In 2002 Qassim Haddad received the prestigious Owais Cultural Foundation Prize for Poetry, popularly known as the Arab Nobel Prize, since it is associated with lifetime achievement and, by Arab literary standards, carries a large prize -- $100,000. In 2000 he received the prize of the Paris- based Lebanese Cultural Forum. These international prizes cap a life of poetic and intellectual achievement. Evidence of this achievement is revealed in 20 or so collections of poetry and his single book of critical essays published, variously, in Bahrain, Lebanon, Kuwait, Morocco, Tunisia, Italy and Britain, from 1970 to 2000, the year that his two-volume collected works were published in Beirut. One of his books, Akhbar Majnun wa-Layla (The Anecdotes of Majnun and Layla), co-published in London and Bahrain in 1996, was illustrated by well-known London-based Iraqi artist, Dia' Al-'Azzawi. In Rome in 2001 a selection of his poetic texts was published along with photographs by Saudi Arabian photographer Salih Al-'Azzaz. This volume featured French translations by Abdul-Latif Al-Laabi and English versions by Naim Ashour. Throughout his career Haddad has participated in national, regional and international cultural conferences and poetry festivals, both in Europe and in the Arab world. Born in Bahrain in 1948, Haddad was educated in that country's schools, eventually working for the Public Library of Bahrain from 1968- 1975. In 1980 he joined the sector of Culture and Art in the Ministry of Information. Literarily, his public career began in 1969 when he helped found the Association of Bahrain Writers and was elected to its Steering Committee. In 1970 he was named editor-in-chief of the literary journal KALIMAT ; this was also the year he co-founded the AWAL Theatre Troupe. Since the early 1980s he has been producing a weekly column, "A Time for Writing," syndicated in several periodicals. In 1994 he founded the first-ever website for Arabic poetry, "Jehat al-Shi'r" (Poetry's Side): www.jehat.com.Since 1997 he has been granted leave-with-pay by the Ministry of Information in order to devote himself fulltime to writing and research. Though Haddad has modified his techniques and themes over his career, his poetic power has remained consistently outstanding. Writing first in free verse, he developed into writing prose poems, eventually branching out into longer compositions, once again in free verse, then adding to this repertoire cycles of short lyrics, often of two or three lines. His poems cover a comprehensive range of issues including the political, social, philosophical and psycho-aesthetic. A favoured mode of Haddad's is to combine motifs of the classical Arabic poem -- the journey in the desert, the solitude of the traveller, the dangers of the road -- with contemporary concerns of identity and heritage. The resulting poems build immediacy and existential angst into familiar images that once conveyed a more stable Arab world. In his cycles of flash poems, he allows the healing, mystic touch of Sufi poets in Arabic, Persian and Indian literatures to echo alongside idioms stemming from European thought and mythology. These syntheses offer glints of hope stemming from forgotten traditions of Arab and non-Arab modes of thought. Multicultural allusions and philosophical implications add colour, depth and universality to his themes of Self and the potential transformation, rather than traditional retrieval, of Arab culture. Poems by Qassim Haddad The dream chapter ( Poetic Works I: 475) O fourth impossible take pity on me Become Genesis ( Poetic Works I: 480) Quivering, this earth. Where can I put down my foot? Suffering catalogue ( Poetic Works II: 261-264) (1) Departing to translate the night. (2) Is script the craving of language? Is meaning the alphabet flowing in form? (3) Who are you (who are you)? Are you crying for a nation? Or will the nation cry for you? You covered the people with a grief song of water, girded the desert with kings. So who are you that you can name a sky with frightened eyes and praise our enemies by silence? You -- who are you? (4) Words shatter around him amassing like battalions, founding and facing, parallel and departing, going beyond and bringing out. The text body becomes his margin, this border a furnace of desire. But he cares not, minds not, convinced he is 'that-which-will-be-scripted'. (5) Write in this key, this form, we'll cry with a like sob: Grant air to your poem, risk a wail to fuse us together ... we'll weep alongside you. Write the dictate of desire, illumine by the bond of madness. Take us to the pitch black of text, the text extending beyond slumber. Write it down! Master the form that bows not to form. (6) A night, as if it were the only night. (7) These are not the screams of the body, but the madness of the corpse and the ravings of the spirit. (8) He stood among reeds. Around him: tyrants armed to the teeth with murderous ammunitions. He took out his flint producing fire, let it inscribe copybooks of exhaustion, but reading the field, always reading the field. (9) I read my blood as the night reads my face. (10) A body ends at its own desire, begins when others declare a truce between two deaths. This body of mine, tested by bridges, examined by love, I postpone for you, offering in its place a sheaf of yet-to-be-scripted sentiments. But, wait, this body's seeking contact, alphabets be damned! The charmed ( Poetic Works I: 501) He lights the house's lone candle, opens the door to the nocturnal room, his gift from the ancestors. His first foot pressing forward, he penetrates the lampless space, veers with his witness-candle, seeking out the dark. The candle expires, he lights it, expires again, he lights it. Matchsticks low, he cannot find the dark. The captain ( Poetic Works II: 44) He built his ship, straightened its towers, banners gulping the breeze. He belted the water with lighthouses, seagulls alone knowing the light, the time, the turning of constellations. He filled the ship's galley with wine and bread, loosed the gangplanks for willing sailors, prepared his sails: whiteness vast as a cosmos filling the horizon and there he stood the loftiest mast guarding, waiting for his men. It was late. Very late he remained standing. The waters of meaning ( Poetic Works II: 78) I fraternised with chaos, my hands surrendering to its seduction. I turned my body into a language-vessel, sketching with ambiguity a fissure in the earth: its narratives, an image mixing water with words. I called it the sin of articulation and prepared for meaning to defy me, I loosed clamouring delirium, domesticated it. I was once a fertile field of antique words, I repaired a tomb, used treacherous sea-speech. I shifted the shape of speech springing from books of slumber... I broke through slumber, chaotic night-dreams overflowing. I unlocked the night, fraternised with my hand, seducing the language of the body. I mixed myself with waters of meaning. Words flocked and whirled about my limbs. Who will read this goblet, become enamoured of my creatures... take wing? Qassim Haddad will be reading his poems, at the invitation of Al-Mawred Al-Thaqafi, on 4 May at 8pm in Makan Hall, Egyptian Centre for Culture and Arts, 1 Saad Zaghloul Street, Mounira, Cairo. Introduced and translated by Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden
