The Woman Who Came In From the Night

For as long as I can recall, Nazik al-Mala'ika has been venerated as one of the major figures of contemporary Arab literature, although few people I’ve met reference her poems. In 2011, four years after Mala'ika died, at age 83, Google honored her with a Google Doodle, and many people I knew at the time, other writers and academics mostly, applauded that, but, still, there was scant mention of her poems. Imagine understanding an artist’s remarkable influence—she was a feminist icon of the Arab canon, known for pioneering Arab free verse—but not engaging with the actual work. Now, thanks to editor and translator Emily Drumsta, a professor at Brown University, readers have Revolt Against the Sun (Saqi Books, 2020), a long overdue and well-rounded reintroduction.

There are many reasons Mala'ika’s work has largely evaded the West. It’s hard to pigeonhole her, for one thing, which is by her own design. Mala'ika was always a neither-here-nor-there kind of poet. She was an Easterner with a calculated reverence for the West, a bard of Occidental impulses in a time and place more accustomed to Orientalist ones. She went from being a student of English poetry to being a scholar of it while simultaneously establishing herself as a thoroughly Arab poet. She was also an innovator whose free verse remains accessible while still keeping within her larger cultural tradition. And her feminism specifically concerned the roles of Arab women without evincing a need to compare, or center, the lives of her Western counterparts, as many women poets in her generation and beyond were tempted to do. (Mala'ika, with little fanfare, studied at Princeton in the 1950s, when it was still an all-male university.) She was also, finally, of the modernist and postmodernist eras but is perhaps best classified as a Romantic poet, despite publishing nearly a century after that movement’s heyday. As Drumsta notes in her substantial introduction, all these facts have perplexed Mala'ika’s biographers and translators.

Today, more than a decade after Mala'ika’s death, we can still say, perhaps bittersweetly, that the reception of her work baffles many readers. Writing in Guernica shortly after the poet’s death, Erica Wright lamented how Mala'ika’s work was handled in the West (using a common variant spelling of the poet's surname):

Every news outlet that I can think to check has published an obituary for Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika. While her significance in the Arab literary world is concrete, her poetry is little known in the United States. In fact, very few translations of her poems exist in English, making the outpouring of obits seem, to be callous, a day late and a dollar short.

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Mala'ika was born in Baghdad, in 1923, to a literary family; her mother was a poet and her father was an editor and a teacher. She began writing as a young child—“some poems, in Iraqi slang, when I was seven years old,” she once said. At age 10, she wrote her first classical poem in Arabic. She studied classical Arabic poets and early 20th-century modernists at the Higher Teachers Training College in Baghdad. She also learned to play the oud and studied theater.

In 1949, Mala'ika published Ashes and Shrapnel, her first volume of free verse poetry. The book, which challenged rigid classical form, was controversial, although other poets had already attempted this breakthrough. (There is much scholarly debate over who is the first Arab free verse poet; candidates include Ali Ahmad Bakathir, Badr Shakir al Sayyab, and Mahmoud Matloub.) Mala'ika’s work eventually emerged as the most popular. At a time when her modernist contemporaries were attempting to jettison the old Arabic meters entirely, she tackled something trickier. Her project, as Drumsta notes in a 2013 interview with ArabLit Quarterly, was to

reconfigure and adapt [Arabic meter] for a new era without letting poetry lose its ‘Arab-ness’—that is, its rootedness in the undulating long and short vowel patterns of the Arabic language. Without these undulations, the careful constructed-ness of poetry (shi‘r or nazm—literally, ‘arrangement’) would be little different from the ‘scattered-ness’ of prose (in Arabic, nathr, which shares its root with the verb for ‘to scatter’). How does one transform something and simultaneously retain a trace of what it once was?

Mala'ika was so concerned with this issue that she often alienated her peers. She made few friends when she warned against using new verse forms to conceal a lack of technical ability, for example.

There was also an aspect of political populism to her aesthetic. In the aforementioned 2013 interview, Drumsta quotes the journalist and activist Ghassan Kanafani, who said about writing poetry from occupied Palestine in 1966: “The modernist poetry that we are now seeing in the Arab capitals is less able to spread as a form of literature commensurate with resistance than traditional poetry.” Drumsta notes that the traditional Khalilian meters (named after the eighth-century scholar al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad) allow poetry to flourish in popular venues—“protests, marches, weddings, and funerals”—because the meter is easy to memorize and to chant. Mala'ika was committed to some aspects of meter for this reason. Concern for her audience and her legacy adds a collective weight to her verse, similar to Walt Whitman’s oracular voice in Leaves of Grass, in which the poet seems to speak beyond his own time to address generations yet to come.

Mala'ika’s interest in the West eventually led her to the United States. She earned a year-long scholarship to study at Princeton, and in 1954, she continued her studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she earned a master’s degree in comparative literature. It’s tempting to speculate about whether this time in the West left much of an impression, but little has been written about this period of her life.

Back in Baghdad, she found love in academia, marrying Abel Hadi Mahbouba, a colleague in the Arabic language department. She continued teaching in Kuwait but was forced to return to Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded the country in 1990. When the Gulf War ended in 1991, she went to Cairo, where, after years of deteriorating health, she died in 2007. She is sometimes called “the poet who died twice” because her death was first announced in 1993. Letters of condolence swamped her home. Obituaries appeared in some Arabic newspapers, followed by great relief when a correction was issued stating she was alive and simply living in seclusion due to her age and health. One wonders how aware she was of all the premature tributes—not the first but perhaps the most definitive hint that she was destined to endure.

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Mala'ika wasn’t swayed by trends—rather, she created them—so it is not surprising that she followed singular paths of influence. Arab and British Romanticism coexist uniquely in her poetry, as do social justice critiques that take both East and West to task in ways that intertwine her personal life with a larger political ideology. She was inspired by Shakespeare, Keats, Byron, and Shelley while simultaneously advancing anti-colonial politics that emphasized Arabism, even as she criticized some aspects of her culture, such as the treatment of women under Islamic law.

In Arabic poetry, the elegy was often thought of as the realm of the woman poet, and much of Mala'ika’s work is elegiac, but how she transformed the genre is what’s noteworthy. Writing about the book’s title poem, Drumsta argues

Though not explicitly an elegy, the poem nevertheless epitomizes this reclaiming of sadness, darkness, and melancholy as realms of ‘revolt’ (thawrah), with inevitable political undertones. . . .‘Revolt’ thus epitomizes much of Mala'ika’s larger project as a poet: displaying an implicit reverence for the Arabic poetic tradition (tūrāth) while also reconfiguring its tropes for a new audience of women speaking in similarly defiant tones.

“Revolt Against the Sun” begins with the intimacy of a confessional poem and slides with remarkable fluidity into a pastoral mode, although the real revelation here is accusatory rather than celebratory:

I came to pour out my uncertainty
in nature, amid fragrances and shade,
but you, Sun, mocked my sadness and my tears
and laughed, from up above, at all my pain

Just a couple of stanzas later, she interrupts her lyricism with what feels like screams and curses: “I will shatter the idol that I built / to you out of my love for radiance / and turn my eyes away from your bright light – / you’re nothing but a ghost, splendor’s pretense.” The speaker knows well the figurative language used to evoke the natural and celestial worlds but will not hesitate to drown it out by privileging her own emotions. The elegy ends up reading more like a manifesto.

Many Arab elegies written by women recount the deaths of heroic men, but Mala'ika almost always mourns women. (Drumsta includes and emphasizes the elegies that center on the poet’s mother and aunt.) Expressions of grief dominate the collection, but Mala'ika’s mourning is almost scintillating. Right after “Elegy for a Woman of No Importance,” an ode to a nameless woman who died in obscurity, is “Three Elegies for My Mother,” which includes a rare authorial note:

For those who are happy, poetry may be merely a mental luxury, but for those who are sad, it becomes a way of life. The following three poems were my attempt to mourn my mother, who died in sad circumstances that caused me great suffering. There was no other outlet for my pain; I had to love it and sing to it.

The trio of poems—“A Song for Sadness,” “The Arrival of Sadness,” and “The Black Flower”—make no explicit mention of her mother; rather, they read like gifts to her rather than about her. And just when that meditation ends, the next poem, “Killing a Dancer,” begins, “To the girl with the sacrificed heart, dance and sing / and rejoice, for the wound is a dance and a smile / ask the victimized dead to sleep on for a while / as you dance, beautiful, reassured, dance and sing.” The effect of all these women juxtaposed in succession is a world of women, real and fictional, anonymous and prominent, who are all commemorated, even if in name only. Mala'ika channels whatever suffering these women endured through her own grief, again connecting her personal life to a larger political and historical consciousness. Even in ceremony, she could not help but be a bit radical.

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Another great joy of reading Mala'ika is negotiating all of her seeming contradictions. Nowhere does her balancing act appear more dynamically than in how she tackles light and darkness. One can see clearly in these poems that the realm of darkness is her light. It’s a poetic world that transforms from a divine, feminine, yin-like quality to a world of secrecy and solitude where, without the glaring exposure of the sun and its endless scrutiny, possibilities can be seeded. In “Revolt Against the Sun,” Mala'ika writes, “Your light no longer stirs feelings in me, / the night stars now inspire all my art.” This theme continues throughout the poem in lines such as “Night is life’s melody, its poetry” and “I aim to bury the past you revealed / And live beneath the canopy of night.” But this poem is only one of many instances of such unique reflection. In “Night Lover,” as if the title weren’t explicit enough, Mala’ika declares, “It is a woman, Night,” and goes on to plead: “If only the songs on her lips, dear Night, could reach your ears, / if only you, Night, could discern her hopes, her dreams, her fears.” It is no coincidence that another poem is titled “To the Poet Keats,” which, she notes, is “after his poem ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’” one of the Western canon’s most celebrated invocations of the after-hours. One of her most famous poems, “Cholera,” begins memorably: “in the night / listen to echoed moans as they fall.” An early collection was titled The Woman in Love with Night (1947). This nocturnal landscape is the perfect backdrop for her explosive investigations into so many unknowns.

So how does a translator of Arab poetry deal with an Arab poet who leans so heavily into Western Romanticism? Until Drumsta, translators relied on the language of the Romantics when tackling Mala'ika’s verse, but the result wasn’t very Arabic. Drumsta also concedes the challenges of honoring Mala'ika’s individual expression and even the confessional aspects of her work when the poet conveyed those sentiments in the traditional metrical and popular registers of Arabic poetry:

On a good day, I feel as if the formal experiments of these translations do something worthwhile for the translation of Arabic poetry, bringing Mala’ika to new readers in a way that she might have appreciated and even respected. On a bad day, I fear these poems read as little more than English ditties, hardly improvements on the old Orientalists’ metrical renderings of classical Arabic and Persian poetry, now confined to dusty tomes (and tombs).

Aside from Drumsta, few Western scholars or artists have reflected seriously on Mala'ika’s work. A notable exception is Adrienne Rich, whose review of the anthology Iraqi Poetry Today (2003) begins, a bit too obviously to me, by addressing the political state of Iraq and the United States:

As an American poet, I see my country represented in Iraq by an inept and cruel military occupation, and by a government whose cultural insensibility, at home and abroad, is absolute. Given the first Gulf War, twelve years of disabling sanctions against the Iraqi people, the coup of the last American election, requiring only the terrorist assaults on home soil to complete consolidation of power into the grasp of the rich and bloody-minded—I begin this review in some anger and bitterness, but with profound gratitude for the project, Iraqi Poetry Today.

This framework makes sense, of course, but it also points to a problem Drumsta is aware of as well: even the greatest Western minds struggle with how to approach Mala'ika, and often the most obvious tactic is to foreground modern geopolitics from a Western standpoint, one that hopefully intersects with the “correct” Middle Eastern perspective. Rich also broached the issue of translation, although she wasn’t fluent in Mala'ika’s mother tongue:

Her longer poems here suggest an impressive authority of voice which in the English doesn’t quite carry over ... One reads, guessing: is this or that poem actually more remarkable than translation can suggest? is it, in translation, bound, like Prometheus, on the rock of its language and cultural references? Has the translation been timid, binding itself within the literal, or within an idea of Anglophone poetic language (e.g. ‘wondrous’) which, to an American eye and ear, seem artificial? How have twentieth century movements in Arabic poetry, from traditional to modernist poetics, with blendings of both, found correspondence in English?

With all these good questions about authority, one wonders why Rich felt compelled to accept the assignment to review the book.

This is yet another reason Drumsta’s collection is so precious. Readers now have an opportunity, thanks to meticulous scholarship, to enjoy Mala'ika with her priorities and her aesthetic honored. The poet’s reflections on her own depression, as well as on Iraq’s struggles with its national identity, feel stunningly modern. Her defiance and rebellion echo strongly when she declares, in “Song of the Abyss,” “I hate my madness, old and new / I’ll send it someplace far away.” There is also power in how she centers herself alongside women she champions. In “To My Late Aunt,” for example, I find her expressions of agony both familiar and revolutionary: “I shed a tear, the tear sheds me.” Again, one is left with seeming contradictions—fragility and strength, sadness and anger, defeat and resilience. I can only wonder if those modes are truly oppositional. Perhaps one message of her work is that the poles bend closer than we think.

My only frustration with this book is more of a request: though I appreciate Drumsta’s academic approach and the fruits of her translation, I have a deep hunger to simply know more about Mala'ika—which, admittedly, contradicts my earlier lament that the poet has often overshadowed the poems. The short bios of Mala'ika available online typically advance an obvious political agenda, or they rehash the most well-documented highlights. Why are there endless texts about the free verse controversies but no real sense of her years in the United States, for example? Given her feminism, why isn’t there more insight into what it was like for her to be among the first female students at Princeton? We know her thoughts on honor killings and sexism in the Arab world but very little about her relationship with her husband or how they established a university together. My point is that so much writing about Mala'ika rarely strays beyond the politics of the exotic other—which is catnip for Western critics contextualizing the Middle East. By contrast, we have rich biographical details about Forugh Farrokhzad, an Iranian poet and filmmaker who died in 1967, at age 32. She’s mostly an exception to the tendency I’ve described. Certainly, the same energy could be directed toward Mala'ika, an Arab woman icon of equal importance who lived a much longer life.

Mala'ika is a poet who, when faced with her parents’ doubts about her unusual syntax, replied, “Say whatever you wish to say. I am confident that my poem will change the map of Arab poetry.” She knew her own worth, and she wanted to be read and remembered, an ambition that has only just begun with this collection. In my favorite poem, “An Invitation to Life,” she rants about how “I cannot stand the still” and “I am sick of the dead.” Mala'ika argues for turbulence of all kinds, whether in inquiry or in art or in everyday life. The poem feels wonderfully brash and petulant, and in its argument for haste, I found joy in my own impatience with Mala'ika’s relative obscurity in the West: “Patience? A virtue for the dead, / moldering in their frigid tombs / living under the reign of worms / they’ve gone to sleep, I give us life / as heat, as sparkling eyes and cheeks.” We still need Mala'ika’s heat, in this volume and those to come.