Cavalry poetics
On the centenary of the first modern Arab poet,
Youssef Rakha is all but silent
Interesting that the earliest celebrated force behind the Arabs'
turn-of-the-century poetic renaissance should turn out to be an army
officer. Not only that: Mahmoud Sami El-Baroudi (1839-1904) was also a
politician of limitless ambition. And this is why he presents
contemporary Arab poetics with an almost paradoxical question. Literary
innovation chimes with neither martial chivalry nor court intrigue; and
to associate a versifier's genius with either at millennium's end sounds
like a politically incorrect gesture.
Yet, the history of Arabic verse being what it is (aside from the
self-glorification prevalent in the Abbasid era, in fact, up until the
1960s vernacular and classic poetry teem with approbatory references to
gallantry, nationalist politics and, to a lesser extent, the glory of
the battlefield), both the poet as eloquent knight in armour and the
poet as secular prophet make sense. Whether such sense might prove
relevant to a disinherited and digitalised generation irrevocably
divorced from canonical literary culture, on the other hand, is an
altogether different issue.
From a history-of-literature point of view, at least, El-Baroudi's
status is indisputable. Though lexically and idiomatically inaccessible
-- more like Quranic Arabic than the language of Naguib Mahfouz -- his
poetry is widely recognised as an indispensable stepping-stone. (His two
best-known heirs, Ahmed Shawqi and Hafez Ibrahim, used similarly
inaccessible language well into the first few decades of the 20th
century.)
In a circle of early- to mid-19th-century reformers thought to have
endorsed national identity in Egypt, El-Baroudi is credited as saviour
of literature, the man who resuscitated language (the highest form of
which was still identified with verse), bringing back to it the
articulate fecundity, not to underline rhetorical polish, of a once
magnificent literary tradition by then in centuries-long demise. (The
"movement" propagated by that circle, roughly coinciding with the reign
of Mohamed Ali Pasha, is often identified with "enlightenment", to be
distinguished from the philosophical Enlightenment of Europe, from which
it nonetheless benefited.)
The old-guard critic Shawqi Deif is among many who speak
disparagingly of the poetry being written at the time of El-Baroudi's
emergence: its dependence on badi' (superficial, purely linguistic embellishments) rather than bayan
(figures of speech and deeper forms of virtuosity); its thematic
paucity, with the vast majority of practitioners writing only occasional
verses, and those in frivolous praise of the powers that be; its
failure to establish a dialogue with the great poets of old; its
fragmentary, unrealistic content and often childish form.
El-Baroudi, by contrast, brought something of the dignity of the
tradition back to verse; he also infused what he wrote with vital and,
so Deif at least insists, sincere emotion, elevating the practice to
thus far seemingly unattainable humane and literary heights: "He rid
[poetry] of all those weeds that had obscured its soul... through all
that he successfully absorbed of the old methods and what he set out
forging out of his emotions and those of his nation..."
In a recent tribute Egyptian poet Ahmed Abdel- Mo'ti Hegazi too
stresses the gradual development of El-Baroudi's almost revolutionary
project. In the still somewhat derivative "poems of youth", he says,
El-Baroudi was exploring a range of approaches, changing from one to the
other, emulating and rejecting his predecessors by turns; by the time
"his instruments matured", on the other hand, his work had emerged into
something unique and highly relevant -- something, essentially, modern.
"His language is the fruit of a wide-ranging, painstaking and meticulous
reading of the whole Arab poetic heritage," Hegazi elaborates; "it is a
conflation of the language of Arab poets through the ages."
Yet all this fails to mention what is probably El- Baroudi's most
celebrated (political) virtue, or the form of his nationalism: his
dogged and admirable Arabism. The poet's Arab bias is to be understood
in the context of his privileged background, and it is vitally important
to assessing his role as an officer and a statesman. For El-Baroudi's
many-sided figure should really require no more of an apologia than his
seminal contribution. Considering his upbringing, it was only normal,
perhaps even commendable, to follow the course he chose. More
importantly, it was perfectly in line with the ideas and feelings his
verses expressed.
And the larger- than-life image he espoused and tried to live up to,
far from a ludicrous invention, was modelled on similar constructions
of ego found throughout the work of his great antecedents since
pre-Islamic times, through the two Abbasid eras and the various
subsequent caliphates. One only has to read Abu Al-Tayyib Al- Mutannabi,
perhaps the greatest Arab poet, to realise that this elevation of ego
(once again undertaken through a conflation of "the sword and the
quill", El- Baroudi's epithet), was no rootless or megalomaniac
innovation but a legitimate aspect of the tradition as a whole.
As a highly individual response to a historically specific
situation, the career, no less than El-Baroudi's sophisticated running
commentary on it (the Diwan), constitutes a legitimate, if less than
selfless take on reality. El- Baroudi came into the world nine years
before the death of Mohamed Ali Pasha, a national anticlimax preceded by
decades of hope and following centuries of economic and epistemological
regress under Mameluke and Ottoman rule. It was an Egyptian national,
the dean of Ashraf (descendants of Prophet Mohamed) Omar Makram, who was
instrumental to bringing the young Albanian officer Mohamed Ali to
power following the French Campaign (1798), reflecting popular
discontent with Ottoman edicts that promoted another wali. And the
Pasha's global ambitions notwithstanding, it was in the context of a
national renaissance -- dependent, first and foremost, on a powerful,
independent army -- that he set out running the country, building what
amounted to a regional superpower against the odds, and letting the
people reap what little economic and political benefits they could in
the process. The military was the gateway to national glory...
El-Baroudi was born into an old, established Mameluke family of
Turko-Kurdish roots (his surname is a reference to the town of Itay
Al-Baroud, where one of his ancestors was governor). His father, himself
a distinguished army officer, was a direct beneficiary of life under
the Pasha, and had at his disposal both money and status. In his book on
the poet Deif points out an "unusual trait" of the family's: a striking
partiality to Arabic, probably resulting from its being the language of
the Quran and the family members being believers, even despite the fact
that Turkish was so arbitrarily favoured in those days that, at the
Military School El-Baroudi attended, students who were heard speaking
Arabic were subject to corporal punishment.
Even though El-Baroudi read Turkish and Farsi, and on graduating
spent a long sojourn serving at the Ottoman foreign ministry in
Istanbul, it was this trait that instilled in him the love of the
language and its arts, which he sought out, initially through his
father, finding old, by then abandoned poetry everywhere -- down to the
unpublished manuscripts of mosque library collections (he is said to
have been better versed in Abbasid poetry than anyone before or since)
-- even as he tried his hand at verses in the other two languages as
well. Much of the Arabic canon, infused with values of chivalry and
courage, acted to fuel El-Baroudi's imagination; and his nascent
political awareness, on a parallel plane, linked Mohamed Ali's
extranational exploits in which his father had participated, with, among
other past glories, Saladin's (also Kurdish) triumph over the
Crusaders.
El-Baroudi grew into his own under Khedive Ismail, however, and
despite maintaining his role as a distinguished servant of the Sultanate
(he fought in Crete in 1864, served in the Khedival Guard for many
years and participated in the Balkan War in 1877), El-Baroudi was not to
remain happy with his position as the leader of a faction of the
cavalry for very long. His career as a politician developed mainly in
the years 1878-1883 (worth noting that this is a relatively short
period, after all), when he assumed a string of high-ranking official
posts, including minister of war and prime minister -- and until he
participated in the Orabi Revolution and was sentenced to exile.
Many commentators point to a shift in the tonality of his verse in
the late 1860s and through the 1870s, a tendency to relinquish the joy
of hopeful confidence in favour of satire and melancholy; and the
sympathetic interpretation is that, seeing his early dream of a
resuscitated nation floundering as Ismail's debts began to accumulate,
acting as a pretext for European powers to take control of Egypt, the
idealistic poet decided to take matters into his own hands. Yet he
played various powers against each other, undertook political manoeuvres
and sustained positive relations with the Palace when it suited his
agenda. He was nonetheless faithful to his notion of Arab identity to
the end, fighting against the discrimination to which Egyptian members
of the army were subjected and, even despite his upbringing and class
superiority, cooperating with the likes of Ahmed Orabi, "leader of the
fellahin".
It would be impossible to outline the complex developments leading
up to the Orabi Revolution and the 1882 British occupation of Egypt in
the context of this piece. Suffice it to say that El-Baroudi made a few
wrong moves on the political chessboard of the period, with as much
desire to lobby power for himself as to liberate the country from
foreign influence and put an end to corruption in the Palace (two aims
that cannot have seemed mutually exclusive) -- only to end up on the
British-ruled island of Ceylon where, along with the leaders of the
revolution except for Abdalla El-Nadim (who disappeared without a trace
for nine years), he was sentenced to life-long exile (he would obtain
pardon from Khedive Abbas Helmy and return to Egypt in 1900).
A largely romantic career in the military conceived of as a modern
reincarnation of the life of "poetry's knights" of old, followed by a
brief, ultimately abortive political career that was part of a bid to
protect and fortify national life: El-Baroudi's extra-poetic pursuits
can hardly invoke Machiavelli; but perhaps they were not as nobly giving
as contemporary readers are meant to believe. An alternative cue for
interpreting them can be found in the more lasting of his achievements:
the career justified and gave life to the Diwan; it acted as
El-Baroudi's inspiration. And theories of the unconscious
notwithstanding, perhaps he was compelled to immerse himself in military
and political embroils in order to ignite the stimulation necessary for
poetic flights.
In fact El-Baroudi's incredibly prolific Diwan, not published in its
entirety until recently, can be read as an extended response to the
life he witnessed and in which he participated -- his contribution to
national renaissance in post-Mohamed Ali, pre-British occupation years.
Hegazi's comment on the development of his style reflects another,
related fact: the plurality of El-Baroudi's voices. For though
technically of the same substance, the constituents of the Diwan reflect
a range of modalities, many of which have precedents in the aghrad
(purposes or themes) of old poetry -- the patriotic-heroic, the erotic-
drunken, the disillusioned-nostalgic. Later, during his years in exile,
he produced poetry as self- justification, arguing against the claim
that it was personal ambition that drove him and delineating the
intricacies of his (always noble) motivation. He never stopped writing
till the end of his life, four years after his return to Egypt, a time
during which he also produced reminiscence and criticism...
Despite frequent news of the death of loved ones back home, in
Ceylon El-Baroudi embraced his new life with all the hopeful confidence
with which he embarked on his military career. He learned English for
the first time in his life and took an active interest in the lives of
the local inhabitants, producing more than one poem on "the people of
Sarandeeb", the island's Arabic name. He engaged in correspondences with
Arab, Farsi and Indian poets, remarried and moved within the island
more than once. Nor did he stop reflecting on the Orabi Revolution,
keeping up with the news to find out what had befallen the country, the
Palace, the army until his return -- by which time he was profoundly
disillusioned with personal glory, so much so that he refused to be
addressed by his rightful title of Pasha. He died quietly, generating
the grief mainly of fellow Arab poets -- his multifarious disciples.
"The Diwan of El-Baroudi is the biography of El- Baroudi," writes
Hegazi, "as if it is a single poem in which the poetic 'I' speaks of
itself, and of its life in the homeland and in exile and in love. And
war. Resentment and discontent. Gravity and jocularity. Youth and old
age..." In the end what this "I" provides is a kind of auto-hagiography
that can also be read as an extended footnote to the history of the
Orabi Revolution and the British occupation of Egypt. It may sound
somewhat stilted to the contemporary ear, it may have less pathos for
the present-day reader than the poetry of the Sixties, but it remains
the document of a holistic vision, one that is backed up by direct
engagement with reality.
Perhaps, rather than the image of the brave knight with the
sharp-pointed mustachio braving the thick of battle astride his
thoroughbred, it is El-Baroudi as a disillusioned army officer in the
late 1860s, still young, hopelessly in love with a young woman who won't
return his favours and sipping wine among a host of friends and
admirers as he spins verse after verse of unrequited love, on the banks
of the Nile island of Roda, that will appeal to present-day readers.
Recommend
Comment
Printer-friendly
