Hatif Janabi | Questions and Their Retinue: Selected Poems / 1996

somewhere between gesticulation and thought

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hatif Janabi Questions and Their Retinue: Selected Poems, translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa (Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1996)

   
Born in Ghammas, Iraq, in 1952, Hatif Janabi spent his earliest years in the relative comfort of a merchant landowner’s house; but in 1963 one of his father’s employees was charged with murder, which endangered his entire family, who were eventually forced to flee. They settled first in Baghdad and then in the Shiite holy city of Najaf. There Janabi observed the local parades to commemorate Hussain’s matyrdom, which involved “highly exhibitionist rituals,” including self-flagellation, all of which made a big impression upon the child.

     As a teenager he began to write poetry. In 1968, Janabi entered Baghdad University to study Arabic literature; upon graduation he was conscripted into the military and served in Southern Iraq in Kikuk, a city made up of Arabs, Persians, Kurds, Turkoman, and adherents of Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and Zorastrianism. His experiences there further broadened his awareness, and in 1976, from a climate highly unfavorable to contemporary poetic expression, he escaped through the northwest border of Iraq across Turkey, Bulgaria, and Romania, to reach Poland, where he obtained a scholarship. He was welcomed warmly in Krakow, and stayed on to graduate from Warsaw University in drama. Despite the censorship of the communist government, Janabi found Poland a place where he was freer to express himself than Iraq, particularly since he did not write in Polish.

     Except for a period of time in Algeria and as a guest professor at Indiana University, he has remained in Poland and has become a Polish citizen.

      The background of these dramatic events—his early experiences in a multi-religious environment and his continued feelings of exile—is necessary to understand his poetry. For Janabi’s poems combine a dramatic sense of grievance, a resigned desperation, and several comic effects, all woven together in associative processes and often extreme surreal imagery. At times the poems seem “to gesticulate wildly,” and other times to be “subdued and pensive.” But all are passionate and serious, and cannot be lightly dismissed.

     Accordingly, there is a power in Questions and Their Retinue that one rarely finds in contemporary American or European poetry. Janabi’s sense of history, of aggravation, disgust, even hate are balanced by radical poetic techniques that push against the often self-righteous sounding rhetoric of his poems. The result is truly quite amazing, as the reader is carried along by the outpouring of imagery that at its most extreme is almost comic; but, the, just as quick is drawn back to language and form.

      There are many wonderful poems in this revelatory volume, but in particular I was struck by “Questions and Their Retinue,” “Open Form,” “Poems without a Shelter,” and “Poems of the New Regions.” Below is a selection from the last named poem:

 

                                               House Songs

                         What do you call a stone that now refuses to fall?
                         What do you call a stone that eats itself,
                         that withers in the light of a candelabra,
                                             that falls in love at the whim of the wind?
                         What do you call a stone ground by wind
                                              in a shattered pot,
                                              a room where tenants pay their debts,
                                              where the children write their lessons
                                              under a porthole that lets in flashes of lightning?
                                              What do you call the miracle of lightning?

                         The solitary date palm
                             in the house yard,
                                       the solitary room
                                       and a forest of eyes,
                             the body hanging
                                        from the wall.
                             What do you call a stone rejected by a wall?
                             The solitary date palm
                             reveals its chest, and leans gently
                                         to a stubborn girl.
                             What do you call a stubborn girl?
                                                          What do you call a stone scratching itself
                                                          that withers in the light of a candelabra,
                                                          that falls in love at the whim of the wind?

      

 

 

Los Angeles, 2003

Reprinted from Mr. Knife, Miss Fork, No. 2 (August 2003).

 

Ranjit Hoskote | Jonahwhale / 2018

a landscape of doubt and loss

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ranjit Hoskote Jonahwhale (Hyrana, India: Penguin/Random House, 2018)

 

The Mumbai poet, writing in English, Ranjit Hoskote has over the past few years honed out a remarkable territory somewhat between a highly metaphoric and symbolic language and writing that is playfully disjunctive, making him one of the most fascinating of contemporary Indian poets.

     In reviewing his 2014 volume Central Time, I concluded “Hoskote has not only created a major new work of poetry but has suggested an alternative to the threatening world in which we daily face our lives.”

   His slimmer, new volume, Jonahwhale, not only continues to provide linguistic shelter in a world of terror and horrors, but pushes his language, even further, revealing just how talented a poet he truly is.

     The very first lines of this work suggest that terrifying world:

 

                        Last word on the subject, I promise.

                        I walked into the train station and it was terrifying.

                        Like nerve gas had laid the architecture out flat,

                        the tall glass columns bloodshot and the booking clerks

                        slumped over, all dead at the till.

 

Even a “plaster Gandhi,” the symbol of pacifism, becomes a kind of threatening figure:

 

                        You missed the last train, it said, he said,

                        you missed the last and only train that was save

                        for a man who’s left half his life behind.

 

As critics have observed, there is something almost Eliot-like about this poem “The Churchgate Gazette,” with its dead clerks and eerie atmosphere suggesting a feeling of “hurry up please it’s time.” Yet Hoskote’s ending is far more surrealistic that anything Eliot might have written, breaking up syntax while turning inward:

                  

                         Break, ice, for me,

                         Let me fall through stinging water

                         in my skin of rust and flame.

 

                         I’ve jumped from a tree

                         That’s branched into the clouds.

                         It’s sucked up all the reality

 

                         I’ve watered it with.

                         Its fruits are red and wrinkled.

                         I plunge into drowned gardens

 

                         where I walked once.

                         Sinking, the water stroking

                         my crown of leaves

 

                         as it comes apart,

                         dark tribune, archaic clown,

                         I open my eyes.

 

Here, whatever achievement the poet might have thought to have previously accomplished (the laurel crown) is mocked, as he comes to a new perception and a new kind reality about his personal failures.

        Even though he has promised us that this is the “last word” on the subject, we already know in a collection that interweaves the stories of leviathans such as Jonah’s whale, in whose belly he sat for three days, and Melville’s Moby Dick that we are in for far more troublesome moments.

        And the poet, in this case, takes us across a bleak and worrisome landscape of doubt and loss.

If some of these moments represent an almost comic view of his condition, such as the invocatory “The Atlas of Lost Beliefs,” wherein he his lists numerous of those beliefs, among them:

 

                      ….apsaras, kinnaras, gandharvas, maends,

                      satyrs, sorcerers, bonobos, organ grinders,

                      stargazers, gunsmiths, long-distance runners,

                      gravediggers, calligraphers, solitary reapers…

 

in a mini-list that goes on for 11 lines longer, ending with “women who run with wolves,” he later takes us into remarkable new worlds, such as in the beautiful poem “Ocean,” beginning with the Melvillian-like “my name is Ocean,” while simultaneously introducing us to larger than life figures such as Ahab (in the poem of that name), where the man in constant pursuit regrets his voyages: “If only I’d harpooned this monster on a page.”

     Like a kind of crazed tourguide, Hoskote takes us into wasted provinces in “the kingdom of shadows,” (“The Heart Fixes on Nothing”) rivers that sometimes run in you veins (“And Sometimes Rivers”) and a world which “empties itself”:

 

                          You shall build your citadels on silt said the preacher

                                   and sink your pride in spice currents

                                   take your parakeets and painted cormorants

                           with you but leave the coconut palms and the Inca silver

                                   leave behind a bloodful of curses

 

      The traveler (in “Sycorax”) wakes up trapped in a tree truck, “speech slurred, though all I’d drunk / was berry-blood.” A wonderful version of Melville’s Redburn, temporarily on shore leave, recounts the dangerous world of Liverpool, where he is attacked by Indians and others, as we see him retelling his own tale with crossed-out lines.

      “Cargo and Ballast,” dedicated to Édouard Glissant, warns us from the start that “Everything will be used against you” and continues with another version of the “Noah-boat Jonah-boat”:

 

                            The captain’s seasick

                                                                 and dying.

                             The mate’s a safe pair of hands

                                                                                 but he’s sulking.

                             Let the drunk passenger handle it. He was

                                    a slave-captain before. Leave it to him.

 

                              What shall we do with ‘em?

                              Throw ‘em in!

 

The end of this wonderful poem shifts into another magic listing of sins suggesting what “the everything” that will be used against “you” includes:

 

                          Beginning with chalk, sulphur, ochre earth, jagged bamboo,

                          ratooned cane, and the blades and axle shafts of words that

                          are javelined at you and you turned into birdcalls,

                          passwords, anthems, spells.

 

It is as if the you, the poet and reader together, is certain to be tortured by the language of the poem itself.

    So many of these early poems are such startling revelations that is little wonder that the second part of the book, “Poona Traffic Shots,” good as it is, simply can’t match the wild adventure of the first part, “Memories of the Jonahwhale.”

     Yet, the final section, “Archipelago” contains many lovely poems, wherein Hoskote once again takes his amazing ability to mash-up memorable images with a sophisticated moral vision wherein  terror and odd beauty meet, dancing hand in hand. “Aperture,” in memory of Diane Arbus, for example, begins with the question:

 

                          What would the knife-grinder want

                          with a broken spoon and a pair of melons,

                          a Japanese bowl spangled with an iron glaze

                          and three dried lilies?

 

                          He’s waiting for the little boy and girl

                          standing hand in hand

                          to cross the chalk line between kerb and street

 

                          and go off like rockets

 

Or, in another tourguide-like stance, Hoskote humorously relates his “Eight Rules for Travellers to Thebes”:

 

                          Beware of babies left on hillsides with their feet pierced.

 

                          Don’t fight with old men where three roads cross.

 

     At 49, Hoskote might be described as a poet in mid-career. Yet this work is so excellent that we suspect that he will soon be, if not already is, one of the greatest anglophone poets of his country.

 

Los Angeles, August 28, 2018