat makes use of the philosophy of the ancients, as can be seen in the following lines:
Good is penetration as to the deceptiveness of remorse. Good shall surely revert
To the rational for his investigation of the mind’s stirrings, be resigned to his pitying
Evil’s fate as a result of his remorse, the remorse of the dying. Call to him, O Evil;
Call Good away from an end that is without prior succession; without future succession.
[Laws of ] purity as argument the bones will defile the earth without further ado.
Your dung produces the reason for verdure in a verdant field of ash.
By reason you are also luxuriantly green an offering of ironclad enticement; by reason
Of the certainty… your young lad is impervious to what is righteous, what is immoral…
[1] Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, Trans. Dana Polan (1986), Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press: 16
However, Barakat does not make use of the Greek philosophy embedded in the thought of the so-called religious philosophers, such as that of Ibn Sina’. He leaves it to Darwish to pick up from where he left off with what can be understood especially from the long poem The Hoopoe. The following lines are revealing:
And maybe we, O hoopoe of secrets, are ghost-winds seeking destruction and a wasteland
He said: Leave your bodies in order to follow me, leave a land of illusion, mirage…
And follow me. Leave your names. Do not seek an answer since the answer is the road
A straight road that disappears into the fog. We said: Did “al-Attar” infect you
With poetic madness? Immersed in the gut of the valley-of-love, he declaimed:
Did al-Ma‘arri[2] stand beside the valley-of-knowledge? And Ibn Sina. . . Did he
Answer the question and did he see you? I see with the heart not with philosophy.
So you’re Sufi? I am a hoopoe. I don’t desire. “I don’t desire that I won’t desire”…
Worthy of note is that neither Barakat nor Darwish are religious. However, Sufism in its simple sense of “mysticism” (not as formalized religion) is clearly present in the poems of both these poets. Darwish in his poem The Kurd Has Only the Wind [For Salim Barakat] comments on Barakat’s technique, which he understands perhaps better than anyone else. I quote a few lines:
The Kurd will draw near to the fire of Truth
Then ignite like poets’ moths //
He knows what he wants from ideality.[3] All of which is
Misleading. Even words’ negatives are a device that fishes
In vain. He reluctantly spurns words then adds them
On the morrow to his vocabulary. And the alphabet
Bestows fantasy as a ram for his convictions,and meaning
To language:
Barakat’s remarkable achievement inspired not only Darwish, but also the older theorist of Arabic modern poetry, the poet Adunis (b. 1930), who likewise wrote a long epic poem entitled Index to the Acts of the Wind. With this poem, Adunis, who theorized the Neo-Sufi trend in Arabic poetry, offered the potential for a new trend in Arabic mainstream poetry.
[2] Al-Ma‘arri (d. 1057 A.D.): the blind Syrian philosopher-poet.
[3] Ideality: unambiguous thought prior to articulation.
