Saadia Mufarreh

Saadia MufarrehRight in her
something lives.
It takes a carnival of wisdom as a ritual,
it sits on a throne of femininity and questions
called amazement .
Its features sketch a full moon
behind ashes of clouds
and in the presence
and in the presence of trees.

To Mahmoud Darwish
Where incidents walk the same road
and the words ride together along the banks of
first question,
where there are many declared attempts
at suicide by linguists and grammarians ,
and the children on the boring school chairs
learn how to draw poetry
and pride themselves in words and sounds
and sometimes succeed.
Where " The lonely Horse …"stands
lonely …to a certain extent ,
enemies of poetry bad-mouth it behind its back
And the last poet becomes
as if he has never been!
Oh …God!

Electra
This ambiguous being
where the humming of truth blends
with the sweetness of myth,
and the expected poem
with memories whose heroic image are
overblown
and where there is …
a lonely photograph that
I stand in front of as if it's a mirror,
whenever the hidden question multiply
and sneak towards me
from the holes in the family tales
amputated by necessity.


She carves her heart …He says, " Follow me , Beautiful Deer"

( 1 )

It sometimes happens …
She plans to give her day a blue memory.
She sweet-talks her prettiest dresses to shed off
yesterday's smell.
She peels her skin with the edge of desire
And survive.

( 2 )

It sometimes happens …
He gurgles with the water of his amputated
childhood.
He struggles with rotten fish on the grass.
With his milk teeth , he ravishes the alleged
history of a tribe.
He sometimes singe .
He is rescued to a certain extent
And sleeps in the bed his amputated
childhood.

( 3 )

It sometimes happens…
He loves her / she loves him.
She carves her heart …she guards his palm tree.
He fills the heart …He says, " Follow me ,
beautiful deer ".

( 4 )

It often happens …
The sand is alone with the dew
They celebrate being
Each on his own !

Refrigerator
I opened it,
tidy were its contents.
Bottles of preserved milk
cartons of yoghurt
bags of frozen meat
yellow apples
medicine and bread
and …and … etc.
In the refrigerator of my soul!
The contents scatter
and expire
and no one opens them.

Distance
Between the room and the hall
is a corridor with broken tiles.
My mother complains how small it is.

Only my sore body knows
how long it really is.

Loss

Only on the side roads
I try to be.
I stroke my hair, hidden by necessity.
I sneak my right hand in my pocket,
I walk like a swan,
I swing my bag in the new air
I sing my spontaneous tunes.

But the side roads are also crowded with people
And the swan doesn't know the language of ants.

The mirror lying down
The garden he has been persistently painting
have no trees, or rivers of milk and honey running
through.
The spaces in the gardens he paints
can only be pale blue
as if they are mirrors lying on their backs
looking at a sky clouded with trees that are stingy
with their early ripened fruit.

A broken glass
He mixes his colours
whenever he notices tow eyes worth painting,
or the hem of a coloured dress
or the break of a dove
or even a broken glass.

He makes hasty brush strokes on the white haze
in front of him, challenging
whenever the skies look wider
and the distinguishing features
are further apart from each other.

He paints
whenever his chest beats with bottled-up sorrow.

Translated by Nay Hannawi
from " Mujarrad Mira'at Mustalqiyya"
( "Merely a Mirror Laying") , Dar al-Mada, Damascus, 1999

Saadia Mufarreh
  • A poet , critic and a writer for almost ten years.
  • Current job ; Art Editor in AL Qabas news paper - Kuwait.
  • Writes weekly and monthly articles in many Arabic papers and magazines .
  • Wrote tenths of poems in different Arabic papers and magazines.
  • Participated in reciting selections of her poems in dozens of verse gatherings.
  • Published so far ,four verse books (Deiwan) ;
    1. He was The Last of Dreamers.( 1st Edition , Kuwait 1990 , 2nd Edition , Cairo 1992).
    2. When you're Absent, I Saddle My Suspicion's Horses . ( Beirut ,1994 ) .
      Book of Sins . ( Cairo , 1997) .
    3. Mere A Mirror Lying Back . ( Damascus , 1999 ) .
  • Won number of verse awards from Arab institutions .
  • Interested in poetry directed for children.
  • Graduated from Kuwait university ( Arabic Language & Education) in 1987.

P.O.BOX 21800
13078 zip
Tel : 4812822
Fax :4842803
KUWAIT
E.mail : saadia111@hotmail.come
Web site : www.saadiah.com

Saadia Mufarreh

Poetry is a gamble, a Poetess is a double provocation ,the critics say !

one usually regrets things he should have done but was unable to do , and the area of regret is always defined by one's ability or inability to carry out that is required to be achieved . Therefore one does not regret what has not been achieved if he has not been able at that moment to perform their act. This seems to me a good and convenient logic ' and I have always has to resort to it to justify moments of failure that I have experienced and became a title of my unannounced life . Perhaps the most important , and the first from the chronological point of view ,is my childhood ,with its vague contradiction being more than the first step in my psychological history ,not to say my whole psychological history .

Why?
There are various possible answers and sometimes there is one answer to this multiple question .

let me ,therefore , use what I have said above to explain what creation represents , as a subject at least , of the value that gave me lots of bright moments to some extent ,compared to lots of disappointments . Shall I say that I chose in an early period of my life to be a poetess or a writer at least ! I know that matters relating to the process of creation can not be talked about in this precise manner and not in this form of historical dating , and I also know that speaking about talent is more suitable than speaking about cautious choice of the writer to be a writer . I know , as well , that this exactly what happened to me . I wanted to be a poetess , and then decided to be so , It seems that happened , although I still have moments of doubt that I am a genuine poetess , and this feeling comes to me , precisely ,whenever I finish a new poem . In that moment my feelings became so vague that it becomes difficult to define them . A feeling of real happiness for an achievement ,that I always perceive in being the most important in my life as a whole and in the same moment a feeling of some sort of sadness at the end . I hate endings . I hate in my reading a novel or watching a film reaching the end . Sadness arises from the deep seated and real fear , that I began to discern lately when finishing a poem .I fear that this poem is the last one in my life. and the old question : how and from where poetry comes ? torture me . Because I have always failed to give an answer to this torturous and deceiptvely easy question , that defeated my ability to know my self reasonably well, and I replaced that defeat with the said fear and matters became less frustrating . Poetry which I chose to deal with in reading and writing has utterly succeeded in riding me of my personal complexes that I expected to hide under their old rapping and good old Mr. Poetry succeeded making me achieve peace with myself .It also succeeded in becoming the most beautiful and largest bet in my life , being also the first bet . Poetry has librated me , I do not mean by that poetry that I write ,but every beautiful poetic experience I had in reading .I have been liberated by poetry in general from many annoying things such as ignorance , fear , need , and inferiority . Poetry being an anti- action , it was easier for me , or at least not difficult , to practice anti-action through it and be protected by it .
Poetry with its prevocational charchtrestic add to women with their prevocational nature in a society controlled by males , more prevocational aspens . It gives them without their knowledge sometimes the first tools , or the conditions for quality and originality to practice poetic creation or any other form of creation .
A woman who choses poetry as a pledge for life is supposed to know right from the beginning the difficulty of her choice and its sweetness and she becomes accordingly ready to conduct her free poetic experience even if that is carried out in a male dominated society , that is oppressive forbidding women to express their intimacy since she was able to cross the secret narrow passage leading to the heaven and hell of poetry .
Yet this wonderful victory is achieved by women despite the conditions they are facing, came as a result of insistence upon the gamble of poetry and creative work in general . It is just a victory in a first battle of a fierce and long war involving many parties . May be we will benefit from international interest shown in recent years in women's writings , especially after the progress made in minorities rights discourse that call for re-evaluation of all forms of expression and the way the other express his or her self , and the importance of emphasising his or her rights of artistic expression free from the historical limits posed by the traditional elite class. The said interests also monitor the many obstacles that hinder the creative experience of women. These obstacles , fortunately do not come from the women writers i. e they are not related to how creative they are or how original and established their talents are , rather they are related to external conditions i.e they came from the other towards women who ever than other is , who can be a man , social temporal or other conditions . This means that referring to female literature as special term to describe women writing is not accurate because it comes from outside the written text it refers to the identity of the writer or his or her gender notwithstanding the nature of the said writing or its subject , It is strange that this type of reference goes on under the interest of almost all new criticism that embrace the idea of the interference of genres and the disappearance of difference between them . The talk about women writings through the term female literature does not limit this literature, or look down to it, even if that is done in good faith and sometimes as a result of a compensating critical interest in this type of
literature . This is not good for criticism and contradicts its general approach in one hand , and is not fair ,objective and accurate on the other , when it ignores the potentials of the text and concentrates instead upon the person creating that text which leads criticism once again to an area it has surpassed many years ago .
Now ,what this has to do with me ?

      And why the poetry I write needs , for example , a special identity , or a term that describe it and give it its mark?
      As for the critics they go on talking , what they say?
Let them say what they want .

(banebal) magazine

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