Rania Khallaf attended the Spring of Poets, an annual, inter-generational forum held in the spirit of spring This year the Spring of Poets (28-29 April) at the Supreme Council of Culture focused on Alexandria, with the term "Alexandrine poetry" extensively debated. According to poet and essayist Alaa Khaled, editor of the first independent literary magazine that has come out of Alexandria in recent times, Amkenah, such regional classification of literature dates back to the 1950s and has at its core a political drive: "The idea was to justify a centralist perspective, with the General Organisation of Cultural Palaces, for example, located in Cairo -- and its many fragile, badly organised branches all over the governorates." Khaled refused to participate in the event. "I am not an Alexandrian poet," he said. "I am just a poet." Certainly the notion of Alexandria as a poetic identity seems to have more to do with nostalgia for a certain, more cosmopolitan period -- the early 20th century, when E M Forester visited C P Cavafy and Lawrence Durrel produced his Quartet -- than with anything contemporary, Arabic or indeed Alexandrine per se. As Khaled points out, today "Alexandrian poetry" is "cultural-palace, or 'provincial' poetry", and it shows all the parochialism and conservatism of the latter designation. It is anathema to all that literary Alexandria stands for. Yet Alexandria University professor Fawzy Eissa, for his part, traces a less widely accepted history of Arabic literature in Alexandria, in which the Ansary school of writers, no less than the Araba'een Group, with poets Abdel-Azim Nagui and Nasser Farghaly at the helm, adopted the prose medium long before it was accepted and showed every sign of cosmopolitanism. To Khaled, however, this is but a historical fluke, many of which Alexandria has produced. The question, rather, is whether there is a definable set of characteristics that makes a piece of writing Alexandrine. Khaled thinks not: "Poetry is a very individual process, what it requires cannot be generalised. The sea can just as well inspire anyone from Cairo or even Upper Egypt. It all depends on the emotional constitution of the poet." This sense seemed to be reflected in the reading of Ayman Massoud and Isabelle Kamal, two young poets from Alexandria who had a session to themselves. Both dealt with daily themes, individual worlds, a personal reality. Eissa agreed with Khaled but stressed the impact of the Mediterranean -- a "profound reference integral to poetic vision", one that comes to be "an alternative to reality, an equivalent of the ideal world, as in the poetry of Fouad Taman and Fawzy Khedr, or else, as in that of Ismail Uqab and Ahmed Fadl Shabloul, it's a vision of woman". Certainly Shabloul's reading evidenced remarkable popularity; and this was at least partly due to the presence of the sea in a lyrical register, which he places himself inside, as it were: "Sea birds are my companions... The fish keep my secrets." Thus the notion of Alexandrine writing begins to take shape. "Greek legend," Eissa added, "also found its way to the work of Mahmoud El-Atreis, one of the city's earlier practitioners, whose references to Zeus and Olympia portray nightmarish world reflecting modern alienation. Alexandria is not only muse but myth, receptacle of woman and the sea. But if this is largely a phenomenon of the early 20th century, a response to a certain literary presence that just happened to be located in the city, with occasional subsequent echoes, why is it necessary to maintain the classification. More importantly -- a gripe poet Sayed Youssef expressed -- when will the literary scene see the end of the centralised structure that has resulted in the marginalisation of so many Alexandrian voices? It is the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, and foreign cultural centres before it, that have made efforts to send ripples through the stagnant pond of Alexandrine cultural life in an ongoing bid to imbue the city with some of its former cosmopolitanism. Ahmkenah has spawned other independent initiatives, with the critical journal Mena, edited by Mahdi Buondoq, making its presence felt. Indeed, in the latest issue of Amkenah, to appear shortly, a file is dedicated to early 20th-century Alexandria, in which poetess Iman Mersal -- originally from Mansoura, she now lives in Canada -- presents cosmopolitanism as an alternative to globalisation, contrasting the early 20th century with the present in terms of immigration laws and freedom of movement. Most of the file, however, contains autobiographical material by non- Egyptian residents of Alexandria in translation; it stresses the ethnic diversity of the city with reference to the period's photography, which evidenced Russian as well as British, Armenian and Italian presence. The question raised by the event remains unanswered, however.
