Walking with Lips Raining Fire and Love! Arab Poets’ Testimony to the World

Abstract

This essay is about Arab poets’ testimonials on the failures and strengths of the human condition. Their work has unmistakably exceeded nationalist projects in line with Fanon’s international dimension of the national consciousness, which is at heart a commitment to human dignity, coevalness, and freedom. Arab poets envisioned liberation through a revolt against the self that has surrendered to the oppressors’ fantasy to consider their injustices a necessary price for modernity and progress. The metaphor of walking with lips raining fire and love captures their quest for coexistence, or what Glissant calls “the poetics of relation” without forgoing burning questions about justice. Thus, their words have guided and fueled anticolonial movements as well as dissent during the postcolonial era. The poets selected here might not all have the same understanding of justice and liberation, yet each one exposes in his and her own way the decay within the very ones who are suffering from international and national forms of oppression. Their testimony shows that oppression in the Arab world cuts through class, ethnic and gender lines. Their voices were enlisted as a way to make this essay a patchwork of testimonials on Arab people yearning for self-determination and dignity, while facing oppression as a way of life. The language of fire emanating from the selected poems that celebrate stories of sacrifice, resistance, and endurance remind us that the real revolution is about imagining human relations that are rooted not in domination and control, but in elevating principles of justice and humanity for all.

• Anticolonialism
• Arab poetry
• oppression

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Khadijah Aldabbagh and Elfadil Ibrahim for their thoughtful and invaluable feedback on translations. We would like to extend our gratitude to all the sisters in Kalimat, poets in their own right.

Notes

1 We use the attribute Arab to refer to Arab-speaking individuals, even as they acknowledge that there are many languages in the space called the Arab world.

2 The immediate context of Dunqul’s “Do not Reconcile” is President Anwar Sadat’s pursuit of a peace deal with Israel, which the poet vehemently rejected. He saw it as a betrayal of the Palestinian right to self-determination and life with dignity and justice. A translation of the excerpt is available at http://www.polarabicpoetry.tumblr.com/post/91953926521/%D9%84%D8%A7-%D8%AA%D8%B5%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AD-do-not-reconcile-by-amal-dunqul.

3 The translation of the poem is Kassis’s, but the last line was changed from “Fire at times, love always” to “Fire at times, love at other times” to preserve the meaning of the original text.

4 Translated from the Arabic by the authors.

5 Translated from the Arabic by the authors.

6 The translation is al-Udhari’s, but the last line of the excerpt is changed to preserve the meaning of the original.

7 Translated from the Arabic by the authors.

8 The authors have relied on the translation available here: http://www.awate.com/jebena-presents-anis-shoshan-the-artist-of-peace/. A few modifications were made to preserve the meaning of the original text.

9 We are grateful to Anfal Hammad for sharing her poem with us. The text was translated from Arabic by the authors.