Djelloul Marbrook

Language For A New Century, Contemporary Poetry From The Middle East, Asia And Beyond, Edited by Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, W.W. Norton, 2008, 734pp.

Nothing is as misleading as the news. It gives us the impression we know something when we know dangerously little. The real news is always how ignorant we are as individuals and nations—nations reflecting, after all, the collective ignorance of their people.

If we really wanted to know something about other cultures, terrorism, fundamentalism, health care, or even the economy, we would immerse ourselves in each other’s arts and literature. This is the leading edge of a culture, not what we call news.

What passes for news the world over is inherently ethnocentric and nativist and contributes to nationalistic and ideological conflict. The news is reported as if our lives are in constant conflict and human striving is some sort of video game. This essentially dog-eat-dog approach to the transmission of information poisons the information and encourages a conviction that cultures are in inevitable conflict with each other and that the society to which the medium at hand belongs must prevail over the other societies being reported. In America, which is often called the most churchgoing of nations, this Darwinian context stirs up divisiveness around the clock, turning news reports into little anxiety bombs with which our homes are seeded. Indeed our daily news reports could be thought of as roadside explosives, the overall context always being conflict.

Even the so-called balanced news formula—if we rule out the possibility of objective reportage—entails he said, she said reportage with its implication that news is ping and then pong, tit for tat, shot for shot, argument and counter-argument.

One of the great paradoxes of our time is that in an era of communicative plenty the kind of ignorance reflected in rabid ideologies swamps reasonable discourse in many parts of the world, including the United States. It was for a brief while voguish to say that the ignorance sponsored by Nazi disinformation could not repeat itself in the world of the Internet, but in the wake of the health care town meetings we know better. The Internet is a neutral conveyor of disinformation as well as enlightenment, and if Big Media get their hands on it there will be nothing neutral about it. Big Media control of the Internet is analogous to the Reich Press Law of 1933, which enabled the Nazis to control Germany’s vibrant press.

Our poets and artists see and say what we dare not speak, what our corporate and political masters do not wish us to see or know. They address the elephant in the room. They express our feelings and hopes. The news is merely packaged anxiety.

Under the circumstances, a book like Language For A New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond is a singular act of cultural heroism. This collection, all 734 pages, took more than six years to produce. The editors, Tina Chang, Nathalie Handal and Ravi Shankar, often despaired of reaching their ambitious goal. Their acknowledgments list is, unsurprisingly, compendious.

Their heroism and that of their many collaborators is equaled by their publisher’s, W.W. Norton & Company of New York City and London.

Here is the news, because the sensibilities of these poets and what they make of their world will reverberate down through the centuries when nobody even remembers what the letters CBS or CNN stood for. But that is not the only reason these poems are the real news of our time. Poetry is one of the loftiest and most powerful expressions of our experience of our own humanity.

Both a poem and a news report do something. A poem shares a recognition, a unique sensibility. A news report typically upsets or angers us, affirms us in our ignorance. True, a news show producer may leaven his report with “human interest” or celebrity trivia, but the sum effect of the daily news report is to heighten anxiety and renew anger. The reason the news is trivial is that trivia is cheap and fattens profits. Poetry, on the other hand, in the making of it and the printing of it, is fabulously costly, because it costs our utmost wit and intellectual courage.

It takes more courage for the poet or artist to merely survive anywhere in the world than it takes for a news reporter to put on a jaunty photographer’s vest and use a bombed-out Baghdad market as a stage prop for yet another uninformative and depressing account of man’s stupidity and ignorance.

Norton, these tireless editors, and all these poets have made an immense sacrifice in behalf of simply saying something that elevates the human intellect, illuminates our experience of each other and the exigencies of our lives. This is the news of our society in the making, not the cheap theatrics of the nightly report. What we can turn into poetry, into song, into art and performance we can transform. We can turn base metal into noble metal, the goal of the alchemists—their stated goal, the authorized version of alchemy. The real and wholly subversive purpose of alchemy, like the real purpose of these poems and the work of these editors and publishers, is to ennoble mankind.

If we can see behind the eyelids of an Iraqi poet or stand with an Asian poet visiting Heidelberg we know infinitely more about another human being and another culture than we can ever learn from cable news or the newspaper. Just as when we see the astonishing athleticism of the Kirov Ballet or the stately elegance of the Bolshoi we know more about Russia than we could ever learn from a pretty face standing in Kremlin Square and telling us about Vladimir Putin’s latest inanity.

For example, I could read Maria Rosa Menocal’s magical Ornament of the World, a history of the Convivencia in medieval Iberia, and not experience that memorable moment in history, for all the book’s excellence, with the same vibrancy and clarity as reading a single Arab poet of the period speaking of the Guadalquiver River as a pale white hand opening the green robe of the surrounding countryside. To the astute reader that single image becomes a window on the Arab mind, the mind that created one of the world’s most heartening civilizations in which, however briefly, Arab and Jew and many others lived in harmony.

Each poem in this collection, like each poem anywhere, is a window and also an algorithm by which the awful complexities of life make sense and somehow, if fleetingly, come to order. What in the so-called news even implies this kind of authority, the authority of a single poem?

If media organizations were as intent on serving the public good as they claim to be they would be engaging in forensic accounting at every level of government in Western society, because that is where the corruption of government begins. But this would be as costly in terms of their budgets as producing Language For A New Century was to Norton and its editors in the context of the publishing industry.

Poetry, this startlingly diverse array, for example, are forensic accounts of the expenditure of the human soul coming to terms with the challenges that daunt and the triumphs and even ecstasies of experience. This is forensic accounting of an almost divine order, and it is costly beyond compare. But the artist is a hero of a stature that makes Achilles a mere sulking adolescent, and those societies that come closest to recognizing this verity become idylls in the romance of humanity.

The introductions of the three editors to each section of this book are elegant and often poignant insights into their approach to the monumental task they set out before them soon after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Ethnocentric ideologues had slaughtered innocents and now ethnocentric Western nations, which had done much over a very long period of time to exacerbate ethnic and societal conflict, armed themselves for a bloodyminded war on terrorism. Who would listen to poets amid a hurricane of flag-waving and demagoguery? And yet ultimately it is the poets who will be heard, who will shed light, who will prise open the darkest crannies and make sense for people yet to be born.

I rarely read forewords ahead of books because I fear they prejudice me, so I had been contemplating my initial reading of this precious library for some time before turning to the poet Carolyn Forché’s prescient foreword. She too, I found, was thinking of these poems as the real news of the advent of our century. Far better read than I in the work of her contemporaries, she had concluded that no archaeological artifact will tell future civilizations as much about us as our poetry. What dig, for example, tells us as much as Homer?

Forché speaks inspiredly of the dislocated poets—she calls them bridge people—who live neither in their birthland nor their foundland but rather on improvised bridges between them. America has more than its share of bridge poets, but so do the European countries. These poets must fathom their roots as well as the nativist hankerings of their hosts. They must cope with a cultural apparatus—witness the media establishment in America—that reflects the perspective of an earlier ethnic elite nostalgic for its heyday. And they, more than others, must confront the failings at either end of the bridge.

Given their precarious situation, we often find micro-cultures taking shape and prospering on these bridges: arcades and shops of thought and sensation, bazaars of recognition. These poets may have one or two passports, but they are constrained to make lives on bridges. They are not entirely welcome at either end. And they represent one of the great phenomena of the times—mass north-south migrations in search of better lives. The tensions inherent in the lives of immigrants to a large degree define our times. We want Mexicans to bring in our crops but we don’t want Mexicans. The French want Arabs to collect their garbage but they don’t want to have to look at them. The Germans need Turks to do work they don’t want to do, but they wish the Turks could go back to Turkey at night. Europe wants good relations with Turkey but doesn’t want to accept Turks on equal terms.

Of this wicked dilemma the news media gleefully package anxiety, but the poets make art and with it the insight required to internalize the unalterable fact that we breathe the same air and are made of the same carbon, the carbon of the stars we all watch at night. —DM

Also recommended:

We Begin Here, Poems for Palestine and Lebanon, Edited by Kamal Boullata and Kathy Engel, Interlink Books, 2007, 276pp.

If Only the Sea Could Sleep, Love Poems, Adonis. Translated from the Arabic by Kamal Boullata, Susan Einb inder and Mirene Ghossein, Green Integer 77, 2003, 150pp.