by Elias Khoury
Did his love of Rawda, the first, die when he encountered Rawd, the second?
How does love begin, and how does it disappear and die?
Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi, God have mercy on him, said, “Love is what the philosophers would call an accident, and an accident cannot be susceptible to other accidents. At the same time, it is an attribute, and attributes cannot be further qualified. The following discussion of love’s accidents and attributes will, therefore, be metaphorical, and will put the attribute in the place of the thing that it qualifies.” In classical Arabic literature, this “attribute,” which swallows the thing described and thus becomes it, has led lovers to their destiny, and destiny is another name for fate, and fate is death. Love itself, however, does not become a destiny, nor is fate transformed into death, unless the poet weaves verses into it, turning the heart and its spasms into words, and eyes and their allure into mirrors. There is no love without an ode to love, no ode without a story that can be written in its margins, at which point the marginalia become a text and the original text a destiny. This is what the poets believed and this is what led lovers to tragedies, for their odes became tokens of their madness and their madness an embodiment of their passion.
Of all the books on love in the classical Arabic library, I feel a special closeness to The Ring of the Dove, compiled by Ibn Hazm in Seville, a province of Andalusia, in AH 418 / AD 1027. In this book, which presents love’s pain in prose narratives, and lovers’ suffering in garlands of odes, I came across the most accurate definition of this emotion that consumes the mind and takes over the memory, turning imagination into a sort of sickness, a bane into a balm.
Ibn Hazm says, “Love, may God exalt you, begins in jest and ends in seriousness. Its aspects are so majestic that they are too subtle to be described and its true nature can thus be known only through the experience of it.” These words captivated me with their wisdom and their despair. Like everything said about this kind of emotion, however, the topic can be defined only in negative terms, for love can only be described through the endurance of pain, while pain has no names.
What caught my attention in the description written by the learned scholar of Andalusia was the relationship between “jest” and “seriousness,” which sums up the relationship between love’s beginning and its ending. Probably what the author meant by seriousness was the lived experience, the pain, and, perhaps, the death, but it never occurred to him to deal with a more critical issue, namely, the ending of love. Suddenly, the lover finds himself emptied of love, like a vessel whose water has been poured out. This is a seriousness that exceeds that described by the chroniclers of love stories. They all halt at the separation, or at that parting of which al-Mutanabbi wrote that it leads at its most extreme to death. Nobody, however, has dared to open the door onto that greatest mystery lurking in the murk of the human soul, the one that obscures the moment when everything vanishes, the one whose pain exceeds all other. I’m not speaking here of the pain of the abandoned lover, of which the bellies of novels and other books are full, but of the pain of the lover who loses his love for no clear cause and finds himself empty and trivial and discovers within himself a deep despair – inspired by the self, not by others or by death.
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It is around this despair that I’ll write the story of my beautiful poet, Waddah al-Yaman – the tale of his love for two women and of how he died once, then again.
Had I the daring of those who write autobiographies, I would write of my own sorrow and pain, not because Dalia left me after having lost her head because of the film she was making about her friend Assaf who committed suicide, but because, suddenly – with no warning, I swear to God! – and for no clear cause, I woke up one day from a heavy sleep, bathing in the humidity and the suffocating heat of Jaffa, to find that my love, which had lasted ten whole years, had evaporated. I felt that all things were vanity. How could I not have been patient, after all those years during which I’d suffered pain, jealousy, and fear, with the woman in whom I had seen all that was most beautiful, most pure, and most tender? Dalia was the light of my eyes. I beheld how she radiated love, and glowed, and I could see light and grope my way through the shadows cast by that light and by joy. Logically, I should have been patient with her in her moment of greatest trial, when it was revealed how her friend Assaf had died. He was fifteen years her junior and she had watched over him like a son. She used to tell me of his fragility and say that within him was an artist who wouldn’t be able to bear his compulsory military service in the Israeli army. And in the midst of her work on a film about a friend of Assaf’s who was the first Israeli to be killed in the second Palestinian intifada, Assaf committed suicide, leaving a videotape similar to those left by Palestinian suicide bombers before they go to their death. That day, Dalia had a nervous breakdown and told me, as we were discussing her decision to stop working in film, that she didn’t love me and was going to disappear from my life forever.
I knew she loved me, that what she had told me was just an expression of a crisis in our relationship and that it was up to me to wait for her, and that in fact is what I’d decided to do. I knew love is the art of waiting, had practiced that art throughout the years of my relationship with Dalia, and was prepared to do so again and enter the worlds of patience and latency, but I suddenly felt, as I sipped my early-morning coffee and dreamed of a cold shower to remove the traces of the humid night from my eyes and body, that I was mediocre and empty and that I would never love the woman again, or want to wait for her. In fact, I wanted to escape this place that was suffocating me and forget Dalia, whose magic had suddenly vanished as though it had never been.
I was struck by grief, not because I’d lost her when she went off to I know not where, but because I’d lost myself. I discovered that the greatest pain comes not from love but from its loss, and that I had entered the maelstrom in which the self despairs of itself, which would lead me six months later to emigrate to America and to work in a restaurant. That’s another story, of interest to no one, differing from the rest only in that it doesn’t interest me either, because it was just a way of using time to kill time, or so I thought until the phantom of Waddah al-Yaman returned to occupy my imagination, my dream that had gone unrealized both in writing and in love.
Who was Waddah al-Yaman?
I first met with Waddah al-Yaman in a book. It was 1978 and I was teaching literature and language at the Haifa school. I was teaching the boys the rules of Arabic grammar and struggling with the dual endings, unable to comprehend why they hadn’t been dropped from Arabic as they had from all other ancient languages and not knowing how to rescue myself from the trap of that tongue whose music enchanted me but whose rules I found myself incapable of teaching because I’d ejected them from my memory the moment I joined the Hebrew Literature Department at the University of Haifa. A colleague advised me to read The Book of Songs by Abu al-Faraj al-Isfahani, and in that unrivaled encyclopedia of verse and song I encountered my poet.
Or rather, no. Before encountering him, I’d mastered the dual and fallen in love with it, discovering that the key to the language and poetry of the Arabs was that relationship between the “I” and its shadow that had been wrought by Arabic’s master poet, Imru’ al-Qays al-Kindi al-Yamani, our grandsire, teacher, and caravan leader to the paradise of music and verse.
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Imru’ al-Qays wasn’t a lover like those who came after him, and it is claimed, though only God knows, that the poet never even existed, an opinion advanced by the dean of Arabic Literature, Taha Hussein, in his On Pre-Islamic Poetry. Likewise, that the famous story about his lost kingdom was simply an indirect expression of the story of a certain notable of the Kinda and his relationship with Islam. Even the existence of a noble saying by the Prophet Muhammad that “the errant king” would lead the poets into hellfire failed to budge the Egyptian writer – regarded as a found
ing father of Arab cultural modernism – from his conviction.
I don’t care whether Imru’ al-Qays was real or invented – what would “real” mean here anyway? We have a story associated with this poet and we have his poems, which is enough to make him real, more real in fact than reality itself. Indeed, I fail to understand how writers can defend their heroes by saying they’re fictional and not factual. Phooey to them! I consider Hamlet to be more real than Shakespeare, the Idiot more tangible than Dostoevsky, Yunis more factual than that Lebanese writer who distorted his image in Gate of the Sun, etc. (Here I will have to make a footnote to say that I know Khalil Ayoub, narrator of Gate of the Sun, personally. Indeed, I’d go so far as to say that I know all the characters in the novels I like just as well as I know Khalil Ayoub.) Imru’ al-Qays taught me the dual, by which the poet’s ego is divided in two, becoming the mirror of a self that refracts against the poet’s shadows in the desert, and the dialogue between ego and ego becomes the starting point for the relationship between words and music.
Getting to know Imru’ al-Qays wasn’t enough for me. I journeyed through The Book of Songs as though on a visit to my memory and observed how my very self had become the receptacle for a literary, poetic, and linguistic storm that shook my being to the core and also turned me into two men dwelling in one body. Suddenly, the Arab asleep within me encountered the Israeli citizen who would move from teaching to writing for a small Israeli newspaper published in Tel Aviv. That too is a story that has nothing to do with our current topic and that I believe to be of strictly personal significance.
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In the Songs, I came across Waddah al-Yaman, whose beauty was initially the only thing that caught my attention. His is one of the rare instances in classical literature in which a man is described as beautiful, and his beauty was so blinding that the man was obliged to cover his face. The poetry of his to be found in his collected works, however, falls short of the level achieved by the love poetry of his day. His meager output cannot be compared to that of Qays ibn al-Mulawwah al-Majnun – “the Madman” – or Jamil, or Umar ibn Abi Rabia, and even though I read the moving story of his death, I failed to notice its significance and importance; I read through the story without paying it much attention, thinking it a fabrication of the imagination and tending to the view that Waddah al-Yaman wasn’t a real poet but a romantic love story to which some verses had been added to provide its hero with a certain nobility. (In those days it was enough for a man to be a poet to elevate his social rank.)
The ancient Arabs built their literary legend on the triad poet–prophet–king. This schema began with Imru’ al-Qays, who was a poet and a king, and culminated with al-Mutanabbi, a poet and prophet who aspired to kingship. The traces of this schema remain engraved on Arabic poetry, like a watermark, to this day.
Our relationships with poets begin with a love of their verses. Without such love, the poet loses his personal presence in our lives and we forget his story, or so I believed until I met the Palestinian poet Rashid Hussein. I first became acquainted with Rashid through Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “He Was What He Became” and was startled by Darwish’s daring in comparing the man to a field of potatoes and maize, telling myself that a man who was like a field of potatoes would have to be a great poet indeed. I read Rashid’s three collections of verse and felt let down: I liked his poetry but felt it was pre-poetry, that he was paving the way for the other poets who came after him and writing the sort of spelling-out of the self that precedes mastery of the language in which it is expressed.
When, though, I looked at the picture of the poet on the cover of a book published in America and edited by Kamal Boullata and Mirene Ghossein, I was amazed – a beautiful man carrying within him a brilliance that shone out through his eyes and a poet who wrote his own story by dying by fire in a small apartment in New York.
I found the book at the Strand in Manhattan in the midst of a display of secondhand books at the entrance and I paid just one dollar for it. The story of this Palestinian poet’s death in a fire caused by alcohol and his burning cigarette drove me to reread his poems, and I felt that his story was in his poetry, and that the sorrow manifested through his words was simply an introduction to the story of his death.
Rashid Hussein didn’t die from love or because of it. He died of despair, and his despair then resembles mine now. The poet died a hero of his own story. I, on the other hand, don’t have the courage to commit suicide, which is why I cannot write my own story the way heroes do. On the contrary, I have to write their stories in order to come close to myself, and by making up stories conceal my inability to be a hero.
It was from this perspective that I rediscovered Waddah al-Yaman. The story of his love and death, which had seemed to me naive thirty years earlier, took on a new meaning, not just as a metaphor evoking the events of the Palestinian Nakba, as that first reading had seemed to indicate, with the lover choosing silence to protect his beloved, but as an expression of what follows the despair that comes when love dies and dissipates. Thus, the poet’s silent death becomes the meaning of the meaning, or the moment at which life acquires meaning through death.
I shall have to write the story twice. The first time as the story of the demise of the lover who seeks to protect his beloved’s life and honor, the second as the story of the death that comes to give vanishing emotions a meaning.
Waddah al-Yaman’s story, like that of other lovesick swains, began with love. He fell in love with a young woman and wrote of her and for her. So to avoid scandal, her family married her off to someone else, and the poet went insane. In its early stages, Waddah’s story resembles that of “Mad-over-Layla.” Qays ibn al-Mulawwah went insane not because he loved, but because he spoke his love and proclaimed it, the story thus becoming part of his poetry, the man evaporating and being so thoroughly subsumed into it that many scholars have expressed doubt as to his existence, regarding him as mere legend and claiming that most of his verse is misattributed.
Waddah al-Yaman was a poet who went mad, and his story almost fell into the oblivion of the lepers’ valley, where his first beloved was buried alive. Waddah al-Yaman’s greatness, however, lies in his ability to transcend the clamor of words and reveal the eloquence of silence. This is why he died in the cruel way that he did, proclaiming silence as the highest level of speech because it holds within it the eloquence of life, which exceeds in its expressive capacity any rhetorical form that language can devise.
(Note: It seems that instead of writing his story, I’m analyzing a story that has never been written, which is one of the drawbacks of the profession I chose for myself. I decided after obtaining my qualification in Hebrew literature from Tel Aviv University, for no clear reason, to become a teacher. And instead of my being attached to a Hebrew school, they sent me to the Wadi al-Nisnas school in Haifa and gave me Arabic literature to teach. In flight from the dolors and inconveniences of that profession, I went to Tel Aviv, where I worked in journalism and ended up being neither one thing nor the other, which is another story that this isn’t the place for.)
The Madness of the Lover
(POINT OF ENTRY 3)
SAID THE CHRONICLER: “How am I to describe Waddah al-Yaman to you? I fear my words may lead you where I do not want to go, and instead of being a guide to my poet become a trap, and that you will think that the man, whose beauty seduced the women of his age, was effeminate. (I use the word ‘beauty’ here rather than ‘good looks’ in view of the fact that writers of the modern age commonly use the latter to refer to male beauty, ‘beauty’ having come to be thought of, for reasons I know not, as feminine. Given that the word ‘beauty’ is indeed feminine, I can describe beauty only in feminine terms, for it is both effeminate and feminizing, like literature, which only becomes literature when feminized by language, and when it has been given the transparency of water, and the bashfulness of eyes.)”
The man was i
n love, and love is the opposite of manliness. It takes what we give the name of manliness – generally a collection of empty claims fatal to the emotions – to its extreme, where it dissolves in the femininity of water and attires itself in the translucent whiteness of death.
If Waddah al-Yaman were to speak, he would describe to us the whiteness in which he drowned and how he discovered in the darkness of the coffer of his love a whiteness words cannot capture.
Said the chronicler: “Waddah, meaning Luminous, was an epithet he acquired due to his beauty and brilliance. His real name was Abd al-Rahman ibn Ismail ibn Abd Kulal. Many stories are told of his strange beauty. He had a fair complexion, reddish hair, a comely face, fine features, and a distant gaze, as though light shone through his eyes.
“The chroniclers differ as to his lineage. One story claims he was a descendant of ‘the Sons,’ i.e., of the Persians whom Sayf ibn Dhi Yazan called to his aid against the Abyssinians in Yemen; another that his father died when he was a child and that his mother then married a Persian, which is where the confusion lies. In reality, the man was a Himyarite on his father’s and grandfather’s side, a Kindite on his grandmother’s.”
The chroniclers trace the story of the epithet that became his name to the conflict that arose, between his mother’s husband on the one hand and his paternal uncle and grandmother on the other, over which tribe he should belong to. They went (as the author of the Songs relates) to the ruler, and he ruled in favor of Waddah’s uncle. “And when the ruler ruled in favor of the Himyarites, he passed his hand over the boy’s head and was taken by his beauty, and he said, ‘Go, for thou art Waddah al-Yaman – Yemen’s luminous child – not a follower of Dhi Yazan!’”