قصيدتان

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.