Habibi: A Moroccan Poet Sings to His Love
Habibi: The Diwan of Alim Maghrebi is a new book of poems by Canadian poet-essayist and frequent PJ Media contributor David Solway. It belongs to his acclaimed series of “translations” of imaginary foreign poets. In this case the ostensible poet, Alim Maghrebi, is a Moroccan who, as Solway tells us in his ostensible introduction, belongs to the (actually existing) school of “new Arab poetry” — “a poetic alloy…of ancestral themes and preoccupations modulated in the language of the street, the newspaper, movies, technology and the Internet.”
Moreover, the introduction tells us, Maghrebi alludes pervasively to the (historical) Meccan poet Umar ibn Abi Rabi’a (644-721), “who was famed for his lyrics lamenting the melancholy transience of love….” Habibi is, indeed, an extended paean and plaint to Maghrebi’s habibi (loved one)—a nameless young Moroccan woman who consumes his days with passions, exaltations, fears, and mortifications.
Habibi is also, simply, a delight from start to finish. Readers who may be chary of today’s often demanding poetry will find this book to be written in a simple and direct, yet poignant and musical language that rises and falls with Maghrebi’s mercurial responses to his fickle, often evasive lover.
When things are going well, the habibi is
…the palm, the date, the sun,
an oasis in the heart of the desert
and also the desert itself
whose dunes undulate in my heart
where no oasis is
She is “…unlikely and consoling/ as peace descending on the Middle East/ or rain upon the arid heart of Marrakech,” and she “…came into my life/ in a flowing garment of laughter,/ redolent of baclava drenched in honey,…”
She offers, too, erotic repletion:
And the tip of my tongue tingles
to taste once again
the subtlety of mint
that flavours your tumbler
of Moroccan tea….
My senses live in you
like contented citizens,…
assured of employment,…
happy in the homeland of their love.
Not for Maghrebi the Koranic heaven with its “shy virgins” and “rivers…rippl[ing] with wine and honey”:
When I set forth in the morning
to jog in the park
I think of you in your designer shorts,
your tank-top t-shirt
and your Nike running shoes…
you who are neither virgin nor bashful
though your eyes are dark and limned with kohl;…
But all that is only one side of this romance; being besotted with this habibi also means suffering from anxiety, jealousy, and desolation. Maghrebi goes so far as to order her a chastity belt from Saudi Arabia — “highly recommended,” no less, by “my friend Prince Bandar.” Yet, all the same, he finds himself accompanying her to a flying-carpet terminal from which she “ascend[s] into the wind” on a finely woven Persian conveyance, on her way to a (presumed) unknown lover.
This sounds like an extraordinary collection from a major PJM writer. Thank you, David, for your beautiful work and your insights into the human condition.
Yes, how true, and I hope we’ll hear from some other poetry lovers out there. Presumably there are some out there.
I love the idea of the deliberate ‘counterfeit’. The translation from non existent originals in this case. Herman Hesse’s Novel Steppenwoulf is purported to be a transcription of the journal of a mysterious middle age lodger. The technique frees the writer to assume an otherwise too imaginary too distant character. I prefer this use of deceptiveness to postmodern deceptiveness because it openly embraces the dark side of our nature and does not pretend to moral superiority.
In this case the imagined figure is a Moroccan poet, and the imaginer is a Canadian Jew. It sounds like it must be a very rich interplay.
The word everyone is looking for is “Heteronym”…the writer’s creation of imaginary characters to serve as pseudoynms. David Solway should have a dozen before he’s done. The Twelve–marching from St. Petersburg (or was it Moscow) to Jerusalem–to announce the arrival of a new spiritual/intellectual age. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronym_(literature)