(Remembering Mowaffaq Mohammad^[1])

tr: Mohsen Beni Saeed

The poet cannot but invent two stances toward the death of a loved one. The first, they find themselves unable to talk, which is the image that seems the most eloquent to express the paleness the world has gotten immersed in; the second one is of a tragic nature; it is ‘dying upon the deceased.’  An expression of refusal, or the impossibility of comprehending the gap that has emerged in the body of existence.

This is what Ounsi el-Hajj^[2] summarized: silence or dying upon the deceased, but he did not tell us what should a person do toward the death of a beloved poet?

The news landed with its full weight on my friend’s Facebook page, the Iraqi poet Aarif AsSa’idy: “What a profound loss, I announce mournfully to you the passing of the great poet Mowaffaq Mohammed”. My hand could not at that moment write other than: Oh God, Oh God. I found refuge in that word from incapacity, because the moment a gladiator who was a legend in a tale falls, we lose the ability to produce words. Betrayed by tongue, hand and memory, the mouth is open only to bewilderment, and the broken heart stands alone before the confusion of world and its paleness.

El-hajj’s advice was of no use for me. I regained my ability to talk, because I could not die upon the deceased. And writing about the departure of Mowaffaq Mohammed is an attempt to retrieve the world from the moment disorientation that coincided with my reading of the news, or a way to extricate the world from the abyss or vacuum into which the speechless one might fall, at the moment the gladiator falls in the arena.

The news spread, but I did not offer condolences to any of my Iraqi friends. Well, I was distressed by the immense loss, believing I was the person most entitled to receive condolences. I wrote a very a short obituary on my page, and left social media outlets afterwards, allowing the whiteness of sorrow to impart its stinging color on things — the color of inevitable endings, against which a person cannot express their anger, nor disobedience and rebellion.

I have known where the meaning of sorrow lies, the extent and depth of the wound that turns you into a poet, however cruel it might be. And I have felt where loss takes you, how it transfers you to your emptiest places, as if you are drowning in the air. Yes, drowning in air, suffocating on it.

Mowaffaq Mohamed, the noble, departed; the honest person who stood against oppression, indifferent to the list of rewards, breaking official rules and regulations, leaving fallow and wild the field of what is conventional. He presented pleas in defense of the poor. He wrote on behalf of widows and orphans. The child poet who in spite of all circumstances of life and its cruelty did not leave his homeland, in hopes of changing something, even through a word.

Deterioration did not melt his far-sighted outlook on the future. He was a child who adhered to the popular image of poetry being the pain shared by the oppressed world. That is why his poems, with their powerful vernacular, expressed in the eloquence of Iraqis, and were unmatched in their power to express the state of anger and worry the poet lived through, as if the audience lived in his heart.

And the people granted him a title that was not festive, enthusiastic, nor fabricated, but was rather the most ferocious expression of the poet’s heart, where his words that came from — the same words buried in the hearts of his audience.

The poet of Hilla, and the Euphrates, the Iraqi with huge sorrow, who, like many others, comes from the Iraqi families that gave part of their flesh and blood to the guillotines of fascism, in defense of a free dignified life that he wished for all posterity of his homeland.

Just like that, in a painful sentence, his friends wrote then dispersed. They wrote about the poet’s departure, as someone would air the shirt of their sorrow on the mountainside of life, hoping exposure to the weather could change it, as if the harshness of the mountainside could dry all these tears.

Abu Khumra left us, the one with dense white hair, a face whose broken wrinkles are just like the hearts of the grieving, his voice the sound of trains running, gasping exhausted. Like the hearts of war-torn lads and their dreams. Their bodies rather.

I saw him, I saw the gladiator, before he fell on the arena of existence. That was in the Festival of Babylonia in 2022. His image is still present in my soul, in his simple clothes, in his quick steps, as if powered by the strength of poetry, not by body energy. I saw him, and felt his massive sorrow infused with my blood, and the burning of his liver pouring his blackness into my liver.

And like one long famished for sorrow, I absorbed his great sorrow, the sorrow that consumed his life and the air in his lungs.

I pursued his motionless worry, the perplexity of his tranquil eyes, and all his moves, which resembled in their contradictions volcano ash. Nothing could predict the imminence of his eruption.

A great poet has left us, one of those who passage through life went quickly as a comet swimming in space, which when it enters earth’s atmosphere burns into ash. Rather, Mowaffaq went back to his heaven, leaving behind the light of a word uttered by no other. A word with which he fought this world, and the self-oppression of humanity.

I sensed his departure in my friends’ conversations, days before his passing away. I asked after him, but their replies were empty of hope that the gladiator would continue with his fight.

   Have you seen an upside down graves?

   And funerals are crying.

   And out of the color of coffin wood

   Out of a mother’s bleakness,

   She embraced her own funeral near her grave

   And wailed, with a broken heart:

   “Is this you, son, I will die with you!

   This is me, your mother, I will die with you.”

When I wrote “a love letter to a sad poet”, I was afraid of your sudden departure. But you left, and did not read the letter. I began writing immediately after our meeting, wrote my letter with all the meanings of beauty, highness, and nobility, that love could bear.

And you were in my letter — the tempter, the beloved, the lover, and the mother who would mourn you with the timeless sorrow found in women’s hearts.

You would have felt happy like a child to read my letter, as your brother Mr. Riyadh Mohammed told me after my friend, the Iraqi journalist Ali Abdulrazzak re-published it on his page in a noble obituary the day you departed.

I felt deep sadness, O Mowaffaq, as friends did not fulfill my hope of delivering my voice and letter to you, to tell you that I loved you, and if I had not, I would have wished to love you a thousand times, to tell you about the meaning of someone who loved you so that they could breathe, to the very last, the shards of glass in your breath. To tell you that my heart grew tender when I listened to you, when I heard poetry grinding the deceased and martyrs in-between your bones, and revived them in your soul, blood and voice, that day in which you were the lord of the dead, custodian of poets, and their deity on earth.

You left us, O Mowaffaq, jumping from life’s pan, leaving the river and its two waves, and your mother’s seven candles lit in a book; leaving your name in the throats of despots. You departed the world of the worried, to your first night, to complete your eternal poem, and tell your companions there that death is more merciful than whose who share air with us on this earth.

I wrote these words to you on my way back from Essaouira to my home in Marrakesh in the back seat of a car. In the front seat, two lovers were leaning on each other; in their affection, they looked like the sparrows that once perched on your floral shirts. It was a magnificent poetic moment, through which God sought to ease the bitterness of Babylonian and Moroccan sorrow in my language, a remembrance while I was writing your love poem:

     “Our pillow is sparrows chirping kiss kiss, flying

     And along your height roses smiling with dew

     And stars, and light swimming

     The eye isn’t quick enough to hear.”

O Mowaffaq, you flew when I, in the light, extended my hand to you, and would not ask the Unknown “who would greet you with peace? and gather you together?”

All the sparrows here and there, and the doves of earth and heaven, from my west to your east, send you greetings of peace, and gather you together.

^[1] – Ounsi el-Hajj is a Lebanese poet (1937- 2014).

^[2] – Ounsi el-Hajj is a Lebanese poet (1937- 2014).

Fadoua Zyani is a Moroccoan poetess, born in Zagora town in 1975. She is the president of “( AZAP) Association Zagora de Poésie”. Many of her texts have been translated into French, English, Spanish, Persian, German and Romanian languages. Some of her published poetry collections are:

• “Blue Autumn”, Sama Publishing House, Kuwait, 2013.
• A collection of poetic gestures, Moroccan Creative University, Casablanca, 2014.
• “One Step ahead of the River”, Marsam Publishing House, Morocco, 2015.
• “The trick of Light at the End of the Corridor”, Seleki brothers Publications, 2017.
• “Matryoshka”, Al-Mutawassit Publishing House, Italy, 2019.
• “Against Loneliness”, Al-Mutawassit Publishing House, 2023.