The New Yorker on Adonis's Complex Relationship to His Heritage

In this week's issue of the New Yorker, Robyn Creswell looks at the culture that made the Syrian-born poet Adonis, his lifelong engagement with conflict and democracy, and his long-held stance that "the alliance of theology with state power was the region’s most deep-rooted danger." More:

Adonis’s current assault on monotheism has a lot in common with his older campaign against Arab nationalism. The very idea of unity—of homogeneity—seems to repel him. For Adonis, monotheism’s obsession with oneness leads inevitably to violence against people who hold different beliefs. It also leads to spiritual small-mindedness. “Concerto al-Quds” is full of questions, as if in rebuke of the certainties of dogma:

How can man, creator of meaning,
draw his destiny into one utterance?
                                       How can his spirit
be poured into a wall?

The poem is also Adonis’s most passionate statement on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. (This is a topic that, unlike most Arab intellectuals of his generation, he has generally avoided, though he has long made clear his contempt for the Palestinian leadership.) In a memorable passage, Adonis quotes an especially repellent verse of Leviticus on pagan nations—“You may even bequeath them to your sons after you, to receive as a possession; you can use them as permanent slaves”—and then, making the modern allegory clear, finds a riposte in a passage from Habakkuk: “Woe to him that builds a town with bloodshed, and establishes it on injustice!” Other sections of the poem recall the demolition, in 1967, of the Moroccan Quarter (torn down to enlarge the passageway to the Western Wall) and the ongoing tunnelling beneath the Arab neighborhood of Wadi Hilwa. For Adonis, this history of destruction and segregation is the shared legacy of all three monotheisms. Israel’s history of illegal settlements and territorial exclusions is only the most recent example of the dangers of mixing religion and politics.

Like many modernist poets, Adonis borrows literary authority from the tradition he declares obsolete. The speaker of his Jerusalem poem is a latter-day prophet, a warner who knows that his catalogue of crimes will almost certainly be ignored. It is impossible to read “Concerto”—the relentlessly high pitch of its language, its emphatic repetitions and violent imagery—without recalling its Old Testament and Quranic models. There is no other modern Arab poet who so successfully conjures the grim beauty of the ancient works even while casting them in forms taken from the twentieth-century avant-garde. In part because written Arabic is a literary language, distinct from the various vernaculars spoken across the region, rhetorical grandeur is native to Arabic in a way that it is not to English. Mattawa’s translation struggles to match Adonis’s wildest flights, but their eloquence and anger do come through:

Ruin is still the daily bread of God’s earth. Will the prophecies
also turn into a siege? Will tunnels be burrowed into their words?
Will their visions splinter into missiles and bombs, into volcanoes
of gas and phosphor?

Head to the New Yorker for all of "The Man Who Remade Arabic Poetry."