Nasser Amjad - Land of No Rain

The exhibition was indeed diverse and ambitious: amazing archaeological finds owned by the city’s museums, recordings by prominent musicians, films from the black-and-white era, dances by men in white gowns and conical hats who whirled for ever, anthologies of poetry, a short story and chapters of a novel in both languages, and so on. In the anthology of poetry were three poems by Younis al-Khattat.

The name sent a shiver down your spine.

The large anthology contained poems by six or seven poets from your country, including a poet who was killed in a mysterious car accident. In the middle of them was the name Younis al-Khattat, with a short confused biography that suggested he also had another name. For ages you hadn’t read the name in any newspaper or book, or heard anyone utter it. You had a recurring dream in which Younis al-Khattat appeared. Despite your wanderings in numerous countries the setting, content and words of the dream did not change. You were in a dark room with a raised bench where three men in military uniform were seated in red sashes, with ribbons on their chests. Next to each one lay an olive-green military cap decorated with an eagle spreading its wings. In front of them the rows of chairs were empty. To the right stood a metal cage holding a thin young man with long hair, a droopy moustache and shifty eyes. The three military men examined the papers in front of them and then looked up, towards the metal cage. Then the one sitting in the middle, the most severe and inscrutable, would speak these words: ‘Younis al-Khattat. Life imprisonment.’ You would wake up soaked in sweat every time.

You knew there had been change in your country. But you didn’t expect to find Younis al-Khattat’s poems included in an anthology of writings selected under the supervision of official institutions, for several reasons. Younis al-Khattat wrote few poems, and they were published in local newspapers with limited circulation or in underground stencil-copied publications edited by young men who believed that words could be as powerful as bullets. Besides that of course there was the fact of his conviction in absentia. It’s true that the poems did bring him some attention in literary circles, and more than one critic wrote about the advent of a promising poet. But the fact remains that he was not a recognised poet, even though some of his poems on love and politics circulated among young people. One of the three poems in the anthology was called ‘The Lady of the City’, which was heavy with influences from the Song of Solomon. The lyricism in it is clear. The pastoralism — the hills covered with lilies, the lions and the spikenard — was also evident. But for all that clarity, a question obsessed you when you read the poem. How could a poet less than twenty years old describe how time weighed on his shoulders, how it had left scars on his body, how it made the ground sprout lily after lily and the gazelles give birth to gazelle after gazelle, and the days and nights pass in succession without his love for his beloved diminishing one iota? You told yourself that sometimes one’s words can sing the praises of something you know nothing about or overestimate the permanence of feelings. They can immortalise a moment that soon proves to be transitory, if not pathetic. You also said that it is emotional and intellectual discipline that generally gives words a way out, saves them from the nonsense of their firm promises and makes it possible to read them again with as little disgust as possible.

You were not surprised for long that Younis al-Khattat’s poems had been included in the part of the large anthology that was devoted to your country. While roaming through the galleries of the cultural institution that was hosting the exhibition, you saw your old comrade Mahmoud, whom you all used to call Abu Tawila because of his unusual height. Ever since middle school in Hamiya, Mahmoud had been noticeably taller than the rest of his colleagues. You were considered tall, but not as tall as Mahmoud. Those extra inches of flesh and bone were probably the only advantage he had over you. It didn’t feel like it was ten years or so since your stormy last meeting. He embraced you and spoke warmly. He waved his hands excitedly. More than once he put his hand on your shoulder with disturbing affection. But you couldn’t respond so obligingly. You needed time to cover half the emotional distance he had already crossed when he met you.

It was hard for you to forget what he had done.

He must have read the statement you and your comrades issued, which called him a defeatist who put his personal interests above the common cause. You were the spokesman for the Organisation and the one who drafted the statements it issued abroad. That was about ten years earlier. Mahmoud’s surprise decision to go home had been less of a shock than his rapid appointment to a prominent official position in the media. Those who suspected he had been a plant saw this as proof of their suspicions, while others rejected this interpretation, which gave the impression that your organisational structure was lax in the face of other forces. They said he was just a defeatist, a petit bourgeois with no stamina. You were one of those who favoured the second explanation. If he had really been a plant, he would have given you away before you left the country: he had known where you were hiding before your escape was arranged, and when you escaped abroad, with some of your comrades, he was with you.

But it was striking that his comments on the nature of your work with the Organisation and on the rigidity of your theories had started only a short time before he suddenly decided to go home, and then only cautiously. He had started talking philosophically, in a decadent liberal tone in your opinion, about the relativity of evil. Comparing two evils: the regime and what he called the overwhelming tide of obscurantism. Within the Organisation you hadn’t taken a clear position on the fact that the religious forces were vocal in the country and that some wings of that movement had turned to violence. You stuck to your class-based analysis of the regime, of the forces that had a real interest in change and the role of the revolutionary vanguard in bringing it about. You pointed out confusedly that what was happening in your country was a struggle within the bourgeois class itself. The right was attacking the right. But the thrust of your propaganda remained focused on the regime, which you held responsible for the conflict, for the violence and the bloodshed that was taking place. You said it was the natural outcome of its decision to use the religious forces to wage war on the left. You observed what was happening in Hamiya towards the end of the Grandson’s reign with a certain vengeful satisfaction. What you didn’t say in your statements, you discussed in your closed meetings: if the regime was weakened by the religious forces, was it in the interests of the forces of change or not? Your comrades were close to unanimous that in the end what was happening would work in their interests, because in your opinion the religious forces did not have a sustainable agenda. They were part of the forces of the past, and history could repeat itself only in the form of farce. By weakening the regime and shaking its foundations, these ahistorical forces would help put history on the right track, whether they wanted to or not. But it was a remark by the theorist of the Organisation that became proverbial, when he likened the religious forces to the ox that ploughs the land and prepares it for those who plant the seeds: the ox that pulls the plough of history. Then, as if he had had a sudden inspiration, he said: ‘Let the ox do the work!’ That phrase became an unofficial slogan. You didn’t like the metaphor. You thought it smacked of opportunism in disguise, but you didn’t say that, perhaps because the issue wasn’t fully clear to you, perhaps because you were taken by surprise by the sudden change in the relationship between the religious forces and the regime. But you were not comfortable with what followed: the beginnings of a flirtation between the Organisation and the religious forces, to confront the regime. On that your position was unambiguous, passionate in fact. You argued for the need to stand firm at equal distance from the regime and from the religious forces. You said that tactics should not part company with strategy, and that it was liberal deviationism to say that the end justifies the means. But all this happened after Mahmoud had gone back to Hamiya. To be fair, you should remember what Mahmoud had said at the meeting where the theorist of the Organisation came up with the ox metaphor. He had ridiculed the slogan ‘Let the ox do the work’ and said the ox would turn its horns on everyone. Now you’re wondering whether what he did was make an ideological and political choice in favour of one evil over another, or whether on the Island of the Sun, the last place you had been together, Mahmoud had met one of the Hamiya officials who had come to the island for tourism and shopping; and the bargaining had started there. You don’t know and you didn’t ask him. But you could find no other convincing explanation for how he had managed to enter the country without being sent back, because he was one of a small minority of people that had tried to go home and not been re-deported by the border guards. Hamiya’s policy in this regard was inflexible: not to let back fugitives even if they were wanted men, to leave them like stray dogs barking in the streets. This was the exact expression current in the official media when referring to opponents of the regime who were active abroad. The expression ‘stray dogs’ rarely meant actual dogs. Anyone who heard the expression on the radio or read it in the newspapers understood immediately what was meant.