Like the Moon Needs Poetry

The below events occurred in 2009, but Syria is much in my thoughts of late.

I met my friend Lukman in the middle of a traffic roundabout, where we hailed a cab and began the interactive journey to Shawki al-Baghdadi’s apartment. Interactive, because few places have known addresses in Damascus; you go to the neighborhood, then the cabbie coasts along the curb, calling out your destination and gleaning information from passers-by.

Lukman had convinced me to accompany him to a gathering of Syrian literati. The evening’s events had been organized by the septuagenarian poet and literary critic Shawki al-Baghdadi in honor of the late Shakib al-Jabri, Syria’s first novelist. I couldn’t imagine why they would want a Minnesotan who had never read a word by al-Jabri present for this event, but Lukman insisted. “These are Syria’s most eminent intellectuals,” he avowed. “If you want to understand the state of Arabic literature, you must understand these men.”

Lukman, a writer himself whose work I had translated, in fact had a dim view of the state of Arabic literature. He had declaimed his criticisms the night before, brandishing a glass of arak.

“The Arabs don’t produce anything new. They just describe their so-called “situation”. And they’re talented at that, real craftsmen. But they deny their Islamic heritage, which is the language of their people, and they don’t create a new philosophy, a new reality, which is what novels are supposed to do. The Russians, they reinvented the whole world, using the language of their people, and their situation was no easier than ours.”

He paused to light a cigarette, then continued. “The Arabs, once they turn fifty, they just look backward instead of ahead. The past is their raw material and they assume their best work is done. So they just rework it and rework it until they die.”

But Lukman was all sweetness and reverence when we arrived at Shawki’s apartment, located in a modern development on the outskirts of Damascus. Shawki greeted us at the door in a housecoat, his rheumy blue-eyed gaze fixing us in turn as he spewed locutions of welcome. He spirited us directly into his office: ceiling-high shelves of crumbling books and periodicals, collected over a lifetime. Lukman noted that there was no computer. “No, I never use a computer,” Shawki scoffed. “Waste of time. It blocks me! I must connect to the paper.” He handed me a copy of the newly published volume of Shakib al-Jabri’s four novels, whose release we were celebrating, and to which Shawki had written the introduction. I carried it out to the sitting room and began to read, so as to have a notion of the writer to whose home we were headed later that evening.

As the gentlemen arrived, all asked Lukman if I spoke Arabic. When he assured them I did, and even added that I was a translator, most tried out their English phrases on me anyway. But one leaned over with flamboyant discretion, mustache twitching, eyes twinkling behind tortoiseshell glasses, and proclaimed in Arabic:

“Miss, you must know that Lukman is the best of people. I taught him! I have known him 25 years -- 25! -- and haven’t met anyone better. No better poet, no better actor, no better man.”

I nodded and voiced my agreement, shooting Lukman a reproving look. He waved off the teacher with his cat-like smile of smoke-browned teeth. Lukman has a reputation for charming the ladies (although he is married, sort of, to a Latvian woman), whose number our companions assumed with glee I had joined. I hadn't, but Lukman didn’t bother to explain that I was not a conquest; at other times he has insisted that I am like his sister, once even his mother. Despite his griminess, Lukman does cut a dashing figure: shoulder-length black locks that curl (when clean) and a lanky, hulking frame. His sprawling limbs look ready to spring to action at any moment. He plays the bad guys on Syrian soap operas.

At last the company had assembled: a dozen of Syria’s brightest Leftists over 60; Lukman, whose poetic career had earned him entrée despite being a “youth” of 43; and me, 27-year-old woman from Minnesota. A minibus had been hired to take us to al-Zanadi, the mountain village near the Lebanese border where the al-Jabris resided. The gentlemen clambered on, harassing one another and showing remarkable adroitness with the rickety fold-down seats. Everyone insisted that I sit up front with Shawki. Then we whipped west out of town, following signs toward Lebanon, the setting sun shearing through the windshield.

Shawki narrated the passing sites for me: identical villages, yawning army barracks, newly planted trees (part of a Syria-wide reforestation initiative). He spoke in elaborate formal Arabic until he discovered with joy that I spoke French. His filmy eyes wobbled as he dug back into memories of his grade school days under the French Mandate. Each word he spoke emerged as if through sedimented layers of knowledge and ideology, crumbled together like the periodicals in his office. Dust seemed to fall from the words as they hit the air, clouding his vision then dissipating, leaving him lost in mid-sentence, bewildered by the architecture of a language he once spoke well. His face maintained an expression of ecstatic nostalgia as he labored.

The sun set behind the Lebanese mountains just before we arrived. Shawki chastised the group. “If you had come on time, we could have enjoyed the sunset!” We rumbled through the village. Unlike Damascus, no Roman letters anywhere. Veils. Stares. As the bus-o’-literati chugged up the hill, Shawki pointed ahead to our destination -- a stone house nestled in an outcrop over the valley, swaddled in fig trees. We pulled into the driveway and the jolly company issued forth, hastening to explore al-Jabri’s historic home in the fading light.

From the ambient chatter, I gathered that al-Jabri was from Halep, and had acquired this place later in life -- a stone house built inside the ruins of another which had been carved straight out of the rock centuries ago. Fruit trees and vines enshrined the limestone walls, and gave way to pines where the nestled house notched into the red clay hill. We trickled along the open, vaulted windows, tracing the chipped stone with the guilty reverence of one sneaking a touch of an ancient statue in a museum. A dapple of houses began to light up against the bands of green forest and ochre mountains, which were shifting spectrally into browns.

Lukman and I walked farther than the others, and he regaled me with tales of his stint in Russia in the winter of ’92. He had accompanied a group of Syrian refugees seeking amnesty in former Soviet-bloc countries, and after befriending an Iraqi-Kurdish mafiaman (Lukman is Kurdish himself), employed himself smuggling souls through to Sweden at $200 a head. He regretted that he had not yet written a novel about this, but swore he could sit down and do it any time.

Lukman has led a life that justifies novelization. He lives as if he were attempting to singlehandedly create the new philosophy he claims the Arabs lack: befriending and promoting all artists, rich or poor, famous and unknown; writing effusive paeans to Alessandro Messi in his column one day, and tearful eulogies to a dead bird found on his windowsill the next; roving the streets of Damascus day and night, managing to be at once everywhere and nowhere. His resulting notoriety has made him a kind of cultural mayor of Damascus -- universally adored, trusted and consulted. He runs a poetry night once a week in the basement of the Firdaws Hotel, called “Bayt al-Qasid” (meaning both “House of the Poem” and “Verse of the Poem”), which the Secret Police allow under their close supervision. Lukman contents himself with subverting their authority as much as possible without getting arrested. He brings in poets from all over the world to read and recite, all interspersed with his own stand-up routines (hilarious) and Kurdish folk songs (heartbreaking).

Given to inserting lines of poetry in conversation, Lukman observed as we trudged through the red clay and pine needles that “the sound of the wind in the trees was the voice of the sea”. Normally I would dismiss such blatant cheesiness, but everything registers as a kind of poetry when trying to communicate in a foreign language. Deliberately speaking in verse evens the playing field in a way, so I followed Lukman’s lead. The line had reminded me of one from the Magnetic Fields song “Come Back From San Francisco”, so I sang:

You need me, like the wind needs the trees

To blow in, like the moon needs poetry

You need me

I translated the verse for him. Delighted, he made me sing it again, as we made our way back along the darkening path. He murmured the words to himself, pleased at this find -- a new American poet, Stephin Merritt. Lukman always has an ear cocked for novelties he could incorporate into his banter at Bayt al-Qasid. It tickled me to think of Stephin Merritt as a poet rather than a rock musician, but upon second thought, Lukman is probably the closest thing he has to a Syrian counterpart. Being a poet is like being a rock star in the Arab World, if only because there are no actual rock stars.

Our companions had settled in a circle on the patio and begun drinking whiskey, arak and Lebanese beer, nibbling from plates of pumpkin seeds, smoking, and carrying on. Everyone hooted as Lukman and I crossed the ring, confirming their impression of my role. I ended up next to our host, the esteemed Shakib al-Jabri’s son Safwan. Al-Jabri’s heir wore his white hair floppy with a part down the middle, a pale blue suit sans tie and, inexplicably, cleats with orange-and-brown striped socks. He persisted in describing obvious aspects of our surroundings in broken yet confident English, as if my not being a native speaker of Arabic also impaired my senses. I endeavored to disabuse him of this impression, to no avail.

When Shawki al-Baghdadi tried to take the floor to give a speech in the increasingly dark and drunken circle, the unlikelihood that his companions would stay quiet made me squirm. He had chosen to deliver his lecture after a fifteen-minute session of jokes about people from Homs (a city whose citizens are the agreed-upon butt of Syrian jokes), and levity prevailed. Everyone managed to keep quiet for the duration of each joke before breaking into raucous laughter for twice as long in between. After multiple false starts, Shawki resorted to admonishing his juniors once again.

“Listen! I am the oldest of you all, and my relationship with the esteemed Shakib al-Jabri goes back some 50 years. So if you please, let me say my piece, and save your observations for the end.”

He scowled with the ferocity of a toothless grandpa polar bear. The crowd of toothier bear-men grumbled but ceded a very delicate silence, into which Grandpa Baghdadi lumbered. His self-hyped speech amounted to platitudes diced up with a constant tick of “know-what-I-mean?”. Gradually, the men on his left and right, who had edged themselves in on the attention reluctantly bestowed on Shawki’s spot in the circle, forced the speech into a three-way dialogue. They soon veered off the intended track (i.e. expounding upon al-Jabri’s achievements) and hurtled down another, all-too-familiar line of discussion. It began innocently: al-Jabri had possessed a document by Benjamin Franklin, whom the men clearly saw as their equal. But after much building of suspense, they revealed that in this document, Franklin warned that the Jews would take over America. They all clearly viewed this as a fulfilled prophecy. I steeled myself for questions, but a squabble over whose right it had been to say the punchline of the story had engulfed the three narrators and the conversation rattled off, uncurious about what the one American present thought.

Later, at an outdoor dinner table under the fig trees laden with mezze (small salads), cups of rayyan (yogurty milk), and two slaughtered lambs submerged in rice and nuts, our boorish host Safwan took his turn to give a speech. He held his rayyan aloft, and spoke briefly about his deceased father, then about the Left, then Bush Sr., then Jr., then the need for the Arabs to resist Imperialism. He ended abruptly, since his audience had begun discreetly pecking at the spread. They toasted with their rayyan before attacking the meal in earnest. In the midst of the passed plates and hand-torn pieces of lamb, the fellow next to me launched into the Islam-is-a-religion-of-peace lecture, while Safwan tried to have a public word with me from the other end of the table about American foreign policy.

Conversations eventually narrowed to two or three, then to one, then to poetry recitation. Having a store of memorized poetry constitutes a standard expectation for any Arab calling himself an intellectual, and really anyone at all. (Unschooled Bedouins often have the best repertoire.) One member of the party recited a poem by the Medieval writer Abu Nuwwas from the famed Khamariyyat (“odes to wine”). The men’s jocularity melted away, as they murmured “Allah!” after particularly beautiful lines, or insisted that certain passages be repeated. Like taking a cab ride, poetry is an interactive experience in Damascus. Listeners are expected to chime in, request encores, and correct mistakes in declension.

Lukman stole the show with a prose poem of his own, recited in the booming singsong of a sportscaster, which narrated an ill-fated school trip in the northern Syrian countryside. The table exploded in laughter at the story’s bawdy climax (the principal seduces the teacher, leaving the kids to do as they please). Lukman captivated all but Safwan, whose face creased in the effort of bringing the spotlight back to himself.

Instead it fell on me. “Miss Anna, you MUST recite something!” one and then all of my companions urged. “In English or in Arabic, yalla, come on!” I was annoyed with myself for not having memorized any poetry, since these situations do come up. “Shakespeare!” they suggested. I racked my brains for the speech I had memorized in high school. But Lukman had another solution. “Why don’t you recite that beautiful poem by, what’s his name -- Sa-teefeen Meereet?” The literati exchanged glances, unsure whether they should know who Stephin Merritt was. Safwan alone nodded in a vigorous display of recognition. (Yeah, right.) At first I protested. Rock lyrics, for these elderly poets? But as they coaxed and pounded the table, I realized that 69 Love Songs is a kind of modern Khamariyyat. These poets should hear Stephin Merritt! He is someone America can be proud of.

So beneath stars and fig leaves, over platters of fruit from the garden, surrounded by quizzical servants frozen in their tracks, the rapt faces of Syria’s aging intellectuals fixed on a Minnesotan singing an indie rock ballad memorized one lonely winter in college:

Come back from San Francisco

It can’t be all that pretty

And all of New York City

Misses you . . .

You need me

Like the wind needs the trees

To blow in, like the moon needs poetry

You need me

They cocked their heads in concentration, the mention of American cities sending gratified waves of comprehension across their faces. They applauded vigorously, and again after Lukman translated. They all repeated the name of this new American poet, this Stephin Merritt, pleased to be in the know and innocent of the absurdly unlikely chance of their ever coming across him again.

As we drove back east after midnight, the hills barely etched into the blackness, I considered the absurdly unlikely chance of that whole evening. Although simultaneous, my experience of that gathering must have been almost wholly different from that of my companions. Had our worlds really collided? Had I correctly imagined the Arab poets of old welling up in the voices of these wizened repositories? Could they see through the words of my song to the icy highways of Minnesota, feel the angst of a silent pair of teenagers flipping through their CD wallets with frozen fingers and burning dreams? Had we really torn off and passed pieces of ourselves like that lamb across the table, nourishing one another with our own shares of wisdowm? Had we shared something so essential that the particulars were irrelevant? Or were the impressions of each other we would leave with a travesty, a mockery?

Not knowing the answers to these questions but getting to pose them again and again is why I travel, I think. I shifted on the car seat as Shawki dozed off next to me, and resisted the urge to rest his head on my shoulder. Because we don't really need answers. Like the moon, we need poetry.