Lethargic Dreams

He put down in a land storytellers speak of, A slothful tavern, legends, prayers, The feeble shade of listlessly murmuring palm trees,

A humid backwash that numbs all feeling...

THIS KIND OF Lotus-eaters imagery deludes many Westerners into viewing the East as lush, exotic, and unique. On the ferry from Algeciras to Tangier it's easy to become engrossed admiring the approaching scenery and to ignore one's fellow passengers--dispirited, unromantic, impoverished North African laborers. It's tempting to affect an eighteenth-century gentleman merchant's self-esteem when brought mint tea and invited to inspect carpets and bolts of silk in a Moroccan bazaar. But the rotting garbage in the streets is probably more typical of the real East. And to queries about the nature of those mysterious blue crystals in the burlap sack, the reply, translated, will be: "Detergent."

Mounah A. Khouri and Hamid Algar have compiled a bilingual Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry that transcends such simplistic, patronizing views of the East. The book is a collection of free verse written both in response to and outside the mainstream of modern Western literature, and the poems avoid the formal abstraction of neo-classical Arabic poetry while retaining its rich imagery. In general, they reflect the Western view that literature should reflect an artist's subjective response to the world about him rather than just a superficial description.

The outstanding characteristic of this poetry is its universality: the poets address broad philosophical, emotional, and social concerns. Their Arabic heritage obviously has shaped their perception, yet the difference in perspective does not detract from, and in fact enhances the Western reader's experience.

Much of the most powerful work deals with war. There is a remarkable similarity in spirit between several of the poems collected here and the poems written by European poets during the First World War. "My Brother" is often reminiscent of Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est:" "...the enemy have not left us any seedling on our lands/Other than the corpses of our dead." Another poem, "In the Valley of the Shadow of Death," evokes the horrors of war indirectly, suggesting that peace is too often taken for granted:

We have fed long on life, sung long on youth, And now with night go barefooted over the rocky path and bleed.

We are satiated with dust, our thirst quenched with tears,

Left and right we have scattered dreams, love, pain and sorrow.

The poems in the book confirm the popularized notions of Islamic fatalism. "The fates have ways unaltering, and men's aims are beyond their impotent reach," writes Gibran. Mikhail Nuaymah declares: "Fate is my ally and destiny my travelling mate." Shukri takes resignation furthest: "Life is but a continual dying/Goodness and pleasures are but borrowed."

Such pessimism would lose its shock value through sheer repitition were it not for the relief afforded by glittering and--to Western readers--unusual cantos like "The King in the Air," a poem somewhat closer to the vivid but unemotional imagery of the neo-classical tradition.

Dusk cloaks him, its bright stars diffusing essence of camphor above amber-perfumed night.

He is a king flying without wings, ruling by the power of imagination and renown...

O wings of imagination, mightiest of wings, against whom the winds break their back.

The move from the past to an even less promising future is portrayed in harsh, space language. The "Village Market" with its "sun, emaciated donkeys, flies...' is replaced in a "False Step" by the alienation of the city. "Here there is nothing I know/And nothing that knows me," says the recent urban immigrant arriving in weather as bitter as his mood. This theme of inexorable dislocation runs through a number of the poems. In "Flower Seller" Najafi realizes that"...the farthest limit of my voyage I reach after passing beyond all bounds." An artist recognizes a similar dilemma in "The Birth of the Poet:' "I have left all behind, living alone in a fullness of dreams."

OF THE AUTHORS represented the work of Nizar Qabbani is the most memorable. Qabbani, while writing about people and places far from the West, succeeds in bring the reader close to an understanding of his literary environment. Rejecting the narcotic apathy in the midst of progress that he considers the downfall of "Our defeated generation...," Qabbani appeals to the young to ignore their parents' example "For we have failed/Are worthless and banal as a melon rind."

In "Bread, Hashish and Moonlight" Qabbani attacks the fatalistic attitude reflected in the other poems. He dispels as an illusion the belief the fulfillment in death can substitute for fulfillment in life. As a result he is forced to dismiss his countrymen bitterly and absolutely:

They console themselves with an opium we call fate

And destiny

In my land, the land of the simple...

Where we slowly chew on our unending songs--

A form of consumption destroying the east--

Our east chewing on its history,

Its lethargic dreams,

Its empty legends...