A Word from the Poet
A poetic experience between the classical and the vernacular
In the age of advanced technology and massive communication tools, modern media can create poets, promote them, and help them achieve temporary notoriety, without them necessarily possessing any talent. However, talent is a fundamental part of the art of poetry, and without it, poetry is not poetry. This divine gift is bestowed by God upon whomever He wishes, and He distributes it to some of His creation in varying degrees and amounts.
Moreover, no good seed can flourish, grow, give back and achieve renown without being planted in a fertile land that embraces it or without being surrounded by a suitable atmosphere. In that ideal environment it is tended to by safe and careful hands that guarantee its continuous irrigation and care for it until it grows and bear’s fruit. Thus, poetry needs diligent formation and establishment, and a climate conducive to blooming and prosperity. It is from this climate that poets draw inspiration from and get their motivation to create and to unleash creativity.
However, it is not possible to articulate the nature of this talent from the beginning, for it is like a latent secret that requires the effort of exploring and revealing to finds its way to the light through the owner’s own intuition or through the opinion of experts around the poet. Those mentors must support the poet to stand independently and to take the first steps towards this rewarding artistic path. Furthermore, it is natural for weak talents to fade away in an atmosphere that lacks care or is riddled with obstacles and frustration. In those circumstances, only strong or extraordinary talents survive.
Today, I can identify some of those milestones that I have experienced in my life, which had a profound impact on the path of my beautiful journey with this great artform. These are the milestones that I have lived through while unaware of what they were or what they meant to me or to my relationship with poetry. Now, whenever I go back and examine those memories, I find precious details lingering brightly in my mind, each shedding light on fragments of my poetic journey. Thus, there is nothing more valuable to a poet, or perhaps to any creator, than the well of their memories. It pours out the most emotional experiences to stimulate creativity and to provide the artists with scenes, live scenes, visions, faces, places, and more.
I have been writing poetry for more than sixty years. I published my first attempt in Beirut in 1963, and I published my first poetry collection The Masts Whine (أنين الصواري) in 1969, bringing the total number of my publications to seven collections, including two vernacular collections.
In this lifelong poetic journey, I have written poems in both classical Arabic and in Vernacular Bahraini Arabic. During this journey, I was subjected to harsh criticsim from my fellow Bahraini intellectuals, who deplored my shift to vernacular Arabic after I published a collection of poetry in classical Arabic at that time. I forgave them all because they did not know that I had been combining both classical and vernacular writing from the start. The fundamental questions posed by my colleagues at that time were: How does an educated poet write poetry in a vernacular language? In an Arab country where there are many dialects and where the mother tongue is exposed to challenges, why does this poet write his poetry in vernacular language when he is able to express himself in classical Arabic? Those were critical times where the writer’s commitment to his people, and his role in society, were heavily discussed.
Thus, these questions tormented me at first, as I saw the widespread acceptance of the poems included in the Palm’s Thirst ( (عطش النخيل collection in 1970, and the eagerness of the Bahraini and Gulf audiences to receive more collections similar. But when I took some time to reflect, I put people’s approval aside and asked those questions they posed to myself once again. I discovered that I had no hand in choosing the language of writing and that, in all honesty, I could only respond to what I felt and in the form that that feeling chooses.
I said at the beginning of the seventies, when Palm’s Thirst (عطش النخيل) was published, that writing poetry in the vernacular dialect is a temporary form of writing, and that this poetry has no future because the dialect is in constant daily development due to the development of society and the spread of education. I also predicted the gap between classical and vernacular would narrow so that the vernacular would gradually rise to be quite similar to classical Arabic. This vision was clear to me, and now it is beautifully realized, after fifty years, by the new vernacular poets in the Sultanate of Oman and in some of what is produced by a few poets from other Gulf countries. The language in which they write is not the vernacular language in which my poems were written in in the early seventies, which was of course not the dialect of the street, but rather an extension of that filtered dialect that folk poetry has brought to us in its finest and most emotional texts. I still write poems in the vernacular, but my new classical writing has overshadowed my vernacular production in recent years, and what I write in the vernacular now has no strong connection to what I wrote fifty years ago, for example. In these texts, there is a difference in how I treat words, how I draw pictures and how I formulate the expression and more. Even the Arabic dialects are no longer a barrier in an Arab world rich with diverse dialects at a time when the whole world has become just a small village.
How and why do I combine classical and vernacular poetry in writing my poems?
I would like to honestly admit that this is completely beyond my control, and from actual experience I do not have a choice in the language of the poem, but rather it chooses itself when I write. This perspective is lost among the general collection of intellectuals and even from some experienced poetry critics, due to their distance from understanding the very nature of the poetic experience itself. They also struggle to realize their distance from understanding what is written in the vernacular language, either out of puritanism or submission to the prevailing preconceived position towards the popular poetry movement since its inception. I do not say this in defense of vernacular Arabic or in favor of it. Standard Arabic is the mother language, and the vernacular i.e., colloquial Arabic, is only a small branch of its many branches that must not be denied or disowned. I am only speaking about my own life experiences, and the circumstances of my upbringing and initial cultural formation.
My cultural foundation, which is the toolbox of my poetic experiences, has passed through different life stages, each stage engraved in my memory, and each led me to the other. What is vital to mention are the two most important stages that came at the beginning of my life as a child under six years old. These first two are intertwined, and I find that I do not know now which one comes before the other. It is as if, while I was in them, I had put a foot here and a foot there at the same time. They are the classical and the vernacular stages. I grew up in a house that was fond of narrating and repeating folk poems day in and day out on occasion and without occasion. My family recited fragments of poems, fragments of verses and texts of popular songs. We also proudly competed to see who could memorize the most by heart. At night, my little imagination was filled with folk tales, legends, and the sorrows of women. I was completely breastfed folk poetry with the first drop from the breast of that simple mother, who was for me, until the last hour of her life, an inexhaustible archive of folk material.
She was the one who insisted, when I was six, that I learn the principles of reading by taking Quran lessons with the neighborhood kids and to continue with it until I could memorize the entire Holy Qur’an. Here was my other stop, and it was my first encounter with Classical Arabic in its finest, richest, most eloquent, and miraculous form containing its noblest meanings and. Surat Maryam and Surah Ar-Rahman, dazzled me with their eloquence, consistency of timbre, elegance of rhythm, and miraculous meanings. I still memorize them by heart as I received them from that source. However, I did not realize at the time what it meant for me to memorize and repeat the verses of the Holy Qur’an at the hands of a woman who was a keen teacher, who did not accept any lapses in pronunciation or any slurred speech. Only now do I realize the value of that first foundation and that blessing that I received early, which helped me greatly in the art of writing poetry, reciting it and in learning the Arabic language in school. It also helped me with my reading and knowledge later.
Through my independent reading, I delved deeper into the world of folk poetry. The fragmentary texts of folk poetry I took in afterwards incited my hunger to read more, so I became passionate about searching for the origins of those poems learning about the great narrators. This led me to read the poetry collections of Abdullah Al-Faraj, Muhammad bin Laboun, Mohsen Al-Hazzani, Fahad Bouresli, Muhammad Al-Faihani, and whatever Nabataean poetry I could find at the time by major poets. Moreover, my passion for these texts led me to collect and write down fragments of folk literature in the region in general. My interest led me to widen my scope of research to include the arena of ancient and modern Iraqi poetry, so I read Ibn al-Khalafa, Aboud al-Karkhi, Abu Dhari, Abu Sarhan, Muthaffar al-Nawab, and all the modern vernacular Iraqi poetry that came into my hands. My aim was get to know the Najdi style of writing and the visual style of folk poetry with all their characteristics.
Many people wonder how it is possible to combine writing poetry in classical Arabic and vernacular language at the same time? What state is the poet in when he chooses the language of the poem? Why can’t a classical poet be creative in vernacular language, or vice versa, when he is fluent in classical Arabic? Why doesn’t a poet like Al-Abnoudi write in classical Arabic, even though he is famous for his vernacular language? Why does the Iraqi poet Muthaffar al-Nawab write in classical Arabic and also write in vernacular language? These are questions that I have always faced during my poetry career.
The matter is that after I pondered carefully and experimented practically, I found that writing poetry in classical Arabic is an independent, stand-alone talent, and writing poetry in vernacular Arabic is also an independent, stand-alone talent, and likewise the art of reciting poetry is another independent talent from the previous two talents, as evidenced by the fact that there are those who have the talent of the art of reciting poetry and not writing it. Thus, there are some glorious poets who fail when reading their poems. God gives humans as many blessings as He wants. There is no doubt that each of those talents have their own unique form and distinct heritage that is also linked with the other. Thus, while I faced criticism from the literary scene in Bahrain by responding to what was going on inside me, I let every talent I had to express itself in vernacular or classical language fully and exhaust its stored energy until it was exhausted or died.
There is no doubt that every talent has its own techniques, and there are those who mistakenly believe, who did not understand the nature of my poetic experience and were not familiar with the nature of vernacular poetry, that my poetic experience was split in two. They also believed that my experience in classical Arabic would lead me to a dead end, as if the poetic experience was a plank of wood under a saw. None of them knew that I had written in the classical and vernacular varieties of Arabic from the beginning and that, thanks to God, I possessed two poetic talents.
Ali Abdulla Khalifa
