The Syrian poet Adonis is living proof that Europe does not have a monopoly of literary talent
Adonis, a Syrian poet, is rumoured to be among the top candidates for the Nobel prize for literature, which is to be awarded tomorrow. He would be the second Arab writer to win the prize, for which he has often before been a bookies' favourite.
In the time that the prize has existed, it has almost always been given to Europeans. Swedes, for example, have received it six times more often than Arabs. It can hardly be believed that Europeans have a monopoly of literary talent.
Anyone who has spent time in the Middle East must know the love of poetry that still can be found at all levels of society. I saw here in Boston this week a film which has a scene set in a Palestinian school playground. In it, 10-year-old girls in yellow uniforms and neat rows are reciting a poem: "What makes life worth living," they chant with some fervour, "is the poetry of Aeschylus." It is hard to imagine British – or Swedish – schoolgirls saying the same.
That particular line comes from the work of Mahmoud Darwish, whose death in 2008 left Adonis unrivalled among Arab poets. So if the millennia of Arabic literature produced by one of the world's great cultures is to be recognised, then Adonis is the man through whom it must be done.
The significance of honouring Arab poetry is obvious. It is the most eloquent and intellectually cogent response to those who belittle and malign Islamic culture; it shows that the Nobel prize committee is capable instead of seeing its depth and richness. What is reductively called "Muslim outreach" has become a dialogue only with clergy and politicians. A people can also be represented by their poets and their playwrights.
Nor would this be a mere token gesture of conciliation. Adonis deserves the prize for being, as Edward Said called him, "today's most daring and provocative Arab poet". A friend of mine came to love his poetry when she was a teenager in the West Bank city of Nablus, during the Palestinian intifada. "Reading him took me to another world," she said, "one that was more sophisticated and unsure – an unfamiliar world. His poetry tells the Arab world not to rest on its history, that it needs to reform, it needs to act."
This in part he did through challenging poetic conventions. Poetry does not translate, and even though I speak Arabic it would be pretentious of me to claim that as I listen to recordings of Adonis reading his complex poems aloud, I can really understand the revolution that he inspired in traditional rhyme and meter.
What I can tell though is that he is a craftsman, weaving together the cultures of the Middle East and of Europe, which are always being torn apart from each other and always needing to be brought back together. The sewing is as subtle as the repairing of love, which in his poetry he says must be done with "threads of wind".
Even his pen-name, Adonis, shows how closely linked they have always been. It is the name of a pagan Syrian prophet whose cult spread to Greece; if we think of it today as a Greek name, it is because the division that appears to separate Arabs and Europeans is a new and transient thing.
His poems do this work because they are deeply infused with both Sufi mystical language and European mythology. Perhaps less visible in his poems, but clear in his interviews, is his Arab nationalism and secularism. Like the great mystic al-Hallaj, to whom he dedicated a poem, he draws upon all religious traditions and challenges them all.
"Everyone pretends that God told them his last words," he said in this rare interview. He doubts it; and he has asked to be given by his critics at least the same tolerance which, in the Islamic tradition, God extended to Satan – the right to be heard. The Nobel prize would give him at least the opportunity.
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