His death means the absence of that masculine celebration of the female body,
and, in turn, the speaker’s dismay at such a loss.
I will never be this beautiful again
On the day you left, I saw on my face
the first lines of ugliness beginning
I saw my skeleton, I saw my white death
So nobody talk to me about poetry or beauty
Spring, the April sea, our language, nothing
will ever be this beautiful again.^22The poem builds on many other pieces by Qabbmnl, and its close parody
implicates it in subordination to his text. As he associates erotic love with
inscription, “I melted in my love all the pens— / The blue...the red...the
green.../ Until the words were formed,”^23 Mohja Kahf turns inscription
into an act of physical closeness and intimacy, as “I wanted to roll with you
on the page / in the sweat and muck of writing,” she writes. Yet, this
same poetics carries within it the seeds of revolt, for it is no longer limited
to boundaries of unrequited love; nor does it entrench its claims within
the obscenities of some ‘Abbmsid verse. Mohja Kahf picks on this, too, as a
poetics of challenge and revolt. In one poem, “When I Love You,” Qabbmnl
writes:
When I love you, your breasts shake off their shame,
Turn into lightning and thunder, a sword, a sandy storm,
When I love you, the Arab cities leap up and demonstrate
Against the ages of repression
And the ages
Of revenge against the laws of the tribe.
(Ibid. 9)In the words of Salma K. Jayyusi, Qabbmnl’s poetry has a liberating
power as it awakens women “... to a new awareness of their bodies and
their sexuality, wrenching them away from the taboos of society, and making
them aware of its discriminatory treatment of the sexes, of its inherent
cruelty” (Introduction, Ibid. vii). While raiding tradition and awakening
sexual consciousness, especially among the young, Qabbmnlmerges daily
speech with images from tradition to establish a language of love that blends
the old and the new. The male may continue to be the speaker whom Kahf
addresses and elegizes, but he is also the victim of desire whose passions set
him again among the demented and the insane, those whose language escapes
limits and borders, as they are in Foucault’s terms, the “disordered” players of
POETIC DIALOGIZATION