The Palestinian poet cannot celebrate language except as a ritual, not only for purification, but also to restore the absent, and awareness of his presence, even if it is a “mischievous awareness” or cruel, as the game of blogging/writing turns into an intimate desire to undermine what the absence creates, and to intentionally touch. To the illusions of that existence, through restoring meaning and being filled with it, or through revealing the defects of the exiled and expelled body, or through what it suffers from an anxious stay in the emergency place, as well as through what appears from the question of being obsessed with fear, where the poem is a major metaphor for practicing the act of restoration, Just as it is the probe and guide for knowledge and concealment, or it is the mythological stick of insight, as it means employing that wretched awareness, or anxiety, in the game of statement, in representing a speech of protest, or in denying absence and emptiness, or perhaps in restoring history that is always threatened with erasure.
In his book of poetry, “Strangers in Light Coats,” published by “Crossroads” (Casablanca/2021), Ghassan Zaqtan takes us through distinct titles and intense poems, to worlds full of his questions. Through them, he seeks out the concerns of the Palestinian haunted by the opposites of the duality of life and death, so the idea of “the road” is present. As a search for existence, or an acquaintance with what is happening, or with the loss and absence he suffers from, the poem appears as if it were a text parallel to life, clear, but full of deep voices, drawing on its metaphors to create the illusion of restoring the absent person, as the counterpart to restoring the “homeland,” in addition to being exposed. On the details that are crowded with pain, waiting, fear, and death, as the poet creates, through his representation of the glowing prose language, images that expand those metaphors that are inseparable from life itself, nor from a memory that is full of the lives of the dead, migrations, and the souls of those stuck in the dystopia of places:
They were not lacking in courage or fun.
Those boys who raised their hands burned with gunpowder,
And their bloody shirts on that October dawn.
Zaqtan’s writing tends toward something reminiscent, as the poem recalls the faces of the absent, haunted by the dream, who carry with them the memory of cities exposed to war, laughter, and dreaming. The poet finds in that tendency a kind of passion for the magic of restoration, and I believe that his poem dedicated to Amjad Nasser, “I Stand By Your Side.” It reveals that magic that is the opposite of absence. We find in the game of restoration a loud denudation of death, as a horrific kidnapping, not only of the friendly being, but also of existence and the details full of secrets and diaries, the signs of which the Palestinian has no choice but to restore that remind him of the life stabbed by absence.
I stand by your side and you don’t see me,
But you remember our fights over the jealous girls that bitten our dreams.
The theme of remembrance reveals the passion for that life, by suggesting the symbolism of presence, as standing is an encoding of that presence, in contrast to the absence suggested by the actual negative sentence, “And you do not see me,” which the poet makes his psychological metaphor to imagine the metaphor of satisfaction by summoning the absent, and by transforming this summoning into… It’s like digging into details whose presence can undermine that absence.
Perhaps the poem “Hope with its Grassy Heart,” which the poet chose for the back cover of his poetry book, suggests, and perhaps sums up, the poet’s presence in language, so the poet makes it his threshold or transcendent platform, which incites re-reading, as if it were the public incitement to cling to life, as the poet’s desire seems open. On intellectual, formal, and retrospective preoccupations that provoke him to approach things in which the connotations of his presence are concentrated in hidden places, or in stories that expand to recall absent people, or to the metaphors of “passing poems,” which the title “Hope and the Grassy Heart” gives them a kind of sensitivity that turns their presence into an oppositional stubbornness to survival in the face of what absence imposes. Of loss, erasure, or death.
I write things that my friends don’t like,
Footnotes that my neighbors, who are robbed of life every day, do not notice.
Discreet texts that my colleagues in the café do not pay attention to,
Poems that no one likes,
Busy with absence and missing,
I write elegies for love and old names,
Hiding behind metaphors that do not convey pathos,
only hope,
Hope alone,
With his grassy heart,
Lonely and stubborn, he pushes her toward the light.
The uniqueness of Ghassan Zaqtan’s writing is revealed through what takes up his anxious vision, tinged with the caution of one searching for himself. He finds in recording this anxiety a scandalous revelation of the lineage of the legendary Palestinian, the immigrant, the exile, and the murdered, in a way that makes his writing a testimony to his existence, and in a way that makes him draw in metaphors and masks in order to fabricate To remain/stay a symbolic presence through his personal poem, that poem that distances itself far from the fires of repetition. The biography of the Palestinian – as we are accustomed to – is only present as a biography of the absent person, far from the illusions of the poetic crowd, standing under the banner of the “issue” that tempted writing about it as a bet on Being close to it, or at a distance from it, to the point that some of them seemed to mislead existence, by repeating the function of the singer stuck in the throat of time and history, and this is what makes Ghassan’s passion for uniqueness not far from his “miserable consciousness.” The hidden consciousness is like a bleeding wound that resists healing, but it declares the pain and bleeding, as if it were a counterpart to the pain of anxiety and alienation, just as it declares the difference, as its poetic right, not to depart repulsively from the “biography” and the “lineage”, but to “privatize” the awareness of this biography and its lineage. Through his personal ritual, he creates a ritual of celebrating his presence in the face of what the “narratives of his absence” are going through in place and identity. He writes with a high metaphor about “strangers in light coats” as one of them, and he writes about “bags forgotten in the night” as if he were borrowing the stick of the poetic wanderer who was exhausted by exile. He began to search for his clarity during the night of estrangement, and he wrote about others and cities as if through them he was writing about his personal biography, as the visionary poet, the revealer and knowledgeable of the secrets and traces of the passing and the absent.
What the poet said…what the stranger spoke
In his poetic book “Speak, O Stranger, Speak,” published by Mediterranean Publications/Italy 2019, Ghassan Zaqtan borrows the mask of the stranger, to point out the absent person, write down his biography, biased toward representing his salvation, and celebrating his lost freedom, and the lust for “conversation” that makes the stranger his companion, and an obsession with the awareness of his existence. And an incentive to confront the memory of the commandments, as his freedom is his greatest metaphor, and it is his passion for writing the different, and for revealing the hidden. The stranger that resembles him is himself the being rebellious against his existence and exile, just as the poem is that absorbs him in the breadth of what the ego sees, and in the breadth of “the text.” “The Open” which makes him free, but not to be liberated from the memory of singing, but to give the poem “the breadth of experience” that gives the poet his uniqueness, not to break free from “the cloak of Mahmoud Darwish,” but rather for that experience to become an awareness of transcendence, and the energy to create what resembles the “miracle of the poem.” Which is represented by the echoes of alienation, and the echoes of the anxious self, haunted by the daily, the subjective, and the unfamiliar, and perhaps open to what the memory bleeds as it watches what the cruelty of absence does, and what suffers from the bleeding self in narrow places, but it is motivated stubbornly, to leap with its metaphors and metaphors to a horizon in which the strange is He is his most daring witness, and he carries his wits about searching for the absent.
Stay a little longer, stranger.
I won’t ask you about your name or your destination,
Just sit under the candle light
That I lit for you.
Don’t remember what shape you were in,
And talk, talk, stranger,
Speak to find my voice
Which the wind carried the sand…
The poet and the technique of brevity
The poetic intensity in Zaqtan’s experience is not limited to the mastery of brevity, nor the vitality of the short sentence, but rather reveals the poet’s obsession with heterogeneity, which makes this duality a passion for transcending the prevailing, and writing a poem that is crowded with signs and sounds that awaken the hidden, thus summoning for it the codes of the mystical, the everyday, the mythological, and the narrative, as if Through composition, he creates what justifies his passion for the ritual that celebrates life through what the stranger creates in his biography and wanderings.
I saw many eyes,
industrialist,
I stole her fear, her pain and her sorrows,
I sold it to strangers who came to watch.
These actual poetic sentences are filled with suggestions to evoke self-pain, and concerns of alienation and anxiety, which place the poet in the face of symbolic predicates of what his existential pain carries, where there is harsh absence and tragic presence, where there are contradictions that rob him, and where “harsh awareness” is a representation of the question of the Palestinian who inhabits language as magic. For purification, and a country of metaphors, where the poet is a researcher, obsessed with the horror of this question, and listening to its hidden signs, those signs that summarize his psychological time, or his biography that is open to the tragedy of absence.
For the poet, language is the equivalent of his strange presence, and perhaps the equivalent of his absence, so the poem is full of his loud voices, its intense sentences are poignant and provocative, revealing the hidden contradictions, and the lust for survival, as he intends, through his “personal poem,” to create awareness of the concept of presence in its philosophical sense, or even In its Sufi sense, by describing writing as the highest manifestation, and it is the intense sensitivity that pushes him to write differently, as a difference that has been enriched by extensive experiences, seeking liberation from the complex of the Dervish voice, by describing freedom – here – as another mask of harsh awareness, which does not search for only the opposite existence. Rather, it is about the different horizon and the language it creates, to say different things to the world, in which the language peels away its lyrical and metaphorical history, so that its nakedness appears exposed and scandalous, creating the astonishment of separation, and revealing what is different in the duality of transcendence and heterogeneity, and the recharacterization of the Palestinian “self,” not as a historical description. Rather, it is described as the mythology that is consumed by the myths of absence and return, and even the myths of wisdom thieves and Sisyphean absurdists.
We were hardly following the dream
Until we woke up,
So that I can remember
We walked behind the darkness of the well
Until we came together
And we parted..
And when we drank the water seven times,
And why did we know it?
Our east!
