Abdul Kadir El Janabi
Issued by the New Culture publication House (Cairo) “The trip of Kamel Al Telmissany : The Surrealist against the Realist ” (300 pages) by Mohsen Elbelasy . A book with a special cultural electric charge that we are not used to in the new Arabic books being issued. It is a hot monitoring of a surrealist cultural figure known to Egypt in the 1940s and 1950s, whose name is Kamel Al Telmissany in the Annals of the History of Freedom.
The information came in it not in the form of dead stones piled in the heads of the pail of stupidity and ignorance, but in the form of flowers that sprout to bear fruit. Here we follow Al Telmissany from his inception and his duty to pass through streams that flooded in the early thirties of Cairo to belong to the “Art and liberty ” group, bearing its surrealist banner, text and scene, poetry, drawing and films… We feel as if we were in the corridors of the free halls at that time, where his works and the works of his companions, Ramses Younan, Fouad Kamel, Anwar Kamel, and the international painters who used to live in Egypt. A documentary book and at the same time a narrative and fictional book that beats between its lines, lively and free poetry that has nothing to do with systems, ideologies, and commercial literature . Mohsen El Belasy is himself a surrealist who is the editor in chief of The Room surrealist Magazine , an international surrealist magazine , Here the interview also came in a new way: to take his full space of the explanation in every answer to a question I asked him… For this reason, we will publish the text of the dialogue in three parts
Abdel Kadir Al Janabi :
Why Kamel Al Telmissany particularly at this time…?
Mohsen Elbelasy :
Many years ago, I was a teenager when I read this phrase by George Henein:
You know those smooth, dull gray booths that sometimes contain powerful electrical transformers and sometimes high-frequency cables, and on the sides you will find a short phrase warning you (Do not open – danger of death) Well, surrealism is something that an infinite fingers has written on it in response to the previous formula ( Please open up – the danger of life )
Since then I have been possessed by being born as a surrealist.
Obsessed with discovering the color of the great auroral wind.
I became fascinated by the revolution in art , literature and philosophy that the group of art and liberty made in the thirties of the last century and
Also
I became fascinated by the achievements of the Arab surrealist group in Paris in the seventies that was founded by Al janabi. I was looking from afar at the burning forest behind the dusk of the past that generates every young moment. But Kamel Al Telmissany , George Henein, and Al Janabi in chronological order, they pushed a special situation in my mind.
The perfect model for me for the surrealist wolfy concept. You (to Al Janabi) have haunted my mind and my imagination for many years, I wrote about the Art and liberty group, I discovered your writing and your publications,in Paris since the 70s, “Le Désir Libertaire” and “The moment” and your activities in the seventies and eighties. At an early age, I was dealing with every surrealist smell that tore Arab philosophical, social and traditional chains with a lot of reverence and lust towards discovering more.
I learned that killing fathers is an eternal condition of the living mind and that the moment is the only pioneer, no future, no past to follow, I learned that surrendering to the magnetism of objective chance is a vast avenue for individual disobedience.
And here is the surrealism shining in a moment that will never fall from my memory
Abd Kadir Al Janabi , whose publications sowed the seeds of rebellion in my nerve cells when I was a young teenager, interviewed me.
That is living surrealism to me
The idea of the book came when I was filming a series of documentary videos in Arabic about Art and Liberty Group, about Kamel Kamel Al Telmissany and Georges Henein, to be viewed as a video series accompanied by a set of articles.
I was filming one of it with the big journalist and critic Professor Samir Gharib in his home about Kamel Al Telmissany and the Art and Liberty group,
perhaps in mid-2019. And he pushed me to write this book at first. Indeed, the adventure began. I was excited about the project with the Egyptian novelist and beautiful friend, May Al-Telmissani , the daughter of the great film critic Abdel Kadir El Telmissany , the younger brother of Kamel .
The truth is that Kamel El Telmissany has a special nature among the wolves of the surrealist group ” art and liberty “in Egypt in the thirties and forties.
For nearly a hundred years, the Arab cultural and artistic scene did not know many personalities who possessed this brutal hunger and the ability to artistic experimentation and travel through forms, templates and schools of imagination like the one he owned, Kamel El Telmissany cannot be described as an artist, a critic only, a cinema director, a film critic, a screenwriter, a production manager, or a short story writer only, or even a social thinker only,
and he cannot be described as a pioneer of realistic cinema in Egypt or on the Arab level only, but he was in himself A comprehensive artistic and cultural movement and a volcano that had the greatest impact in shaping the awareness of a group of his contemporary creators who later became exceptional and distinguished artists, each in his field and place.
Starting with his classmates in the Saidia High School, Ratib Siddik, Fouad Kamel and Saad Al-Khadem, who later became the most important Egyptian plastic artists names in the twentieth century, passing through his younger brothers Hassan Al Telmissany , Abdel kadir Al Telmissany and their distinctive influences on the progressive cinematic movement in Egypt, and the exceptional plastic artist Inji Aflaton and her sister the Poet Gilberte Aflaton , the actors Imad Hamdi, Mounir Murad, and many creators, filmmakers, plastic artists and writers who were influenced by him.
Kamel Al Telmissany , Georges Henein and Ramses Younan were the main pillars of the formation of the Art and liberty group.
Kamel carries its first DNA.
Even before the group’s birth, starting in the mid-thirties, and Kamel was interested in integrating his drawings with literary texts. He drew drawings of stories for writers such as Taha Hussein and others, leading to his visual collaboration with Albert Cossery in his masterpiece Humans Forgotten by God, which is one of the most important collections of stories in the history of modern Egyptian literature in my opinion.
Kamel was also one of the main founders of
“the New Orientalists Group” in 1937 with Saad Al-Khadem, Rateb Siddik, Kamal Al-Malakh and others, this group that issued the new Orientalists manifesto. The first manifesto of its kind inviting folk art to a clear, explicit and radical modernist form.
The modernization attempts of folk art did not take this radical approach before the group of the new Orientalists, which Kamel launched in an early period of his youth. The artistic stages of Kamel’s artistic life were evolutionary paths of modern Egyptian art, whether plastic, cinematic or critical.
The truth is that the volume of lost items in the history of the surrealist movement in the Middle East since the beginning of its eruption at the beginning of the thirties of the last century through the group of “the tryers” in Cairo as a primary origin through the group of Art and Liberty and your Arab surrealist group in Paris ( to Al janabi) And every detail in this missing and even what is available represents a dose of incitement to more surrealist fissures and fissions of the Arab imagination that suffers from historical and imaginary rust.
The book also stems from shedding light on the path of the development and emergence of the avant-garde Francophone cultural movement in Cairo in the last third part of the nineteenth century and its roots extending since the French occupation against Egypt in 1805 and the spread of the French language in the Egyptian cultural circles at the beginning of the twentieth century until the start of surrealist activity in Egypt And the first surrealist storm phase in Cairo at the end of the twenties and the beginning of the thirties through artists, poets, photographers who were not highlighted in Egypt much before, such as Mayo, Ida Karr, Lee Miller and Mary Cavadia except a little in the writings of Professor Samir Gharib and Professor Bashir El Sebaei. Then we come to the beginning of the real surrealist activity through The group of “The the tryers” in Cairo and anatomy of its composition at the beginning of the thirties until the end of this decade, to the activity of Georges Henein and the beginning of the activity of Kamel Al Telmissany at the end of the thirties and his founding of the group of the new Orientalists , then his collective poetry book with Georges Henein, in which he shared his drawings and congratulated them by Andre Breton in 1938. All this was achieved by Kamel Al Telmissany in his youth before founding the Art and liberty group.
All of this creates a vertical sociological scene for the enormous cultural activity of Cairo as an active cosmopolitan city in the first half of the twentieth century, and the endless fissures it hides in its memory. It is embodied in the influence of Kamel Al Telmissany by the forcible prostitutes, deep in dark paths under the skin of Cairo. He conveyed their suffering and bleeding with drawings and words, which were clearly visible in Fahima’s personality, the ghost of this book.
Also, the dramatic path of Kamel’s life and its radical transformations from one extreme to the other from the end of the 1920s until the beginning of seventies tempted me to intertwine some of the twists and turns and developments of the modern art movement in Egypt with Kamel’s life journey,
which buried its most important landmarks after the commodification of the Egyptian imagination over tens of years for many considerations, starting from The seventies and perhaps years before that, the truth is that at the public or popular level in Egypt, Kamel Al-Telmissany was known as a film director in the fifties, but not many people had seen his critical or plastic product surprisingly ahead of his time, before 1945.
Also, despite the passage of more than eighty years of Kamel’s Critical activity If we dissect his critical articles, we will find that he presents a model lacking in the contemporary Arab contemporary critical movement and preceded it perhaps by tens of years regarding the art of the critical article by braiding it with other literary templates. Of course I have a hostile behavior towards the contemporary Arab critical movement, I do not deny this feeling and do everything I can to disturb its sleep.
Also, all this braiding inside the book pours into the crucible of the question that heads the title of the book, “The Surrealist Against the Realist.” How did Kamel Al Telmissany turn from an active surrealist into a realistic cinema director?
What happened and formed the social anatomy of the cultural circles in Egypt that contemporary this transformation, especially as it came at a moment in which the class, social and cultural structure of the Egyptian society changed during World War II, which was embodied in his first film” The Black Market” 1945 and the emergence of a class of war merchants who had a great impact in changing the shape of the Egyptian society.
Kamel Al Telmissany also turned to realistic cinema and directed The black market “movie was contemporary to the emergence of Egyptian realist cinema with the clear concept of social realist cinema, after Kamal Selim’s initial attempts at the end of the thirties.
This social change affected not only Kamel but also caused changes in the paths of some of his companions in the Surrealist Art and Liberty group.
The first chapter of the book also discusses the change in the literary and artistic circles in light of the growth of fascist forces in Egypt and the emergence of progressive anti-fascist artistic and literary currents starting with the 1930 constitution and the assumption of Ismail Sidqi Pasha as prime minister until the end of the second war in 1945
As for Kamel Al-Telmissany’s transformation into realistic cinema and his journey with Studio Misr and the film production entities that completely changed their shape after 1952, the book examines the political and social changes after52 and their relationship to the film production system through a critical journey in Kamel’s cinematic works during the fifties and their development, and analyzes his works as a screenwriter In addition to being a director and production manager. He wrote two books of film criticism and a lost novel, the secret of which will be known in the book.
Until his departure from Egypt in the early sixties to Beirut, where he worked as a production manager for the Rahbaniya and Fayrouz music band , his life in Beirut was full of artistic activity as usual, until his death alone, far from Cairo, from which he was expelled.
All the details of this trip cast their arrows on our contemporary reality, whether intellectually, literary, artistic or social directly, and raise in our faces questions about the path that paved the way to the state of paralysis and cultural poverty that we live in now in the Middle East.
I was trying to push the reader to force their minds to ask what happened to the deterioration of the Arab imagination to this extent, after it produced this form prior to its time and piercing the social circumstance in the thirties and forties of the last century, the most active eras in the development of modern Egyptian thought, in addition to what the Arab Surrealist group presented in Paris Which you(Al Janabi) established in the seventies and eighties to be now an eternal bridge with renewed life between one surrealist era and another. Of course, these movements were historical exceptions, but they are exceptions that made the future of free art in our region.
The biography of Kamel Al Telmissany was a vast template into which all these questions were poured, to make the pages of the book cry out for more research and excavation in the tunnels and alleys of free-fantasy lifters in the history of our region, whether the Middle East or North Africa.
Abdel Kadir Al Janabi :
– Do you think that a book about Kamel Al Telmissany will give an artistic or creative push to the current Egyptian culture?
Mohsen Elbelasy :
We will find at every turn within this book a struggle between the reactionary forces and the forces that raised the banner of the free imagination high during the last century, even dynamically in the biography of Kamel and his contemporaries. Whether this conflict is literary, critical, plastic, cinematic, cultural, social, political, or even personal.
The fate of Kamel and his companions in the Art and liberty group was a stark mirror of the purity and honesty of the economic, political, philosophical, artistic and literary struggles that the world lived through the first and second wars and between them and after them.
The fate of the censorship forms on art in the fifties and its effects on artistic production forms and , especially in the cinema and theater, raises a banner carrying many questions inside the book, and confirms the conditionality of art’s freedom to advance any society and bring it out of darkness.
. Any reactionary philosophical, intellectual or cultural construction will not fall except by exposing the loopholes of its linguistics.
When we read the majority of Kamel Al-Telmisani’s critical articles, some of which are published in the book, we will find in the introduction, in the front or at the end of it as a literary or poetic texts that are highly condensed, and may reach the limit of poetic narration or pure poetry within the article.
The article to Kamel Al Telmissany is a literary work, with a full-fledged foundation.
I think that in the history of the Arab critical article Kamel Al Telmissany is an exceptional breakthrough that is suitable to astonish any reader in any era and serves as a whip that whips the poor imaginations of the majority of contemporary critical article writers.
Yes, perhaps one of my goals for writing the book was to expose the poverty of the contemporary linguistic and critical imagination. It fascinates you when you read a critical article by Kamel Al Telmissany that he possessed the chemistry of the word “like Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Mallarmé and all the surrealist poets who came after them.
You feel the visible poetry in its full sense when his world takes you to situations Renewed sensuality, contradictory and splitting semantics.
This erosion of the paralysis of the prevailing Arab culture and the corruption of Arab monetary and even linguistic non-movement during the past hundred years did not occur in a radical and clear way except through two explosions in the captive Arab imagination, the first explosion was through the group of Art and liberty in Egypt and the second explosion was through your Arab Surrealist group in Paris in 70s.
Reopening the doors of these mines, burning with life, and supernatural wolf imaginations, such as Kamel Al Telmissany , and bringing out the dragons that inhabit them alive and saving the flames of their achievements for the Right moment and other fission cases, will incite more desire for research and exploration among the serious researchers and prospectors, and will incite hunger to spin a rope that connects immortal moments in which the banner of imagination is free, Fluttering on the shores of the contemporary surrealist movement in the Middle East and North Africa, and any literary and artistic movements that raise the banner of free imagination and mad love above every banner.
Abdel Kadir Al Janabi :
Do you intend to write extensive books about the heroes of the surrealist group “Art and liberty “, such as your book about Al Telmissany ?
Mohsen Elbelasy :
The truth is, perhaps in the coming years I will look for more of what is missing in the history of the Egyptian surrealist movement but not before four or five years. The next few years I will devote myself to the surrealism of the current era in the region and perhaps globally. I will focus my efforts on developing modern means of collaborations between surrealist groups in the world and their integration into publishing and cultural groups that combine thier efforts. Of course, we consider ourselves legitimate sons of the Art and liberty group and your Arab surrealist group in Paris (to Al janabi) in the seventies. And we will not achieve anything if we do not know all the details of those who we came out from their intellectual womb, even if we believe that we do not need ancestors, but we look to you and the group of Art and liberty not as ancestors, but as founders and pioneers of what we are doing now.
Our hunger for more drilling and excavation in your achievements will not subside, but our group or contemporary movement needs to combine our efforts now to refine it with an intellectual, artistic, philosophical and visual project that will live long until we hand the flag to those who will come after us. I may be working on several collective projects , but I have to put all my efforts and focus on my poetic and visual projects as well.
Abdel Kadir Al Janabi :
What is the main motive that urged you to embrace surrealism as an intellectual and creative reference for your contemporary activities?
Mohsen Elbelasy :
On the cover of the first issue of your magazine
“Le Desir Libertaire” was written in 1973
“If you love love… you will love surrealism.”
I believe in this saying that bears witness to the eternity of surrealism, that it unites with love and strips it of social pollutants that are false and fragile.
In any place and at any time, the concept of eternal surrealism will remain the most brilliant way to open a future to the mind that is wider than its present.
In fact, we look at first surrealism, Breton’s surrealism as a moving starting point for our contemporary activities and not as a fossil reference that freezes us in technical cases whose circumstances differ from the current reality.
Surrealism is not linked to a temporal or spatial centrality, on the contrary, in the legendary essence of Surrealism it is against the convulsive Hitlerite of the conditions of space and time. Surrealism rises to the highest point where all these contradictions are resolved.
But the biological space in the human subconscious is almost the same, and perhaps in the animal as well. I have a research interest in the dreams of wolves and dogs, animals have their own vast and special surrealism.
Surrealism is an adventure that is constantly changing and reforming by changing the imaginary reality of man, but perhaps the enemies of surrealism remained unchanged as they are with the same faces, identities, references and coffins.
But the temporal skin differed, the oppressors of imaginations are mummies that proliferated for centuries.
What concerns us in the past history of the surrealist movement is to avoid the historical mistakes in the paths that disrupted global surrealism for many years, whether by dyeing it with utilitarian propaganda discourses or restricting it to an imaginary authoritarianism that wears a mask that connects it in the paralysis of reality.
We practice surrealism on a surrealist planet. Being a surrealist does not mean that you are a soldier or a member of a realistic discourse.
But your surrealist identity is that you have a vast space in your subconscious in which you can create a parallel reality with its poetic beings, in which all contradictions that trap imagination are dissolved, And melt in it all self or collective -censorship .
Of course without ignoring the social biases of surrealism.
Our perception of surrealism includes the certainty that the surrealist poetic act in all its forms is a supreme act with the freedom of its unconscious spaces, and its spontaneous ramification with Surrealist images, which combines all the forms of daily life, in a special remote space outside the foggy atmosphere of daily reality.
To create new lives in which all contradictions are resolved
For me personally, Surrealism is a decisive hammer for demolishing the prisons of existing language and the lived dictionary, and perhaps to bring down the linguistic power of grammarians and academic language men, guardians of prisons of imagination, even of enslaved visual language.
Surrealism is a rebellion against linguistic origins and a rebellion against the calcification of the dominant visual receptors, the first jailer at the gateway to the inner world of man standing behind his eye.
We aspire to a complete break with these handcuffs / assets / statues that imprisoned the free imagination of man, to break with the pollutants that hide the absolute power of pure poetry, and its repressed power, to reconsider language as a comprehensive concept of freedom by dropping its jailers is one of our goals.
By underestimating the imprisoned linguistic logic and directing the black arrows of humor towards it, we strip from it that intended rebellious dislocation.
We will strive to make surrealism, everything that our imagination can create.
On the other hand, after Breton’s death, the inevitable eternity of Surrealism has called for a permanent development in the means of invoking surrealism as a comprehensive philosophical concept, after 1968 and the divisions that occurred in the surrealist movement and the theses of Vincent Bonoure and Jean Schuster and the various battles that took place over eternity Surrealism and the change and development of its concepts, or even the political differences that occurred between the surrealists at the end of the sixties and the beginning of the seventies, all of this led to pushing surrealism to new lands and new fields that developed from its philosophical structure and made it in many cases continue to race against time
To beat time in the end, as usual.
To reach your surrealist activity (to Al janabi) in the seventies and eighties as an Arab surrealist group in Paris. “surrealism after the storm” , it injected into the blood capillaries of the hidden history of the Arab imagination anew its rebellious, imaginary flames to completely expose the falsehood of the Arab mind in the seventies and then the eighties in a philosophical, artistic and literary revolution.
As for globally surrealism
It entered a new phase of life at the end of the nineties and the beginning of this century, the phase of comprehensive and broad linking of surrealism with technology and its cognitive and communicative tools and linking all of this to all interrelated sciences.
Even if this activity remains far from the eyes of the mentally and imaginatively paralyzed.
We are on that path, linking surrealism with science and technology to continue your path to (Al janabi)
with the means of the present moment. Even at the level of the visual arts.
The imaginative energy that this free union could produce is unimaginable.
Surrealism / science / technology.
Abdel Kadir Al Janabi :
You don’t think that surrealism has achieved what it came for? And It must change belonging to its principles?
Mohsen Elbelasy :
“We are all under the mercy of the dream and we owe it to ourselves to bear its power in our waking state.
The dream is a giant who wears mirrors and lightning.
What is paper and pen, what is writing, what is poetry in front of this giant who has the clouds in his muscles?
There you falter in front of the serpent, ignoring fallen papers and glass traps, fearing for your fortune, for your heart and for your pleasure, and looking in the shadows of your dreams for all the Mathematical signs that will make you die naturally.”
Surrealist Revolution / December 1, 1924.
Surrealism has long ears that suck everything around it from place and time
Surrealism does not present itself as a presentation of a fixed dogma, everything must be expected from the future.
The great sin has always been to consider surrealism as an “artistic avant-garde” and to ignore the clear and permanent nature of surrealism as a biological space within the human mind in which the free worlds of the subconscious lie.
Of course, corpses of criticism and academic commodity or domestication may always feel fearful of surrealism as they have always been, and would describe it as the artistic avant-garde of an outdated school.
Trying to hide the true nature of surrealism.
Will humans attempt to liberate their consciousness or thier unconsciousness end?
After a hundred years? A thousand years? million years?
Surrealism is an eternal existence within the human mind, a biological existence, an ever-renewing desire.
Will the magic of objective chance end?
The history and existence of Surrealism has a linear aspect that represents one in a million of its true and eternal existence in everyday life.
If we put surrealism as a concept in parallel with world history, surrealism will surpass this history by surpassing reality and resolving its contradictions.
Surrealism, with all its futuristic developments, is the only magic hammer that will break the imaginary prison of the individual or the group.
In view of the savagery of neoliberal capitalism and the accompanying “commodity social structures of the human imagination”,
It can be argued that surrealism is more important than ever to liberate one’s imagination.
What has changed in the aspects of man’s oppressive forces, his freedom and his imagination since 1924 until now? nothing
The urgency for the massive presence of surrealism to liberate the human imagination increased.
All the facts of morphology , which is a science concerned with studying the form and structure of living organisms and their distinctive characteristics in terms of their external appearance, as well as the shape and structure of their internal parts, are consistent with the essence of surrealism and biological psychology.
Even the movement of adaptation and change of moving psychological energies with the obstacles created by the environment are biological facts that surrealism has identified with and made a vast entrance to understand and tame it to produce what we can call impossible lust.
Even the morphology of the human eye and its reception of the surrealist work or the visual artwork as a whole and its psychological effects indicate the eternity of surrealism, the eye was only aware of a slice of reality, but psychological morphology completes the rest of the bridge and forms a more complete picture of what the visible is.
It is that space that surrealism inhabits forever.
All this places surrealism in an eternal biological and psychological space.
Surrealism is the creative echo of biological psychology and its developments.
Myth and utopia exist within language in all its written and visual forms, but how do you transform the mosaic of this myth into a mental liberating force? This is a surrealist mission that will never end.
Surrealism is an integrated civilization hidden within the human mind for thousands of years, and it will remain alive for thousands of years and perhaps for millions of years.
The energy of the subconscious will remain alive and carry the fissions of infinite energies as it was since the formation of the first human consciousness and perhaps before that in the minds of the great apes and will remain until the extinction of man or his evolution into another type of being.
Eros is immortal and will remain utopian desires based on a materialistic, earthly view, a permanent radical desire to change human consciousness and liberate absolute desire. There will still be a radical love for wonder, there will be a savage, mystical desire to negate all self- and collective censorship,
Long live hunger towards refusal to adapt forever.
surrealism will continue to summon and tame impossible possibilities.
The desire to change life will always be higher and purer than the desire to change the world.
History, time, is a marginal matter for the concept of surrealism. If we look at some of the drawings on the walls of ancient caves, we will find in some of their details that surrealism, as an expression of the unconscious worlds, was initially a desire to discover and interpret reality in free and transparent ways as it is now and will remain forever.
It will always remain the hidden magic of the imagination, and free from all the lies of social existence,
What about in a historical period in which the world turns into an oval-shaped dungeon.
Contemporary man is in dire need of surrealism more than ever, and this need will increase brutally in the next few years. There is an unprecedented activity regarding the formation of contemporary surrealist groups around the world. We can say that in the last five years there has been a boom in the formation of surrealist groups and the development of their activities and their research interests.
Surrealism is eternal, time is an illusion. Surrealism is eternal as long as the human imagination is alive.
Surrealism is a space for biological activity and not just a philosophical, literary or artistic movement.
Abdel Kadir Al Janabi :
Is Surrealism really a current project in Arab society, I mean that it is the only serum to develop the Arab mentality towards an open, free and revolutionary imagination?
Mohsen Elbelasy :
Before falling asleep at night, in that moment that writhes in anxiety like oxygen caught between liquid and solid,
When your head begins to absorb all the noise of daily life and turn it into the juice of pictures , for a few moments that may be like eternity, when you feel that your eyes will explode to drown everyone in what lies within you, without any control, you want to stand giant and slap all the half-corpses you met in your day on thier stone faces.
The lake of free babbling sucks your eyelids down to close the thickest curtain and opens an endless curtain on a show in which all your pain and material handicaps are removed, you are there you are not a slave to your physical pain nor to the face paints that drown you all day.
There you are free with all the meaning of freedom, that is surrealism. Where human purity can rise to heights where a person feels his absolute freedom.
Where all your inner voices are united in a free imaginary harmony, voices that will captivate all the other trapped voices.
This is what the individual and collective Arab mind needs to tear up everything that enslaves its imagination, this free union with the supernatural abilities of the human imagination.
We are hostile to the oppressors of imagination and its oppressed as well.
We have to contemplate the comical reality of the majority of the Arab critical movement and its isolation, which is multiplying day by day.
Whether in terms of academic criticism or what I call commercial criticism
The apparent history of the Arab critical movement is the history of its isolation, defeats, and empty masturbations.
Contemporary international surrealism is a direct measure of this isolation, which has evolved into a pride in isolation with a logic that carries a lot of crude foolishness.
I’m talking about the vast majority. Of course, there are exceptions that count on the fingers of the hand.
Arab critics recycle the paralysis of the imagination and put it in new, dilapidated boxes.
How miserable they see concepts such as surrealism. I can say that the majority of Arab critics view surrealism as a school that expresses madness or artificial madness belonging to the last century and restricts it to crusty names such as Dali or Breton, only. Childish, adolescent, miserable view.
They ignore contemporary international surrealist activity with blind and foolish logic and impotence.
Surrealism here and now is a magical trial of the contemporary Arab mind and imagination that ended up in total slavery to concepts that eventually produced by the religious radical groups that controlled the mind of society from the bottom up, combined with stagnant submissive behavior as a result of historical conditions and social, economic and political forms in which the conversation took a long time.
Surrealism is a concentrated capsule for the comprehensive liberation of the Arab imagination
On the other hand, more than seven thousand Arabic copies of the first issue of the room surrealist magazine were read, and sulfur website views in the Arab region exceeded twenty-three thousand readers.
This is a clear and explicit invocation of surrealism from thousands of hungry imaginations for absolute freedom.
The turnout of young writers and artists into our activities is a decisive sign that surrealism, in its comprehensive sense, is here. Even if the blind ignore it.
There are thousands of corpses, critical coffins and literary brothels, but there are thousands of contemporary minds still alive in the Arab region who dealt with our contemporary surrealist movement and the room surrealist magazine with a clear and intense hunger for more.
We have more than twenty thousand Arab imaginations that follow our activities and strive for comprehensive surrealist liberation.
This responds to the coffins of Arab criticism and the militaries of language.
It is a redefinition of the images and concept of desire in the Arab mind to complement what you started as an Arab surrealist group in Paris in the seventies of attempts to liberate the Arab desire/imagination.
You mention the word ” All Power of the Internationalist Imagination on the cover of
” le Désir libertaire ”
What if every Arab believed in the potential of imagination?
What if thousands of Arabs sought to reveal their esoteric dreams in all expressions?
Only if they see the path towards possessing the abilities of their free mystical realms
We will always promise the Arab critical, linguistic, and artistic paralysis groups with more confusion, and even fear.
Abdel Kadir Al Janabi :
What is poetry in your opinion?
Mohsen Elbelasy :
Listen to the mysterious, revealing and fierce voices within you.
And if you are caught up by fear of doing so, remember that it is wrong for the senses to belong to the everyday, lived world.
For me any discovery that changes the nature or direction or a phenomenon constitutes
of something or is a surrealist /poetic truth.
Objective chance , the subtlety of the intuition of the expectation, and the constant search for its flash .
Going without a destination, the poet has an unknown encounter with the word, freed from any linguistic logic.
In poetry the mind blows out of the mind. It aims at the spontaneous reclassification of things into a deeper and freer order, which is impossible to explain by the means of the ordinary mind.
The poet alternately is a deadwood pruner, a transformer, and a thunderbolt.
Silence is a complete poetic and surrealist work.
The word must be left in suspense for a moment before it is transferred to a physical state on paper. At dawn or dusk, we walk down the road and sometimes come across the silhouette of a silent fairy woman, whose silence is the most comprehensive concept of poetry, and surrealism.
an absolutely possessed throat, echoing between howls and silence.
the secrets of the world created, within the poetic mystery, darkness unfolds while questioning is stripped.
Earthly legend and mystery doors open to infinity.
The poet is an enemy of the sufist .
The poet is not bound by a vision or a superior authority.
Poetry is a momentary extraction of the unknown from the veins of every language.
If the poem does not have a chaotic body that smells of demolition, negation and destruction of all existing literary forms, genres,
Then what is living poetry?
Poetry should be the color of dried blood
The poem is the beginning and end of the world, it revives the world and its death, dismantles all self- and collective censorship, esoteric and physical, and drops every daily living dictionary.
The poem is an arena for the execution of all linguistic paralysis by burning with the napalm of the lust.
Poetry is not a linguistic expression, but a visual, physical and perhaps biological expression as well.
Real poetry employs itself to monitor a waking dream which is resentful of its fate, re-sculpting it with dough baked by chaos inside the bone furnace called the human head.
I believe that enhancing poetic esoteric awareness does not come only by enhancing the possession of language or general cognitive awareness, but by developing and training the eye on scenes of logic disintegration always, whether they are daily or artistic works.
Even with everyday mind games
Thus, the magnetic linguistic ability self-develops and expands not only through the subconscious mind, but also through the nerves of the eye’s practice of strenuous imaginative sports to extract the faculties of impossible earthy miracles in all its forms and templates.
I treat the Arabic language rules as a relationship between oppression and freedom; understand it
As a repressive social specter that must be removed and rebuilt anew every moment with vast doors to spend the free desire.
Poetry is the chaotic condensation of the inner momentary realization, but the seer poet must tame the tools of this condensation towards a permanent quest for the human interior, a quest fertilized by doubts in everything outside the individual.
Every human being has a poetic companion who lives behind his eye, the cunning poet who makes him constantly jump like a kangaroo and always seeks to protect this kangaroo from drowning in the prior cement lakes and to teach this kangaroo that there is no limit to what is called verbal maturity,
poetry is a permanent electrical revolution inside the mind It is not controlled by something imaginary or even social.
The chief function of poetry is to impart sharp disturbances to language and to overthrow every possible holiness it bears. For me grammarians and academics of language are the social police of the imagination.
I despise even the inherited Arab aspirations to rebel against the Arabic language, except of course à few poets , I see the deceptive horizon of most Arab poets now that they throw themselves in the recycling factories of closed poetic ambitions.
Abdel Kadir Al Janabi :
Do you believe in the revolutionary role of surrealist games, especially the art of collage that you practice?
Mohsen Elbelasy :
If we agree on the concept of rebellious beauty, we will say that the rebellious aesthetics in the digital future world is based on the concept of collage, whether the work is visual, audio, literary or cinematic, collage with its various concepts is the formal framework for the future.
In a world marked by increasingly infinite fractures,
Collage deconstruction creates the progressive motor for any future movement, whether philosophical, artistic or literary.
Now we must abandon the idea of single-focus media, and enjoy the magical flow of parts and collect them into new structures and bodies.
For the psychological world of the individual in the present and the future, the surrealist games are the best shock absorber for The reality that is heading towards its doom.
The development of different collective psychological models to respond to the changing emotional forms becomes a central motive for liberating desire.
This psychological abstraction produces a massive rebellious force in a world in which the human interior has been commodified and denatured.
Surrealist games are the killing of memory and the revival of the concept of momentary memory, which is basically free lust that is not pre-conceptual.
The basic idea here is the psychological synthesis led by objective chance.
At the level of written surrealist games, we always practice many surrealist games as a group and collective automatist writing.
The practice of collective automatism is the lost paradise that the individual is deprived of under the self-censorship imposed by the prevailing social logic.
which leads to a tangible psychological change in social behavior To open the horizon of imagination towards new ways to unleash the imagination.
It is a supernatural disintegrator for any submissive compliance, whether with language or with the cages of instincts in all its forms.
We can imagine the revolutionary impact of the imagination in relation to the demolition of the dominant meaning of expressive activity and its reconstruction again,
SULFUR 