We have waited a long time for Ahmed Hegazi's latest poetry collection, but Osama Kamal says, it was well worth the wait When a prolific poet takes 20 years to put together a collection of poetry, one gets thinking. What made Ahmed Abdel-Moati Hegazi fall silent between Ashgar al-Ismant (Trees of Cement), his seventh collection of poems, released in 1989, and Talal al-Waqt (Ruins of Time), released last August? Hegazi has his reasons, of course. When I talked to him at the book launch, he said that a poet was not a functionary. No one wrote poetry for a living. One wrote when the urge took him, he said. And the urge this time was indeed compelling. His new collection is revolutionary, riveting, scathing, and also soothing. It is a reflection on times of free thinking and progress, and also an intimate inkling of what makes a great poet stay the course. Talal al-Waqt is published by the Egyptian General Book Authority and comes with brilliant illustrations by the talented artist Wagih Wahba. Hegazi is not your average poet. He is one of the initiators of a new tradition in Egyptian poetry. Along with Salah Abdel-Sabour (1931 �ê" 1981), Hegazi is one of the creators of the non-linear poem, a style of artistic expression that took the 1960s by storm. Abdel Sabour's first collection, Al-Nas Fi Beladi (People in My Country), which appeared in 1957, was followed in 1959 by Hegazi's Madinah Bela Qalb (City without a Heart). The two collections together launched the start of the free verse movement, as critics in Egypt like to term it. When I asked Hegazi about the long hiatus, he said that he did not write poetry for a living. Rather he waited for the inspiration to come, and then followed it to the end. Poetry was not a profession, he reminded me He began his career as a reporter on Rose al-Yusuf and Sabah al-Kheir, where he worked from 1956 to 1973 alongside Salah Abdel-Sabour, Salah Jahin and Ragaa El-Naqqash. At first his editors, men like Ihsan Abdel-Qoddus and Ahmed Bahaaeddin, did not ask him to report on anything, just to write poetry when the inspiration came to him. In 1987 he moved on to Al-Ahram where he met the great intellectual figures of the time: Tawfiq El-Hakim, Hussein Fawzi, Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawi, Ihsan Abdel-Qoddus and Lotfi El-Kholi. As this generation disappeared from the scene, Hegazi started writing a full page every week, sometimes sharing the space with Ghali Shokri and Neamat Ahmed Fouad. He has been editor-of-chief of the magazine Ibdaa (Creativity) since 1990. The book launch at Warshat Al-Zeitun followed earlier signing at the Cairo Book Fair held in neighbourhood of Faysal in August by the Ministry of Culture. This was the second meeting he attended in Warshat Al-Zeitun. His first appearance was two years ago, when he celebrated the 50th anniversary of the release of his first collection, Madinah Bela Qalb. It took Hegazi two decades to write Talal al-Waqt, but the key poem of the same title dates back to 1991. Other poems are more recent, some written after the 25 January Revolution: "Iradat al-Hayah" ("Will to Live"), "Awdat al-Roh" ("Return of the Soul") and "Al-Toghah" ("Despots"). Hegazi says he wrote Talal al-Waqt after listening to Andalusian music performed by the Abdel-Karim Al-Raey Band in Morocco. The music made him feel as if he were connected to two cities and two histories. In this poem, he summons the old Arab poetic tradition of bemoaning the ruins, with a slight shift of focus: instead of bemoaning lost love, he bemoans a lost culture. The rest of the collection is mainly a tribute to the great literary figures of the last century, people whom he got to know and admire, and sometimes oppose. The poem "Al-Karawan" ("The Curlew") is a tribute to the literary giant Abbas El-Aqqad (1989 �ê" 1964). Interestingly, El-Aqqad was dismissive of the non-linear poetry of Hegazi and Abdel-Sabour, so dismissive in fact that he managed to block them from going to a poetry festival, saying that they wrote prose, not real poetry. To retaliate, Hegazi wrote a linear poem which he called "Fi Hegaa al-Aqqad" ("In Disparagement of El-Aqqad)", thus proving to the great man that he could write in any genre of poetry he chose to follow. When I asked Hegazi if he would have written "Fi Hegaa aE-Aqqad" had he been able to go back in time, he answered in the affirmative, saying that he had to stand up for his beliefs. Non-linear poetry soon caught on, proving that Hegazi was on the right side of history. Society was changing fast and it needed new artistic modalities to keep up with its evolving mood. In "Sareq al-Nar", ("Fire Thief"), Hegazi eulogises Taha Hussein and pays tribute to the great man's contribution to liberal thinking. The period 1923 �ê" 1952, Hegazi said, was one of the most creative in Egyptian culture. It was also a period in which most artists and intellectuals worked independently from the state. After 1952, this situation was reversed. In "Awdat al-Roh", a tribute to Tawfiq El-Hakim (1898 �ê" 1987), Hegazi summons the atmosphere of al-Hakim's novel of the same title, blending it with imagery from the 1919 revolution. Hegazi pays homage to the Tunisian poet Aboul-Qassem Alchebbi in "Iradat al-Hayah". Alchebbi's poems are widely seen as a harbinger of the recent spate of Arab revolutions. In "Shafaq Ala Sur al-Madinah" ("Glow over the City Walls"), Hegazi commemorates Farag Fouda (1945 �ê" 1992), the writer who was assassinated by Islamist militants offended by his rigorous rebuttal of the arguments concerning the Islamic state. Then a bit of family reminiscing in "Ayyam Ommi", Hegazi's tribute to his own mother, a woman who married a much older man and then spent most of her time alone at home, doting on her children. When the poet's father died in 1956, his mother was 43 and the youngest of all her siblings. When someone died, she walked barefoot to the house of the deceased and then mourned for weeks on end. Eulogising the Lebanese poet and politician Amin Nakhlah, (1901 �ê" 1976), Hegazi wrote a linear poem, more or less in Nakhlah's own style. "Naht" ("Sculpture"), a poem written in 1995, has an unusual history. In this poem, Hegazi discusses the beauty of the human body. But when two poets, Abdel-Monem Ramadan and Hassan Teleb, offered an opposing perspective on the same topic, critics took notice. Both Mahmoud Amin El-Alim and Lotfi Abdel-Badie wrote literary essays about the three poems. Hegazi says that "Naht" reminds him of Pygmalion, a story so haunting that poets and playwrights are forever compelled to immortalise it. Hegazi's collection is a commentary on the struggle between liberalism and traditionalism. Dwelling on the pioneers of Egyptian enlightenment, he is hinting that we can be pioneers too.
