The Revolver Above the Dead Sea
My mouth sinks into the fireplace
My tongue is a piece of ice
Alone with the battleground and the banner
And when the night strikes my sad
face . . .
I disappear inside a book about bitter fruit
and the bones of mammoths
Inside my chest, the screams of steamships
rise up
And in front of me is a green orange
Meanwhile the pipe comes nearer
to burn the blue curtains
So I go back to my mind’s chamber
to toss out onto the street
all the statues, pictures and poems
Then I kiss the hand of al-Khidr
Oh, that cat standing
behind the wall
He is my dark enemy
Let him be . . .
I aged beyond forty
and the candlestick is in the mausoleum
So descend, o tears
for my pillow is made of iron
And if I had but one toy
I would have laughed at the desert
All the angels I have created
no longer delight me
The grain is around the pot of clay
the rain in the cloud
And there is a porcupine and a bottle of wine
in my insides
I hate the song that goes
“The night has seven daughters”
For night is a yellow beast
No, I will not collect the spider’s thread
I will not love the eye that resembles
a candle
nor the open mouth of the sultan
Because I love the revolver that rings out
across the Dead Sea
Zionism is giving birth to dogs
So let the revolution raise its red whip
and let the rifle’s magazine break
Only then will the ice melt
and pictures and curtains be hung
And I will go to the sun
in the Sinai
and fall asleep at the edge of the spring
like a nightingale’s feather . . .
The Nightmare
Above the pale lamp
stood the black bird
The sea was behind the street
Stop
Terror invaded me
From which side does this voice
come?
I stared at the night
into its veins swollen with darkness
Where was I before this moment
when I felt a breeze cold
like the edge of a blade
Come back, o ghost
An ambulance went by quickly
then vanished
and silence prevailed again all around
I know not the place that
I am walking to
And he said . . . O ghost
but I did not die
I moved another step forward
and it seemed my feet had the echo
of a drum
Is it not enough for you to die once?
Ghosts also die
Ah . . .
I saw the sparrow flutter
its wings
It was flying in the open air
and approaching my face
Was it . . .
It was carrying my face
Why do you want to know
the truth? Ha!
How blind you are
The street will come to an end and nothing is left
but the sea
Suddenly the lamp was extinguished
and a faint song became louder
Water spoke to the poet
asking for him
wishing for his withered body
and I tottered
That was my body cast
on the pavement
And the tumult broke out around me
Who brought it to
this land?
Raise it higher
It is intoxicated
I am drugged with love,
I screamed with tremendous rage
and crawled forward
The lamp had been lit
and the bird had vanished
Then
Then I reached the sea
Two Poems
Ḥusayn Mardān
translated from the Arabic by Suneela Mubayi
Mardān’s writing is perhaps the most vivid embodiment of rebellion against social norms in Iraq and aesthetic conventions of Arabic poetry. After dropping out of school at age ten and being beaten by his parents for composing poetry, he walked from the outskirts of Ba‘quba to Baghdad at the age of twenty. He had no money and so worked in construction to survive while frequenting cafés where writers and poets gathered. He soon declared himself “a true man of the street . . . the chief of vagabonds in Iraq and the world.” His first collection, Qasaʾid ʿAriya (Naked Poems, 1949), caused a sensation due to the frankness of the language and the subject matter focused on sex, violence, death, and the Devil, set in the brothels in Baghdad. It led to his prosecution by the state for obscenity and a sensational trial in which he was ultimately acquitted. Mardān established his singular voice in Iraqi literature of the time by experimenting with hallucinatory writing under the influence of opium, hashish, and morphine in the collection Suwar Mur‘iba (Terrifying Images, 1951).
His later writing, which is represented here, I consider to be more mature and developed. It challenges the linguistic structures of both conventional and free verse poetry, and marks the debut of his version of unrhymed poetry, which he termed nathr murakkaz (concentrated prose), years before it was promoted by Beirut’s better-known Shiʿr magazine group under the term qasidat al-nathr (prose poem) in 1959–60. These aspects of Mardān’s work are demonstrated in the two poems, “The Revolver Above the Dead Sea” and “The Nightmare,” written toward the end of his life and published in Alif Ba’ magazine. The first poem evokes the devastating defeat suffered by the Arab armies at the hands of Israel in the June 1967 war. In it, Mardan expresses his sorrow mixed with anger in a surrealist atmosphere, full of sarcastic references to the role of the Arab leadership in the plight of the Palestinians. The second poem is reminiscent of his earlier writings under the influence of narcotics, where fantastical imagery reigns. The poet speaks as though he were beyond the grave and alludes to his intoxication with both love and rage, concluding at the edge of the sea, something infinite and boundless.
His later writing, which is represented here, I consider to be more mature and developed. It challenges the linguistic structures of both conventional and free verse poetry, and marks the debut of his version of unrhymed poetry, which he termed nathr murakkaz (concentrated prose), years before it was promoted by Beirut’s better-known Shiʿr magazine group under the term qasidat al-nathr (prose poem) in 1959–60. These aspects of Mardān’s work are demonstrated in the two poems, “The Revolver Above the Dead Sea” and “The Nightmare,” written toward the end of his life and published in Alif Ba’ magazine. The first poem evokes the devastating defeat suffered by the Arab armies at the hands of Israel in the June 1967 war. In it, Mardan expresses his sorrow mixed with anger in a surrealist atmosphere, full of sarcastic references to the role of the Arab leadership in the plight of the Palestinians. The second poem is reminiscent of his earlier writings under the influence of narcotics, where fantastical imagery reigns. The poet speaks as though he were beyond the grave and alludes to his intoxication with both love and rage, concluding at the edge of the sea, something infinite and boundless.
Ḥusayn Mardān was born in 1927 in the al-Hindiyya district of Diyālā Province, northeast of Baghdad. His father was a low-ranking police officer with a limited income. He was not successful in school but was an early rebel and a voracious reader outside of class. He had read the pre-Islamic poet ʿAntara b. Shaddād by the time he was seven years old and had apparently decided to become a poet at an early age. He arrived in Baghdad in 1947 at the age of twenty with a burning desire to become a great poet and writer. He first worked as a laborer in construction and later became a journalist at Al-Ahālī, the newspaper of the National Democratic Party. He did not care how he lived: he subsisted on meager food, slept on the pavement and in parks, and immersed himself in the street, café, brothel, and underworld life of the city. Mardān self-identified as “the Baudelaire of Iraq” and his early writings linked transgressive sex, violence, and pain. He gravitated from writing sexually transgressive erotic poetry to becoming a committed poet in some of his later collections after being exposed to Marxist literature in prison. Toward the end of his life, he achieved a degree of stability with a house and a job but still considered himself “the chief of vagabonds in Iraq and the world” who was unable to remain alone at home for more than a couple of hours. He died in Baghdad in October 1972 of a sudden heart attack and was the first Iraqi poet to have his funeral broadcast live on state television.
Suneela Mubayi is a freshly minted Ph.D. in Arabic literature at NYU where she is completing a thesis on the intersection of classical and modern Arabic poetry. She has translated poems and short stories between Arabic, English, and Urdu, which have been published in Banipal, Beirut39, Jadaliyya, and elsewhere. She wishes to re-establish the position of Arabic as a vehicular language of the global South, the role it played for many centuries. She also hopes to one day be able to call herself a poet.
