Adonis: Identity is a Creation

Adonis in conversation with Guillaume Basset

Guillaume Basset : How do you think of yourself? I mean, you were born in Syria...

Adonis: I was born in Syria and naturalized Lebanese. Now I live in France and I am a French citizen. For me, identity is never fixed or ready-made. It’s not something one inherits: one creates one’s identity; one creates it by creating. I create my identity by creating my life and my work. So I’ve been born three times: in Syria, in Lebanon and in France.

GB: And with the publication of each of your books, you’re born again?

A: That’s right. It’s a new birth, an open identity. As if my identity comes from in front of me, rather than behind me. It’s a creation. Identity is a creation, like love, or poetry. Always able to be created, or re-created. Always unfinished. I’ve even written a conversation with a friend of mine: “Unfinished Identity.”

GB: How do you view the political situation in Syria and Lebanon?

A: In political terms, the situation doesn’t surprise me. It follows the logic of things, the movement of history, the conflicts in the Middle East and its relations with the West, the rise of fundamentalism, etc. To me, it’s understandable. The same situation has happened before—in Europe, for example. What happened between France and Germany was terrible, but the wisdom of France, and Germany as well, allowed them to get past it. So we must understand what’s going on between Lebanon and Syria. Especially because they’re two brothers, and what occurs between brothers is always more difficult and more complex. It’s explicable, it’s understandable; but we must work to go beyond it. And there are many intellectuals, including me, working on just that.

GB: The saddest thing, looking at the current situation in the Arab-Muslim world—which has been noted many times—is the gap between its present and its glorious heritage. It had great success in literature, medicine, science, philosophy, and even religious tolerance: there were many viziers who were Jewish, or Christian...

A: That’s true even now.In Morocco, the king’s chief advisor is a Jew. The Arabs’ openness toward Jews continues. Egypt made peace with Israel, and Jordan too.The openness of the Gulf countries, especially Qatar...

GB: I had thought that most Jews in Arab countries emigrated -particularly to Israel.

A: But there are still Jews, even in Damascus. Most did leave, but important Jewish minorities remain. Even in Damascus, even in Yemen, even in Cairo. On the Arab side, one should note that most Arabs are open to the Jews. Besides, their shared history isn’t limited to Andalusia. It was already the case in the Arab heartland. The Quran itself is a renewal, not to say are production: it’s an extension of the Bible. For example, a Jew, an Israeli, can criticize the Bible, can criticize whichever prophet he likes, and Jews say nothing, they accept the criticism. As for me, as a Muslim I can’t criticize a single Jewish prophet, even though they said nothing about Muslims. Islam commands me to believe in them as prophets. One time I joked with a Jewish poet, a friend of mine,“Listen, there is a political problem, but that will get resolved—today, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. It will get resolved.The more important problem is the religious one. You see, the book that defends and protects Judaism isn’t the Bible, but the Quran.” In the end, for secularists and atheists, the problem with Judaism is the Quran. It’s very complicated.

GB: And you, have you had problems? Because your book, al-Kitab [The Book]—I had some misunderstandings in the bookstore, but I imagine that in Arabic, if I went and said, “al-Kitab,” which is to say, “The Book,” people would think of the Quran.

A: But it was well received. Very well received, in fact. They took a poll of readers and the readers said that the best book in the history of Arabic literature was al-Kitab. The regimes didn’t like it, but one can’t identify a people by its regime. Imagine identifying the Egyptian people by that scoundrel Mubarak. Unfortunately, there’s a tendency among people, especially those who are highly politicized, to identify the Syrian people with the Syrian regime. But one can’t do that, because it’s essentially false. It’s the same mistake made by Muslim fanatics who identify the Israeli people with the Israeli regime.

As for The Book itself, it’s very difficult to understand for someone without a very good grasp of Arab history. It’s a travel essay, a rereading of Arab history. It was inspired by some great experiments that preceded me—for example, Dante’s Divine Comedy. But there’s a big difference, since that is a voyage in the heavens, undertaken with a religious spirit. As for me, I did the opposite: I travel on land, through the history and politics of Arab countries, from immediately after the death of Muhammad up through the ninth century. It’s the most significant period of Arab history and needs to be reread. I wrote three volumes, the first of which has been translated into French. The most difficult thing for me was the structure. I tried to avoid a narrative form, as I don’t like narration, especially in poetry. To be a poet is to be anti-narrative. If not, poetry becomes fables. But how could I give life, how could I show all the political, cultural and religious complexity without using narrative?

I worked on the problem for a year, searching for a form that I liked. Then one day, watching a very beautiful film, I said to myself, “That’s it!” On the screen, you see past and present, you watch a scene and listen to music. It was this amazing complexity that gave my book’s form. I began by selecting a guide for my journey and chose al-Mutanabbi, because he was the poet who unified politics and poetry. Then I divided the page into four parts. The right portion of the page—left, in the French version—was the personal memory of my guide, what he remembered while walking by my side through this history. The central portion was his individual experience as I imagined it. The third, at the bottom of the page, established a connection between the two parts. And on the left side of the page—right, in the French version—for someone interested in the history were the references. That was the form. Then there’s a series of homages for great poets who were killed, marginalized, or exiled. Homages to those poets in Arab history who were great lights, but who, for one reason or another, were marginalized, even in the present. I was telling my readers that Arab history is more than a history of the sword, that there were also great men. It was an immense amount of work. I had to read all of Arab history, a crazy undertaking.

GB: Were you attempting an exhaustive synthesis, or were you leaving things open?

A: Open. I let the reader find the way, the horizon. I didn’t make any judgment. We mustn’t close things off.

GB: You were talking about typography and it made me think of my translated copy of the Quran. Comparing this with your latest work, History Torn over a Woman’s Body, I have the impression that you use a religious form, but then alter it in order to make it your own. Not as Dante did, spiritually, but as something completely incarnate. As if it were necessary to transform the revealed book into a book that is open to real history.

A:Exactly. Once I asked Jean Genet, “Jean, you should write in a language closer to that of Céline. Your life, your experience, must push you in that direction, so why write in the language of Mallarmé?” He told me,“The language of Céline is one that differs from writer to writer, but Mallarmé’s language is connected to French identity. I wanted to write like Mallarmé to subvert, to destroy French culture.” And so, in my case, when I take up Hagar, for example—a religious personage, mother of the Arabs, mother of Ishmael, wife of Abraham, who was father of the Jews and who sent her into exile—I take the story and change it radically.

I transform Hagar, prototype of the exiled woman, tortured and scorned, into the prototype for a revolutionary woman, anti-religious and anti-prophetical. Religion must be destroyed from the interior, not the exterior. You can’t destroy something of which you have no knowledge. Unfortunately, many of my communist friends and intellectuals wanted to do just that, and they failed. They criticized the Arabic tradition from a position of ignorance. You can’t get rid of Rimbaud by being ignorant about him. You must read Rimbaud, understand Rimbaud. A thousand times, in order to go beyond him. If not, you’ll never get beyond him. My friends thought religion was nothing, that it was finished. My friends said: why talk about religion, religion is over and done with. For good. But look, you can’t be against religion as a personal experience. You must be against religion as an institution, as a regime, as an ideology.

GB: This is the difference between Church and mysticism.

A: Absolutely. If we don’t understand that, we can’t do anything. The proof: after seventy years and twenty million people put to death by Stalin, nothing changed.

GB: I got to know your work through, Mihyar of Damascus: His songs and Singularities, and there was already an evolution between the two books. This evolution continues through The Book, as well as History Torn over a Woman’s Body. This transformation, is it the fruit of a constant evolution, or simply the product of brief experiments and adaptation?

A: I think it’s been an evolution. To better explain, to better grasp the thing I’m trying to transform. The style changes with the experience.

GB: I see that when you were searching for words you made circles with your hands. This reminds me of a division people often make between two schools of poetry: the narrative school, which heads immediately for its object—straightforwardly, one could say—and the non-narrative school, usually descriptive though not necessarily so, which attempts on the contrary to circle around its object, never quite exposing it, trying to suggest its limits through a mix of different voices.

A: Absolutely. I belong to the second school. In the end, one cannot just say the object. The power of the word, and its weakness, is that it cannot say the thing. Suppose the word could say the thing—then the word would die, and the thing too. The world would end. It’s lucky that the word cannot totally say the thing—except in religion, and ideology. The only spaces in which words are totally adequate to say things are totalitarian spaces.Neither religion nor ideology has a culture: they have doctrines. And we know what both of these are based on: the anti-human. This is why it’s lucky that words cannot say things. Can one say love? Never. One shouldn’t, in any case. A poet can say how he has experienced love, or how he sees it according to his own lights. Unfortunately, this sort of poetry is rare. Poets write with their heads. There’s no such thing as love—there’s a relation, a rapport between a woman and a man, which you might call love. But love as such, the legend of love, the love one finds in books, that doesn’t exist.

GB: Just before we were talking about Mahmoud Darwish, who died three weeks ago, sadly. Anything to say?

A: What can I say about a friend...It’s a catastrophe for me, personally. I’ve lost a part of myself. There it is. Maybe we need to accept death as a part of life… I think he was a bit camouflaged by politics. People viewed him through the lens of politics more than through the lens of poetry. This happens a lot. Aragon, for example, was camouflaged by politics, but he was actually a great writer. At some point there will be studies of Darwish from a poetic standpoint—but this will be the work of readers. At the moment, there’s a public that conceals the reality of the poet people love. Unlike readers, the public is a veil.

In Paris 26 August 2008

Photo: © Rossano B. Maniscalchi