DIALOGUE WithAbdul Kader el JANABI /BY Philippe Bouret

A bit

Philippe Bouret

DIALOGUE With
Abdul Kader el JANABI

Translated by Pierre Petiot

The language of the other helped me to build myself a poet

• The language of the other allows me to discover in my language my own language of poet.
• Poetry is the opposite of literature
• To translate for me is to be live with others in the language.
• I am mixed with the other
• Translation is a destruction operation
• Translating a poem is tearing the skin off the text
• I then try to create another skin for this poem that comes to me from the other.
• Translation is a transfer of flesh without the skin
• Translating is a real birth of the beginnings of language
• To make a poem a political instrument is to betray poetry.
  
  
  

I liked Breton because of Trotski and Trotski because of Breton. No more.

• The language of the other allows me to discover in my language my own language of poet.
•  Either we do poetry, or we do activism
• To make a poem a political instrument is to betray poetry.
• Surrealism in its determined struggle against all religion is forever a model for human color freedom.
• Breton, I hold him as a member of my family

I don’t let go until I find and I am finally appeased

• The metric is in you and comes from nowhere else

The slogan is an extraction of language

• The slogan like the poem is a fragment, it is an extraction, a brief form of language.

The title cuts the umbilical cord of the poem

• The title comes from over there
•  The title of a poem is the child of the previous poem.
• The title is a cut between the mother and the newborn.

The power of poetry is the fragment

• Each poem is a fragment that belongs to a whole.
• Fragmenting a collection allows it to become a powerful block

The philosopher thinks but the poet imagines

• The poet’s mental resonance is not deliberate

Cinema is a solitary encounter with the image, not without others

• Poetry does not lie in observation, but in the gaze.
• I have no connection with psychoanalysis, neither with Freud, nor with Lacan

My loneliness is an open loneliness

• Loneliness is a helping factor for the poet
• Suddenly something happens and I grab the keys to the poem.

Since I am writing, I improvise my life.

• I warn my wife, I tell her “I’m taking the bus”.
• I work the language while walking.
• I am a poet of the moment.
•  Sometimes I walk around and get attacked with ideas
• “In the meantime, Baghdad is far”.
• The poem is an extension of the poet’s organism, of the poet’s body, that is style
• There is only one kind of poetry for me, it’s surrealist poetry
• Always, opening – closing – filling.
• The prose poem is a literary genre that has more to do with the novel than with poetry
•  In a rhetorical accident, the prose lost one foot.
•  All the poet’s work lies in the creation of a linguistic ambiguity.
• Max Jacob says that the prose poem is a closed jewel.
• Writing for me is like a call that comes from the other,
• Everything is a call

*****

He says “Tu” to me

so I say “Tu” to him^[1]

The artist who consents to speak to the psychoanalyst – outside of the analytical session – is ready for the possible construction of another, unprecedented device, where the emergence of a singular saying beyond the said becomes possible, otherwise. In the city, the word exchanged can then be elevated to the dignity of the act and signal to know in a shared clos’ed room.

There is the gesture of writing and there is the body, there is poetry and there is the letter, there is sound and there is cadence. Reformulating a dialogue in writing is a real work of writing that opens the way to a new text.

Who speaks when the word of one, spoken and heard word is written by the other?

It is in this experience that I have been engaged for several years and it is in a place that I call expanding psychoanalysis that this dialogue takes place.

I push the door of a large Parisian brasserie, I sweep the space, I am going to the encounter of a look, in a voice hitherto unknown. Only the letter preceded the writing body to say it better and aroused desire. Desire, my desire, not without my body which I must engage in the experience. To cross the threshold, hear the door leaf close, the heartbeat speed up. Stop, look in the cabinet of curiosities …

A man,

over there

a coffee

a book,

an empty place

The poet

the writing

the other

expected.

I go ahead, he turns his head towards me, he smiles at me …

I set foot on the moon.

I am with Abdul Kader el Janabi.

He tell me you

So I tell him you.

*****

The language of the other helped me to build myself as a poet

Philippe Bouret : The preface to your latest book L’ivresse géométrique des sorciers – which you published at L’Asymétrie éditions, in your collection Arabie-sur-Seine – deals with the question of the title. We will come back to it. It was while turning the first pages that a sentence seized me to the point of immediately wondering about it. You say of the poet “In fact, he fooled us with this illusion”. What illusion are you talking about?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: This verse is taken from a poem about an author who boasted of giving readers the great poem, a persistent illusion of failed poets who cannot keep their promise.

Philippe Bouret: So, your encounter with writing?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: It remains an enigma for me. I wonder again and again when it happened and who pushed me to the point where I got involved in writing one day. Especially in poetry.

Philippe Bouret: Oh good?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I still have my own idea of the circumstances, not the why.
I worked in a shirt factory. A friend once showed me poems he was writing and I immediately asked him “How do we write this? It was Arabic poetry, what we call free poetry. Free? It’s quickly said, because it is a regulated poetry, precise with a very rigorous respect for versification. The number of feet is no coincidence, the composition is strict. In short, you can’t do just anything. I was then about 18 years old. The man’s name was Jamil. It is thanks to him that I got to know the work of Salama Moussa – he had given me Selected Pieces. I had never opened a poetry book and here I come across a sentence that has always remained in my head and which, I am convinced – believe me – has guided and still guides my life as a writer. Salama Moussa says that literature has no other purpose than to “Criticize life“. It was Jamil who also introduced me to the cinema and introduced me to the actor who counted most in my life, Marlon Brando.

Philippe Bouret: You write, in Horizon vertical, “[Brando] embodied in my eyes nobility, integrity, the most beautiful moments of childhood in the history of cinema. His way of mumbling, eating his text and stopping in the middle of the sentence to find the right word allowed him to express the concern of the post-war period, like no other before him had succeeded to do. Was it not the same elliptical and dissonant syntax with which modern poetry was to be exposed? “

Before meeting Jamil, before the age of 18, you had nothing to do with poetry or writing?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Absolutely none. I was passionate about cinema. Especially American cinema. And Jamil reinforced this interest. After the coup d’etat of February 8, 1963, I had even more pleasure in entering the cinemas in search of a humanity, I escaped, I entered into always renewed dreams that I kept in me long after the session. It was in the new Grenade cinema that I learned, on November 28, 1963, of the assassination of John Kennedy. It was a great shock to me and an increased fear of losing liberties by the death of one of its greatest defenders. This era only increased my cinephile desire, by the anxiety of seeing a single party set up. I wanted to know, but not what I was taught in class. I was missing school, I was going to cafes and I was hanging out in the streets of Baghdad. I read more and more popular American novels (very well translated by the way). I wanted to know what was going on in the world, how people lived outside my country.

Philippe Bouret: The other, always the other at the heart of your desire to know?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, this practice of going out on the street, in cafés, to meet others has not changed much since. You see, today, I’ll meet you at the Kepler. I always get the major source of my inspiration from it.

I discovered poetry by chance. The precise moment remains very uncertain for me. How the trigger was triggered remains a mystery. I can only remember one thing, it was Jamil who at the factory showed me poems and when I asked him how it was done, he gave me directions.

Philippe Bouret: This working and literary meeting with Jamil was founding.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes. I trusted him to such an extent that I started to have the same tastes as him. It started with ancient Arabic songs that I thought were great. For his part, he had no desire to embark me on any engagement whatsoever. He only made me share his passions. He had an influence on me such as André Gide says “which creates nothing but awakens”.

Philippe Bouret: The psychoanalyst that I am cannot remain insensitive to this meeting that you describe with so much detail and that decided your link to literature, your destiny as a poet. You seized this opportunity, this offer which came to you from the life, of another, of a worker and you made the force of your existence of it. Let me read this extract from Horizon vertical which I find precious because it sheds light on this point: “In contact with this worker friend who dreamed of writing a detective story – did he ever write it? – I later discovered what was in me, this ardent desire to know the other and to realize my childhood dreams. I can never thank this companion enough for enlightening me on two personalities whose importance I will later discover: Salama Moussa and Marlon Brando. In other words, the secular revival of Arab thought and the rebellious aura which arouses reverie and allows the spectator to recognize the individual who is in him and the role he can play in creating situations that escape consensus “. And I continue with these last sentences. Let the reader understand! “These two aspects, the objectivity of a secular tolerance and subjectivity as a projection of the dream on the screen, merge in me as a new nature: the permanent suspicion against any form of authority, which would be enough to correct me if by chance I was siding with authority ”

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, did I build everything from there? The encounter with Jamil was a turning point in my life and an opening beyond measure.

But now, I began to want to write poems, but I could not properly adjust my sentences with regard to Arabic metrics. Jamil explained to me the Arabic poetic tradition and the precision that was required to write. When I approached the metrics of Arabic poetic writing, it was not easy, it takes time and practice.

Philippe Bouret: Years later, it was precisely this metric, these rules that you fiercely opposed.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Exactly! The more I worked, the less I managed to respect the rules. I couldn’t write metrically correct poems. And that’s where I thought I might be able to do translations. That is to say, to take poetry in another way and above all from another language and another culture.

Philippe Bouret: We tell you tradition, you answer translation … Subversion?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Translation, that’s an essential word for me, which is at the origin of my engagement in poetry. Writing according to Arabic rules was impossible for me. I couldn’t do it. I then had the idea of translating English poems into Arabic, thanks to friends who introduced me to Anglo-Saxon authors. I felt that I was grasping something there. I had to reach the poetic Arabic language by translating English poems. This idea made me totally enthusiastic.

Philippe Bouret: You have the idea of catching the question of Arabic poetry by going through another language. A foreign language, right?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: That’s exactly it. At that time, I knew English because my mother worked in an English house and as a child, I was always with her, so I learned the language and I continued to improve here and there. You must know that my mother was very good at telling popular legends and she aroused my interest like no other.

Philippe Bouret:  The language that comes to you from a storytelling mother. “She wanted to die before me so as not to be devoured with grief at the time of my disappearance” you write in Vertical Horizon.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, it meant a lot to me. She had an extraordinary personality. She regularly participated in women’s demonstrations, particularly the one on July 14, 1958. It is thanks to her and her professional background that I learned English.

But when I started translating, it was something other than speaking the language. Translating is not easy, even less when it comes to poetry and especially when one attacks big names like I did Helen Thomas for example. I realized that I needed to deepen my knowledge of literary English and I began to read English and American poetry without moderation.

From the moment I had a good level and after reading many Anglo-Saxon authors, I started to translate them. Thanks to some essential contacts in certain newspapers, I was able to publish some poems. I tell that in my book Horizon vertical. There was a daily newspaper in Baghdad called An Nasr in which I published a lot of Arabic translations of African American poetry. I used to go to the American library regularly to borrow books.

Philippe Bouret: In a small text The grace of paradox, which we find in your book: The geometric intoxication of sorcerers and more particularly in The spleen of Baghdad, you write: “In the American library in Baghdad, I collected the following idea in a book whose title I forgot: the philosopher stabilizes words, he freezes them in a straightforward denotation. The poet being a disturber, his words change one by another, violating their lexical meaning! Since then, I perceive the excitement in calm; the sacred in the profane etc. In short, I started to work in the field of contradictions, far from the rail of metaphors”  What more can be said ? This prose poem perfectly translates my way of being and thinking.
How did you manage to publicize your work as a translator?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: There were friends who served me as intermediaries. For example there was a cafe in Baghdad, which was called Café Ibrahim which I frequented a lot.

Philippe Bouret: Ah yes! the “The Agitated  of the Jar” café? (Laughs)

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, that’s it! You are well informed – I see that you have read me … –  it was also known by this name. It was a café where the youth of the time gathered between 1962 and 1969, and which I frequented a lot when I joined the central command, after the military coup of July 17, 1968, when the Ba ‘th took power. In 1970, I left Iraq permanently.

Philippe Bouret: Since 1970, you have not returned to your country?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Exactly, in 1970, I left Baghdad forever, I have not seen Iraq since that date. In 1963 there was the bloody coup, in February exactly that marked a stop for me. In 1964, we saw the emergence of a new generation of Arab poets, young people coming out of prison – former communists – who began to see the world in a different way and who started to work for certain newspapers. I don’t know by what miracle, but I became friends with these people and showed them my translations. It was around this time that I really started to publish in several Iraqi newspapers. American poems, but also Czech, Russian and all that from books and magazines in which I found texts. I was then in friendship with the director of the Czech Cultural Center – Czechoslovakia at the time – who gave me books in English on the literature of his country. I remember a magazine called Spectram of which he gave me each outgoing issue. I began to love a poet, Miroslav Holub, who wrote in the style of William Carlos Williams. A huge poet. I think he died today. The director of the Cultural Center even went so far as to send him my translation. So he knew who I was back then, and he certainly didn’t know what happened to me afterwards.

I did a lot of translations that I published, and apart from that, I had a huge desire to write. So I tried. I wanted to make a novel or a story. So I wrote two short stories, short stories as they say and I started a real novel. I was about 20 pages away when my family members discovered them and they burned everything, because of Sadam of course. The Ba’thists were starting to attack and search houses to flush out the Communists, they were looking for writings from opponents. My family was very poor and no one could read. They may have thought that my texts were communist leaflets. It is true that I also wrote leaflets, as early as the 1960s. My mother was afraid that I would go to prison. She wanted to protect me, so everything was burned.

I would like so much that these twenty pages were still there, if only to know how I wrote at the time, in what way, what was my style.

Philippe Bouret: So you were nineteen, twenty years old?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, roughly.

Philippe Bouret: You came to Arabic writing through the English language and through translation, as a detour.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Know that during all these sixties, I did not write any poems. The first text of my pen was in 1973, for the magazine I had created, Le Désir libertaire. By publishing number 1, I was almost forced to write my first poem. I said to myself, this is a surrealist review, I still have to write one! And I composed a poem on war, in Arabic, The din of the mind. It’s the first poem I wrote in my life.

Philippe Bouret:

I would like you to read it to me. Do you want ?

Abdul Kader el Janabi:

The head dreams of the waters

The capital of the heart is a candle of stone

Failing on the legs of the night

This Olympian wolf

Hunted down between the pages of history

plants his panic claws

In the flesh of the pilgrims.

Their cries resemble the convulsive groans of children

Listening to a familiar old man

Who sadly speaks of his father,

Dead of an overflow of wars:

His arm is an old-fashioned dagger

His body a desert of titles and wandering lamps

His head a column of other fireboxes.

So I rise until dusk

Leaving the beloved village

Overgrown with nostalgia flowers

Where the world is like a volcano of cottony mists

Or like a forest that is not afraid of the visit of lions.

The wall of our childhood is a cloud

From where a thousand southern fragrances are exhaled

War oozes vaccination cards

And abundant bouquets

Distributed on the markets of weariness.

I arrive unarmed on the plateaus of war

Like I’m entering a festival of locations

Where the borders were only rivers of ophidians and sands

I enter with my bare hands

Shouting in the tunnels of the soul :

Come war, hold me to the point of grogginess

Come, stay in the port of my sufferings

Me the lover coming back from the distance

Come for love here

Is a cold summer and a forbidden cloud

Come, for my love is no longer a sun shining from the mouth of the cannon

Come, for the thousand and one nights is a session to a next death

Come, tell me about the desire that was

And flows between the lines

O war!

I’m laughing between the loss of the announcement

And the remnants of emotion.

It’s weird, don’t you think, to start writing a poem only in 1973, almost out of obligation and at the age of 29?

Philippe Bouret: This late beginning  of writing is surprising indeed!

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Absolutely late! But I had a long experience of poetry translation. I first expressed myself through the translation which is for me a real work of writing. You see, it was thanks to the translation that I came to love poetry so much.

Philippe Bouret: Your interest in poetry stems from another language that you translate into Arabic – English in this case – a language of poets. Writing from the writing of the other, I really like this experience.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: It’s exactly that. The other is what matters to me, it is from the other that my link to literature, poetry, the letter has been built. This is a cardinal point in my link to writing. This is how I understood that poetry is the opposite of literature.

Philippe Bouret: Sorry ?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: This formula surprises you, doesn’t it?

Philippe Bouret: Indeed!

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I will answer you with a short text co-written by Breton and Éluard

“Poetry is the opposite of literature. Poetry reigns over the idols of all species and realistic illusions; fortunately it maintains the equivocation between the language of “truth” and the language of “creation”. And this creative, real role of language (which is of mineral origin) is made as obvious as possible by the a priori total non-necessity of the subject “

I understood poetry only through the other, the foreigner and not through the metric tradition of my own language. The friend who introduced me to poetry tried to show me how to write a poem according to the rules of Arabic poetry, he did everything he could, in vain. But when translation introduced me to the world of free poetry, without any respect for any metric, there I felt that there was an exceptional means of expression for the poet. And it was the other, the one who speaks and writes a language other than mine, who  brought me that. It was a discovery for me  and at the same time a new freedom. It was from the transfer of the language of the other into my mother language that I discovered free poetry and through it a possibility for freedom.

Philippe Bouret: Did that represent for you a means of extracting yourself from the Arab tradition, from religion, from culture? Almost a strategy?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Exactly, you’re right, it has become a strategy and for me the one and only way to gain my freedom. It allowed me to discover the weight of Arab poetry and the shackles it represented for the country and for me. Many people said at the time that I was not a poet, because I had no respect for Arab poetic orthodoxy. With free poetry, as I discovered it from English language and authors, I suddenly had at my disposal a tool to extract myself from all these constraints of metrics.

You should know that the Arabs have absolutely no idea what free poetry is. They sometimes think they are doing free poetry by adding feet to traditional verses, but it’s bullshit. It is not a matter of the number of feet, twelve, thirteen, twenty … free poetry as I understand it is completely open. We must refer for this to Cendrars or the surrealists. Admittedly, we have respect for the number of syllables and the cadence, but the number of syllables only  depends on the cadence of the poet himself, on his internal rhythm.

So I discovered at that time that my conception of poetry had nothing to do with the Arab conception. It started from the question of the other. That’s why, from immemorial time and until today, I have remained faithful to the Western poetry that I have worked on and always tried to understand deeply and not as a passade.

I studied each poet, his style, his way of treating the language, how he writes, like this or that. I tried to translate western poetry into Arabic, that is to say translate the language of the other with my own language. What got me started was finding my unique way of arranging the others words in my own language.

I don’t have a classical writing, you understood it and you could see it in my texts, since you read me. What matters to me is the language of the other. I try to see how he constructs it in his poetry and to be inspired by it to find my singular writing in Arabic, without any influence from the classical literature of this language. For me it’s a question of loyalty to free western poetry. I never betrayed it.

For example, when I translate a book by William Carlos Williams, the Arabs are very surprised. They find that it is solid and respectful of the poet’s style, one finds the tone of William Carlos Williams  in it, while discovering my own writing.

Philippe Bouret: Crossing from one language to another to make another Arabic poetry exist through translation. What was your target by getting into for this work?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Why am I like that? Because from the start, I felt that my way of poetically  expressing myself was going to be achieved through the other. I knew that I could not invent another Arabic poetry except on basis of the language of the other. It was and it still  is a conviction for me. I found classical Arabic poetry compelling, it traps the poet in a rigid and unshakable structure. At first, I even think it was unconscious, I felt something I couldn’t explain. But I was convinced that poetry was not that. Classical Arabic poetry was foreign to me, while Western free poetry corresponded to my keen desire for freedom.You know, Philippe … the poetry is there … somewhere.

Philippe Bouret: Did you benefit from an education that enabled you to discover classical Arabic poetry early enough?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: An education? No. However, I read Arabic poetry very early, but it didn’t appeal to me. When I started writing, Western, not Eastern, influences resonated in my head. When I write poetry, Antara or the Mu’allaqat don’t come to my head. Breton is the one who is arriving – Breton whom I read in English the first time – Reverdi, who I also read in English. This is what comes to me when I think of poetry or when I write. Behind each poem there is an influence. André Gide defined influence, he said that influence writes nothing, that it only shows what is already in the poem that is being written there. If western poetry influences me, it is not that it is identifiable in my poems, like what would be a repetition, but it is in place to show me what I write.

Philippe Bouret: Would the influence be defined as something that touches you to the point of pushing you to write and allowing you to read your own writing afterwards based on its lighting?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: That’s exactly it. Western influence allowed me to discover my own language. The Arabic language outside of any poetic orthodoxy. From Western poetry, I found my own language.

Philippe Bouret: Reading you from another language … I find it fascinating. You discover the language of the other and by discovering it, it comes to reveal something to you about your own language and about your singular being as a poet.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The language of the other allows me to discover in my language my own language of poet. The language of the other helped me build myself as a poet.

Philippe Bouret: Are you paying homage to otherness?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I started writing poems thinking of the other, of the way he or she  writes. This is the reason why the translation imposed itself on me above everything else. To translate for me is to be live, in direct contact with the language of the other and with the other of the language. I am constantly in this position when I write.

Philippe Bouret: How do you do it?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I start and when I have a good corpus, I work with my wife on grammar and conjugation questions. When I reread, I realize that a lot is missing because I respected the Arabic text. At that time, I rewrite the poem entirely. That’s why I don’t like to use the word “translate”. The only word that suits me is “adaptation”. Some of my friends agree and consider that my texts in Arabic are not translations, but scriptures from my own language. There is something in poetry that totally escapes translation to the point that all “translation” is writing in itself. You can spot it very easily in my adaptation texts. I start from the text of the Western poet and I write in my language a new text, but which is not unrelated to the original.

Philippe Bouret: Would you then speak of translation as an interpretation?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Not at all, it’s more like a renaissance from other horizons.

Philippe Bouret: From your practice of translating poems and the consequences you draw from that, would you extend your conception to translation in general? The poem would be untranslatable and any translation would be a new writing, therefore a creation?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: There is something of that, yes. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m trying to show that translation is possible. If one grabs the poem, if one feels the way of writing of the poet whom one translates, the writing remains a translation. For example, I have read Paul Celan a lot in both English and French. I compared, I ask, I question the others. But there comes a time when I have to close my eyes and imagine Paul Celan and the conditions under which he wrote the text. What happened at that time, how was it? Where was he? Did he fall? What word arrived under his pen? What word could have entered his head? What book did he open to search for a short sentence or read someone else’s poem? This is how I try to approach the original moment of creation of the poem by the other. But nothing will change my own understanding and the use I make of my own language to say the text of Paul Celan as closely as possible.

Philippe Bouret: So, for you, translation is a possible act?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, by merging with the other. I get mixed with the other, I go into the other, in his language and I try to extract this impression that I feel when reading his poem.

Philippe Bouret: When you translate, do you pass something from one poet to another poet, from one language to another language?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: It goes even further than that, more than a smuggling position. Translation is a destruction operation. Translation comes to deliver a text in another language, but without the skin of this text. Translating a poem is tearing the skin of the text. And I try to create another skin for this poem that comes to me from the other.

Philippe Bouret: Explain to me why you think that the translation requires a change of envelope?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Because translation is a transfer of flesh without the skin. The skin of my translation is not the original skin of the poem. I’m trying to give – keep quiet and safe, I’m not Frankenstein (Laughs) – another skin to this flesh. I wrote a collection whose title in classical Arabic is Thaoub el mâ ’(The robe of water). In French, it is the envelope in which the fetus is located and which contains the amniotic fluid. The child is wrapped in this skin, this robe of water. The Arabs call it this way and it’s very beautiful Thaoub el ma ’, The robe of water and I found this expression so extraordinary that I offered it as title to my collection. We were in the 1980s. In this title is the idea of birth, a central theme in my writing. That’s what I bring the translation to, to that tearing of the envelope of the fetus that opens onto my own conception of poetry.

Philippe Bouret: To translate is to simultaneously grasp the fetus, the water and the envelope?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: It is that and it is what allows me to discover my own language, my own image, the timbre, the tone, the musicality and the cadence that is in the poem. Tearing the skin apart, Thaoub el Mâ ’is not enough, translating the word is not enough, you have to discover the rhythm. To translate is to tear the skin and make another. Writing is a real birth of the beginnings of language.

Philippe Bouret: Tell me about this idea of childbirth.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: We are in 1977, I write Le plein air du langue – Fi Hawa el lougha el talk. The word el talk, I left it as it is, because it has two meanings. It means childbirth and it also means space. I used it in the title of the collection in the sense of rebirth. We cannot make this ambiguity heard in French. Whether in terms of translation or poem writing, I am having a real birth, I absolutely have to take out what is in me.

Philippe Bouret: And what about translation?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: It is also like a child delivery from the language of the other. And this is where I position myself in relation to the Arabic language and where I establish a radical difference between poetry and political activism. I write the language. Poetry for me is essentially a matter of language, not politics and I join Baudelaire there. I never associated my poetic creation with a cause, because I came to poetry from my European interiority which put an end to the mixture of poetry, politics, activism and social. Poetry has nothing to do with that.

I liked Breton because of Trotsky
and Trotsky because of Breton.
No more.

Philippe Bouret: Tell me about this cleavage that you establish between poetry and politics?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I have always been in contact with the other. My poems are part of a western conception of poetry, even if I write in Arabic. A traditional Arab cannot accept real free poetry. To write, I radically disregard politics. The partition between one and the other is completely sealed.

Philippe Bouret: Are there one or more Western poets who counted for you in this “radical” distinction?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The greatest of all in this area is for me Benjamin Péret. Few poets apart from him have approached this subject and even fewer artists refer to this concept that he developed. Poetry and politics are two questions that I have to ask myself when writing. We cannot ignore the distinction. Either we do poetry or we do activism. Above all, do not confuse the two. No specialist to my knowledge has emphasized this original concept by Benjamin Péret. Of course there is talk of his texts against Aragon, Le déshonneur des poètes, he wrote in Mexico in 1945 is a marvel. Much has been written about his texts on poetry, but there is never any talk of the cleavage he establishes between poetry and politics. For me, this is fundamental.

Philippe Bouret: You may be referring to the very famous collection in which Aragon participated, with Seghers, Éluard, Ponge and others, L’honneur des poètes, published in July 1943.

Abdul Kader el Janabi:

Yes, it was an anthology of resistant poets. Péret attacked the texts because he considered that poetry was crushed by politics, by this way of militating the poem, of making the poem a text of resistance and therefore a text which has nothing to do with poetry anymore.

Philippe Bouret: For you, mixing poetry and politics would distort the very essence of poetry?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: You say it very rightly. But I go much further and say it’s a betrayal and I weigh my words. To make a poem a political instrument is to betray poetry.

Philippe Bouret: What you say reminds me of my reading of Le Désir Libertaire. I note in your surrealist group a permanent spirit of fighting together, but above all as well, the constant concern to preserve the “one by one”. This is why it is a little difficult for me to grasp what you mean by a radical separation of poetry and politics. I quote you “… Le Désir Libertaire has affirmed that poetry is only of the individual who realizes himself and that the only poet to come will be the revolution, this one realizing that one”. As if from this “one by one” a revolutionary universal could be reached . There is indeed a link between poetry and politics there, right?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: You have to understand that Le Désir Libertaire was written in the heart of the 70s. As far as individual or collective writing is concerned, it is part of a period which is in the midst of social and political whirlwind and which is experiencing a mixing of ideas like no other.

Faced with the rise of nationalisms everywhere and particularly in the Arab countries, we thought that this regression went hand in hand with an archaic prosody, which required a revolution both social and theoretical but also a revolution in writing. It is from there that the text of Benjamin Péret takes all its meaning for us. Péret clarified the importance of never confusing poetic action with political action. It was a real eye-opener for me. At the same time, it was possible to be a poet and activist as long as the registers were kept separate. The ego, the writer subject – as you sometimes say – became independent.

Philippe Bouret: Poetry is nonetheless a weapon, and in particular surrealism “It is and has always been my only weapon in the face of the arms factories and in the east of all despotism“.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Poetry is individual, a poet cannot write collectively. Individually, he can ! In his own way he can detect a collective problem, but with his responsibility. This is why our poems were outside any prosodic rule dictated from the outside. Arab critics were not mistaken since we were immediately cataloged as traitors. For me, poetry cannot solve a social problem or bring down a dictator. Poetry widens the poet’s vision and this widening helps him to have a clear vision of the world and people. For me this is poetry in arms and from this point of view it is very sufficient because I am a poet and my subversive or revolutionary reaction becomes reflex. Surrealism in its determined struggle against all religion is forever a model for a human colored freedom. Many religious and political obstacles stand in the way of this freedom.

Philippe Bouret: How do you do in practice to operate the divide between the poet and the activist?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: You should know that the publication of my first poem, Le Vacarme de l’Esprit, which we talked about, is a poem about war which was published during the Yom Kippur War in 1973. I have twenty- nine years at that time, my poem was released in December 1973, the war started in October. But in fact, I’m not talking about war as an activist would do, my poem isn’t a slogan. Le Vacarme de l’Esprit is not a political text, the language I use is indirect and brings into play an entire imaginary side that is specific of poetry.

Philippe Bouret: What you unfold here is very complex for me. When I read the poem, however, I see words which are in direct contact with the conflict of which you speak. The word war is present in almost every stanza

Come war, hold me to the point of grogginess

Come, stay in the port of my sufferings

And at the end…

O war

I’m laughing between the loss of the anouncement

And the remnants of emotion

Philippe Bouret: Can you explain to me how this poem is not a political text and even differs from it?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Here the theme of war makes no observation or praise. This poem tries to immerse the reader in his own thought so that he analyzes the cultural data in which he evolves, far from any political ideology on the subject. This text was produced against the mainstream of what is called poetry against war.

I want to go back to the 60s so that you understand how things came together for me. During this period, I do not write any poems. I read a great deal, translate and publish my translations in many newspapers and magazines in Baghdad and Iraq. One day, I translated into Arabic into the Iraqi weekly Ar-Rassid, the preface to issue 1 of The Surrealist Revolution, signed by Jacques-André Boiffard, Paul Éluard and Roger Vitrac. We are in 1969 exactly. At the same time I chose part of a Fidel Castro’s speech to intellectuals in a Lebanese magazine. I found that it was in line with the manifesto of FIARI (International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Art). It was a text about art freedom, a warning about the unfortunate inclination to mix art and propaganda. Consequently convinced of the quality of this extraordinary text, I choose a fragment to publish it in the Iraqi magazine. I was then in a personal political evolution, I began to understand what communism, Stalinism, Trotskyism was. And from there, obviously, I also began to understand André Breton.

Philippe Bouret: Ah… Breton! Here we are !

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Breton, I hold him as a member of my family and he is. Especially when I knew that he, like me, had loved Mervyn Le Roy’s film Je suis un évadé. A remarkable work that counted in my life. I am thinking in particular of the last scene in the film: The woman asks the hero what he is linving on and he, proudly, with a pistol in hand, replies “I am stealing” and he disappears into the shade. This scene is a revelation that tells the viewer that in society, “Property is theft”. In fact, I liked Breton because of Trotsky and Trotski because of Breton (Laughs). Two years later, I left Iraq to go into exile in London. My head was full of Anglo-Saxon poetry, English poetry and Trotskyism. Everything is here !

Philippe Bouret: I was very interested to read the link you make between this last scene from Je suis un évadé, and your mother. You say she was a “Beautiful, believing and generous” communist. “From her, I learned to throw myself with all my might into the eddies of life and to feel as an offense the fear of following its meanders, of stalling endlessly” … You also say, in Horizon vertical, that she wanted to preserve your life from any miserabilist attempt. It’s from her that you hold the “horror of begging or attracting pity” and there you talk about the film. What connection is there between Breton, your mother and this scene?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: In short: Breton, the fascination of the poet, my mother, the rigor against miserabilism and this scene, model for me of social engagement.

Philippe Bouret: I know that she even came to visit you in Paris in 1978. When you left Baghdad, you did not come directly to France?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: No, I went to London. I stayed there for two and a half years, then I came to Paris, then to Vienna before settling down definitively in Paris …

Philippe Bouret: In 1973, when you wrote your first poem, Le Vacarme de l’Esprit, were you in Paris?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, we were publishing the first issue of the magazine Le Désir Libertaire at the time, in an orientation that was frankly in tune with culture and the surrealist sense.

I don’t let go until I find

and finally be appeased

Philippe Bouret: What is the “surrealist sense” for Abdul Kader el Janabi’s ?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The surrealist sense refers to the culture of the “first draft”, automatic writing for example, the interest in dreams. Let me add a nuance and a precision that is not always emphasized when we speak of automatic writing. For example, when I write a poem in this state of mind, I don’t stop there, I don’t keep my first draft. I must systematically rework the text. At the beginning, we interpreted surrealism in a fairly simplistic way, we said: here is a poet who arrives, he begins to write, just like that, all at once, and here is the poem!  As for myself, I have always been very critical of this perception. The poem, even when produced in automatic writing, must always submit to the criticism of its author. We don’t use the image for the image. The image in surrealism has a precise mental function. The term “automatic” – if we go in Breton’s direction – is very precise. For example when he wrote in 1940 his poem Pleine Marge, which I translated and published in an issue of my review An Noqta (n ° 4, 1982) and you look at the manuscript, you realize that Breton has crossed out, corrected , modified, worked on the language, the manuscript is covered to the point that you can barely read. The reproduction of this document was published, in this same issue, under the title in Arabic: “The automatic poem by André Breton” in order to fight the easy and vulgar automatism dear to the epigone battalions of all countries.

André Breton’s manuscript: Full margin

It has nothing to do with the common idea that many people have of automatic writing. People think it’s written like this, trrrrrrrrr, and the author leaves the text as it is. That’s wrong !

Philippe Bouret: What about you?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I always start with a first draft and afterwards I work on my text, and that can last a very long time. I am very keen about the precision of the language, which will require a lot of work from me , I clean, I correct, I seek the right word etc.

Philippe Bouret: Do you provide an additional element to automatic writing or do you consider that originally – as you seem to indicate with the Breton manuscript – this technique is always supplemented by a text searched work?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Looking at his manuscripts, we can clearly see that Breton was reworking his texts from automatic writing. My personal work always starts from automatic writing, from a text that comes to me about a situation that inspires me.  So I write and let my pen go, which can go in many directions that I cannot control. But at this point, my text is not yet a poem. It is only a first draft which must certainly seduce me but also invite me to work on the language, it is the text which will guide me. I never write a poem about something, like say “Oh yes, I’m going to do a poem about love”. It never happens that way.  It’s often just a sentence that comes, almost naked, and it’s up to me to figure out how to dress it. A tiny thing can be the source of a poem. I absolutely must be seduced at start, there must be a spark. Either it goes out immediately and it doesn’t work, or it ignites.

Philippe Bouret: I find it quite remarkable the way in which you put back into place the question of automatic writing by specifying that there is a posterior work essential to lead to a poetic text.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I often use a sentence in Arabic to say that “After months, the poem is written in two or three minutes“

Philippe Bouret: To carve the language, tighten it, make it exist, how do you do it?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The shaping of the text is essential, I sometimes look for a word for several weeks, a sentence, its grammatical construction, a rhythm, a cadence. The actual work of the poem may last a long time. When I write a poem, I am often lost, I don’t know how to do it. So, I cry for help. If you are going to read my poem called Inaugural  – you will find it at the beginning of my book L’ivresse géométrique des sorciers, in the Rapt des lumières chapter – you will hear how much I ask for help. The last stanza says this:

To me

            The Girls of memory,

The spirits of honey,

The workers of the sleep

The rhetoricians of sweat

And all the shepherds of the plain!

Philippe Bouret: “The workers of the sleep“, are you talking about dreams?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, and it can also be anything that brings calm so that I am in a mood favorable to automatic writing. I am asking for help because I know that the work  on the text is going to be difficult and that inspiration does not come like that … I appeal to dream, to memory and to calm. In the book you are holding, each poem has required at least two or three months of work. My wife is very supportive as regards grammar. Then I confront the text alone, by myself. I even work at night while sleeping, it turns in my head, I wake up in the morning and I say to myself “Ah well, I found the right word! ” I don’t give up until I find and I am finally appeased. My wife sometimes says to me “There, it’s okay, it’s good …” And I answer her “No, it’s not it yet, it’s not okay, I have to look for the precise word again …“.  And, when I think I have finished the poem, when I reread it and it suits me. I say to myself “That’s it! “

Philippe Bouret: Do you consider that the true precision of the Arabic poem, contrary to what one would tend to think, is not found in the metric, but rather in the choice of the word.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: What is metric? These are strict rules established by others, a specific number of feet, a rigorous rhythm etc. The opposite of freedom. The choice of the word only belongs to the poet. His own cadence, his own metric, everything is purely mental, singular and unique.

Philippe Bouret: The choice of the right word escapes counting?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: That’s right. But we must not believe that poetry as I understand it escapes metrics, only the metric of which I speak is that of the poet, that which is inside him and which does not come from anywhere else.

The metric is in you.

The slogan is an extraction of the language

Philippe Bouret: What caused you this “libertarian desire” to change Arabic poetry and get rid of tradition, to write in Arabic but otherwise? When you talk about it, you use the word revolution.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, for me there was a language revolution. In 1968, I was in Baghdad, and in France there were the revolutionary events that you know. May 68 had an extraordinary effect on me. I got involved very closely with it, in the press, both listening to the radio and reading the newspapers or watching TV. I was sort of seized by what was going on. One day, in a Lebanese television program called Poetry, I saw the slogans written on the walls in the streets of Paris. Short, rich, imaginative and incisive texts. To see what was happening in France and to read this writing of the people pushed me to revolt against the classical Arabic language. I spotted in the slogans the birth of a new language and I suddenly found myself revolted by what was happening in Iraq, thanks to what I spotted in the language of the other. You see how much  the echo which comes to me from elsewhere has counted and still counts. It went through language to wake up my rebellious being against the rigidity of my own language, that of my country. The way in which the language was treated in France in May 68, as renewed, as inhabited by a new breath was a wake-up call for me. I experienced some kind of fascination at that moment.

Philippe Bouret: You speak of revolt, what relationship do you establish between slogan and freedom?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: To me, the slogan is akin to aphorism, that is, the brief expression of a long thought. The slogan is a kind of tightening of an idea. The slogan has something of the poem in that in very few words, you open an almost unlimited space. The slogan like the poem is a fragment, it is an extraction, a brief form of language.(Write what I just told you there! It’s the first time that I put it this way. This is the lively and creative side of our dialogue). I think that the slogans that I saw written on the walls of Paris, on TV, during the revolt of 1968 are at the origin of my desire for writing and my first poems in 1973, precisely when I arrived in Paris. I sometimes happen to insert slogans in my texts, even now , a sentence which echoes this use of language which was for me a trigger. One of the functions of poetic writing is to open language from the fragment. I open language to reach new ideas, to indicate a course, a direction. This is why I give  such a high importance to the titles of my poems or prose texts.

The title cuts the umbilical cord of the poem

Philippe Bouret: You devoted the first three pages of your book L’ivresse géometrique des sorciers to the question of the title. For this, you make use of aphorism, a form that is dear to you. In this chapter The title signals to the reader, you write: “The title, the first apparent identity of a work, is also its lock and its signifying key”. Further … “The title is the hour of the poem”. Can you tell me more about this importance of the title in which I hear the echo of your interest in the slogan?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The title is the scissors which cut the umbilical cord of the poem and which allow cutting with the preceding text. The title has a function of separation between the poems, it comes to create a cut with a remainder.

Philippe Bouret: So, for you, the title does not announce the poem which follows, but is rather related to the poem which precedes as scansion?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, I like your wording. We could read that in the light of Lacan’s mirror stage, the beginning of autonomy, the first consciousness of the “I”. A title comes from over there. You will also find in L’ivresse géométrique des sorciers a chapter called Let’s move to the night sun, which is another way of indicating the cut, I somehow  say “let’s move to something else ! “.

Philippe Bouret: When a poem is finished, you leave it, it is no longer there, and neither are you. Does the title come to chant this act of passage and at the same time of rupture. Does the title allow the poem to have a new life independent of the life of previous texts?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: In poetry, for me, the cut is always aphoristic . Aphorism you know is very important, it comes to join in this sense the question of slogan and freedom. The majority of my prose texts and poems are constructed from the aphoristic structure.

Philippe Bouret: Doesn’t aphorism sign both the act of the poet and his powerlessness to say more? Doesn’t it constitute a limit, which would also be an opening insofar as there is always something which escapes, this remainder of which you spoke. ? Which would bring us back to title status for example. What do you think ?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: On the contrary, aphorism is extension in one line, the trait of the spirit par excellence. As Karl Kraus said: “Aphorism never coincides with truth; it is half a truth or a truth and a half “.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The title of a poem is the child of the previous poem. I like to use the term childbirth to say that the poem is always a newborn. This is the signifier that I use in my text Dans le plein air du langage, which we have already discussed. The word el thâq in Arabic means both the anxiety of childbirth and shooting, the pistol.  In the title there is something immediate, dry, tight, like the slogan. There is also in the word el thâq the idea of freedom.

Philippe Bouret: Is the title like a shot?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The title is like the mother cutting with the newborn, the title is radical.

Philippe Bouret: Impossible to go back?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Impossible, yes if the title is right!

Philippe Bouret: You say that the title is essential and yet, in your collection Un pays que je ne verrai jamais, you did not put a title, but a number for each one of your poems. Why ?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: In this book, it’s special.The numbering of my texts aims to give a form to the collection. This is to say that this book is almost a single poem, a single event. The title I have chosen Un pays que je ne verrai jamais, is in a way, an obstacle, it just prohibits any other title. It is self-sufficient. From there, I could no longer give a title to each poem, impossible! Un pays que je ne verrai jamais has such power that there is nothing to add. So how do you do it? I had only one recourse, the numbering of the texts, the series, faced with the power of the title of the collection. To title each poem was to erase the main title. Impossible !

Philippe Bouret: You number, so you separate and at the same time you offer the collection a series structure that brings together. You can quickly understand from reading it that the country in question is Iraq. Poem 2 of the collection seems to me to carry this power of which you speak:

2

Iraq is a story without narrator

A page full of anything but words

Yet its story

Is written between the lines.

The power of poetry is the fragment

Abdul Kader el Janabi: What counted for me was the title of the book, basically. Your remark is correct, to number the poems inside the collection, is to insist on the idea of series and to say how much each poem is a fragment which belongs to a whole.

Philippe Bouret: With the cut, as you practice it, you come to say that the poem is fragmentary, that it is independent and that at the same time it belongs to a whole. Does this conception have something to do with what you call Libertarian Desire?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Libertarian Desire is a programmatic whole that constitutes me. All the fragments are therefore both part of me and part of the program.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The title of the collection, in this specific case is an entity but a fragmented entity. How can I tell you that? …Fragmentation exists in the poem itself. The life of a poem is not all. Even though I have published poems with titles, the fact remains that they are fragments. It is the cut that gives them this status. Le pays que je ne verrai jamais, I have taken fragmentation to the extreme by using the number. There, I made a second cut, to emphasize this idea of fragment, I removed the title to replace it with a number. I wanted to give new life to the poetic act by inventing a completely different construction. This is what gives incredible strength to the book. Fragmenting it allows it to become a powerful block.

The philosopher thinks but the poet imagines

Philippe Bouret: In the play L’exilé de midi, are you referring to the Bible when you talk about the second coming of the book, the poem?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I don’t usually refer to any bible or to such and such a prophet. Let the last chapter of L’Ivresse Géométrique des Sorciers “The Second Coming of the Poem” plays with a common expression referring to the reappearance of Christ. This title as I told you, takes up the last verse of the poem “L’exilé de midi “.  Not more. When the poem is there, it’s like a second coming. That of Christ to complete a work. Christ was to come to bring peace and light to the earth. It’s called the second coming of Christ in the Bible. For me, the poem and the book are a new life. They show the background of existence and provide an interpretation.

Philippe Bouret: Diantre ! You Kader, are you referring to Christ? However, I read – in your book The Libertarian Desire – Arab surrealism in Paris 1973-1975 that you make religion the main obstacle to the cultural modernity of Arab society (and perhaps even of all societies).

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Certainly everything that is religious is an obstacle to life and about that point I do not give up. In this book there is nothing mystical, there is no reference to Sufism for example, except to make a radical separation between the poet and the Sufi, as I operate the separation between the poet and the philosopher. The philosopher cannot write a poem, his approach to life is so different! And especially its relationship to language. The poet is in the imagination. The philosopher thinks but the poet imagines. In my poems, a large part escapes me that I do not master. My mental resonance is not deliberate, it escapes me and yet there is no poem that can do without it.

Philippe Bouret: I would like you to clarify what you mean by “mental resonance”.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The conceptual echo of what I see, read, trying to find the mental dimension to lyrical images. Let’s say, a kind of transmission of concepts so that the poem vibrates with intellectual cadences.

Cinema is a lonely encounter with the image,

but not without the others

Philippe Bouret: The interview you gave to the Italian newspaper La Republica in August 2004 and which is found in Le Désir Libertaire I really liked. You unfold several themes and particularly that of loneliness. You talk about it when you talk about the cinemas that you used intensively during your youth. Your passion for American cinema is known. So you are talking about loneliness in the dark room: loneliness of looking, loneliness of reception, loneliness of free thought and hope. “The great loneliness has nothing to do with isolation“. Is this where revolutionary hope was born in you?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, there is a part of that indeed. This solitude, it was I who decided it. In cinema theaters, it is the way things work. You are watching alone, but you are with others.

Philippe Bouret: We join the idea of the fragment again …

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, exactly. It’s very enlightening what you’re saying. There are lots of people around you and everyone is going to watch the same thing. But you, with your solitude, you will have a singular look. Although you are sitting there with everyone and everyone is watching the same picture, your reception of the film will be special. Everyone will then experience a solitary encounter. Going to the cinema is choosing solitude in relation to the image. When I was young, my life was mainly haunted by cinema. I was in cinema theaters all the time. In fact, I should never have become a poet, but a filmmaker, director or something like that. Cinema was something essential for me in Iraq, it was an outside window that allowed me to see the world. I discovered completely unknown landscapes through films. Snow for example… it was a real discovery for me. I had never seen snow … it has amazingly developed my imagination.

Philippe Bouret: What do you think of these two positions, that of the cinema spectator and that of the poetry reader?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Admittedly, the poetry reader is also alone, but he has the choice, he can set all his lonely cameras on the poem. The spectator in a room does not have a truly independent choice. The picture takes him somewhere. Sometimes he even ends up in the movies because he is accompanying a friend, or because he saw the advertisement for the film in a newspaper. The reader is more independent.

Philippe Bouret: What difference do you make between image and language?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: It doesn’t make much difference to me. Language, when it is organized in sentences, is an image. The image is also a sentence, a writing. And one depends on the other. The word alone already creates an image and the image arouses the word. There is always a very close link between image and language. In both, the gaze is summoned by creation, one cannot escape it. Listen to what I wrote: “Poetry does not lie in observation, but in the gaze. Not in duration but in the moment, not in the argument, but in the marvelous that it radiates“. Poetry, for me, is by no means a mental laboratory. It is about feeling in the moment what is fleeting to always broaden my knowledge. The gaze, if it is specific to the poet, is not so to the philosopher. The philosopher, observes, he does not look. Listen, I write in the same chapter, a little further “When the philosopher thinks, the poet imagines“. For the poet, there is no line of reflection to follow, but a whole world to explore, which is not the function of the philosopher. Poetry cultivates the love of knowing without chasing after it, because poetry is knowledge.

Philippe Bouret: What difference do you make between the French word « Connaissance »  and the French word « Savoir »?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I do not distinguish between the two terms here. I’m only talking about the English equivalent knowledge. If I have to be more precise, for me « Connaissance » is a voluntary and subjective process, « Savoir » being ultimately composed of multiple fragments of perception, learning or culture.

Philippe Bouret: You talk about the poet and the philosopher and in Horizon vertical, you talk about psychoanalysis. You write: “One day, I proposed to my friend Jabbar, one-eyed and communist, to go see Roger Key’s film, Le cabinet du Dr. Caligari. He accompanied me to the cinema and refused to enter, preferring to wait for me at the cafe. “Ah psychoanalysis! Too bad you missed the film”, I told him when meeting him again after the screening”. But you don’t say more about your connections to psychoanalysis. What about it?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I have no connection with psychoanalysis, neither with Freud, nor with Lacan. My culture is that of a self-taught forager who made his enchantments out of chance. There is the strength of the poetic image which creates a convergence with various currents. When we write a poem, we navigate in the unknown … we don’t think of propagating the ideas of others, but of finding the exact juxtaposition between two words by letting the figurative sense take care of creating an image in convergence with a idea maybe in the air.

My loneliness is an open loneliness

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Look! Here are three texts: Retranchements, Solitudes, Isolement, which originally were in one piece. My wife said to me “It’s too heavy as a single text, you should make clippings“. I started to think and thought she was right. So I made three parts and gave a title to each of them.

Philippe Bouret: Your wife seems to play an important role in your relationship to the text and particularly to the translation. I know you write in Arabic and then translate into French.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, she helps me a lot in the choice of words and in the use of the French grammar. She is very precise on this aspect. She is of Spanish origin, she was born in France and she has a perfect control of the language. She always has judicious remarks on the choice of my words. She has a reader’s position and it is very precious. She provides me with her criticisms which then allow me to rework my texts. Her gaze is important and she intervenes particularly when I translate my poems into French. I also have other friends in the publishing team who are very supportive of me. My wife often discusses the length of my texts and their compact aspect. She suggests me to lighten and reduce. I listen to her and I start to have ideas that I submit to her. I explain to her how I think to cut, delete, correct and she gives me her opinion. In these three texts You will find the development of my thought on entrenchment, loneliness and isolation.

Philippe Bouret: We talked about the loneliness of the reader, that of the cinephile. What about the loneliness of the poet?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: The poet is always alone and it is in this solitude that he writes. Solitude allows him to approach the world in a unique way. He sees many things and he understands them. Loneliness is a helping factor for the poet who gives him the possibility of looking at things differently.

Since I am writing, I improvise my life.

Philippe Bouret: When you write, do you need certain conditions of place, time, mental disposition?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: No, I write like just that. I’m on the street, in a city place and suddenly something happens and I grab the keys to the poem. Whether I’m on the street or on the bus, in a cafe or elsewhere, inspiration springs up when I don’t expect it. But I often also provoke situations. For example, some mornings, I take the bus, not because I have some shopping to do or an appointment, but just to take the bus,  simply to immerse myself in an urban and social atmosphere that may be become an inspiration. I warn my wife, I tell her “I’m taking the bus“. I take a book, I read on the bus and sometimes inspiration springs out.

Philippe Bouret: This link with the street is very precocious for you, not unrelated to language and your passion for cinema. In your book Horizon vertical I read “Expelled from Koranic school, I spent my days in the street. Better than elsewhere, the child there learns to name things by their names and – thanks to conflicts between street actors, animals, humans – all the courteous or rude words that will be useful to him as an adult. Because the street is a giant screen on which all social categories parade … ”

Kader, the street is always present in your life and you, you are present on the street, as a citizen-poet in the city, in contact with the world and in constant relation with the other “… civil servants, plainclothes police, traffic police and other very distinguished people, students, teachers, traders, businessmen … but also: beggars, unemployed, prostitutes, cats and dogs, disables and cripples, mules, street vendors, night owls and early risers no longer knowing where to find refuge … And even the mad that we children take pleasure in escorting, out of sympathy or to harass them ”…and it continues.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, my passion for what is happening on the street has not changed. Generally, when I take the bus, I go to the Latin Quarter. But I have nothing to do in the Latin Quarter, I just go like that, just to take the bus and then I walk in the streets. Line 95 to Saint Germain. I like to watch the world around me and ideas come to me, a phrase that takes hold of me and directs me to a poem. And then once the text is writen the real work of writing begins, because the first draft does not count if it is not followed by a real work of, and on the language as I said to you earlier, corrections, choice of the words, grammar.

Philippe Bouret: Do you do that at your work table?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: No, I go to the café and there I start to work.

Philippe Bouret: We always fall back again upon this otherness that you previously mentioned about the translation. You are a poet among others. A poet in the world and in the city. Everything happens there for you, from inspiration to writing the first draft, to the final correction of the text. Alone, but among others?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: That’s it. I’m always lonely, but it’s an open loneliness. I am with the world and at the same time I am cut off from it. I don’t write poems sitting at my desk,  at my work table. I can’t do it. Even when I have already written a text, I take my sheet of paper and I go out to work on it elsewhere, in the world. Even when walking, I often find a way to arrange my sentences. I work on the language while walking. Even when I am with my wife, suddenly she says to me “What is happening to you?“. In fact I just found a new aphorism. (Laughter) And I don’t know why.

Philippe Bouret: the other is the starting point from which everything is organized for you. Whether it is the translation which allows you to discover your own writing, or the actual writing of your texts which can only be done in a solitary immersion in the world, but which as we have understood has nothing to do with isolation.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: You got it and that’s the way it is indeed. But I don’t know why or how it all works in me. The only thing I know is that I can’t help it. It’s always the other, the stranger I come across, who is unavoidable and necessary. The one that allowed me to find my own Arabic language and to use it in the writing of my poetry.

Philippe Bouret: When you did you come up with the idea that the classical Arabic language was a constraint for you ? Was it an idea from elsewhere or something that you felt in yourself ?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I don’t know why I experienced this constraint. There is also something else that I must tell you, since we have reached this point and your questions make me think of it. Sometimes I don’t write anything for a very long time, it can last for years, and sometimes I don’t stop. For example, I have never worked as long on a book as I did for L’ivresse Géométrique des Sorciers.

Philippe Bouret: When you’re not writing, in which state are you ?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: When I don’t write, I read a lot and I look around. It does not bother me. It doesn’t come, that’s all, and I do with that. I’m not the type to force myself to write or lament because I don’t write. I can wait a very long time without any particular problem. And one day, the need to write reappears, so I grab the moment and get started. I am a poet of the moment. Sometimes I say to my wife “I had a sentence and it just disappeared“. She says to me “Where was your sentence? ” I answer her “There, in the garden, it was just  with me right now and … it disappeared! “

So I always make sure that I have a pen with me so that I don’t get caught off guard when I’m attacked by ideas. If I don’t have a pen and an idea, a sentence arrives, I panic because I know it will go away as quickly as it came.

Philippe Bouret: The poet, attacked by ideas.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: It’s very funny. I realize it right now as we talk together about it : It’s always when I forget my pen that ideas attack me! (Laughs). I often  take my pen, just in case,  and nothing happens. But I only have to forget it for hop … ideas to attack. So when I take my pen, I am calm, I will not be attacked … (Laughter)

Since I am writing, I improvise my life.

The poem is an extension of the poet’s organism and body. This is style. Yes, of course; the writer and naturalist Buffon was right when he said “style is the man himself”.

“Winter walked on tiptoe …” I am referring here to Mallarmé’s evenings where “Worms walked on tiptoe“. This is a well adjusted  poem in terms of metrics! Such an image is extraordinary.

Another thing that I cannot explain. When a sentence happens to me, while walking, I know when it is an aphorism and when  it is not the start of a poem. Sometimes it needs a few tweaks, but I know that’s it. And I start working on it like an aphorism. On the other hand, other sentences happen to me which I know will open with a long poem. Maybe because I immediately understand that this is a slogan.

Philippe Bouret: To return to the cinema, I know that you are, at least that you have been, a great collector of soundtracks. Do you relate the soundtrack of a film to the slogan?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Precisely, talking about aphorisms leads me to discuss film music with you. I indeed had a huge collection of soundtracks. I had 11,000 CDs, which I sold, as I had too much trouble keeping them at home. Film music has a very special status: We don’t listen to a soundtrack, we are invaded by an image. It looks exactly like an aphorism because the link with the image is direct. When a sentence comes to my mind, it has the same effect on me, I have an immediate image and I immediately know whether  it will be an aphorism or a poem. Writing goes through the image, at least for me, which may be due to my cinematographic culture. When my wife asks me, for example, why do I care so much about a word – when I have found a word that fits, I never let it go, I refuse to change it for another – I tell her it’s because I hear it, it’s this one and not another. And there, you see, when it comes to the word, it’s a matter of sound.

Philippe Bouret: Can you give me an example?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Listen to this! … A sentence like this for example: “Meanwhile, Baghdad is far“. This sentence sprang up like this and I already knew that it was going to open on a poem, that I was not dealing with an aphorism. This opening key triggered memories dating back to my thirteenth birthday and I went into almost uncontrollable associations of ideas. This gushing became a fertile matter, which imposed itself. I just had to be there to grab it. And there I started to fill.

Philippe Bouret: You started to fill?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, to fill. The sentence opens a space that I just have to fill, I will make a little sketch to explain:

As soon as the sentence comes to me and I decide to keep it, the plan of the poem appears to me. As soon as I have the beginning, I look for the end, the fall. Okay, so I have this sentence that will be the beginning and I have the end. What have I left to do? I still have to fill the space that separates one from the other. Let’s continue in this same text: The title Humain, trop humain, that’s Nietzschean. So I have a key that opens and a key that closes. Opening is easy, it springs up without me having anything to do with it, it just comes to me. But to close, this is where the work is summoned, and thirdly, I have to fill with words, I have to go from one point to another and that is real work. For me, the poem is that. The first sentence may have nothing to do with the development or even withthe title of the poem, it only has metaphorical value.

Sometimes I write titles and my wife wonders, “What is this title? ” I am unable to tell her why, but what I do know is that I shall leave it. Take this title, for example, Un après midi de cheval that came after an afternoon in which a whole series of pleasant events happened to me. In French, we say “Un après midi de chien^[2]” to speak of unpleasant events. On the contrary, in this case, the events were rather happy and had nothing miserable. I wondered how I could name such an afternoon and the word horse came to me. The horse is also the symbol of masculinity, sex and it presents a certain nobility. So, I took it.

Philippe Bouret: The two texts that you have just mentioned are not versified. What do you call it.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I call it prose poems. This is why I chose the title Spleen de Bagdad, in reference to Spleen de Paris by Baudelaire. The original title was not that one. I had chosen Prose of my life, but I found that Spleen from Baghdad was better and above all more enigmatic for the reader.

Philippe Bouret: Wasn’t it for you too?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: No, never! Baghdad is still there with its spleen. And that’s how I built this chapter in prose and gave it strength based on anecdotes from my life, in the city or at home with my father.

You know, Philippe, the title of a poem is always an oddity and it always has a function. For that one, for example, Field of Stelae, I was in Berlin where I visited the Memoriam for the Jews. I was in the company of an Israeli friend from Iraqi origin named Reuvin Snir. It was he who led me to this place fifteen years ago and a poem came to me about this visit with him on the description of the place.

There is nothing to explain. A poem comes like that. I say that in metaphorical form in a prose poem called Méridien,

Méridien: Noon, on Ar-Rashid street, devoured by hunger and penniless, I saw a poet. I ran to him and asked him if he could lend me some small change to buy a sandwich. He gave me a copy of his first collection and said “eat!”.  I ate.

I don’t need to explain. I am attracted to little things. That day in Berlin, I was very impressed with the stone blocks of the Memoriam. There was total silence, nobody spoke, there was an inner calm which led me to write the poem in Arabic.

Philippe Bouret: You write in the opening words of Spleen de Bagdad “Poetry and Baghdad are inseparable. One reflects, then feeds the other and vice versa. There is a close relationship between the city and the logos ”. In Méridien, what is the place of surrealism?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: There is none … a priori. This text rather refers to Baudelaire or Max Jacob. But, since surrealism is not defined by any method, why wouldn’t we see surrealism here, nothing prevents us from it.There is only one poetry for me, it is surrealist poetry, true poetry, the original. Because when we are in poetry, we are in language, in dreams, in the unconscious. I do not have a narrow idea of surrealism, nor do I have a priori. When I read Max Jacob – of whom I translated some twenty prose  poems – I was struck. I translated Le cornet à dés in the preface of which in 1916 Max Jacob began with “Everything that exists is located” and he explains what a prose poem is. I studied Max Jacob a lot, I analyzed his ideasx and I translated the text into Arabic. His work and what I understood from it influenced me a lot in my writing of prose poems. All art historians say that it was Max Jacob who invented and fixed the poems in prose, that it was he who gave the code, who indicated how we open, how we close, how we keep an impersonal form, how we choose a frame of reference. We owe him all that. Then, when I was able to build my own prose poems, I understood this formalization of Max Jacob better, because I went through the experience of writing. I just had to find the anecdote.

For Humain, trop humain, I started off with a news story in Baghdad where one morning a fisherman was found dead in his boat, with the fish that waggled, still alive around him, it was his catch of the day. My reference to Nietzsche in this text is “I still remember his big Nietzschean mustache, but Abbass didn’t know anything about the philosopher …” and I played with that, I had my closing for the text. All I had to do was to fill in between opening and closing, finding the words between “Meanwhile Baghdad is far away …” and “He was a simple man, his existence had been doomed to cast his net in whitewater to the point that only the good fish he caught every day had become his opinions. His death caused a great stir that day ” Do you understand?

For the prose poem, I don’t get away with it if I don’t think about closing. Before I even write. After, it’s a filling. A prose poem can be four or five pages long. Always, open – close – fill.

Philippe Bouret: It’s like a beat …

Abdul Kader el Janabi: You’re right, it’s thanks to this beat that the reader accepts the poem, it’s like a flash. The reader should see that all at a glance. The text, and everything else is literature,  is a direct reference to Verlaine. It tells a story, that of an Iraqi poet who had a lot in common with Verlaine. “… Abdul Amir, without even imagining it, did like Paul Verlaine at Café François 1er: he welcomed his rich admirers and made them understand that they had to pay a drink in order to have the privilege of sitting near him”. A photographer, Dornac, made a photo of Verlaine in the famous cafe at 69, Boulevard Saint Michel, it is one of the rare traces of Verlaine on the photographic level. But no one has photographed Abdul Amir either at Café Haidar-Khana or at Café Ibrahim. Here’s an anecdote. Opening and closing. I only  had to fill.

Philippe Bouret: Tell me about this “filling”

Abdul Kader el Janabi: It’s like a construction. You have to drive the reader from opening to closing. You will therefore have to make a precise choice of the words and sentences that will constitute the journey. But this construction, also escapes me, I cannot explain what is happening. I write. Some prose poems are very brief. A single idea sometimes, it is there, essential, it is self-sufficient. No need to explain, that’s it, period! You also have this anecdote of the new costume, offered by my father, of which I did not know where it had gone. Costume that I find at home when coming back. The prose poem acts as a metaphor. René Char has written many prose poems, Pierre Reverdy etc. Each in their own way, but with the same structure of opening, closing, filling.

Philippe Bouret: What difference do you make between the prose poem and the poem?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: A big difference.The prose poem has nothing to do with the rules. It’s a literary genre in itself, it’s not a free verse development. The prose poem has more to do with romance than poetry. It tells you a story, an anecdote and this very briefly. It has nothing to do with poetry, as there is no metric, even personal.

We often make a mistake. You have to read: poem EN prose, prose in the sense of the material, prose-poem of prose. The poem is built with prose material that has nothing to do with metrics, even the most subjective. Poetry is based on metrics, metrics specific to the poet as I explained to you. Not a metric that would rule,  a law established by the other, but a metric that is unique to each artist. The prose poem is made of prose only, it has hence nothing to do with the question of the syllable, rhythm etc. The Arabs confuse free poetry with the prose poem. Free poetry, it has a very specific name, this is what is called irregular poetry. It has nothing to do with prose poetry, which is a literary genre in its own right. It only points to the ignorance of the Arabs with regard to poetry and literature. I have fought all my life against this Arab conception of poetry. I wrote three or four books on it. On this question, one day, I wrote this: “In a rhetorical accident, prose lost a foot. ” This sentence came to me like that, I don’t need to explain why. It is like a slogan, it is self-sufficient. It is, that’s all. Like the aphorism “No narration without memory injury”. This kind of accidental sentences opens up many ideas.

There is a poem where I explained that. I left it as it was. What is this poem that came like that? I do not know. What I do know is that it came. All the poet’s work lies in the creation of a linguistic ambiguity. The crucible of any poetic objective is a passage, that of passing from prose and things of the world, to the poem.

War scene

What can I hope
            In these times of war?
No chance to come back

I have to go to the periphery
            North of the battle
                        Where I will be safe for this night.

Nothing to add to this text. Nothing ! I don’t even know what it’s about. Of course there are ideas, but it is up to the reader to find them.

Philippe Bouret: is the poem’s layout on the page, that of the verses, the typography important to you?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, it is very important, because in our world there is a big problem: there is no more vacuum.

Philippe Bouret: This is the title of the poem that follows …

There is no more vacuum
Everything is filled:
Mac Donald’s,
Les Deux Magots,
La Coupole
The Mac Mahon cinema,
The Pompidou Centre
And even the vacant lots
That used to give vagueness…
                        To the vaccum !

Abdul Kader el Janabi: This idea came to me very quickly. Emptiness and Ovid^[3] of course … There is no more emptiness in our century. I like to play with words, I like to play with hands. The short poem is enough, no need to add more.

Philippe Bouret: While certain texts require a long work?

Abdul Kader el Janabi: Yes, several weeks. A word is missing which I cannot find, a sentence which I cannot construct etc. I take things off, I cut … Max Jacob says that the prose poem is a closed piece of jewelry.

Philippe Bouret: To follow you, throughout this dialogue, the other appears as your main source of inspiration. The other of the language, the other of the city, the other of the bus and the other of the cafe seem to summon you to writing.

Abdul Kader el Janabi: I can be inspired by anything. You’re right, the other is everywhere. I feel like a call that comes from the other, that comes from the world, to which I can only respond by writing. Listen!

Everything is a call :
            The zero,
                        The syllable,
                                    Life,
                                                Death,
                                                            The poem
The, the, the …
And let the plate turn!

The call is the call to live, the call to die, the call to write, the call to eat, the call to go out. Everything is a call ! To this call I answer, I take my pen and I write. I write sometimes without understanding. So, I don’t edit anything, I keep the text as it came to me, because I don’t know where it comes from, I don’t know how it comes, but I know one thing, it’s that I have to keep it, and not rework it, like this one …

Desolation

In tune
            The flute and the infinite
Tenorize along the ruins
Accusing the confines of felony.

*****

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^[1]     In French there are two ways to speak tgo a person. You may say “vous” to older people or people to which you need to show respect. You say “tu” to your friends or people to whom you do not intend or need to show formal respect.
“You” in English is actually an equivalent to the French “Tu” just as the Dutch “Jou” or “jij”.

^[2]     A dog’s afternoon

^[3]     « Au Vide » (To emptiness) sounds exactly like the Latin poet’s name Ovide in French. It is of course impossible to render such plays on words in English.