Jabra ibrahim jabra biography channel
Jabra Ibrahim Jabra: Ramparts
Beneath the walls, walls.
And beneath them, walls.
Ur, Jericho, Ninevah, Nimrud—
On the debris where the sighs of lovers went to die
Where chattered then vanished the teeth of captives, stripped bare
There, now are hills that bloom each spring
Now home to crickets and ants,
Refuge to sparrows in the late morning
Feeling the last traces of the evening dew
Through tattered feathers
Beneath their tails lies a head
Before which millions once kneeled
Which ladies’ hands once anointed with perfume.
Hide the laments of your heart in light song.
You son has come to stay in the valley.
Then to wander through the wilderness
Where ladies, wrapped in soil,
Walk along the ramparts
Walls lie beneath them, and walls.
In the wastes are cities into whose halls he enters
Seeing nothing but towering walls
Punctured by blind peepholes
And marble floors stretching out, empty
Beneath the last echoes of singing voices
But nightly go the singers
Behind the walls, where the ants and crickets live
Where not hope, but the deposed kings wait.
Where donkey manure clothes the history of states,
The memory of conquests, and the letting of blood.
Hide your desire—really, hide it! And hide also the desire of the other sons.
Beneath their feet, the lust of years and years
Chases their flesh as they race
Through the collapsing walls
Collecting the fullness of lips
In ceramic cups
Squeezing arteries and veins
So as to draw in thick blood the appetite of the night
On pages of stone.
The eagle seizes the sun in its beak
While the viper brings forth the wisdom of its poison.
Disguise your desire—disguise it well!
Don bracelets of silver and pure gold,
Bracelets of thorn and bindweed.
Ur, Nimrud, and the sacred virgins
In the temples of Babel and Byblos
Offering their bodies to strangers
So that the hills might bloom (above the old city ramparts)
So that the fields of grain might tremble with gold,
And the anemones might shiver in the meadows
Beneath
Publisher Description
This book continues the personal story of Jabra Ibrahim Jabra (1920-1994) that began with The First Well: A Bethlehem Boyhood. Jabra was one of the Middle East's leading novelists, poets, critics, painters, and translators (he was the first to translate The Sound and the Fury into Arabic), and is the writer who is given credit for modernizing the Arabic novel. This book not only helps us understand Jabra as a writer and human being but also his times in post-World War II Baghdad when Iraq was enjoying an unprecedented period of creativity in literature and the arts. As a bright and inquisitive young man he became friends with the archeologist Max Mallowan and his wife, who, he later learned, was Agatha Christie (she wrote The Mousetrap during this period, in a little mud brick room). Jabra's intellectual autobiography quickly developed as he traveled to Jerusalem, Oxford, and Harvard University, where he studied with I. A. Richards and Archibald MacLeish. A number of different teaching posts in Baghdad provided him opportunities to become friends with many leading poets, such as Buland al-Haydari and Tawfiq Sayigh; historians like George Antonius; and the renowned translators of Arabic literature Desmond Stewart and Denys Johnson-Davies. But this book is not only about matters of the mind, it is about matters of the heart as well. Jabra beautifully describes his lengthy love affair with a young Muslim woman, the beautiful Lamica, whom he first met near Princesses' Street and whom he eventually married. He recounts all of the difficulties they had to surmount, and the pleasures to be had. This is the last book that Jabra published during his lifetime. Not only is Jabra's life an outstanding example of the circumstances--and fate--of the Palestinian in the twentieth century, but it also provides countless interesting insights into the cultural life of the Middle East in general and its modes of interconnection with the West
.