Desert Voices, Moneera Al-Ghadeer, Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2009, pp 246 Damn the womb that bore you Your love deprives my eye of sleep My springtime is the sight of you My desire just hearing your name It is a tribute to its distinctiveness that the author of Desert Voices treats the poems of the Bedouin women of Saudi Arabia with caution. Elegant, intellectually stimulating and long, these poems by anonymous Bedouin women, mostly modern and contemporary, celebrate the power of the imagination in a cruel and forbidding moonscape. This is not a book for the under 20s, even though some of the poetesses are surely teenagers. Not that the poems are particularly scandalous, but the text is eminently nebulous, far from lucid even though liberally spiced with exotica. This dense volume, thick with theoretical disputation, looks not unlike the doctoral dissertation on which it was based. Youngsters may well be put off, however: this hardcover and the poems it examines make great reading for the rest of us. But this is not to imply that the writing is dry. On the contrary, the text is surprisingly readable considering the delicate subject matter. There is a touch of decayed complexity, decomposition almost, but like the best of wines it is luscious, fruity, youthful and exceptionally intoxicating. Yet Al-Ghadeer keeps her feet on the ground. "Although literary studies on Arab women's writing are impressive, there is an obvious lack of comparative analysis of oral and written Arab women's poetry," she explains at the outset in the introduction. And sure enough, the poems she examines can hardly be described as exercises in restraint. " I swore that I would pour to him my saliva," threatens a lovelorn Bedouin poetess. "Here we observe a significant rhetorical strategy in Bedouin women's poetry, stemming from their insight into the power of language," Al-Ghadeer notes. She quickly conjures up the menacing milieu within which the Bedouin poetesses of Saudi Arabia compose their songs. "An attentive reading of melancholic description of desire unfolds a space where erotic longing and its declaration signify risk, even violent retribution, for any woman who transgresses." However, these traditional poems composed against the backdrop of uncompromising religiosity, do not go against the West's secular aesthetics. "Bedouin poetry would provide invaluable material for reflection on the debates around oral culture and women's poetic composition, but so far there is no translation or discussion presenting it to English-language readers," notes the author. Indeed, the last chapter of this pioneering work is devoted to the question of translation: The Translatability of the Nomadic. The chapter itself is subdivided into three sections: Translation Theory and Bedouin Women's Poetry; Bedouin Ethos and the Untranslatable; and Translation and the Metaphor of Modernity. As Lila Abu-Lughod, Columbia University author of Veiled Sentiments: Honour and Poetry in a Bedouin Society notes, Al-Ghadeer's work might well prove to be a trendsetter. "In simply taking for the first time ever this magnificient poetry and brining it, hopefully for good, into the canon of Arab poetry, this book is an important breakthrough," Abu-Lughod stipulates. "This impressive poetic tradition has been systematically marginalised both in Arabic and in Euro-American literary studies, to the extent that most English and French literary criticism of Arabic literature presupposes that oral poetry by women in Arabia does not exist," she stresses. Desert Voices is a work of exhilarating seriousness. It is the process of loss, with its ghost images, that demonstrates the Bedouin poetesses of Arabia as lovers comparing the death of their beloved with mothers mourning the loss of a child. They are as ferocious in their feelings as the wild animals of their desert. They are untamed creatures, and yet their humanity traverses the bounds of the djinn and ghouls of the desolate wastelands of the cradle of Islam. It comes as a stunning riposte to Orientalist misconceptions about Arab women. Desert Voices is an exposé of the innermost desires and emotional aspirations of the Bedouin women of Arabia. Every single one of these honestly drawn and heartbreakingly familiar poetesses gave me personally immeasurable pleasure. These women are neither angels nor she-devils. They obviously have a keen sense of humour. This isn't the first book of poetry that made me laugh out loud. However, it is the first book on women's poetry that actually moved me. The author, an academic, nevertheless has an ear for the excruciatingly painful platitudes of female-male interactions in the wastelands of Arabia. She demonstrates her knowledge and understanding of the fragility of human experience in the desolate wildernesses of the Arabian Peninsula -- one of the most inhospitable places on Earth. Religion and sexual impulse, plus the burning desire for emotional fulfillment constantly take their toll. Some of the poems -- the metaphors and similes are harsh enough to make the reader queasy. Others are so indiscreet and tempestuous in their vulgarity as to make the more prudish reader blush and quiver. Their saving grace, however, is that they make one laugh. Lyrical rhetoric of Bedouin poetesses traces the tragic echo of the human condition and the reverberations of the harsh environment. Nature can be pitiless. Yet through the warmth and vitality of the narrative and the discriminating selection of poems that touch a raw nerve, or simply touch the heart, the work unfolds nicely, in a gripping sort of way. And, in spite of the academic jargon, the author never fails to astonish the reader with the subtlety of her well worked scholastic plot. These poems propel the pace of the work forward. These poetesses sometimes depict themselves as victims of their peers, or of their own self-pity. My heart A she-falcon With broken eggs Whose yolk has vanished: Nothing left but the shell Nobody really feels what the she-falcon feels. Women who want a man to feel for their femininity, intensely, without playing the sympathetic woman. They crave men, not women -- loving men. These women want a man?s passion inside their most sensitive organs. Yet, desire is invariably and interchangeably associated with death and suffering -- brutish death and inconsolable suffering. With chapter headings such as "Melancholic Desire" and "A Malady of Grief" and sub-headings such as "Unraveling Loss" and "Mourning Like Desert Animals", it is as if Al-Ghadeer peers morbidly into the utter desolation of the desert. The author concedes that life goes on, even in the wilderness of Nejd, the pulsating heart of the Arabian Peninsula and the home of Wahabism, that particular puritanical strand of fundamentalist Islam that is virtually the official ideology of Saudi Arabia. "The relationship with death is kept in constant motion, starting with the question, forming myriad knots and finally returning to spectacular time. Time that obliterates its trajectory annihilates itself by repeating itself," Al-Ghadeer notes. There is an echo of reincarnation, the very antithesis of pristine Islam in its Wahabi interpretation. "There is an absence of time, the moment of death," she extrapolates. "The Arabic hajr has a connotation of separation from a beloved, of leaving, of forsaking and abandonment. If death implies infinite separation, then it is identified with what it generates." Al-Ghadeer cites the example of a particular poem to clarify her meaning, to advance her case. She notes how the Bedouin poetess assumes death ability to speak and communicate with the living. O abandonment of death, Where is my love? Into a knot Twice over He tied me Without a touch, And I tied him Into one knot That cannot be undone. "My approach is concerned with being attentive to the registers of this poetry," Al-Ghadeer extrapolates. "There is an interesting displacement from the voice to the eye within the poem, but this displacement can be taken further, from the look to the speech that haunts Bedouin women?s poetry," she notes. " The eye roams endlessly across an open landscape," sings one Bedouin poetess. The land is far more ancient that Islam. Since time immemorial the Bedouins sang, and composed their distinctive poems. Nature and the scorched landscape of their homeland shaped the collective tribal psyche. Islam often prevails, though. Even in irreverent poetry which has traditionally had an ambiguous status within Islam. "At the end of the poem, desire is interrupted and a didactic and judging voice derails its course from a love poem to an elegiac mode in which the speaker renounces her desire," the author illustrates the content of one particular poem. "After the ego has internalised the lost object, moving it from the external world inward, a moral and judging voice is reproduced. In other words, the ego is split and becomes the object that reflects upon itself." The husband: God forbid I should enter his house! No! Not till the sun goes down in the east Al-Ghadeer is unequivocal. "In vanquishing carnal desire, the speaker describes a scene of finality. The image of the sun setting in the east." The poetess articulates her rage, her revulsion. Her love-hate relationship with her husband is disconcerting. "The poem diverts the notion of sexual desire from the private domain to public social space," Al-Ghadeer elucidates. And figurative language does feature prominently in the poems of the Bedouin women of Arabia. He dropped me, I dropped him: Like a wild cow dropped By a hunter's bullet! "This ironic defiance demonstrates the crucial politics of desire and portrays a gendered form of grievance, while the poem puts forward a private woman's feelings in the public sphere." Indeed, the Bedouin poetess "contests domestication" as Al-Ghadeer so aptly puts it. "These metaphors release a passionate fury." The Bedouin woman is a creature of passion, and she is far from complacent with the affairs of the heart. "The poetic tone becomes a woman's cry. But this disobedient cry renders the impossibility of reconciliation or return." Ominously, the Bedouin poetess can be vengeful, hateful and unforgiving. I wish my husband, like Semiha's, had his throat cut. I'll mourn the required four months and ten days. I'll patiently mingle with the funeral assembly, And I'll wail! I'll dress myself up in sorrow, And his separation from me Will be heaven. Reviewed by Gamal Nkrumah
