A poet of a very special style, a poet to the bone. My close friend to my soul and my colleague in journalism at An-Nahar newspaper for more than twenty years. She passed away in the summer of 2014.
I bring it up today with excerpts from a conversation I had with her in Montpellier, southern France, when we were participating in the European Poetry Festival:
Sabah Kharrat Zwain is a poet who started writing in French, published several collections of them, then wrote in Arabic. Or, perhaps.” It was issued to her in Arabic: “As if there is a defect or in a defective place,” “Time is still lost,” “The Leaning House, Time, and Walls.”
Sabah is characterized by privacy and uniqueness in writing, and her concept of writing stems from an insistence on “breaking through” the prevailing to reach an open space to infinity, and at this insistence the poet’s experience emerges and is distinguished, because her texts are inlaid with images and special and strange ideas.
To get to know more about this character and to introduce the “worry poet”, I convey and recall what we talked about years ago:
– How do you come to poetry and where do you classify your poetic presence, especially since you wrote several collections of poetry in French?
As everyone comes, through an urgent feeling of need to write a poem, then poems, then a divan, then printing, then marketing, then start thinking about writing another poem and other poems, then another diwan, then printing, then marketing, and so on.
-Thus only?
Perhaps I should have entered poetry through another door, but I do not know this door. Or rather, I entered poetry through what is called the form, and the form is my obsession. The contents are easy, but the forms are fugitive. Since my first book, I began to worry about “how to write,” and I still ask my writing, how do you want me to write it? i couldn’t. I didn’t arrive. As if I was unable to find the form, as writing was every time as if I had not found it, but the form loomed every time, and I almost perished, but the attempt is also a victory, as searching is like finding. Through this anxiety I entered writing. Writing is just an attempt. Perhaps I entered poetry out of suspicion. I entered through fear. Fear is a lot. salt. He haunts me in almost every poem. I repeat, I am afraid.
The poetess Sabah’s concept of writing stems from her insistence on “breaking through” the mainstream to reach an endlessly open space
-Scared?
-I was always afraid. The word fear is repeated a lot in my Francophone collections.
-Do you distinguish between Sabah the poetess in French and the poetess Sabah in Arabic?
I do not distinguish between Sabah in Arabic and Sabah in the other language. I am one, I am myself, I am my language, I am my writing… The only difference between before and now is that before I almost disappeared into the language of others, so I expelled it from my writing and entered the freedom of my language. I once said that we write so as not to die. As for now, I say that we write in order to delude ourselves that we exist.
Also read: With a “southern” lens, the by-elections have ended to select four new members for the Doctors Syndicate
So, what does writing mean to you, what did it achieve for you and where did it lead you?
It means to me hieroglyphs, symbols, Greek tragedy, and gods in all their contemporary meanings. I will answer your question with poems from my book “Time is Still Wasted”.
Writing means to me: impossible anymore and how the word anymore. The sheet is blank. I want to avoid what has been committed so far. How to avoid times, how to enter. Afraid of nudity, and there is fear of my limits. In nudity I approach the last word. and the comma. I am out of possibility.
Writing Made Me: Back to Signals and Scarves.
Writing brought me to: the place of survival, the place of death.
There is sparkling anxiety in your answer. What are the sources of your anxiety?
My concern, I think, is desire. The desire to write, the desire to cancel it, the desire to reach it, the desire not to reach it, the desire to continue, the desire to see the hidden form, the desire to eliminate it, the desire to survive, and the illusion of desire.
The poetess Sabah: The relationship of my poetry to place is like the relationship to time. There is no place without its connection to time
– This crowded anxiety – so to speak – generates more anxiety, how do you face this feeling?
I always dreamed of immortalizing a few hundred years (only), as it was difficult for my imagination to go beyond that. Desire for desire. I often thought of the futility of everything we do, because nothing will remain, there will be no history and there will be no geography, everything will be as if it never was. But I was always ashamed of myself because of my thinking, and I felt the need to give up this absurd desire, until I once read one of Sartre’s books where anxiety itself disturbs me, so I reassured myself and made sure of myself and made sure that I was very normal, like him, and my desire was also the desire of others. I was relieved and congratulated. stability in one language.
- You do not distinguish between Sabah in Arabic and Sabah in other languages, why did you translate your French works into Arabic?
– I decided to transfer my first four collections to Arabic, which was originally written in French, due to my deep desire to “be” within my original and natural language and not a marginal part of a language coming from books, this is on the one hand. On the other hand, the intent of translation, which is my translation, or translation, is an attempt by me to gather myself, that is, to gather my language, in order to settle in one place, the place of language. The main goal, then, is to cancel what I did in the French language because I was not convinced of my existence outside my language. In any case, the translation process took place within one scope only, which is the scope of linguistic identity only, as the spirit has not changed. That is, if I had written these four collections in Arabic from the beginning, they would have definitely come as they are now, in their current form. My relationship with writing is this: this is how it was and is still this way, and my poem continues and continues from my first book until today, so I consider these collections as if they were originally written in Arabic. Time makes the place.
-Does the place influence your life, and how does your hair relate to the place?
The relationship of my poetry to place is like the relationship to time. There is no place without its association with time, provided that time is a special, distinct, hurtful, deep, sad, and deadly time.
