The Literary Work as a Debt to Beauty

Reflections

tortuous and complex, yet always open-ended, trajectory: literature, this passionate adventure, is, to me, an exacting labour that implicates one's own being.
I could state straight away my conviction that literary works are written in the midst of doubt and questioning, interrogation, ambivalence and ambiguity, in short, while one is searching for truths; this search is sustained by an inner fire which tries to reach hidden depths, so as to give them expression in a language that always struggles to find its words, and all the more so if the language in which one writes is not one's mother tongue, a foreign language, which is my case. I will return to this question later on; but, it is no platitude to say that in the field of writing any language is a foreign language. I could add to this that writing is speaking in silence, with all the eloquence, the sense and the meaning that is borne by silence. Perhaps, poetry is placed there: in the economy of the word, in allusion, in metaphor, suggestiveness; poetry is not to be found in explanation, in redundance or paraphrase. The work becomes light enmeshed in shadow; it is inhabited by antagonism, painful agony and inner turmoil, it is a loving rebellion at a remove from simplifying assertions, or didactic and all too tedious ideologies. We need only to think of socialist realism, of a work which is his master's voice and a means of propaganda; there is no need to recall here how fatal this has been for so many works that History has cast into oblivion!
The literary work that makes us attentive is above all an act of freedom; it is freed from political, social, religious, or ideological, and, perhaps, linguistic enslavement. In the freezing cold of the American winter, I wanted to track the traces of this writer who I used to read as an adolescent in Tunisia, and whose poetic aphorisms and spiritualist thoughts were so uplifting for the soul, so elevating for love, art, and beauty, and for the human condition itself which he has so well described in Broken Wings.
Khalil Gibran had also lived in Europe and was a friend of Rodin: thanks to his far-eastern influences, he brought a new spirituality to Arab culture, and at the same time he shook up the Christian tradition. It did not take long for the clergy to start If the people one day decide to live / Fate needs to respond Night needs to dissipate / Chains need to be broken 1 These lines, which are now part of Tunisia's national anthem, were sung by thousands of protesters during the recent Arab rebellions. However, this very poem, "The will to live," was the cause of the author's conviction for heresy in the 1930s.
The loneliness of art that Rainer Maria Rilke talks about is very real indeed. Because even today, al-Shabbi's loneliness endures and his struggle for the affirmation of the human will before Destiny is considered blasphemous by numerous salafist fundamentalists. What is more, they have rewritten and misquoted the poem on many websites, in order to subject it to God's Will. al-Shabbi's freedom is always unsettling, its share in the course of History notwithstanding. Through translations that appeared in the Arab Middle East, al-Shabbi discovered the French Romantics rather late. And since we can establish that he had no knowledge of poetic movements like surrealism, futurism or dadaism, we can very well see al-Shabbi as one of the founders of Arab literary modernity because of his themes at least, since the form of his poetry remained classical. Gibran and al-Shabbi alike are thieves of fire and their modernity, well before the modernity of the Syrian-Lebanese Adonis, had to face conservatism, an immoveable weightiness, the definitive shutting downof the process of innovation. Every work that questions an ancestral heritage and attempts to become unchained is led to ask the nagging question: what is modernity?
With regard to French literature, for instance, is it inevitably that of Baudelaire, or is modernity throughout literary history relative and specific? This, to me, is a most fascinating comparative project that will always challenge me.
I have read both Khalil Gibran and Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi; their works were part of my "book of sand" (El libro de arena, 1975), to remember Jorge Luis Borges . What I mean here is that a literary work that writes itself infinitely (as inexhaustible and immense as grains of sand), makes us realise our inability to grasp all that is being written by the human spirit; thereby our pride is thwarted, and so much the better. We ought to learn a lot from literature andits obstacles, from its accumulated knowledges and its entangled pages; from this human relaying within which we discover more than we invent. Such is Umberto Eco's good fortune in The I admit that our South, which, by the way, I wonder where its border would be set, is ridden by troubles and conflicts, while the North can leisurely turn its gaze to other skies, and search for literary inspirations elsewhere. However, to me, this imbalanced relation is an intolerable menace, as it encloses, immobilises and fossilises, so to speak, one's own identity. What prevents me then from inverting the North-South relation, so that it becomes South-North? An identity that fears the Other stagnates and dies, or else, becomes dangerous and murderous, to remember the Franco-Lebanese Amin Maalouf's Murderous Identities. 2  The Pleasure of him who wants to discover the World, commonly known as Roger's book; al-Mas'udi (9 th -10 th c) wrote his Fields of Gold; Marco Polo's contemporary, Ibn Battûta (1304-1377) in the narrative of his voyage to the borders of China, also described Constantinople. So many writers discovered the wonders of the world and turned their gaze to the Other without adversity or violence;certainly, their gaze was prejudiced and/or estranging at times, yet subscribing to the fundamental idea in Islam, that it is the duty of the Muslim to discover and to know the earth that belongs to God. Needless to say, rereading and returning to these authors always fills me with a nostalgia that is hard to fend off, as these times seem by now too distant and buried under the piles of the dust of current events. And this is why I often found myself rigorously re/searching the traces of certain Arab writers in order to rewrite modernity. Let me tell you that in doing so, I join the Mexican Octavio Paz whose We need to uphold the beauty of art before its enemies, before the blindness that is spreading across the world. To this end, we need to reconstruct the Tower of Babel, build an understanding between languages and cultures, leave the doom of cacophony behind us, without pride, without hegemonic intentions. Still, I am neither a blissful, nor a naïve optimist, because the body of literature also has flaws, ugly stains, fanatical nationalism, persistent prejudices, its grey zones: Drieu La Rochelle, Céline who became an antisemite, the Norwegian Knut Hamsun who collaborated with theNazis, Peter Handke who attended the funeral of the war criminal Milosevic with a rose in his hand. This is why the literary work compels us to be vigilant, to be on the lookout for unwanted deviations, for the failure to uphold the fundamental values of Humanity.The art which is a debt to beauty constitutes an act of a culture that forms the basis of civilisations. Without them, our humanity will be reduced to a ferocious jungle. Art can help us build a fraternal world: for the sake of this world, literature deserves the greatest sacrifices, as well as difficult yet beautiful crossings.