KHAL AND HAWI 245But Khal does not lose interest in the wider issues of Arab culture, as is
clearly shown in his poem 'The Departure' or 'The Long Poem'^59 (a prose
poem) in which he denounces in the manner of an Old Testament prophet
contemporary society with its artificiality, lack of authenticity, its death and
stagnation, mediocrity and false values, and paints a horrifying and vivid pic-
ture of it in a series of powerful images rendered in a style that is biblical in
its rhythm and associations: he complains bitterly that 'mountains move
every day while there is no faith in the homes, the new is a breast that is not
yet round'; 'Eyes are eaten by flies in the city of the Lord', 'our women's
thighs are displayed on the pavement, their breasts are sold in shops and
their lips are neon signs'. It ends with the prophecy: 'The last days are at
hand, their hours are counted on the fingers. Defeat is a raised banner, labour
pains are burning seas. Give us a sign O Lord'. Lately, Khal bas become
increasingly dissatisfied with the limitations of literary Arabic — the language
of writing as opposed to the spoken language — and has been advocating the
use of the language of speech for serious literary purposes such as the writ-
ing of poetry.
Equally concerned about the position of Arab culture in the context of the
modern world is Khalfl Hawi (b. 192 5) who, like Khal and Taufiq Sayigh, also
uses dominantly Christian symbolism which seems to express a specifically
Christian sensibility and outlook although he claims that he uses Christian
symbols not for their doctrinal content, but for their universal significance as
archetypal images. However, as an epigraph to his first volume of verse
The River of Ashes, he uses these words from his poem 'The Bridge', dedicated
to the rising generation:
They will cross the bridge nimbly in the morning,
A firm bridge wrought with my ribs.
From the caves and the marshes of the East
To another East that is new.which embody the conception of the poet as the Redeemer whose sacrifice
will save his people and take his society out of the stagnant marshes of the
Arab East and lead them to the new East.
Hawi is a graduate in philosophy and Arabic from the American University
of Beirut where he took his M.A. on a thesis in Islamic philosophy dealing
with the question of reason and faith in Ghazali and Averroes from a Kan-
tian point of view. For his doctorate he went to Cambridge (1956) where he
wrote a thesis on Jibran (published later as Gibran Khalil Gibran, His Back-
ground, Character and Works, Beirut 1963), and deepened his knowledge of
English literature, which he acquired as a student in Beirut, reading, together