verse be borrowed for a slogan. In a sequence of
poems written in besieged Beirut in 1982, Saadi
describes life at the edge in haiku-like minimal-
ism. In ‘‘A Raid,’’ the most dramatic of sounds—
an explosion—is described in a gentle manner, as
if whispering:
The room shivers
from distant explosions.
The curtains shiver.
Then the heart shivers.
Why are you in the midst of this shivering?
This sequence of miniature poems consti-
tutes the diaries of the poet in West Beirut
when he was living under the bombardment of
Israeli war planes, with water and electricity cut
off by the invading army. The telegraphic style
seems appropriate for this precarious existence.
The short, abrupt sentences and the rationed
diction reproduce aesthetically the ascetic con-
ditions of life in a war zone. The repetition of
‘‘shiver’’ in the poem recreates the convulsive
motion of shuddering.
Many of the poems of Saadi are shots of a
scene or even shots of a detail in a scene. Such
scenes, which Saadi encapsulates in his poems,
are perfectly ordinary, if not down right familiar
and mundane. The poet makes us see beauty in
small things and sense the poetry of everyday
scenes. The poetic is not sought in the distant
and elevated, in the transcendent or fantastic,
but in the here and now. Thus Saadi teaches us
his aesthetic philosophy: beauty is lying there in
front of us in the street, in the market place, in
our sitting rooms and bedrooms. All we have to
do is see it.
The Iraqi critic, Tarrad Al-Kubaisy, has
called Saadi: ‘‘He who saw’’—a locution often
reserved for Gilgamesh, the hero of the ancient
Mesopotamian epic. Seeing is then not simply
observing but also penetrating what is beneath
the surface. Saadi is the lucid one who sees the
inner core of things and who makes his readers
see the invisible beneath—not beyond—the visi-
ble. He makes us see the harmony, the beauty,
and the poetry of the quotidian, of the passing
moment. His aim is not to immortalise but to
retrieve and preserve. In this sense he is, like
Cavafy, fully aware of the passage of time and
the urgency to record special moments. Because
Saadi has been a wandering poet, a modern-day
troubadour constantly on the move, his fugitive
existence makes him more prepared to snatch
the moment from our disjointed times. The
tavern, the bar, the cafe ́, and the hotel recur as
settings in his poems. They point to transitory
existence, a life on the go, in which companion-
ship is based on free spirit and individual choice
rather than on settled and conventional consid-
erations. ‘‘The Chalets Bar’’ (1984) is a poem that
points to the thriving fellowship of people from
different races and nationalities, drinking
together in a Yemeni bar. Memory also plays
an important role in Saadi’s poetry. Having
been imprisoned, he recalls in his cell what he
could not see and partake in. Living away from
his homeland, he remembers the sites of his
country. As he grows older, reminiscences of
childhood unfold in his poetry, as in this extract:
And now
I remember trees:
the date palm of our mosque in Basra, at the
end of Basra
a bird’s beak,
a child’s secret,
a summer feast.
I remember the date palm.
I touch it. I become it, when it falls black
without fronds,
when a dam fell, hewn by lightning.
And I remember the mighty mulberry
when it rumbled, butchered with an axe.
In his poem ‘‘A Woman’’ (1984), the title
suggests a woman, but she turns out to bethe
woman. It is one of several poems by Saadi
where the closure explains the rest of the text
and pushes the reader to read the poem
retrospectively...
Having lived in more than [a] dozen cities in
the Arab world and Europe without settling any-
where permanently, Saadi exemplifies the exilic
condition. This dispersion, translated poetically
into fragmentation, leaves for the poet the task
of reconstructing the self, of making the shards
into a whole. Poetry becomes the medium by
which a face is given to this defaced existence.
In his poem entitled ‘‘Poetry’’ (1985), Saadi
refers to the task of the poet by referring to
himself through the persona of L’Akhdar,a
poetic double who figures in more than one
poem...
In the longer poems, such as ‘‘The Trees of
Ithaca’’ (1989), Saadi narrates the exodus of the
Palestinians from Beirut. The classical journey of
Odysseus, and its re-interpretation by the poet Cav-
afy, is a subtext in this poem. One displacementAmerica, America