Omar Taher tells Rania Khallaf about the challenges of the vernacular Now in his late 20s, Omar Taher affords a representative example of the younger generation of ammiya (colloquial) Arabic poets. His first two books, Meshwar lehad Al-Heita (A Journey All the Way to the Wall) and Labudd men Kheyana (A Necessary Betrayal) -- both published by Sharqiyat in 1999 -- displayed a fresh, thoroughly contemporary approach to a genre riddled with ethnic and traditional associations. Likewise 'Erfouh Belhozn (They Knew Him by Melancholy, Miret 2003), his third collection of poems, combined an aptitude for traditional metres with the ability to achieve poetry in prose. In his most recent book, Wad' Muhrig (An Embarrassing Situation) -- the appearance of which prompts the present conversation -- Taher is even more decidedly prosaic. The present poems are also significantly more sensual -- a fact Taher is willing to admit. "I was rather conservative in my previous work," he admits. "Now I try to mute the voice of the censor inside me. In time I've come to realise that censorship of any kind and in any form should be irrevocably eliminated, and no censorship is worse than the internal kind. As long as eroticism, even obscenity performs a necessary function -- as long as it conveys the meaning I want to communicate, a poet should never be ashamed of it. I'd rather be an obscene than an unskilled or mediocre poet, in the end..." Here as elsewhere Taher speaks of his interior and emotional life; and seldom does a personal failure assume societal, let alone political significance. Such apparent egotism, he says, "is partially true": "I see the world through my own eyes, myself, and through my intimate relationships with others." Combined with his choice of genre, the statement is almost paradoxical, for ammiya has always been a vehicle for collective consciousness, the medium through which the turn-of-the-century master Bairam El-Tonsi, and such towering 1960s figures as Fouad Haddad and Salah Jahin after him, expressed national and historical concerns -- more often than not in formulaic, aurally compelling forms in which personal self expression played but a minor role. "My poems may seem too individualistic," Taher says, "which looks like a relatively easy game to play. But read them carefully and you'll see the overlap between the self and its surroundings. I believe," he declaims, "that it is in this area of overlap that a true poet makes his contribution." Yet such individuality makes for problematic conceptions. The women in Taher's poems, for example, almost always come across as marginal and voiceless, consumed by the overriding presence of a male ego. "I am always attracted to women of experience, whether good or bad, women who have done something different with their lives. For me such a woman is in herself a poem. By contrast, however," he explains, "I'm incapable of expressing humdrum romanticism in my poems, the stereotypes depress me..." Since Labudd men Kheyana Taher has engaged consciously in self- identification. In a poem about the poet, for example, he writes, "Everyone/ Tries to create, with people, the story of his life/ Except for the poet/ He creates his own life... a story for all people." What does being a poet imply in an increasingly materialistic world, however? "Writing poetry is more difficult than any other art," Taher says, "because of the intensity it demands in terms of both ideas and language. It's hard to define the word 'poet', the reader too must have a poet inside him to be able to appreciate poetry." Yet it is often through projection onto mundane, everyday objects that the poetic self is best expressed. In "A pair of jeans", for example, one of a handful of flawless, brilliant poems, Taher seems to identify with the beautifully personalised garment of the title: "The prettiest thing about him is his stains/ The darkest -- self belief/ Frank as the desert/ Shy as night..." The jeans tells us more about the poet than any amount of self revelation -- something he seems unwilling to concede. Taher wrote "A pair of jeans" in Rio de Janeiro during a 45-day tour of Latin America in 1999, he says: "I spent five days there watching the carnival and interviewing Paulo Coelho." It would not be an exaggeration to say that travel, which he acknowledges as a major stimulus, tends to extract the best out of him. "The carnival was a fascinating thing," he recalls, "one of the most exceptional events of my life. The people there were just so extremely happy as they danced and loved each other." The tour prompted a shift not only in technique but in content, he explains: self-expression took on peculiarly mundane but ceaselessly evocative forms; and prose, hitherto an experiment, began to predominate. The tendency to eschew the (nationalist) politics of older ammiya poets -- such themes were always present, whether implicitly or explicitly -- is not unique to Taher's project, in which not even the vaguest hint of ideology can be found. "I really don't care about politics" is a sentiment Taher shares with many 1990s poets, except that he expresses it in an unduly blunt, almost disingenuous way: "I am only interested in watching politicians -- the way they behave and the way they treat ordinary people. Today there are no political theories in which you could have any faith. So I don't really see the point... "The first generation of ammiya poets established the rules," Taher goes on, seemingly eager to set out a historical framework in which to legitimise his work, given its divorce from any political context. "Then came another generation, including Abdel-Rahman El-Abnoudi and Sayed Hegab, who developed the genre, each in his way. A long, long time elapsed before a new generation of ammiya poets could emerge. In the early 1990s," Taher elaborates, "people like Magdi El-Gabri, Shehata El-Eryan and Masoud Shouman started writing ammiya poetry, and they were doing interesting things with prose, but none of them went on practising the genre for very long. Only five years ago did a promising new wave of voices -- Sadeq Sharshar, Karim Barghouti, Ragab El-Sawi, Baha Jahin -- make itself heard... [The older generation of vernacular poets] can hardly be seen as allies," Taher comments. "They attack prose poetry, for one thing, claiming that it soils and destroys the tradition." Taher's mastery of rhyme and rhythm does not take away from his conviction that his own achievement resides in the way he developed the possibilities of prose in ammiya. "My first collection was almost prose, not quite. Then I started combining both styles, just to demonstrate -- first to myself, then to poets who adopt a position against prose poetry -- that they are not mutually exclusive, that the one is not better than the other, and that I can do both equally well." He beams. "The poet is an ordinary man," he says, discrediting the aura of sanctity surrounding such poets as El-Abnoudi and Jahin (the latter was known as Am Salah, a reference to his status as universal godfather). "I have no sympathy with poets who depend on their image," he goes on (referring, probably, to the former), "turning their poems into a kind of product directed at the masses. If I turned my poems into a popular show, that would make me a clown or monologist," he adds. Writing in ammiya poses a different kind of challenge: the poet's ability to continue working in a near vacuum. There is a marked dearth of serious literary criticism covering the genre, for one thing; and then the vernacular is harder to translate into foreign languages than standard Arabic. "Such problems confront the vast majority of ammiya poets," Taher explains, "especially now that so much else is being translated, which kind of leaves us behind. But the task of successfully translating a ammiya poem," he insists, "requires a bilingual talent with a rare feeling for culture, a very special sense of the language. And it will likely take the critics another 50 years," he prophesies sarcastically, "before they start paying any attention to the work of my generation of ammiya poets." Such nearly black humour is not uncharacteristic of Taher's work -- which will extract a smile from the reader more frequently than most poetry. "Chalet", another extremely good poem, for example, depicts a young man smoking a cigarette on the balcony of a wooden beach chalet as a caricature of Hemingway's Old Man of the sea. By the end of the last line, the words have acted to precipitate "a meaningful image" -- all that poetry really is, for Taher: "I like to write about things that I see, not about ideas or ideologies. Sitting in a room imagining things and feelings does not yield anything real." And real is important because poetry is, among other things, "a way in which to treat my depression", Taher muses: "I have no specific project per se, and my aim is to write and to develop my instruments -- something that I do through an exploration of new meanings, new styles of writing, new images." Taher claims he writes for and about people, in the end, but his individuality is such that he never reads out to an audience: "I read out loud only when I'm sure that those listening will understand what I'm reading." This brings to mind the two Fernando Pessoa lines with which he prefaces Wad' Muhrig : "Being a poet is not my ambition/ Just a way of staying alone." Likewise Taher, for whom poetry was never an ambition: "But I'll go on so long as I'm still caught in the game. I can't retrace my steps. And I won't stop writing until I have nothing to write about."
