By Youssef Rakha Omar Taher reads like a millennial conjunction of Salah Jahin and Mohamed Al- Maghout. The 29-year-old Upper Egypt- born poet combines a command of traditional vernacular verse with a prose- oriented sensibility rooted in modern standard Arabic, producing prose poems unlike any that have been written since the emergence of the form in the early 1990s as a generic replacement for both the short story and taf'ila verse. Though designed with popular appeal in mind -- much like Jahin's work, they are spontaneous and moving -- these poems have none of the lexical or prosodic embellishments, or parochial associations, usually found in vernacular poetry. Unlike either Jahin (a master of Egyptian Arabic) or Al-Maghout (a Syrian whose prose poetry differs little in tone or world view from the taf'ila verses of his contemporaries), Taher tends to focus on the individual daily-life themes present in the 1990s poetry showcased in, among other periodicals, Al-Garad and Al-Kitaba Al-Okhra. He forgoes the collective, grand-narrative subject matter of 1960s poets like Amal Donqol or Salah Abdel-Sabour, to mention but two Egyptians. The voice that emerges in his previous books -- Meshwar lehad Al-Heita (A journey all the way to the wall, 1998) and Labudd men Kheyana (A necessary betrayal, 2000) -- is neither existentially tormented nor convinced of a greater cosmic or historical order. It is, rather, a simple, unpretentious expression of the phenomenological world: city life, friendship, love, social history and the unselfconscious ego. In ' Erfouh Belhozn (They knew him by melancholy), his last book, Taher's voice takes on a more confessional, humourous timbre, with the surface imagery tending away from the abstract and towards the concrete and mundane. Divided into three sections, with a long prologue written in rhyming couplets, Iqa' Al-Beng (Anaesthetic rhythm), this slim volume may give the impression of a writer in search of a form. But perhaps the variations in length and structure should be read as an indication of the range of possibilities inherent in the vernacular. Taher's language, while never benefiting directly from standard Arabic (hitherto the only poetic medium free from folkloric associations), remains unrelated to culturally specific or exotic modes of speech. This is an interesting aspect of Taher's project as a whole: he divests colloquial Arabic of any vestige of locatable background, any "local colour" or baladi identity, in order to reach a transparency that will prove relevant, in the long term, not only to literature but to many formal discourses. Taher's work could be said to legitimise and empower the spoken language as a contemporary, literate medium. English creeps in, in Latin characters, the way it does in everyday conversation; it is treated neither as a statement of cultural alliance nor a shameful sign of linguistic decadence. Nor is standard Arabic entirely excluded: it too occupies a space equivalent to the one it occupies in present-day speech, as an old- fashioned, humourous or learned way of saying certain things in certain contexts. Neither undermines the wholeness of any one poem. ' Erfouh Belhozn is remarkable from the formal as well as etymological viewpoint. Some poems rely on conventional metres, testifying to Taher's ability to function in that tradition without compromising his post- millennial urban perspective, in itself a significant feat. Others, like Al- Intizar Al-Mumit (Waiting that kills), are no more than a few sentences, even a few words, strung together like a parable or a joke: "The so-and- so/ Who will open the door and come in suddenly/ If only she knew how long I've been waiting." In others Taher incorporates the conventions of another kind of text into the body of the poem; Atil Odet Al-Montaj (Victim of the editing room), for example, is written like a film script. More outstanding are poems like Nokia and Made In China (the titles are given in English in the original), which draw on consumer culture to describe an intimate experience. The one (an example of Taher's narrative mode) invests the task of deleting a "phone book contact" with all the devastation of a failed love affair, the other (an example of his descriptive mode) registers the effect on a Chinese young man observed in a video rental store of a mobile phone call he receives while choosing a film to take home. Often both modes are combined to create a kind of glitch in time, with a historically specific situation evoked in isolation from its wider context. Though always engaged with his surroundings, Taher never fails to look beyond them, turning a mobile phone screen into the legend of a soul in distress. Perhaps more than any other merit, Taher's ability to restrain his opinions, seldom revealing his standpoint, helps hold the poems together. In the same way he rarefies language, the poet clears his field of view of ideological interference. And the result is not only a unique voice, but poetry that defies its time. A pair of jeans Bantalon Jenz By Omar Taher A pair of jeans Never folded in a shop window No street contained his stride A pair of jeans That started off as a sail Waves threw him on the closet shelf The prettiest thing about him is his stains The darkest -- self belief Frank as the desert Shy as night A pair of jeans That welcomed every speck of dust Freeing space among his threads Still he preserves his colour Daily he stands Ironing out the creases The breaks And the knee marks To stride faster than time Not once shaken by thorns of wool Or taken in by the tenderness of linen Seeing him is loving him, or hating him You could never say, I didn't notice An original pair of jeans Challenging the looks of trousers That pass him and don't see his point Maybe because he's used to humming as he walks Or because he gives an impression That he alone knows the secrets of skirts Maybe the only jeans who can soil himself The better to stand out among trousers A pair of jeans Who wakes up with a headache And a strained voice Unable to choose a shirt Or differentiate among colours Straight from the house to the street No thought as to where he's going Translated by Youssef Rakha
