Behind the funeral of a friend
In the body of a strange woman
In the woods of things when crowded
With the years of a not coming hour
The wind blows.
(Ibid. 60–61)The images of the robe of dust bring both the wind and Jannb together, as
both are empowered in this sweeping freedom to chase out the source of
horror and destruction. The poem uses images from the present Iraqi city
of Nmxiriyyah to place Jannb there, in a street traditionally called “ ‘Aqd
al-hawm” (The Love Avenue) in reference to the locations of brothels there.
Instead of the ancient joy, love, and sex, there are only death, cemeteries,
corpses, and graves where Jannb invokes the compassion of the soil in a world
devoid of life and love.^43
Language redeemedA seventh dialogic strategy targets superimposed limitations, strictures, and
bondage that fossilize language and deprive it of spontaneity. This strategy
becomes a poetic engagement with issues of language and tradition, as in the
poetry of Adnnls, >amld Sa‘ld, and Bennls. Adnnls sums up the issue in
pointing out the disparity between appearance and reality, representation and
presentation, in disjointed times. “Whenever I say: my country is within
reach / And bears fruit in a reachable language / Another language kicks me /
To another language” (“Xa.rm’ II,” 85; “The Desert,” 27). Using the image of
the river, the wave, the water, the desert, the dust, and the green and the
silver blue, the Moroccan poet Mu.ammad Bennls rediscovers language as
newly born, still pure and shiny, “lightening on water,” as he describes
the sense of meeting this language, as opposed to its death in the hands of
others. In his poem “Lughatun” (A Language), he finds it a “language / with
which I searched for my body / caves enjoying the silver blue.”^44 This lan-
guage, in its unadulterated form, “... unifies me with my desert,” a desert
that “expands re-iterating uncertain caravans’ singing.” He adds, “You lan-
guage, / by which hand I wrote you / traversing the land / listening to
the coldness of the <md(Arabic) between two corpses, two funerals.” Out of
this meeting comes a resurrected Arabic, rich with shades and meanings.
“This is the language through which / I got acquainted with an inhaling
in the unseen / by which I received what a glittering color moistens in
the body.” This language has its meaning as a river in “Nahrun Yufmji’”
(The River Surprises). With all the power of water and its connotations and
bearing on life, the poet draws it as a rich language, or he draws the latter as
such. “A River / Surprises what remains of life between us / a life that survives
on the verge of death / A river which hides among corners / or lightens”
POETIC DIALOGIZATION