http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/07/09/police.procedure.cnna/index.html?related

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An Arab Poet Who Dares to Differ

July 13, 2002
By ADAM SHATZ






BERLIN - "If I had to choose one word to describe myself,
it would be peasant," the poet known as Adonis said
recently in his cozy office at the Institute for Advanced
Studies here.

It is an uncharacteristic note of humility, coming from a
man who renamed himself after the Greek fertility god and
who is widely considered the Arab world's greatest living
poet. Adonis (pronounced AH-doh-nees) was born Ali Ahmad
Said to farmers who raised him in a Syrian village without
electricity. But the only patch of land this urbane,
irreverent man has cultivated is the garden of language.

Wearing a tweed jacket and a button-down blue shirt,
Adonis, 72, has a wild shock of hair, a grizzled face,
clever eyes that always seem to be reaching for their
target, and the light step of someone who has been on the
move for nearly a half century. Small and excitable, he can
shift in a moment from literary theory to literary gossip.

Some Arab poets are more popular than Adonis - Mahmoud
Darwish, the Palestinian poet, for instance - but none are
more admired. A pioneer of the prose poem, he has played a
role in Arab modernism comparable to T. S. Eliot's in
English-language poetry. The literary and cultural critic
Edward Said calls him "today's most daring and provocative
Arab poet." The poet Samuel Hazo, who translated Adonis's
collection "The Pages of Day and Night," said, "There is
Arabic poetry before Adonis, and there is Arabic poetry
after Adonis."

Experimental in style and prophetic in tone, Adonis's
poetry combines the formal innovations of modernism with
the mystical imagery of classical Arabic poetry. He has
evoked the anguish of exile, the spiritual desolation of
the Arab world, the intoxicating experiences of madness and
erotic bliss, the existential dance of self and the other.
But what defines his work, above all, is the force of
creative destruction, which burns through everything he
writes. "We will die if we do not create gods/We will die
if we do not kill them," he once wrote, echoing his
favorite poet, Nietzsche.

Poetry, he said, is "a question that begets another
question" - a deeply subversive stance in a region in which
poets are often expected to take stands and provide
answers. Why is there so much didactic poetry in Arabic?
Speaking in French, Adonis gets straight to the point:
"It's a tradition, beginning with Islam, which introduced
the ideological use of poetry to the world long before
Communism. There's a line that runs from Islam to the
caliphs to the parties of right and left." Thanks to the
difficulty of his work, and his often vehement critiques of
Arab society, Adonis is more respected than loved by Arab
readers.

Adonis, for his part, appears to relish his contrarian
reputation, sneering at "the public" as "an ideological
notion" and trying to please it "a sign of decadence for a
true work of art." Asked about the Egyptian novelist Naguib
Mahfouz, who is said to have been chosen over him for the
Nobel Prize in 1988, he said, "Mahfouz is more of a symbol
than a great writer."

As for his rival Arab poets, they are "continuing the
tradition with a few variations, whereas I am the rupture
with the past, I am the one who is revolutionizing the
order of things, and that is ultimately what matters."

Adonis, who lives in Paris, is spending the year in Berlin,
where he hopes to finish the fourth volume of "Al-Kitab"
("The Book"), a Dantesque journey into what he calls "the
inferno of Arab history," beginning with the death of the
Prophet Muhammad and concluding with the fall of Baghdad to
the Mongols in 1258. As a member of the Alawites, a Shiite
minority in Syria, Adonis has always had an acute sense of
being an outsider, and "Al-Kitab" offers a radically
heretical view of Arab history, as seen by its many
dissidents.

"I am among those who seek the ills of the Arabs in their
own history, not outside of it," he said. An outspoken
champion of secular democracy and a ferocious critic of
organized religion, Adonis has published many studies of
Arab culture and history, notably the book "The Changing
and the Fixed: A Study of Conformity and Originality in
Arab Culture." In that volume, banned in certain Arab
countries as heresy, Adonis accused Islam's clerics of
perpetuating what he calls past-ism - a stubborn tendency
to cling to what is known and to fear the new. According to
Adonis, even apparently secular forms of politics in the
Arab world, notably Arab nationalism and Marxism, are
religious in structure, presenting themselves as
revelations - absolute truths that confirm received wisdom
instead of fostering debate.

"We live in a culture that doesn't leave a space for
questions," he said, puffing on a cigarillo. "It knows all
the answers in advance. Even God has nothing left to say!"
He let out a high-pitched giggle, as he often does after
saying something particularly ominous or apocalyptic. What
the Arab world needs, more than anything, he said, is a
"revolution of subjectivity" that would emancipate people
from tradition. Until this inner revolution occurs, he
warned, Arabs would know only a secondhand modernity, a
dangerous brew of hollow consumerism, rigged elections and
radical Islam. "There is no more culture in the Arab
world," he said. "It's finished. Culturally speaking, we
are a part of Western culture, but only as consumers, not
as creators."

To American readers of Fouad Ajami and V. S. Naipaul,
Adonis's criticisms of Arab society may have a familiar
ring. But what sets him apart from these men is that he
writes in Arabic for an Arab audience, and that he is
equally critical of the West, particularly the United
States. "What strikes me about the States," he said,
widening his arms as if he were conducting the Berlin
Philharmonic, "is the richness of American society on the
one hand and, on the other" - he brought his hands together
as if he were measuring a grain of sand - "the smallness of
its foreign policy."

Since Sept. 11, some readers have turned to Adonis's
chilling 1971 poem, "The Funeral of New York," a vision of
the city in flames that has a strong claim to being "The
Waste Land" of our time. In the poem, a nameless narrator
wanders through the Financial District and Harlem, looking
in vain for Walt Whitman's ghost and angrily imagining "an
eastern wind" uprooting skyscrapers, "a cloud necklaced
with fire" and "people melting like tears."

"New York, to me, is both heaven and hell," he explained,
adding, "When I read this poem today, it frightens me."

The eldest of six children, Adonis was born in 1930 in
Qassabin, on the coast near Latakia. Although his father
could not afford to send him to school, he taught his son
to read poetry and the Koran. According to a well-known
story, when Shukri al-Kuwatli, the first president of the
newly independent republic, visited nearby Jableh, the
14-year-old Adonis insisted on reading a poem he had
written for the occasion. The president was dazzled by the
boy's gifts. "Tell me, what do you want?" he asked him. "I
want to go to school," Adonis replied.

Within a week, the president had arranged for Adonis to
attend a French-run high school. From there he went on to
the University of Damascus, where he studied German
philosophy and discovered Rimbaud and Baudelaire. At 19 he
changed his name to Adonis because he couldn't get poems
published under his own name. "I am a pagan prophet," he
often says, a self-description that, like his name, is the
subject of many jokes among his Arab peers.

In 1956, after spending a year in prison for antigovernment
activities, Adonis fled to Beirut, then a vibrant,
cosmopolitan haven for Arab poets, exiles and rebels. With
his friend Yusuf al-Khal, a Lebanese poet, he edited the
seminal journal Shir (Poetry), a forum for experimental
Arabic poetry as well as European verse in translation.

"All the poetry in the Arab world in this period was either
traditionalist or nationalist," Adonis recalled. "What we
were trying to achieve was a rediscovery of the self,
against the tribe, against the umma, against all these
ideological forms of culture. And though we were often
boycotted and accused of Americanism and other sins,
everyone acknowledges today that all that is true and real
in Arab poetry comes from Shir."

In 1968, Adonis created another influential journal,
Mawaqif (Positions), which enlarged the focus of Shir by
addressing the politics - and the illusions - of Arab
nations after their defeat by Israel in 1967. When the
Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt was at his
apogee, Mawaqif devoted a special issue to skewering the
ideology of pan-Arabism. The next issue took on an even
more sacred cow, the Palestinian movement. "Our project was
to put into question an entire culture and history, not
just poetry," he said, "in order to renew Arab thought."

Adonis said he would have been happy to stay in Beirut, but
the civil war there made that impossible. During the 1982
Israeli invasion of Lebanon, his bedroom was bombed while
he sat with his wife, Khalida, in the living room. A year
later he settled in Paris, choosing, as he puts it, the
"hell of exile" over "the hell of daily life" in the Arab
countries. Hell may seem a strong word to describe the life
of a middle-class literature professor at the College de
France, but the earthly comforts of life in exile, he said,
come with a painful sense of solitude, as well as the
ever-present menace of the fatwas issued against him.

"We are all seen as renegades and anti-Muslims, and we're
all on hit lists," he said, referring to secular Arab
intellectuals. Meanwhile, he said, fundamentalism is
nourished by the Israeli military campaign in the West
Bank. "We are caught," he said, "between fundamentalism and
the silence of our Jewish intellectual friends."

"The Palestinian problem," he continued, lowering his voice
for emphasis, "goes beyond politics. It is an ethical
problem, and ethics is never on the side of power. Jews and
Palestinians must live together, whether it's in two states
or in a federation." He paused, sipping from a glass of red
wine. "Religion has ceased to be a culture and become a
mythology, for Islam as well as Judaism. These are people
who do not recognize, or reflect the other, in their
language, people completely closed in on themselves.
Everyone pretends that God told them his last words." He
laughed heartily, but he did not look happy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/13/arts/12ADON.html?ex27605634&ei=1&
en