In Search of Another History: Devin King Reviews City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut by Robyn Creswell

Robyn Creswell’s new book on Arabic Modernism, City of Beginnings, is half a Cold War thriller starring poets. Don’t get too excited! The other half is the usual applied theory. It took me an afternoon to read the first hundred pages and two weeks to read the second.

You ever have some dude at a party “well, actually” you about abstract expressionism? How it was all funded by the CIA? Same plot here. Creswell starts his book with a description of how Arabic Modernism came to be, focusing on the literary scene in Beirut and the writers around Yusuf al-Khan’s magazine Shi’r [Poetry]. Shi’r published forty-four issues from 1957–’64 and ’67– ’70, and was essentially the Beirut version of the Chicago mag of the same name: poetry, translations, manifestoes, criticism, and letters. Like other late modernist mags, Shi’r positioned itself as resolutely apolitical. While this couldn’t have been a more obvious stance for international late modernists, it was an unusual position to take in the hyper-politicized Arabic world. Outside of Lebanon, Creswell shows us, most Arabic literary output was being overtaken and funded by the state or was being built up in response to the state.

Adonis (ah-don-EES not uh-DAHN-is) is, globally at least, the most famous of these Arabic modernists, so Creswell uses the author’s biography to introduce the larger stakes of the magazine and the broader literary movement. Quickly: as a university student in Damascus, Adonis joined the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP) but was put in jail for a year after a coup that put the party out of favor. When Adonis got out of jail, the writer left for Beirut and established himself in the neighborhood of West Beirut—which Creswell describes as the Arab world’s Greenwich Village. Adonis’s description of this move to Beirut gives Creswell his title, and the paragraph that Creswell quotes from Adonis’s 1993 memoir, Ha anta ayyuhaal-waqt (There You Are, O Time), is worth quoting in full. Creswell’s book is worth your time, at least, for the previously untranslated stuff. Reading the book made me want to quit my quarantine sourdough starter in order to learn Arabic. Adonis lives in Paris now—he’s in his nineties—and has been more fully translated into French:

Beirut. As soon as my feet touched its soil and I began wandering its streets, I felt I was in a different city: not a city of endings, as was the case with Damascus, but a city of beginnings; not a city of certainty, but a city of searching. I felt the city wasn’t a completed structure, one you could only enter into as it stood and live in as it was, but rather an open and unfinished project.…The difference between Beirut and Damascus was evident in the streets, in people’s behavior, in their relations to one another, in the cultural activity—the newspapers, journals, and clubs—in the cafes, and in the dynamism of everyday life. This difference with Damascus suggested two things: first, an openness to modern gadgets and ideas of all sorts; and second, a kind of neutralism towards past values and the heritage in general….Beirut, looked at from within, was a world escaping from the history that had raised it or given birth to it, a world setting out in the direction of another history, not the one written for it, but one that would write itself.

Adonis’s work is marked by the argument made in those last sentences—his poetry and his criticism set out in search of another history, one unsullied by normal pressures. For Adonis, because of his own history and the consistent tying of culture with politics that he sees in the Arab world, these pressures are most often political. Or historico-political. His comrades at Shi’r agreed with him, and they made a movement.

If this gets you pumped about Adonis, I’m going to quietly suggest you spend your time reading all the Adonis you can find in whatever language you can find it in and then read this book.

Creswell argues—ad infinitum—that the apolitical ideal of Beirut modernism is shallow, fake, and anything but apolitical. Hence, the CIA. The first chapter of the book ends with a description of a conference in Rome attended by representatives of Shi’r and sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a Berlin organization founded in 1950 to “woo European intellectuals away from Communism and toward…a redefined, militant liberalism that championed individual freedom and capitalist dynamism against the threat of Soviet totalitarianism.” The CCF, which funded magazines, art exhibits, international conferences, and artists grants all around the world, was unmasked in 1966 by The New York Times as a CIA front. Will the Shi’r poets and editors accept money from the CCF and become part of a network of international liberalism? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

No matter the answer, Creswell’s point is clear to anyone who’s sat in a seminar class at any point since…I don’t know, when did the Modernists lose power in academia? I was born in ’81, help me out. I never had to sit in a room with Kenner or Bloom and listen to them tell me what true and pure writing was, but I have to imagine it was just as trifling as having to be reminded every other paragraph that “no politics is a kind of politics.” This is backed up by the rogues’ gallery: Jameson, Foucault, Benjamin, etc.

Creswell ain’t wrong, but I’ll say this about Adonis: at least he fucking tried. Is trying. The best parts of Creswell’s book are when he just describes what’s at stake for Adonis and the other modernists as writers. Creswell knows the under-reported Arabic literary history cold and the book’s explainer sections transfix; one wishes for a more complete history. What does Creswell include? Why Adonis curates a three-volume history of Arabic poetry and how it remakes the canon as one of pluralism and transformation rather than conservative nationalism. Why the prose poem in Arabic pisses off just as many people as it did elsewhere. How Adonis’s untouchable Songs of Mihyar the Damascene reinvents the hero’s journey as a “movement of dissatisfaction.”

Creswell could clearly write a fuller history, but the book has other aims. Quite simply, it creates a space for Arabic Modernism in avant-garde poetics departments in English speaking countries. For all my complaints about Creswell’s constant recourse to theory it is, for better or worse, what sells in the classroom. Creswell walks the line. He loves the material, but has to make it palatable for our moment. I get it—he teaches at Yale—but the book suffers.

The most egregious example. There’s a whole chapter in Creswell’s book analyzing a contemporary of Adonis’s, a prose poet named Unsi al-Hajj. Creswell zooms in on this one poem of al-Hajj’s, The Bubble of Origin, or the Heretical Poem. This poem is tailor made for Action Books’ roster. Why? The poem is a dialogue with cum from al-Hajj’s recent masturbation session in the toilet. Cum’s name is Charlotte. I’m not kidding! Joyelle, Johannes, if you’re reading, check this out, publish a full translation of the book it’s from, Lan. Here’s a section of the poem:

Then she said:

—Say something! So I said:

—Wait until I leave the toilet.

When I did, I pounced upon Charlotte and wiped her out. That night I awoke to meditate, as so often, upon the enigmas of creation. Suddenly I saw Charlotte on my finger. I made the sign of the cross and Charlotte grew larger. Here I became afraid, then I became afraid, then I became afraid, until I was a forest of fear.

After I had became a forest of fear I went back and became an end of fear. After I had become an end of fear I went back and became a sign of fear. And so the morning dawned and the sparrows chirped and I was seized by an overwhelming need for the toilet. I had hardly entered before Charlotte pushed me against the wall, tore off my clothes, and beat me to a pulp.

Yes yes y’all. A poem about getting the shit beat out of you by your own splooge, and/or how your splooge makes you masturbate again the morning after. Creswell reads the poem through Artaud, and Derrida reading Artaud, and Deleuze reading Artaud as “a narrative about the origins of the prose poem itself, a parable or a parody of genesis.” For Creswell, repressions of material like al-Hajj’s, like Artaud’s, “generate new forms of expression.” But because of Creswell’s constant scare mongering about liberal self-expression, the chapter also reads as a damning of late modernisms’ whole project as nothing but interior experience. Creswell may not want to make this point, but he makes it nonetheless: a poem about onanistic creation suggests any attempt at creative self-freedom, like Adonis’s, is simply an act of self-pleasure that parodies genesis.

I like masturbation. I also like poetry. Here’s a poem of Adonis’s from Kareem James Abu-Zeid’s and Ivan Eubanks’s sparkling new translation of Adonis’s most famous/most important book Songs of Mihyar the Damascene. Creswell writes the helpful introduction. The poem is called Defeat:

I fuse you now, my songs,

Into clouds, into elegies, into rain.

I mix grace with crime,

Knitting the banner of dirt and mourning

With spears of defeat.

 

Enchantment, fire, and banquets

Are my kingdom, fog

is my army, and the world is defeat.