The Egyptian poet Amal Donqol died 25 years ago this week. His memory lives on, notably in his wife's biography, writes Heba Sharobeem The Egyptian poet Amal Donqol (1940-1983) died 25 years ago, yet his poetry is so much alive that it seems as if it had been written only yesterday. People are still able to relate to it and see their own painful situations through Donqol's eyes. Donqol's poetry has been much studied by critics, but the man himself and the vision that shaped his poetry are perhaps less well- known. It is for this reason that Al-Janubi: Amal Donqol, (Amal Donqol: the Southerner), a 1985 biography by Donqol's wife, the critic Abla Al-Reweiny, is such an essential volume: by reading it the reader sees that Donqol's life was coloured by constant pain, starting in his childhood and continuing until his death. Donqol experienced the pain of bereavement at a very young age when his brother, sister and father passed away one after the other. As Al-Reweiny notes, the loss of these members of his family was followed by "the loss of the city and the loss of the country. These continuous losses always put him in confrontation with death." Such experiences were accentuated by an early encounter with injustice when his uncles took his family's land, leaving him destitute. This event, together with Donqol's reading, left a strong imprint on his character and his poetry, making him a rebellious man and a poet. Donqol was always angry at injustice, a feeling that made him side with the poor and the oppressed, and this was reflected in his poetry. As Donqol writes in his poem "Book of Genesis," "I saw Adam's son building his fences round the farm/of God, buying from those around him and selling to his brethren/ bread and water/.../I said, let there be love on earth, but there wasn't love. /Love has become the property of those who can pay." As a young man Donqol was extremely sensitive, feeling insecure. He writes in his autobiographical poem, "The Southerner" that "I taught the heart to watch out," and he goes on to relate his agony in his autobiographical writings: "My journey with suffering started at the age of ten. From the age of 17 up till now, I have been estranged from anything that could make me feel secure." Therefore, he opened his heart to only a few people, masking his sensitivity with aggression lest he should be hurt. However, the most imposing form of pain that afflicted Donqol's life came in the shape of the cancer that appeared nine months after his marriage. It is bitterly ironic that cancer seemed like an infant begotten by his marriage. In her writings on the subject Susan Sontag has written of cancer as a "demonic pregnancy." However, for Donqol cancer was somehow an inevitable conclusion to a restless and painful life. Perhaps it was as if cancer had to happen as a result of Donqol's constant struggle with the world, together with his frustrations at all sorts of injustice and his search for the absolute. In his poem, "Do not Make Peace," for example, Donqol writes that he will not make peace until the murdered man returns to the child who has been waiting for him, which is impossible. The Southerner reveals the various stages of Donqol's cancer and the physical and psychological pain accompanying it. In the last weeks of his life, Donqol suffered from renal and multiple organ failure, making him unable to move. Finally, he went into a coma that led to his death on 21 May 1983. Psychologically, he felt very indignant at the media's celebration of him as "the sick poet," even as it overlooked his poetry. Despite his frustration, Donqol fought his illness courageously. This impressed the Egyptian poet Ahmed Abdel-Moe'ti Hijazi who remarked that "as the cancer took away his withered body, his soul shone with fierce brilliance and grew stronger until visitors could virtually see his struggle with death, a struggle between two equals, death and poetry.When the body finally surrendered to the monster's paws, Donqol came out of the struggle victorious. He became a sheer voice, a great voice, that resonated more clearly and purely than at any other time." Al-Reweiny describes Donqol as "the most beautiful rare fish in the sea," one that kept looking for equilibrium in this unjust world of ours. It got to him and made the cancer spread. She wonders "why the death of the poet has to be a loud, cancerous explosion. Why does he have to die cell by cell, to witness his own death, moment by moment?" Donqol's battle with cancer is figured as one taking place between a rare, but helpless, fish and a ferocious shark waiting for the right moment to devour its prey. This brings to mind Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea and the famous lines about human resilience: "man is not made for defeat... A man can be destroyed but not defeated." In an interview with Al-Reweiny, she said that Donqol had not read Hemingway's novel but that he had wanted to present his experiences as victorious ones. Donqol's particular resistance took the form of the many operations he underwent in his battle with cancer and in his accepting high doses of radiotherapy. The doctors expected his body to collapse, but it did not. "It came out victorious." Resistance also took the form of the hope with which Donqol and his wife equipped themselves. This is obvious in Al-Reweiny's description of Room No. 8 at the Cancer Institute, a room whose cemented walls "loved poetry". The lunchtime meal was communal and the room was always full of visitors, "the street and the café moving into the room." Nevertheless, Donqol's major means of fighting cancer remained poetry, which was his "substitute for suicide". In Room No. 8, he wrote the poems collected postmously in his last book Room No. 8 Papers, all of them coloured by the smell of death, especially the the poem The Southerner. Poetry was Donqol's source of power, and Al-Reweiny recounts a story of his participation in a poetry festival at the time. The night of the festival Donqol was so weak having lost half his weight that he was unable to walk unaided. Weak, sick, his hair falling out, he considered not participating in the festival, fearing that people would pity him. However, he changed his mind, and, once on stage and hearing the audience's applause, he was able to stand on his own. That night he went up seven flights of stairs alone, apparently in complete health. He managed to do so because of "his success and the triumphant spirit of the poet inside him." This strong sense of fighting brings to mind stories from Greek and Egyptian mythology. There is Sisyphus, for example, who defied the gods and tried to elude death but was destined to push a rock up a hill, only to have it fall when he neared the top. Finally, Donqol emerges like a phoenix, the legendary bird reborn from the ashes. Al-Reweiny's biography of Donqol spares the reader little of the pain he experienced in his life, this pain being seen as having shaped his character and affected his poetry. To quote André Maurois, the book and the life it presents resemble "the close of a great drama, the dying refrain of a completed song, [and] the final verse of a finished poem," one that celebrates enduring love and the spirit of a poet whose works remain very much alive.
