by Elias Khoury
Did the dream poem arouse her desires, causing her to send a message to the poet and invite him to come to Damascus? How did the woman dare? For these love poems had found their way onto every tongue and it had been reported to her that her husband the caliph had decided to kill the Yemeni poet.
Did she invite him in order to kill him?
Only death releases the lover from the one he loves. It is the eraser that transforms life into a shadow, leaving on the soul the marks of obedience and submission.
Did Rawd, or Umm al-Banin, know that by inviting the poet to Damascus she was forcing the story to its climax, allowing death to then come and extinguish the flame?
I don’t believe the woman could have found a way to contact her poet and invite him to come to her. It is more likely that Waddah decided to go because he’d heard the call of love coming to him from the depths of her pain at their separation.
The story has it that the poet confided his decision to his friend Abu Zubayd al-Ta’i, who wrenched the mask from his face and wept. Then he told the poet he would go with him to Syria to bear witness to the death that awaited him there.
Waddah al-Yaman smiled and responded to his friend with two lines of Imru’ al-Qays:
My friend wept on seeing the road ahead
and on being assured that to meet Caesar we were resolved.
“Let your eye not weep,” I told him. “We do but
seek to regain a kingdom, or to die and be absolved.”
Waddah al-Yaman said, “I’m no king seeking his kingdom, and if I’m slain it’ll be by the eyes of the woman who brought me back to life.”
Waddah reached Damascus in the spring. The plum blossoms were opening along the banks of the seven rivers that traverse the city and the white of the almond branches glittered under the sun. Snow could be seen on the peak of Mount Hermon, which enfolds the Lands of Syria in its white mantle.
In the city, which seemed to the poet like God’s paradise on earth, Waddah al-Yaman lodged at an inn by night and wandered the roads by day, and he began to waste away and walk in circles around the palace of al-Walid ceaselessly.
Said the chronicler: “Al-Waddah’s mind had become possessed by his beloved and it began to melt and dissolve, and after long suffering from this tribulation, he left for Syria, where he took to walking in circles each day around the palace of al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik. However, he was unable to come up with a stratagem for entering the palace until he happened to see the blond slave girl. He quickly struck up a friendship with her and asked her, ‘Do you know Umm al-Banin?’ ‘Do not be so foolish as to ask after my mistress!’ said the girl. ‘But she is my cousin,’ he said, ‘and would be happy to know where I am, were you to tell her.’ ‘I shall tell her,’ said the girl.
“The slave girl left and informed Umm al-Banin, who exclaimed, ‘Oh my! Is he alive?’ ‘He is,’ the girl said. ‘Tell him,’ said Umm al-Banin, ‘Stay where you are until my messenger comes to you. I shall rack my brains for a ruse to help you.’
“So she schemed until in the end she got him inside the palace in a coffer. He stayed with her for a while, and whenever she felt it was safe, she would take him out and he would sit with her, and when she feared they might be seen, she would put him back in.”
In this coffer would be written the final chapter of the story of the poet whose beauty bewitched women and whose silent death became his poem, a poem written in stifled breaths and through surrender to a death unlike any other.
In the coffer of love, the world evaporates into thin air, words disintegrate, feelings are erased, and the whiteness of death fills the blackness of the pit into which the poet had been thrown.
This is where the story begins.
The Night of the Queen
(POINT OF ENTRY 6)
(NOTE 1: IN this chapter, the story reaches its climax. The questions my novel will pose have nothing to do with the sterile discussion that revolved and revolves, anciently and today, around the story’s historical veracity. Perhaps this insistence on searching for the truth was one of the elements that prevented the emergence of a story-based literature among the Arabs, or ensured that it emerged obliquely, until the imagination burst with The Thousand and One Nights. It is noteworthy that Taha Hussein, leader and Grand Old Man of the modernists, fell into this trap set by the ancients: instead of analyzing the stories and legends of the ancient poets, he set out to refute them scientifically and thus, having decided to expunge the story from literature, wasted his talent and erudition on proving things that didn’t need proving [as though literature could ever work without a story, when stories are its kernel!]. It’s bizarre that the G.O.M., in a moment of rationalist exuberance, obliterated pre-Islamic poetry as a source for the Arabic language, positing instead the Koran as its wellspring. The man’s rationalism and materialism dropped him into a hole that the ancient Arab critics, starting with Qudama ibn Jaafar, had sought to avoid, so as to liberate the language from Koranic sacralism. The linguists and critics had regarded pre-Islamic poetry as a source for the understanding of the Koran, thus giving language precedence over the sacred. Taha Hussein’s rationalist extremism, however, led him into the trap, making rationalism the other face of religious superstition – an issue that deserves separate treatment.)
(Note 2: My novel will address questions concerning the relationship between love and death. The tale of how Waddah al-Yaman entered his coffer of death is well known and has been told dozens of times; echoes of it reach modern Arabic poetry, as when the Yemeni poet Abdallah al-Bardawni alluded to it in his two wonderful lines:
What shall I tell of Sanaa, my father?
A pretty town, its lovers consumption and mange!
It died for nothing in Waddah’s coffer
but the love and the joy in its guts never change.
The question isn’t how Waddah came to enter the coffer of his death, a story I shall tell just to get the facts straight, but in the moments separating life from death: how did Waddah reread his life in the whiteness of the dark, how did he recover his first Rawda, the beloved whom he’d left to die in the valley of the lepers, and how did his love for Umm al-Banin evaporate?
It was his despair of love, which had turned into despair of life itself, that drove him to silence.)
The chronicler says that Waddah didn’t believe the slave girl. He saw before him a blond woman wrapped in a yellow veil. Her eyes were small and swallowed up by thick eyelids that made them look like two little almonds. She went up to him and asked him who he was. The Yemeni was walking along the banks of the River Barada, making his way around the caliph’s palace at a distance, not daring to go closer and unable to bear being farther. Wandering in circles, he kept reciting the poems from his dreams and repeating the name of Rawd, who had appeared to him at Mecca in a kind of epiphany.
The man had begun to doubt himself and his memory. Had his night with Umm al-Banin been real or imagined? What difference did it make, he asked himself, when after the night he’d spent in Umm al-Banin’s bedchamber, he’d recovered the self that had deserted him in the lepers’ valley and had seen how the leprosy had eaten away at his soul and how love had dawned within him as beauty does in women in love?
And he decided to go to her.
Nevertheless, after the exhausting journey to Syria (its sky washed by spring with an effulgent blue), the poet felt that the desert was seeping into him and that the thirst that rose up from his innards had set his lips afire, and he felt he was a stranger, and alone.
The poet told himself he’d gone there to die and he sat and waited in the shade of a Damascene jasmine. He closed his eyes and suddenly the demon of poetry came to him:
In Syria my soul refused to mend –
memory of the dwelling place of tribe and lover held me in thrall,
My heart is caught – it pitched its tent where they pitched thei
rs
and now can scarce resist their call.
Would that the winds might be a messenger to you
be they from north or from south!
He felt a hand take his and pull him up. He stood and walked like a sleepwalker. He found himself in darkness. Everything was dark inside the vestibule to which the hand led him. He walked and walked, stumbling with trembling steps, knowing he was going to his death in her presence.
The story has it that it all began in the queen’s wing.
Andalusia had yet to be born in poetry at the time of Waddah al-Yaman, but he sensed the Andalusia of desire. He felt that he was in a familiar place, like the Andalusian throb in the throat that has made of that land a repository for the mysteries of a strange mixture of homeland and exile. I’m no expert on Andalusian literature, but when I read the poetry of Ibn Zaydun or Wallada or al-Muatamid, and when I lose myself in the music of the muwashshahat, I feel as though I’m walking along a narrow ledge overlooking the valley of death – a poetry written in the midst of loss, and a memory that transcends nostalgia to arrive at a joy mixed with grief.
That is how I imagined Waddah as he walked into that dark vestibule, holding the slave girl’s hand, his face reflecting a mixture of fear, joy, anticipation, and curiosity.
The only thing like love is love.
A tempest that recomposes the world, as though things were born swathed in mystery and ambiguity and are now beheld anew, as if they hadn’t existed before love gushed from the water of the eyes. He walked in darkness, his eyes closed, enveloped in vertigo. When he opened his eyes and saw her, he smelled the fragrance of the laurel in her long black hair that flowed down to her ankles. He halted, dazzled by the whiteness that shone from her bare wrists, and found himself prostrate before the poetry of her eyes.
The story has it that Waddah and Rawd lived for three months in their private Andalusia. They spent the time alone, sipping the golden wine of Baalbek while he recited poetry to her.
During his stay in al-Walid’s palace, Waddah discovered two blacknesses – the blackness of her hair, which covered her milky white body filled with a night of love, and the blackness of the Damascene coffer in which she would hide him whenever danger approached.
The story goes that the poet spent long hours in the coffer and grew used to sleeping on the Damascene silk that his queen had spread over the coffer’s bottom, and that the owner of the hair would slip in at night and whisper to him the words the poet had spread over the ground for the barefoot queen to walk upon.
The story does not, however, tell of the torments of Waddah.
True, when the queen was visited by her master the caliph, she would avoid meeting with him in the room containing the coffer. The eunuch would come to her to announce the news of the caliph’s visit, and she would hurry off to another suite, to bathe, perfume herself, and wait, and would not return until after the dawn call to prayer.
Once, however, she returned to the room containing the coffer in the company of her master.
He heard her say, “Why do you want this room, sire?” and heard him reply that in that room he could smell the scent of Syrian wood.
He told her that this room smelled different from the rest of the rooms.
She said it was the smell of love. “But I smell wine,” he said. “I drink to extinguish my jealous desire for you when I imagine you whoring with your many slave girls,” she said. “You are the most beautiful of my whores,” he said. “Come!” He heard the man guffaw as he ordered her to take off her clothes and listened to her as she sighed before him. How could Waddah recount these terrible moments? Probably, he would never have found the words to do so, and, had he done so, would have found no one to listen to him, and, if he had, no one would have believed that strange feeling in which jealousy blended with lust, hatred with love. She would moan before her master as she did with him, repeating the expression that used to set him on fire whenever he entered her, and crying out, “God!” then falling silent for a moment before saying, “Rahimo!” – which sounded to him like “Mercy!” – and then repeating the two phrases countless times before her waters burst forth.
(Note: When Waddah heard the word rahimo, he felt amazement at the mistress who would ask her lover for mercy at the very moment that love reached its climax, almost as though she were performing an act of worship. Once, he asked her why she asked for his mercy when it was he who lived in the shade of her love and compassion. The queen smiled and said that she’d heard the word for the first time from her slave girl Ghadira, who was the daughter of an Assyrian prince and had been taken captive in a raid on northern Iraq and who said that rahimo meant “love” in Syriac. That day, Waddah learned that rahma, meaning “mercy”; rahimo, meaning “love”; and tarahum, meaning “mutual respect” all come from one root, which is the woman’s rahim, or womb, and he decided to write a poem on the relationship of tarahum to love and on the woman’s rahim, that inexhaustible wellspring of tenderness. Fate, however, failed to grant him the time, and mercy still awaits its poet.)
The same expressions, the rahimo that sprang from the cry of love, the rise and fall of her white body – he’d see them with his ears and ignite with fury, and see them with his closed eyes and ignite with desire.
Waddah didn’t sleep that night until he heard the muezzin announce the birth of dawn. He fell asleep without sleeping, and when he woke, his mistress was no longer there to open the coffer for him and invite him to eat. He remained concealed – hungry and thirsty – and when she opened the coffer in the evening he didn’t meet her eyes, which were cast down, while her body trembled and her voice choked in her throat.
That night, she put food and drink out for him and went away to sleep in another room.
The Coffer of Silence
(POINT OF ENTRY 7)
(NOTE: DO I have the right to skip the three months Waddah spent in the queen’s palace and pause at only two moments – the poet’s arrival, and the confusion of his feelings as he listened to her moaning with the caliph – before getting to, or with the aim of getting to, his tragic end?
I doubt if this way of doing things is appropriate to a novel; it’s more like a cinematic treatment, when the writer of the screenplay divides the time up into scenes that summarize things so as to take the viewer to the constructed ending. In other words, such treatments set little store by anything but the beginning and the end and ignore the daily life that reinterprets these and gives them meaning. A novel, on the other hand, interprets life itself through the imagination so that the reader may live the relationship between the beginning and the end as a journey, not a fate.
All the same, when the author finds himself caught up in making metaphors, he’s obliged to make use of such shortcuts and finds himself in a situation similar to that of the poets, though minus their greatest stylistic aid, namely music. I have no choice, however. It’s Waddah’s story and can only be written as a poetic story, which is to say as a metaphor. The ending, therefore, has to carry all the possible meanings within it and sum life up within the time spent inside the coffer, which was no more than half an hour.)
Said the chronicler: “The lovers never spoke of that sad night. The queen commanded him to forget. She said forgetfulness was the cure for those who could not control their lives. She said she feared for him and for herself.
“The poet forgot, or resolved to forget, the night, and things went back to the way they had been, or so the lovers tried to convince themselves. Two changes, however, occurred in the outward relationship between them. The first was the appearance in the story of fear. What the queen did not tell her poet was that she’d felt that the caliph had smelled betrayal. The disappearance of Waddah from Yemen and the Hejaz and the chroniclers’ failure to recite any new poems by him may have aroused his suspicions, not to mention the caliph’s insistence on making love to her in the room containing Waddah’s coffer because
it ‘smelled different.’ She seemed frightened all the time. She no longer would burst into laughter, she stopped singing his poems while strumming on the oud, and she drank less wine, out of fear that her husband might suddenly turn up. Henceforth, the only thing she appeared to want from her poet was his body, as though the spirits of dead lovers that had fluttered about the coffer room had abandoned the place, never to return. The second change manifested itself in the poet’s ceasing to write poetry. When she asked him if his demon had abandoned him, he said that the words halted in consternation and became impossible to pronounce when faced with the poem of her body, which had been written by the Creator, Mighty and Sublime. She nodded but didn’t believe him.”
How can love live with fear, and without poetry? Said the chronicler: “Umm al-Banin loved Waddah. She would send for him and he would come to her and stay with her, and when she felt afraid, she would hide him in the coffer and lock him in.
“Al-Walid was presented with a necklace of great worth. It pleased him and he thought it handsome, so he called one of his servants and sent him with it to Umm al-Banin, telling him, ‘Say to her, “This necklace pleased me, so I thought you were the more worthy of it.’” The servant went in to see her unannounced while Waddah was with her, so she put him in the coffer but he saw her do so. He gave her al-Walid’s message and thrust the necklace at her. Then he said, ‘Mistress, give me a gemstone from it!’
“‘I will not, you son of an uncircumcised woman! What would you do with such a thing?’ she said.
“So the servant left, full of ire against her, and went back to al-Walid and informed him. Al-Walid said, ‘You’re a liar!’ and ordered that he be beheaded. Then he put on his slippers and went to see Umm al-Banin, who was sitting in the same room, combing her hair. The servant had described to him the coffer into which she had put the poet so he sat down on it and said to her, ‘Umm al-Banin, did you like the necklace I sent you?’ ‘All these beautiful things,’ she said, ‘are a part of your bounty to me, and so is the necklace, my lord.’