22 The New York Review
power is his literary autonomy. Mihyar
is a universal, abstract figure, but he is
also a product of his age. In another
poem, as the “New Noah” who re-
fuses God’s commands, he resurrects
the drowned unbelievers as he pilots a
rogue ark. He represents “a heroically
secular, dynamic, and individualized
notion of the human—a kind of Cold
Wa r Übermensch,” Creswell writes.
Songs of Mihyar exalts freedom over
any communal bonds, yet the mood is
not triumphant but melancholic, while
refusing to acknowledge what has been
lost. “Nothing binds us together, and
everything divides us,” the poet writes
in “Psalm.”
If Adonis was arguably the first in
Arabic to experiment with the prose
poem, it was Unsi al- Hajj’s collection
Lan (Will Not), published by Shi‘r in
1960 and still untranslated into En-
glish, that pushed the group’s ideas to
their radical extreme. “Destruction
and destruction and destruction,” the
young poet urged in his preface, figur-
ing himself as a poète maudit, unafraid
to test the limits of the sexual, surreal,
and obscene. Al- Hajj spoke not of the
shimmering expanses of the sea but of
entrapment, not of rebirth but of can-
cer, a solitary death from within, as the
signal afflictions of the modern age.
Embracing the prose poem as an act
of illiteracy and aphasia, al- Hajj chal-
lenged his fellow modernists, Creswell
writes, to answer the question “of how
and what the poet may communicate
when he has no community.” In “The
Bubble of Origin, or the Heretical
Poem,” the solitary poet converses in a
toilet stall with a sperm named Char-
lotte, in what Creswell reads as an alle-
gory for the genesis of the prose poem
itself. “Verily verily I say I say unto you
unto you,” the seed chatters in a Bibli-
cal cadence, cursing the poet so that he
will “not be created again.” The poem
blasphemes against the act of liter-
ary creation, casting it as purely self-
pleasuring. Charlotte bears a French
name and is a rather “literary” sperm,
parodying Shi‘r’s infatuation with
European letters. “Unsi is the purest
among us,” Adonis declared.In its covert deployment of the he-
roic individualism of the avant- garde
to lure intellectuals across the globe
away from communism, the Congress
for Cultural Freedom possessed an
arsenal of prestigious little magazines,
from Encounter, edited by Spender,
Irving Kristol, and Frank Kermode
in London, to Quest in India, to Ni-
geria’s Black Orpheus and Uganda’s
Tra n sition. (The CCF also contributed
funding to The Paris Review, where
Creswell would later serve as poetry
editor.) Across the magazines, content
was often translated and published si-
multaneously in different languages,
creating for the first time a networked,
global experience of “world literature,”
and helping bring international fame
to a set of writers, from Gabriel García
Márquez to Chinua Achebe. When in
1961 al- Khal and Adonis were invited
to Rome for the summit, it turned out
to be an audition of sorts. John Hunt,
the director of the CCF office in Paris,
asked al- Khal to arrive in Rome a few
days early. The CIA spy was eager to
launch an Arabic CCF magazine—in a
letter unearthed by Creswell, Hunt re-ferred to the prospective journal as “a
prop,” a way of “maintaining our pres-
ence” in the region—and identified al-
Khal as a potential publisher.
The Shi‘r poets had clear affinities
with the CCF’s ideals of artistic free-
dom and autonomy. Yet in private talks
in Rome, and in the heated exchange
with Spender, irreconcilable differ-
ences became apparent as to what they
imagined world literature to be. While
Spender reproached them for ignoring
their own heritage, Hunt worried that
al- Khal, a Greek Orthodox Christian,
and Adonis, an Alawite, would be seen
as illegitimate representatives of a Sunni
Muslim majority. Deeming them too
radical and isolated—Shi‘r was banned
in Iraq and the UAR—Hunt appointed
the Palestinian poet Tawfiq Sayigh to
serve as editor for the new CCF publica-
tion, Hiwar (Dialogue). In his five- year
stint, Sayigh nevertheless frequently
published Shi‘r poets, among them al-
Hajj, Salma Khadra Jayyusi, and Jabra
Ibrahim Jabra, in addition to serializ-
ing Tayeb Salih’s masterpiece Season
of Migration to the North.
In 1966, when the CCF’s true nature
was exposed, al- Hajj, “purest among
us,” expressed the shock and dismay
that many in Beirut felt on learning
they had been implicated in “an odi-
ous American plot.” “The American
intelligence service! Could we, all
those who wrote in Hiwar, be writing
for the CIA?” al- Hajj asked incredu-
lously. Those who had disavowed polit-
ical commitment had been unwittingly
taking sides all along. What the poets
ventured toward—a place on the map
of world literature—was never a neu-
tral, free zone, but an uneven space that
maintained Euro- American hegemony.
Yet at the same time, Beirut’s avant-
garde literary scene had somehow be-
come, as the scholar Elizabeth Holt
recently wrote, “a site of global power
contestation so critical it had attracted
the attention of an imperially minded
American security apparatus.” “And
suddenly I felt important!” al- Hajj re-
membered, capturing the absurdity with
characteristic humor as he imagined
his eccentric friends as double agents
and the frail Badr Shakir al- Sayyab as
Iraq’s James Bond. “And I asked my-
self: Was the CIA really endowed with
intelligence to this degree?”As if in response to Spender and
Arab critics such as al- Mala’ika, in the
mid- 1960s Adonis began to read more
deeply in the canon of classical Ara-
bic poetry and put out his own, three-
volume anthology. He decided to do
a doctorate, and in 1973 he published
his research in The Fixed and the Dy-
namic, a four- volume study of Islamic
history, literature, and theology. In
his plunge into turath, or Arabic liter-
ary heritage, Adonis located the true
origins of European modernity in the
eighth- and ninth- century Arab past,
far away from the tainted present. He
argued that Sufi mystics were like the
first secularists, the egalitarian sect of
the Qarmatians like early Marxists,
and the poet Abu Tamman the first
modernist, while the physician al- Razi
and the alchemist Jabir bin Hayyan an-
ticipated modern science. Finding what
he thought were the true roots of mod-
ernism in the medieval, Arab- Islamic
past, Adonis wrested it away from the
European gatekeepers who believed
they had the sole authority to define it.Today Adonis is included in the
Nobel Prize betting odds at Ladbrokes
each year. Although the Congress for
Cultural Freedom was eventually shut
down following the revelation of its
funding, in many ways the continued
success of the idea of world literature
has validated and perpetuated its proj-
ect. Much like a government bureau,
world literature still operates with
budgets and quotas, allotting limited
resources and attention to writers
in Arabic. Of the many- voiced Shi‘r
group, only Adonis would gain a po-
dium from which to speak to the world.
In a 1970 poem he paraded a list of in-
stitutions where he was invited—Johns
Hopkins, Harvard, Princeton, the Uni-
versity of Michigan at Ann Arbor, the
United Nations—ever pushing the lim-
its of what qualifies as poetry.
From Paris, where he now lives,
the eighty- nine- year- old Adonis has
infuriated many with his pronounce-
ments, particularly on Islam and the
Syrian civil war. While City of Begin-
nings centers on the 1950s and 1960s,
in an epilogue that catches us up on
the next forty years of Adonis’s poli-
tics, Cres well must wade into clouded
waters. Adonis is viewed by many as
Islamophobic, elitist, and deeply out
of touch. In a 1969 editorial, he wrote
that since the Arab public “can nei-
ther read nor write and is stuffed with
parochial religious and cultural tradi-
tions that contradict the revolution,”
the poet “cannot be led by the people,
but must go on ahead of them.” This at-
titude has continued. To explain pres-
ent crises, Adonis tends to look to the
medieval Islamic past and to essential-
izing traits of the “Arab mind,” rather
than contemporary realities of imperi-
alism and global injustice. In 2011, as
the Assad regime violently suppressed
the protests in Syria, Adonis refused
to declare his solidarity with the ma-
jority Sunni demonstrators; a belated
editorial criticizing Bashar al- Assad,
published after thousands had been
murdered, seemed to echo official pro-
paganda, referring to Assad incorrectly
as the “elected president.” Critics were
dismayed that the great Syrian poet
hailed as revolutionary wouldn’t sup-
port the revolution. Creswell argues
that Adonis’s apparent contradictions
can be explained by old principles that
never left him, “including his skep-
ticism toward all forms of political
involvement, a fierce repudiation of
leftism,” and his insistence on cultural
autonomy, even as history proves that
to be a mirage.
In trying to separate poetry from
politics, and safeguard the purity of
their art from this fallen, temporal
realm, Adonis and other Beiruti mod-
ernists sought to render their strange
words timeless and universal. Yet the
ending of City of Beginnings leaves
us with the sense that Adonis’s he-
roics have aged uneasily, with over
500,000 Syrians dead and twelve mil-
lion displaced. It is impossible to exalt
dis engagement when the sea of the
mythical Phoenicians has become a
basin of political tragedy. While the
poetic innovations of the Shi‘r group
will live on, the ideology that moved
them seems obsolete today, a relic of a
particular and fleeting midcentury mo-
ment. The question—as, bizarrely, the
CIA once understood—is not so much
how to protect poetry from the vicissi-
tudes of the world, but how poetry can
help protect us.Bill Jacobson
Place (Series) #665, 2012
Pigment print on Epson Ultrasmooth paper, mounted to museum board
and dibond, 28 x 22 inches, image size, 37 x 31 inches, mounted, Ed. 7hirambutler.com