United with Fire

By Jonathan Callard

We find hope, Henri Nouwen once wrote, from people who have “the courage to enter so deeply into human suffering and speak from there.” Iraqi writer Fadhil Al-Azzawi is one such hope-giver, who, despite a long exile from his land and people, has been ceaselessly pressing words together in prayer for decades. Miracle Maker: The Selected Poems of Fadhil Al-Azzawi (BOA Editions Limited, 2003), translated by Khaled Mattawa, is a glance at one man's savage determination to stay alive and see beauty in the midst of building despair.

Poetry, even in the absurd form that he used – with references to clowns and dancers and Romeo the lover – was his way of talking to himself, of reminding himself and those on the outside that they were human, that they could be good, even in the face of cruelty and violence.

In scenes that are reminiscent of today's Abu Ghraib scandal, Al-Azzawi's early poetry, first published in Rising to the Spring in 1974, fought disconnection and isolation. In 1963, the Baathist Party took over political control of the country in a coup, aided by a young Saddam Hussein. Junta leaders sentenced Al-Azzawi to three years in the infamous Al-Hilla prison for dangerous speech and expelled him from Baghdad University, where he was studying. He smuggled his words out of prison to Arabic newspapers, while inside he and others were being tortured. When the prison became overcrowded, Al-Azzawi and others were crowded into a room that had a hole cut in the middle of it, leading to the gallows. Poetry, even in the absurd form that he used – with references to clowns and dancers and Romeo the lover – was his way of talking to himself, of reminding himself and those on the outside that they were human, that they could be good, even in the face of cruelty and violence.

“So that poetry tears out the masks of convention, / that the word encompasses the world, / I am crucified in this exile / outside the guidelines of the profession / flogging the faces of the poets,” he wrote in “Mr. Edouard Luqa's Dilemma.”

In 1965, Al-Azzawi was released. He became the editor of several Arabic journals. He met Salima, his wife, who tells him in “The Teachings of F. Al-Azzawi” that she is truly with him when neither of them exists, “even in poems.” Love drove him when nothing else made sense, not even the words he wrote.

Poems from The Eastern Tree (1975) delved into fantasy and fable to subvert the increasingly harsh regime of Saddam Hussein. No humans, no modern-day stories, could explain the human rights abuses in Iraq anymore. Al-Azzawi sent the common man, Abdullah, to find truth from the sea and dragons and enchanted deserts and beautiful princesses. In “A Donkey at a Mill,” Abdullah spies a miller flogging an exhausted animal, and offers to console the miller by taking the place of the donkey. As he accepts the lashes to his back, the donkey turns and thanks him. The line between human and animal blurs. The poems crackle with barely contained fury and desperate sadness.

Al-Azzawi turned to imagination and memory to keep breathing. In “Happiness,” a poet is jailed in a cell. Stanza by stanza, his captors bar up his window, cut down the trees outside, and raise the walls so that he cannot connect with the natural world. “It's enough that I am alive,” the poet reminds himself, and then when he is led to the gallows, he smiles: “As I climb the ladder of my death / I write my poems in the memory of the future.” Poems extolling the glories of Babylon in its prime, with its hanging gardens and scholars and great thinkers, or even farther back in history, when Abraham was thrown into the fire by Nimrod but did not burn, reminded Iraqis of their proud heritage.

“How can I be lonely when I have your love, my people?” Al-Azzawi called out in “The Key,” anticipating exile. “How can I be a prisoner when I have the key to the future?”

In “Epilogue,” he exhorted them to join the parade of people walking towards “the light coming from the darkness of / days.” “If you see the parade. . .” he says, “follow it and do not ask where it is going.”

In 1976, Al-Azzawi accepted a scholarship to study communications at the University of Leipzig in East Germany, and left Iraq for good. His subsequent books of poetry, A Man Throws Stones into a Well , At the End of All Journeys, A Moth on Its Way to Fire , and Bedouins Under an Alien Sky , all focus on the dislocation of living as an Arab in the West.

“And we got drunk together / “ he wrote in “Song of Myself” of his fellow Iraqi exiles, “once here and once there / in Berlin or Cyprus, / or London or Paris, / and sometimes / in hell.” Now he's in Berlin, running into Angel Gabriel on a bus, who points a pistol at him and threatens him to recite the Qu'ran.

The prodigal son can return home in his poems, dodging customs and continents with a turn of a phrase, but there is a cost. Al-Azzawi relives the trauma of growing up in an occupied country, haunted by visions of soldiers intent on raping his mother and ignoring his proffered cigarettes to “leave our city in peace.”

The prodigal son can return home in his poems, dodging customs and continents with a turn of a phrase, but there is a cost. Al-Azzawi relives the trauma of growing up in an occupied country, haunted by visions of soldiers intent on raping his mother and ignoring his proffered cigarettes to “leave our city in peace.” Now, memory “sits / in her sand cave / and issues its first communiqué / against me.”

I found Al-Azzawi's welding of the real and the surreal, of heaven and hell, to be jarring. Why did this talented poet, who had seen so much ugliness around him, brazenly raise up the evil in his own heart with as much fervor as his love for humanity? Why did he admit to drinking the same wine as “murderers and conjurers?”

It was only when he turned his attention to my culture that I began to understand. He wrote “Elegy of the Living” on the eve of the 1991 U.S. invasion of Iraq. He questioned America's assumption to Divine Providence, comparing its actions instead to the “pagan rites” of a “dilapidated continent,” where “capitalism sits / in her old carriage / greeting the crowds lining the streets / on her way to hell.” But he also sent back the Patriot missiles' “poisoned gifts . . . without spite / or hatred” to Frost and Ginsberg and Elvis and Marilyn Monroe, whom he gave thanks for, in addition to a naked Statue of Liberty “offering herself to the dogs.” He is at his most powerful because we cannot make him the other; we cannot separate our darkness and our compassion from his.

Many a poet, many an activist, strives – in the words of theologian William Stringfellow – to “live humanly in the midst of death.” Reading Al-Azzawi's poetry, like speaking the truth, can be exhausting. If prayer is about practice and not results, we find hope in the fact that he has never stopped writing, never stopped examining and hectoring and confessing and dreaming. “Our exile is distant and deep as a river. / But we will never drown, / believing that everything will in the end turn out well,” he chants in “On Half-Deserted Streets with Prufrock,” riffing on T.S. Eliot's poem. “The rose itself will be the spring in its entirety / united with fire.”

Jonathan Callard is a writer living in Oakland, Calif. He is an editorial assistant for The Witness and program coordinator for the Center for Anglican Learning and Leadership at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, Calif. Jonathan edits the web log content for Every Voice Network's “From the Lists” section, and has his own blog . He may be reached by email at jonathancallard@hotmail.com .