الرحيل إلى المتاهة

Notes

1. Raḥīl is a departure or setting out on a journey, and in Arabic it is also a common way of speaking of death, 'the final departure'. In the classical ode, the raḥīl is the section describing the poet's journey across the desert. Matāha is a maze or trackless wilderness in which one loses one's way: the refugees set out not towards a destination but into bewilderment itself. ↩
2. Both halves of the verse open with yā la-, the Arabic exclamation of lament and astonishment, as if the poet were calling out to the departure and the ruin themselves. Ḍanā is the wasting sickness that grief and love bring on, and ʿanāʾ is toil and hardship. The dream does not simply fade: indithār is the word for traces effaced by wind and time, here swallowed up in the 'spectre' of hardship. ↩
3. Mutayamminan means 'seeking good fortune or blessing' (yumn). The heart bends to kiss the soil as one kisses something blessed, hoping to take its blessing with it. ↩
4. The subject of the second half is taken to be 'my steps', which share the first verb: they balk at the journey, yet fear drives them on even when they are exhausted. Grammatically it can also be the journey itself, which presses on in fear whenever weariness overtakes it. ↩
5. The verse turns on words for surrounding. Al-baḥr al-muḥīṭ, the ocean, is literally 'the encircling sea', and the same root gives ḥāṭa, 'hemmed in, encircled'. The ocean round the boat mirrors the lostness that has closed round the refugees' hopes. Tīh, 'lostness, aimless wandering', also calls to mind the forty years in which the Children of Israel wandered in the wilderness (al-tīh). Amkhuru, 'I plough through', is the verb used of a ship cleaving the water: the poet becomes the boat. ↩
6. Aqilla al-lawma, 'go easy on the blame', echoes the famous opening of the Umayyad poet Jarīr, in which he tells the woman who reproaches him aqillī al-lawma, to lessen her blame. In classical poetry the reproacher (ʿādhil) scolds the lover for his conduct; here it is the homeland itself that reproaches its son for leaving, and he answers as a lover would, protesting that he has never taken another. ↩
7. The aṭlāl, the ruined traces of an abandoned encampment, are the traditional opening of the classical Arabic ode: the poet halts at them and asks them where the beloved has gone, though they cannot answer. Here the motif is turned round. It is the homeland that is told to question its own ruins, and the question is not where the loved ones went but who drove them out. ↩
8. Ṭahūr is a term from Islamic law for what is pure in itself and also purifies other things, as clean water does. Mutaʿaffin means rotten, putrid. The two words stand in stark contrast (ṭibāq). The verb badā, 'it has come to appear', here 'now wears', suggests that the rot is a face laid over the land by what was done to it, not its true nature. The word 'rotten' returns in the last verses of the poem. ↩
9. Ḥūt is a large fish or whale, a danger to so small a boat on the open ocean. The word may also call to mind the Qur'anic story of Jonah, 'the man of the fish', swallowed at sea. ↩
10. An ʿifrīt is a powerful and malevolent jinn. Dandana means to hum or croon a tune under one's breath, indistinctly; the demon's humming picks up the song of death of the ninth verse. ↩
11. Shākhiṣa is used of eyes that stare wide open, fixed and unblinking; in the Qur'an it describes the eyes of people overwhelmed on the Day of Judgement. Here the fixed stare is one of intense, anxious hope. Sanā is radiance, the light of the dawn awaited in the previous verse. The hope is pictured as something that should 'shade' the refugees, a shelter they still lack. ↩
12. The two halves are built in exact parallel, and each is a paradox: the homeland longs for and loves the very people it kills and devours. Yaghtālunā ('murders us', especially by treachery) and yaqtātunā ('feeds on us, makes us its food') differ by only a letter or two, a near-pun (jinās) that binds the two cruelties together. The homeland is at once the lover and the killer, a theme that returns at the end of the poem. ↩
13. Shudhdhādh al-āfāq, literally 'the strays of the horizons', is an Arabic idiom for rootless riff-raff drawn from every quarter, people who belong nowhere. Wakr is the nest of a bird of prey or the den of a beast: they emerge from a lair, not from a home. ↩
14. Istaʾsadū, 'they played the lion', means that they turned fierce and overbearing against the defenceless. ʿIrḍ is a person's honour, and especially the honour of the family bound up with its women; to 'make it lawful prey' (istabāḥa, to treat as lawful what is forbidden) points to the rape and abuse of women. ↩
15. 'They called themselves by our name': the gangs claimed to act in the name of the very people they were destroying, adding usurpation of their name to all the other crimes. ↩
16. Ghāla, 'to destroy by stealth, to make away with', and ghūl, the ghoul, a desert monster of Arabic folklore that devours travellers, come from the same root. The monster does exactly what its name says, and the sound-play (jinās) makes the image all the heavier. ↩
17. Tashattut al-shaml, 'the scattering of what was gathered', is the Arabic idiom for the break-up of a family or community. The 'gardens of pain' are a bitter reversal: where orchards once grew, what now flourishes is pain. ↩
18. Īthār, selflessness, is the virtue of putting others before oneself even in want, praised in the Qur'an (Q 59:9). The poet sets it against the greed and violence he has just described. ↩
19. Raṣṣ al-ṣufūf, closing up the ranks shoulder to shoulder, is the image used of rows of worshippers at prayer and of battle lines; it recalls the Qur'anic praise of those who stand in ranks 'as though they were a building solidly compacted' (Q 61:4). ↩
20. Aṭūfu, 'I go round', echoes ṭawāf, the circling of the Kaʿba in pilgrimage. The poet circles the cities of exile as a pilgrim circles a shrine, carrying the homeland's face with him. ↩
21. Majnūn, 'the madman', recalls Qays ibn al-Mulawwaḥ, the Majnūn of Laylā, the legendary lover of Arabic tradition who lost his reason for love and wandered in the desert asking after his beloved. The poet wanders through the cities in the same way, asking after his homeland. ↩
22. Ajrab, 'mangy', is used of a scabby animal, and maslūl means wasted by consumption: the figure is loathsome and diseased. Yanbarī means to thrust oneself forward, to step up boldly and unbidden. The image is of such a creature parading naked in a place kept pure: the men of violence who have seized the public square. ↩
23. Jiyaf (singular jīfa) is carrion, the rotting carcass of an animal, a word of the utmost harshness. The carrion are the killers, vile as rotting carcasses, borne off to the worst of graves; the shock lies in hearing them called ‘our people’, as in the twenty-eighth verse, where they ‘called themselves by our name’. ↩
24. The rifles were carried by arms that should have turned them on an enemy; they 'lost their way' and 'came to rest' (istawat, settled, took aim) in the ribs of their own people. The image is of the civil war, in which the guns of the nation were turned on the nation. The words also chime: ḍallat, 'they lost their way', and ḍulūʿinā, 'our ribs', share their opening sounds (jinās), binding the straying to its target. ↩
25. The poet takes up the word mutaʿaffin, 'rotten', from the seventeenth verse, now with the definite article, and flings it back in the face of the imagined critic. His love is defiant: he loves the homeland not in spite of its state but in that very state. ↩
26. Mutafanninan means 'with art, with skill', and also 'in ever more varied ways'. The idea of the lover killed by the beloved is a commonplace of Arabic love poetry, where it is a figure for the torment of passion; here the conceit becomes literal. The beloved is the homeland, which has truly killed its lovers, and has done so with a horrible inventiveness. ↩