who has the ability to mix the spiritual and the physical, the real and the unreal, and the mythical with the present, in her verse.
Al Ghanem engulfed by the soul
Nujoom Al Ghanem is one of the strongest modern Emirati poets who rose in the early 1980s in the Gulf region. Her language is such that it permeates the soul with a rich and flavoured life experience that goes beyond the five senses. Her ability to mix the spiritual and the physical, the real and the unreal, the mythical with the present, is what makes her poems resonate in the mind more than any other writer. Al Ghanem offers a spiritual and mystical surrounding without ascending or descending into deep and obscure regions of the psyche. Hers is an experience that combines the possible with the limitless and all-embracing possibilities of love, regeneration and an infinite room for acceptance and change. Her words are laden with a past full of sorrows, but this is not a hindrance to the boundless love contained in the mystic heart of a loving poet. Hers is an experience that mixes the culture of the East with that of the West in unique and unparalleled way of accepting the other as part of one’s own making.
Al Ghanem was born in 1962 in Dubai, in the UAE, where she currently lives and works. She has published five poetry collections that grabbed the attention of Arab critics and readers. She studied TV production and direction in Ohio, in the USA, has an MA in cinema production from Griffith University in Australia and has directed three short films. She started her career as a journalist then shifted to training and finally to mass communication. She is an active member in her community and is currently writing poetry full time.
The following poems are taken from more than one poetry collection including her new anthology, which is being compiled and is due to be published later this year. The poems were selected by the poet herself and dedicated to The Jordan Times Weekender.
(Part 1)
Angels of Absence
My mother lets her prayers escape
To every other morning,
To every passer-by who carries our news,
As she exchanges blames with God
Because He has not yet granted her wishes
* * *
Fever draws her
To sanatoriums
And gardens she thinks will cure her pains
But she falls once more
Hitting her blood
As if it were a life jacket
* * *
I look at the range
The walls are mighty
And so are sorrows
* * *
I will leave everything in place
Even the dust accumulated over the trees
So that they too will know
How our bodies are pained when no one touches them
* * *
Scattered by the wind…
That’s how
She saw
Her death
* * *
I will be happy
I told my heart that made me dizzy with its sorrows
And I lit a candle for the angels
And another one
For the love that inspired me with poetry
* * *
Good For Them
A toast
And the greeting of the rain
To those who wound
And become preoccupied with innocence
When your eyes look into theirs
Yesterday
We met yesterday,
We documented our signatures
On the long roads.
Yesterday we faked
The first reason to meet,
And we spent the first day
Furnishing our tent.
Yesterday,
I swear it was yesterday.
What are all those years
That whenever we count
Increase one more?
Dark Marble
After all these seasons,
And one year flinging at another,
There I am waiting for you grandmother,
Waiting for this tender punishment
That is stronger than the storm’s sting.
There I take off my face as I turn to the corner,
My hand between my two pitch-black hands
And my clothes shabby and cold.
You will come now
You will come after a while,
But the moon …
The rotten fruit
hanging in the night
dimmed in my coat.
Here I am in the ancient passageway
My hands are clasped
My feet brush the emptiness
A destitute student
Who becomes old every time she steps on the doorstep.
O grandmother
After all these seasons
And one year flinging at another,
Where can I get the braid of stories that spill at the hour of your happiness.
It is time for the morning to whiff
With the smell of hot bread
And with the heavier list of advice in my school bag.
O kind hearted grandmother
There’s a notch under the shirt
What’s to become of that notch
While she has not yet completed her seventh year?
Lies are the wisdom of the young
What need I to tell you
So you would realise what a child I was?
I like to stay beside you even if I am not doing anything…
I wake up
So the morning would bestow its kiss on me
And lend me your smell.
My heart wakes up in the early morning
To contemplate the lightness of your sleep
And the secrets of the bygone night
Where we left the warmth of our breaths
To swing like stars in the wind,
And in the long night
Our souls melt into each other.
I wake up today
To know more than any other time
That I will allow my self
To bask in your love
Even if the times are narrow
Or if my limbs are cold
In the night of loneliness
Because in your absence
They lose the way
Even when they are at home.
What loneliness does with our hearts
My head is dizzy from the humidity of the beach
And my thoughts are like my eyes disturbed by the hanging clouds
In the far away sky …
I find myself unable to be precise
In my small details
Or to gaze into your eyes
And my fingers tremble
When you ask the question
If I was cured that day
But you do not wait for an answer
Or turn to the long silence
That follows the questions
But you sip your coffee
Preoccupied by the faces of strangers
And the bit of moon left
From last night.
You gaze at the waves of the sand
Scattered in the space of imaginations
And the ruins of homes
That our souls have deserted
My head spins in the heat of anxiety
Clinging on to thoughts of escape
And my heart is tossed by the forebodings of absence.
The branches of loneliness shake
In the fear of waiting
And I am unable to offer it
any water of assurance
Or even a prayer to the sky
To wet her hair with rain …
Kingdom of Doubts
Behind this evening
Where the star is perplexed as to
from which lantern it should look
and from which door it should pass
behind this evening
I glimpsed dreams with sunken eyes
Waving with tired arms
Before placing their dress on their shoulders
And disappearing in the dark
Like a bird
Frightened by the wind
OOOOOOOOOOh
It is the scream
Coming closer to me and without knowing for whom
It goes back
I let off my petrified butterfly
And the swish of my dress follows me
assured
that I did not betray the companionship
Will I return?
Is this a vision or a trap
The directions are woven by flashes
A notch in the night
Jumps like a wick and a doze
And the dress behind me is like a blade that scrapes the paths
Shall I return?
Here
Rub your eye sockets with this bread
Who is it?
Not before the water writhes
And the moon becomes dry
Who is it?
You will only hear the voice ripped like a knife
Tired by time
The birds are on their branches
Dance frozen in circling
The dead trees.
Come
So I would warm the cold in you
No…No
The screams vibrate in my senses
And the swish of the dress recedes,
My body is a stick that bounces between two unknown palms
My eyes are white clouds
Who is it?
I hear the paths strike my ears
I loosen my fingers from my face
There a pigeon rolls its egg
On top of my chest
And my tongue circles like an ancient pendulum
Behind that evening …
Correction:
At dawn
I tied my bundle
And went out
In the companionship
Of the storm
The houses sunk in front of my eyes, the edges of the earth trembled…
I became like an old tortoise on the face of a rough planet nothing
Between me and the sky except a strong wind and clouds decorated with diamonds.
Suddenly one of the clouds turned into a woman who proceeded towards me
And I ran in search of shelter, I was struck by what resembles love; but she was
Following me from castle to castle, from room to room,
I screamed out don’t come any closer your electricity will strike me,
I left her in one of the rooms sitting like a teacher from the strange
Ages sipping lessons and crying, sipping lessons and the class
Is empty except for benches while I am ill fortuned outside,
I climb one stairs and descend from another in search of a cave.
Jordantimes
15-2-07
***
Omnia Amin
Nujoom Al Ghanem is one of the strongest modern Emirati poets who rose in the early 1980s in the Gulf region. Her language is such that it permeates the soul with a rich and flavoured life experience that goes beyond the five senses. Her ability to mix the spiritual and the physical, the real and the unreal, the mythical with the present, is what makes her poems resonate in the mind more than any other writer. Al Ghanem offers a spiritual and mystical surrounding without ascending or descending into deep and obscure regions of the psyche. Hers is an experience that combines the possible with the limitless and all-embracing possibilities of love, regeneration and an infinite room for acceptance and change. Her words are laden with a past full of sorrows, but this is not a hindrance to the boundless love contained in the mystic heart of a loving poet. Hers is an experience that mixes the culture of the East with that of the West in unique and unparalleled way of accepting the other as part of one’s own making.
Al Ghanem was born in 1962 in Dubai, in the UAE, where she currently lives and works. She has published five poetry collections that grabbed the attention of Arab critics and readers. She studied TV production and direction in Ohio, in the USA, has an MA in cinema production from Griffith University in Australia and has directed three short films. She started her career as a journalist then shifted to training and finally to mass communication. She is an active member in her community and is currently writing poetry full time.
A Writer’s Testimonial
My Private Memory … My Components
by Nujoom Al Ghanem
This testimonial was read at the Bahraini Writers Association in the winter of 2005
I woke up in the early morning and tried to recall what friends had said the night before about this interview: “The memory of modernism in the Gulf” … A personal experience. I was told that I will be in a paradise of intimacy but nonetheless I did not have any heartsease.
I woke up in the morning and the eloquent words echoed in my ears and so did my anxiety. My head was still immersed with questions and my eyes gazed at the ceiling of the room. Distant voices reached me from outside to remind me of the time. I am used to escaping but this time I found myself unable to.
Imagine what electronic chatting might do, especially when it is among poets who master foolishness and chaos. Today I am a hostage of this beautiful foolishness, which my friend Fawziyah Al Sindi was responsible for, and of course I was her partner in liking the idea.
I wanted to be told by friends that the matter would be easy, but what can I do so you would forgive my feelings of doubt?
What can I say about modernism to friends who are more equipped than myself? It seems to be a duelling of already anticipated results!
You come bare-chested, amazed by words and their secrets. Your only weapon is your language and whatever disasters in between are yours alone and they end with “intimate” bullets.
I spent most of my life – and maybe it’s the case with most of my generation – being burnt by the fires of this term.
Although we did not want to be parties in the debate around it, we have been classified as modernist; out of sarcasm, of course, and not out of acknowledging that this is the truth!
The main reason for this is the fact that we chose to write in blank verse.
Just as poetry brings you peace it can also bring you a catastrophe, especially in our Arab world that does not allow you fresh air.
Modernism does not reside in explanation or diagnosis, but in the ability to live it in a real manner.
Modernism does not concern me as a term and it never did one of those days. I was not preoccupied with the Arab rivalry that extends from the ocean to the gulf and is concerned with its meaning and its effects. I used to watch the ongoing dispute and feel estranged!
I call it a dispute, because in my opinion it never reached the level of a composed and intellectual discussion.
The journalistic storms would end up being chapters in books and some of them resorted to translations and depended on copying, so we ended having double superficiality.
This was the prevalent scene and, unfortunately, for years and years we were only aided by those who started their own critical and academic projects. But because they are rare the sound of the void remained loud in our cultural scene, not only in criticism, but also in creativity.
I hope that what I say here is not taken for being more than a testimony. Because theory and criticism is not my field, and because placing me in this stream will make me feel estranged,
I hope you forgive me my commitment not to wade into this kind of dispute and to be content with speaking about my vision as a human being, a poet and the understating of myself, of the components and the effects that played and still play a role in my life and that contributed in my making, whether directly or indirectly.
Memory:
Like others of my generation I consider literary resources, be they poetry, novels or drama, some the most important foundations on which I built my experience.
Arabic poetry formed the main source in my first stage in life in childhood, as it presented an amazing window to another world that resembles nothing in reality.
Reading Al Mutanabi, Abu Firas Al Hamadani, Niffari, Abu Nawwas and Abu Al Alaa Al Miari is a form of complete magic for any pupil in the early, middle or late period at school.
Maybe our relationship with Arab poetic heritage stems from this amazement that overwhelms one at a young age and remains in control of one like an eternal dream.
Or maybe it goes back to this vision that lends some kind of sacredness to the old poetic texts and transforms them in time into a taboo.
No matter what, this in itself is considered the real substance and memory in which experience is nurtured.
I remained gripped by this rich and magical heritage until I got to know the more modernist poetry in high school.
What gripped me most was its ability to register the daily details in a less complicated language and with images that allow the current mind to accept them or to accept the similarity between them and the particularity of time and place.
From there the window of knowledge started to widen because of an increase in the variety of readings and the beginning of awareness of what was happening around us, locally and in the Arab world. From there I also started to imitate, not only in writing but also in drawing.
I have to admit that I enjoyed a rich childhood and a youth in which all the elements that could contribute to the making of a human being who has interests of a particular kind were there.
I got the books I wanted easily and also the music and the drawing utensils.
I wanted to do everything and to learn everything.
Writing started in its awkward form in the late seventies. By the early eighties I took a firm decision to stop the childish attempts in imitating the traditional form of poetry and to commit to one form that is to blank verse, which I like to call free verse.
I used to read with passion and the mystic experience in the verses of Al Hallaj and Sahrawardi, then Ibn Arabi, added another dimension to my experience, related to my questions about existentialism and my entrance into modern philosophical worlds.
Every phase led me to another and like others I was overtaken by Nihilism, Dadaism, Surrealism then Structuralism and linguistics as well as other movements that make one more chaotic and bohemian.
In addition to that, there were other fingerprints that left deep marks in the self and questions that would never ever get an answer.
These fingerprints are exemplified in the poems of Saint John Pierce, Baudelaire, Rambo, T.S. Eliot, Aragon, Jack Perk and in philosophy as well as in the verses of Shakespeare’s plays.
I have to here thank Jabra Khalil Jabra for his big project in translation.
There were also the sacred books that I refer to here as being essential in deepening my knowledge, in confusing my thoughts and in charging them and enhancing my language and my spiritual growth.
I wrote a lot that I later refused to put in book form and I chose a little of it to form my first book The Night of Heaven.
Between The Night of Heaven and Pomegranate Blossoms I faced many challenges concerning my personal beliefs and my questioning of my text and the world.
In more than 20 years I produced four books only and my fifth was electronically published and is not yet printed in book form.
The reason is not because I do not write, but because I am indescribably hard with my texts and because every time I ask myself for whom do I write and why?
Translated by Dr Omnia Amin