LONGING TO BELONG: SARGON BOULUS’S EXILIC POETRY ON COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND IDENTITY
A Thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree
Master of Arts In Humanities
by Mona Rasho Malik San Francisco, California Summer 2018 Copyright by Mona Rasho Malik 2018 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read Longing to Belong: Sargon Bouhts’s Exilic Poetry on
Collective Memory’ and Identity by Mona Rasho Malik, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree Master of Arts in Humanities at San Francisco State
University.
Dr. Carel Bertram Ph.D. Professor LONGING TO BELONG: SARGON BOULUS'S EXILIC POETRY ON COLLECTIVE MEMORY AND IDENTITY
Mona Rasho Malik San Francisco, California 2018
The nature of human exile has been a recurring theme in poetry for millennia, with its emphasis on the loss of “home.” While the meaning of home is perhaps this genre’s most complex and protean focus, this concept is rarely reflected in studies of poetry.
This thesis explores the poetry and art of Sargon Boulus as perceptions of the evolving nature of “home” from the perspective of exile. In this context, the emphasis is on a sense of home in terms of a psychological state of contentment, acceptance and belonging. By focusing on this Assyrian poet in diaspora, I explore articulations of the human condition of ontological rootedness, the trauma of war and the facility for identifying with a culture and negotiating a sense of belonging. Closer analysis reveals the significance of his poetry in narrating the experience of living in a foreign place and as it evokes the memory of home, a sentiment shared by all displaced people.
Furthermore, we are introduced to the poet’s own pursuit for a home to rest his weary soul.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While volunteering with the Assyrian Aid Society of America, a humanitarian organization, for over two decades I was fortunate to have the opportunity of traveling to Assyria, our homeland in Iraq, as part of the research to promote awareness of our endangered Assyrian culture. Every visit instilled a desire to return to the land of my ancestors, to hear my language spoken on the streets, to laugh and cry with people who lost everything to multiple genocides and most of all, to feel a sense of belonging. I began to wonder about this longing to return to my place of birth: was it an instinctual sense of “home” I was experiencing or missing? Or was this longing also connected to a communal consciousness carried through literature? Even after living in America for over 40 years, did I feel more rooted in Assyria?
I was inspired to explore these complex human conditions of identity, otherness and longing for “home”. Scholarship in Humanities allows me to investigate these intangible human situations through literature, poetry and art. At the same time, I consciously selected an Assyrian poet, Sargon Boulus, whose work deserves a world stage by virtue of his universal expression of the diasporic experience. My reference to the poet, Sargon, by his first name is personal on account of the historical meaning within my Assyrian heritage. Sargon is a name that harkens back to generations of Akkadian and Assyrian kings, a metaphorical reminder of my shared rich culture with
I am grateful for all the words of encouragement I received along this journey and most of all, I am indebted to my supervising professors, Dr. Carel Bertram and Dr. Mary Scott, for their patience and unconditional support.
v TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures...... vii
Introduction: Poets Define a Language for Exile and Otherness in Diaspora...... 1
Chapter 1: Sargon Boulus: His Life and Inspiration...... 8
Chapter 2: Continuity and Translation...... 28
Chapter 3: Ut Pictura Poesis...... 40
Chapter 4: Conclusion: Poetry and a Sense of Home...... 48
Bibliography:...... 53 LIST OF FIGURES
Figures Page
1. The Illusion o f Man by Sargon Boulus...... 41 2. Perpetual Embrace by Sargon Boulus...... 41 3. Statue o f Ashurbanipal by Fred Parhad...... 51
vii 1
Introduction: Poets Define a Language for Exile and Otherness in Diaspora
Among early civilizations, banishment and exile were imposed by ruling powers as deliberate punishment for offenders. Such prolonged absence from one’s country of origin and the deprivation from lifelong comforts and security from one’s community were considered severe forms of torture. Presently, in an environment of spiritual disconnect and omnipresent global tension, exile has transformed into an exodus of massive scale by innocent people, yet the effects are just as devastating. Exile has had a profound impact on individuals uprooted from one culture to another, on the host communities they join, and the ones they abandoned. As we encounter an era of vast migration, issues of security, cultural identity and otherness have manifested as global concerns. These tribulations pertain specifically to people who have been forcibly displaced from their homelands to become refugees or have been resettled in a new host country.
One region that has been critically affected by human displacement from continued conflicts is Iraq, which has experienced one of the darkest periods in its history: from
1985 to the present the Iraqi diaspora has multiplied to over 4.5 million, including approximately 1.5 million just in the last ten years, dispersed throughout the globe to face foreign environments and adjust to assimilation and acceptance by host communities. 2
How does one fill the void prompted by uprootedness? Displacement and uprootedness in diaspora communities, as Lindenstrauss suggests, “forces us to rethink the rubrics of state and of nation, to challenge accepted notions of citizenship, and to question existing conceptualizations of the importance of territoriality.”1 In practice, developed nations implement such studies to support their “quest for control over cross border movement.”2 States apply statistics, demographics and other studies that reduce the human experience to mere data with financial and political implications, but with a complete disregard for the intangible human encounter. I suggest, however, that complex human conditions of security, identity, and otherness resulting from loss of hom e cannot be explored without considering the art, literature and poetry of the affected community.
In this thesis I will focus on poetry in the context of displacement from Iraq.
Poetry is an essential part of the cultural heritage of the Middle East extending back to Mesopotamian and Phoenician traditions when the Fertile Crescent spanned from the Persian Gulf to Upper Egypt. In Iraq, the home of many prolific poets dating back to pre-Islamic times, poetry is a treasured literary art, but in modern times it has often been censored by the State as an instrument of political propaganda in times of conflict. From the 1970's until the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, the oppressive Ba'athist
1 Lindenstrauss, Gallia. Transnational Communities andDiasporic Politics. 2010.
2 Castles, Stephen & De Haas, Hein & Miller, Mark. The Age o f Migration. 2014. 3
administration exerted their power to prosecute poets and other artists for subversive activities. Poetry was a threat to the ruling party when it was not in praise of the ruler.
After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, a number of victims came forward with tales of incarceration, intimidation, censorship and eventual exile for most.3 For example, poet
Salman Dawood was approached by three security men after Dawood’s poem was published. The poem was considered rebellious and critical of the government. The poet
Amer Abed published a book of poetry and later realized that the most important poem was omitted in the final version of the book. Conversely, when poets and writers ceded to the government, chronicling tributes to Saddam Hussein, the war and the Ba’athist ideology, they were rewarded with grandiose titles such as “Poet of the War,” or “Poet of the Mother of all Battles.”
Consequently, many poets (artists/writers in general) chose exile, which meant safety as well as freedom of expression. Diaspora became not just a choice, but their only salvation. Poets living in diaspora have now become symbols of resistance and voices of exile, infused with human values as opposed to state values. A community’s values are organic incarnations of tradition, myth, cultural and religious history and ethnic disposition. Human values can be a progressive influence toward a country’s decision process regarding immigration policy as well as inspire diaspora-host country’s
J Harding, Luk. Everyday tales o f Saddam's cruelty. The Guardian, December 21, 2003 4
grassroots politics. Presently, the prose poets of Iraq are at the forefront for articulating the sentiments shared by their diaspora community.
This thesis focuses on poetry, the language of culture, from the Assyrian-Iraqi diaspora after the fall of the Nationalist Party of President Qasim in 1963. Assyrians are currently an ethnoreligious minority in their native land of Mesopotamia which is modern day northern Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and the northwestern border of
Iran. Indigenous to the region, the Assyrians were once the majority and speak a modern dialect of ancient Aramaic. Since the first century A.D., Assyrians adopted Christianity and remnants of their churches can be found in the region dating back to the 4th century
A.D. beginning with the establishment of The Assyrian Church of the East. Hence their hostile existence among other majority non-Christian communities that have settled in the region in quest for territorial dominance and access to its natural resources, mainly oil.
After centuries of persecution, the Assyrians in the region had ceased to produce major works of art because survival took precedence. Consequently, very little had been published in the region’s literary tradition, and poetry was no exception. It is a tragic state of existence that is barely studied and should be considered in view of the fact that when one cannot feel, see or hear a culture, it no longer exists. However, a more tolerant and unrestricted diaspora environment has alleviated the struggle for physical survival, fostering the mental and physical space to create, here, I discuss this reemergent cultural voice. 5
I focus mainly on one diasporic Assyrian-Iraqi poet, Sargon Boulus (1944-2007), who left an extensive body of work in the Arabic language, only a little of which has been published in English translation. Most of Sargon’s poems are dark, mysterious, full of allusion to death and reveal a burden of the historical and current sufferings of oppression, aging and war. His work is on a distinguished scale equal to the best Arabic language writers of his generation. Sargon’s poetry is what the French philosopher,
Gaston Bachelard, describes as “the resonances of this contemplation of grandeur.”4
Although Bachelard is referring to Rilke’s poem, expressing a depiction of immensity and infinity summoned by the mention of the deep sea, so does Sargon’s poetry inspire majestic aspirations within the human spirit. I hope to demonstrate the complex nature of
Sargon’s writing as declarations of resistance against oppression and silence and a yearning for unrestricted freedom of expression while searching to find home, the ultimate solidity of roots. Poetry endows us with the means to express rootedness, the trauma of war, cultural identity and a sense of belonging.
I intend to unfold Sargon’s poetic expressions of his shared collective memory and identity in relation to the fluid concept of home and the desire to belong. What the term home conjures initially is a physical place, a house perhaps, where one trusts that there will be warmth, love, support and safety. In exile, home is in the past as poets find
4 Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics o f Space. 1969, p. 183. 6
comfort in the present with their words. Memories of home are vital components of the collective memory of any community dispersed throughout the world deprived of hopes that one day they may be able to return home. Most issues facing displaced people and refugees are the same as those that face a banished person: the human desire to belong to a geographical place one can refer to as the homeland. Creative works of exiled artists not only imply the political and economic repercussions of living away from the homeland but also expose the trauma caused by their dislocation and the need for normalcy.
Poets have the ability to evoke the borderless nature of pain and fear that arises from the duality of exile and home. It is this duality that Columbia professor and intellectual Edward Said (1935-2003) illustrated in his teachings, which has been the guiding light to my thesis. An immigrant himself, Said related art to a communal language maintaining that the migrant’s consciousness “is that of the intellectual and artist in exile, the political figure between domains, between forms, between homes and between languages.”51 have found that poetry reflects Said’s ideas on the effects of loss in exile, Edward Said reflected, “exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: it’s essential sadness can never be surmounted.”6
5 Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. 1994. 6 Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. 2000, p. 137. 7
His interpretation of the dual state of coexisting realities as an exile has echoes in
Sargon’s poetry and later in his paintings. Sargon immortalized the poetic tradition of the region through his writing and through his rare paintings. However, his creations were anything but traditional. Hence, because he is part of a tradition, but with a new voice, I chose to write about Sargon whose body of work is extensive in the Arabic language and rarely published in English translation.
Furthermore, since published works in English on Sargon Boulus are very scarce, 1 have been able to rely on my interviews with Sargon’s poet friends and family. In fact, I was asked to write the Wikipedia entry by Sargon’s nephew, Ashur Yoseph, which I did in the form of a more extensive biography of Sargon Boulus in February 2013 under the account name of Sooreta.7 Another central source for my thesis was an extensive interview published in Banipal8, an online magazine. The editors of Banipal, Samuel
Shimon and Margaret Obank, were close friends with Sargon and published the only
English translation book, Knife Sharpener, as a posthumous tribute to Sargon Boulus. We are fortunate to have this book of Sargon’s poems from 1991 to 2007, all of which he translated personally from Arabic to English.
7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sargon_Boulus K http://www.banipal.co.uk/ 8
Chapter 1: Sargon Boulus: His Life and Inspiration
Sargon was born to an Assyrian family in the British-built 7-mile enclave of
Habbaniya, the place of Sargon’s first cherished memories. It was a self-contained civilian village with its own power station on the edge of a shallow lake 57 miles west of
Baghdad, Iraq. From 1935 to 1960, Habbaniya was the site of an RAF (Royal Air Force) installation and most of the Assyrians were employed by the British, hence the English language fluency of most Habbaniya Assyrians, including Sargon. His father worked for the British, like the rest of the men in the village. On rare occasions Sargon would accompany his father to work. He was fascinated with the English women in their aristocratic homes, “having their tea, seemingly almost half-naked among their flowers and well-kept lawns.”9 This image was in such contrast to the mud huts where the
Assyrians lived, and so different from the older females he was surrounded by, who were well covered and dressed in black most of the time. Of the British, Sargon later recalled,
“I've even written about this somewhere, some lines in a poem. Of course, I wasn’t aware at the time that they were occupying the country, I was too young.”10 Sargon is referring to the multiple betrayals of the British against the Assyrians starting with WWI through the 1960’s, most prominent of which was the 1933 massacre at Simele (small town in
9 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009, page 16 10 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Margaret Obank, Schoppingen, Germany, August 1997 9
Northern Iraq) where thousands of Assyrians perished at the hands of the Kurdish
General, Bakr Sidqi. During both World Wars the British seized the opportunity to take advantage of the vulnerable Assyrians by securing their services in return for false promises of independence in their own homeland. Although the British were not the perpetrators of the massacre, their negligence and disregard of several warnings as to the vulnerable condition of the minorities in a newly emancipated Iraq.11
In 1956, Sargon’s family moved to the large, multi-ethnic city of Kirkuk, his first experience with displacement. Sargon found his talent for words at an early age and
Kirkuk’s rich diverse community inspired his work. He was an avid reader but never great at academics. Sargon had access to western literature due to another British presence in Iraq, The British Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC). Again, every Assyrian household had at least one family member working at IPC. In addition to Arabic and East
European literature, he read James Joyce, Henry Miller, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Sherwood Anderson. Franz Kafka, Czeslav Milosz and all the Beat writers12 were some of his favorites and poetry was the guiding light.
Sargon started publishing poems and short stories as a teenager in various Iraqi journals and magazines and started to translate American and British poetry into Arabic.
As he became recognized among his peers, he eventually sent his poetry to Beirut where
11 Malek, Yusuf. The British Betrayal o f the Assyrians. Warren Point, New Jersey, 1935 12 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009. 10
they were published in the prominent publication Shi > (Poem, in Arabic). His poetry resonates with the memories of this period in his life, embracing the hardships and tenderness with equal passion. Through many tribulations, Sargon traveled by land and mostly by foot from Baghdad to Beirut where he met those who would become his lifelong colleagues and fellow poets. From there he was clever enough to talk the
American ambassador into allowing him entry to the USA, where he made San Francisco his base for almost four decades. Since he had become aware of the “Beat writers” and their work while he was living in Kirkuk, Sargon was obsessed with the idea of making
San Francisco his home and being part of the Beat family. But when the 22-year old
Sargon finally arrived in San Francisco in 1967, he eventually became disillusioned by the counterculture scene and when the Beats dissolved and scattered, mostly to the more affordable suburbs, so did he retreat to a quiet life of poetry. He used San Francisco only as a base from which he would escape whenever he was invited to present his work. He lived a quiet life of an artist, writing poetry and sometimes painting. He could be in Paris,
Dublin, Berlin, Marrakech or Yemen at a moment’s notice. Sargon was in “eternal exile, without the sentimentality of yearning for return (for, in reality, there is no return.. ,).13
Once an immigrant, always an immigrant.
After the first Gulf War (1991), Sargon became disenchanted with the America of
13 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009, page 18. 11
his dreams, the America he had escaped to, for creative liberty and physical security.
Since, as previously mentioned, the ruling Ba’ath government controlled all publishing content, there was very little opportunity for Sargon or any other independent poets to advance their careers under such restrictive conditions. Additionally, there was always the fear of being drafted into the Iraqi armed forces since they were at war with the Kurds in the 1960’s and with Iran in the 1980’s.
He began to see America as another occupying “thirsty master”14 with an insatiable appetite for oil. Sargon did not shy away from political implication in his own writing as he was well aware that poetry is a powerful vehicle for controversial commentary. Following what had been for centuries, in the Middle East, poetry was once an effective form of communication to convey not only all aspects of the human condition but also political messages. In this poem published in 1998, Sargon references a master that he claims is from America and yet it alludes to the post WWII English occupation of Iraq and to the Epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest surviving written literature:
This Master Who... This is a master who came from America to drink from the Tigris
14 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009, page 43. 12
the Euphrates. This is a thirsty master who will drink all the oil in our wells, and poison all the water in our rivers.
This is a hungry master who will devour our children by the thousand, thousands upon thousands, upon thousands.
This is a master who has come to drink blood from the Tigris and Euphrates.
In this poem, Sargon reminds us that his beloved home’s natural oil resources are still being plundered at any human cost even if the master needs to “devour our children.”
Evoking a quote from the 4000-year old Babylonian poem, Epic of Gilgamesh, where
Ishtar is being reprimanded by Gilgamesh for having multiple lovers with a propensity for abandoning them and then perpetrating horrible pain, Sargon is remembering the 13
quote, “a palace that crushes down valiant warriors/an elephant who devours its own covering.”15 Another reference to historical tragedies is the dual emphasis on the rivers,
Tigris and Euphrates, which have been the sites of multiple atrocities. One of the most documented events is referred to as the Siege of Baghdad of 125816 when the Mongol commander Hulagu Khan massacred thousands of citizens in one week until the local
Abbasid government capitulated. There are claims that the survivors described scenes from the siege as the Tigris running black with ink from the enormous quantities of books flung into the river and red from the blood of the scientists and philosophers killed.17
Sargon is imagining the river turning black with ink when he writes that the master will
“poison all the waters in our rivers.” He is also recalling the scene of the bloody rivers when he writes of the “master who has come to drink the blood from the Tigris and
Euphrates.” Sargon’s own exposure to a “master” is revealed in this poem when he often spoke of childhood memories on a British military base. As a child, Sargon remembers living on an English military base which was one of the remnants of the English occupation in Iraq. The sole purpose of the remaining RAF (Royal Air Force) bases was to protect British petroleum interests and secure important air routes.
15 Kovacs, Maureen Gallery. The Epic o f Gilgamesh. 1989, Tablet VI 16 Wikipedia. Siege o f Baghdad. 1258 17 Ibid 14
Following the attacks of September 11, he began to spend more time away from the
US and traveled to Europe to find solace among other Iraqi literary expatriates. While
Sargon chose to live in exile, he was still haunted by the wars that ravaged his beloved
Iraq. In the next poem, perhaps written in Pacifica (a San Francisco suburb) sometime after the 1991, it appears that he may have imagined how his life would have been different had he remained in Iraq. He turned his focus on the devastating effects of the last few decades, especially the psychological scars of battle and a repeat of history that has devastated the region. In the poem, “The Letter Arrived,” Sargon is recalling recent and ancient cries for redemption;
The Letter Arrived You said that you write while the bombs rain down, erase the history o f the roofs, eradicate the faces o f the houses.
You said: I write to you while God allows them to write my destiny; this is what makes me doubt He is God. You wrote to say: My words, these creatures threatened with fire. Without them, I wouldn ’t be able to live. After "they” are gone, I will regain them with all their purity like my white bed in the barbarians' dark night. I keep vigil in my poem until dawn, every night. Then you said: I need a mountain, a sanctuary. I need other humans. And you sent the letter. 15
The letter, having no explicit sender, appears as a voice of a ghost delivering a message to him in San Francisco with news of the war in Iraq. These are not just voices of the present but also of the past. Sargon believes “A writer is a witness to his age. It is all a matter of being aware, in the middle of chaos and madness, war and massacre, of those faint voices that tell us about times gone by.”18 He uses the antiquated word
“barbarians,” a term of Greek origin literally meaning whoever is not Greek, for the invaders causing all the destruction. In ancient times, Greeks referred to the Persians and later to the Turks as barbarians. In modern times, Sargon is referring to the Americans as the invading barbarians.
Sargon feels the annihilation of memories, of history when he writes “...eradicate the faces of the houses.” For houses to have “faces” they are more human than if they just have “facades.” Humanizing a house alerts us of a loss far more insurmountable than the loss of a physical space. The depth of the loss involves the familiar repetition of daily life, the social networks, the scents and tastes enjoyed in the spaces of the physical home and most of all, that one belongs there. It is the hopelessness shaped by displacement and the realization that all the life experiences one comes to trust and build upon will never be reassembled, even if the physical house was rebuilt.
18 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009, page 18. 16
The voice is reaching out for salvation from a human connection, reaching out to
Sargon with words. Sargon is feeling helpless, sensing the geographical distance between himself and his fellow poets in Iraq. Sargon wants us to feel the experience without overstating it and call our attention to the anguish of the victims of war. The use of
“bombs,” “erase” and “roofs” are powerful images in two short lines. He is describing the savagery of war as it plunders the lives and homes of every human being in its path.
Tellingly, the meter of this poem does not constitute a rhyme scheme but rhythmic pattern in bursts of brief lines that strike a strong emotion every time he begins with the words “You said.” As if the author of the letter is writing his thoughts between bombs. Sargon means for us to read quickly through the short stanzas until we reach the next stanza and pause before we start the quick pace again. He wants us to feel the sense of immanent destruction, urgency and despair with every line and at times with dueling complexity. The burden of a heavy “mountain” weighing on his conscience also becomes a “sanctuary” from the rain of bombs.
The same sense of urgency is evident in some of Sargon’s other poems when he refers to several raqa (exodus) tragedies over the past 100 years in the next poem: 17
A Kev to the House Water shook and splintered A man dreamt as he bent, in his thirst, to drink that he left and the river his city, one day, in a storm swept his reflection away that was bending the fields; in its widening circles columns o f dust rose at its approach while he tried to salvage on the outskirts o f a hamlet what was left that rode the wind, and wove with his cupped hand, in a hurry now around his feet. for the sun had begun to sink A man dreamt like a magical windowpane that a woman across the border with a child in her arms that he envisioned for so long. sang a song he knew And was crossing now. from childhood and kept repeating to himself Before anyone could call as he crossed the desert his name, he turned and looked. as if it were He left his suitcase his only well. in the middle o f the road. From his hand that shuddered Blit a voice warned him - slit by the only thing it held: the key in the midst o f his dream. to his father’s house - A darkness fell hot drops o f blood dribbled, suddenly on the plain. andfell in the dust.
A bird soared out o f a tree This is the line - whose abandoned bough here your first path kept tipping at air - comes to an end. silence deepened Rub the dust out o f your eyes, until he could hear time and look: this land of the others, sneak past a dying orchard where you shall tread. light-footed as a fox or a quail.
Sargon always spoke of the raqa to his friend, the poet Michael Mammo, and how it has often appeared in his poems. When Mammo once asked Sargon why he didn’t write about the Assyrian struggles, Sargon answered “I did, I wrote about the raqa from Ashur 18
to countries of current modernity, I wrote that it has never stopped, this raqa.,,]9 The title and the last paragraph are reminiscent of the Palestinian struggle and the symbol of the key as the refugees’ aspirations to return to the homes that were seized by their occupiers.
“In a storm that was bending the fields...” means the new borders were being drawn and they were volatile. The border is where “your first path/ comes to an end.” Sargon is implying that the border line was formed by the “hot drops of blood” from innocent men and women killed in one of the many conflicts in the region. Furthermore, forgo the suitcase filled with childhood memories, since the original home cannot be reconstructed in the “land of others” in an attempt to perpetuate one’s identity.
“A song he knew from childhood and kept repeating to himself as he crossed the desert.. is an attempt to hold on to the only piece of identity, his culture. The song represents a life sustaining “well” in the desolation of the dry hot desert. The metaphor adds dimension to heighten the emotion in his message. As in his other poems, reference to the desert is a common image associated with his dreams, which are his memories.
Desert landscapes have been in Arabic poetry since 600 A.D. as in the poems of Umar
Ibn Rabiah and Al-Khansa, a major female poet in classical Arabic. A1 Khansa became known for her expressive elegies and uninhibited style which were both unique qualities to have been recorded regarding a female poet during the 6th and 7th centuries. Sargon’s
19 Mammo, Michael. Personal Interview with Assyrian Poet, Michael Mammo, from Sweden. October 2012 19
usage of the desert is similar to A1 Khansa’s metaphor of “losing one’s way in the desert”20 as signifying death. In her most famous and longest elegy to her brother, Sakhr, she laments his death in line 17, “Sakhr was the one to whom lead riders directed caravans,/ as if he were a mountain with a fire at the summit.” In the context of Bedoiun etiquette, hosting a stranger who traveled the desert far from his or her home is a revered responsibility.
Sargon had his own experiences with the desert. First while he crossed the Syrian desert on his way to Lebanon from Iraq recalling his two-month journey, “1 crossed the desert to Hasakah and then to Homs and then to Damascus - and then to Beirut and that’s a tremendous adventure in my life. I’m still writing about it. It’s a very symbolic thing in the life of all the prophets and poets - what they call the dark night of the soul.”21 He continued, “I had crossed the desert on foot, with no suitcase, nothing, only a small bag with the manuscript of King Lear and some of my poems in a notebook I still have with me here today. This notebook is still the source of magic to me.”22 Decades later while attending a book festival in Jordan he remembers, “I truly, personally, physically saw the reactions with my own eyes, heard them with my own ears. In such desert places like these small places in Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Sharjah, even towns in the desert, I found
20 Farrin, Raymond. Abundance from the Desert Classical Arabic Poetry. 2011, page 81.
21 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Margaret Obank, Schoppingen, Germany, August 1997 22 Ibid 20
people who knew my poems and are actually aware of what I am doing, people from a godforsaken village, in a desert. It was a shock to me, a beautiful shock.”23
Sargon’s poems depict the emotions of any group of people forced into abandoning their homes to seek safer locations and prepare a new life in a foreign place; “this land of the others.” His poetry suggests that people meander through their lives in an oneiric state, almost oblivious to circumstances, until a sudden awareness ensues. Sargon presents a dreamy state of being in the beginning of the poem and ends with the awareness that they may never return to their homes.
Memories entwined with home, particularly childhood impressions, nurtured
Sargon’s themes. He believed that people’s pasts are permanently engraved in their memory waiting to be rediscovered, most importantly, childhood memories. In the introduction to his book, Knife Sharpener, Sargon wrote, “Willingly or not, 1 keep going back and forth into the past.”24 Sargon said, “No matter how far you go, you will come back to the same spring waters, to their source in your childhood and in your family, so that you can drink from them.”25 Sargon seems to understand that although water is a powerful force of nature capable of great destruction, it is also a source of life for all living things. In poetry, water is a metaphor for rebirth or rejuvenation. It has been found
23 Ibid 24 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener, page 15 ■5 Boulus, Sargon. Zeugen am Ufer (Witnesses on the Shore). German and Arabic, 1997. 21
in literature since the Epic of Gilgamesh (2100 BC). In the eleventh tablet of the epic, the flood signifies purity, virtue and rebirth by comparison to a woman in labor, “When the seventh day arrived, the storm was pounding/ the flood was a war-struggling with itself like a woman/ writhing (in labor).”26
One of Sargon’s earliest childhood memories was of a time when he was sitting with his mother on the shores of Lake Habbaniyah. He believed that was the reason water has remained an important symbol in life. With reference to this specific memory he said,
“it is these small subtle details that can drive you along the path of your life, the rest of your life.”27 The next poem written in 2001, expresses some of Sargon’s vivid memories of his childhood home through memories of Lake Habbaniyah:
A Dream o f Childhood What desire took me As if by hand...
What guides my steps to that pool hidden in the country o f childhood: the orchards aglow with light, a breeze blowing at noon, and the red-and-silver serpent that loved to wallow in the sun, lying like a folded rosary at the bottom
26 Kovacs, Maureen Gallery. The Epic o f Gilgamesh. 1989, Tablet XI 27 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Margaret Obank, Schoppingen, Germany, August 1997 22
o f the pool, under a face o f granite, by the water o f the lake.
How he started When I teased him With a ruler, Probed him gently With a pencil, Or dropped a smalt Pebble on his back. He thrashed wildly And spun off As if stung by a bolt, causing the sun to be banished from the pool, as the water turned murky with sediment, that drifted slowly in his wake.
And I remember a hawk in flight, clutching a fish between his claws, still twisting to break free.
In the lines, “What guides my steps / to that pool hidden / in the country / of childhood”,28 Sargon is referring to the unexplainable urge to reach back into the vast expanse of childhood experiences in the safety and security of home. He reminds us of
28 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener, page 70 23
the innocence and simplicity of our own childhood perceptions, free from biases. At first glance, a child does not consider a snake as a threatening creature, instead his perception may be that it is a virtuous creature, hence the comparison to a “folded rosary.” But once the snake was disturbed by an unprovoked aggression of the “ruler,” the mood shifts to chaos with the sudden movements of the snake as it “thrashed wildly and spun off’ causing the water to turn “murky.” This is an allegory of a lifetime of occupation by an unwelcomed “ruler” who violently disrupts homes “causing the sun/ to be banished.” The poem begins with a child’s sweet memory of home and ends with uprootedness and a longing to be free to return home.
In another poem written in 2003, Sargon used a handful of earth as a metaphor to symbolize home, expressing fear, anxiety and a sense of loss:
The Pouch of Dust in Amman, with a thousand others The woman they called like her, who wait for a visa Umm Mohammed, the fortune- that will take them anywhere, teller around whose skinny neck she who knew hangs what looks like a necklace as she crossed the border but is only a black leather pouch she might never see home again, she said contains a handful and now shall carry this black pouch of dust from home... of dust like a yoke around the one who squats on her neck wherever a wooden crate in Hashimiyya Square she goes.
This poem is emblematic of Sargon’s poetry in its frenzied quality that portrays loss, hopelessness and fear that home will cease to exist. Sargon depicts the human tragedy of exile with such powerful imagery that it evokes feelings of inconsolable grief. 24
The fortune teller carries her “handful of dust from home”29 like a heavy burden around her skinny neck. Sargon is implying that displacement requires an added torment: to bear the burden of not forgetting the roots of one’s existence. Perhaps the “skinny neck” is too weak for such a burden and it will eventually submit. Sargon mentions Hashimiyya
Square for a number of reasons, one being his personal experience with the public square and Roman style amphitheater when visiting Amman in 2002 on his way to Yemen to meet with other poets. The Square is a large open space, bordered by trees and designed as a public garden, shared by locals and transient visitors as well as large number of homeless refugees with extended arms asking for bakhsheesh (alms). The “one who squats on a wooden crate” represents the refugees who find themselves in between here and there, between home and an uncertain future. Even her name, “Umm Mohammed,”30 is intentionally generic to underscore the universality of the tragedy and that it could happen to any mother, from any other part of the world.
Sargon portrays their mourning with the “pouch of dust” and their grief for a lost home in the realization that after crossing the border “she might never see home again.”
In their displacement from their own personal land, refugees will always “carry the black pouch/ of dust like yoke,” referring to the oppression of imperialist powers that prompted
29 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener, page 107 30 “Umm” means mother (of) in Arabic. Most Arab mothers are referred to as the mother of their “child’s name.” 25
their current tragedy. Dust also represents death, perhaps in this context equating loss of
home to dying, echoing Genesis 3:19:
By the sweat o f your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; fo r dust you are and to dust you will return.31
Sargon’s demonstration of biblical literacy adds a richness from a historical sense:
awareness of history can help us understand the past and contribute to the future.
Although he was not religious, Sargon was cognizant of the Bibles dynamic role in
shaping our collective experience.
From what we have seen, and his larger collection of works, what does signify
“home” to Sargon the vagabond? Is it where he was born or where he spent his teenage
years or is home wherever he made a connection with people? Our larger question will
be, did Sargon ever find a place he could label as “home?”
In the following poem, he refers to poetic spaces as the architecture of the
imagination that shelter ancestry and memory:
31 Holy Bible. New International Version. Biblica, 2011. 26
The Dream o f Houses All that furniture devoured by distances There is a street somewhere Beyond the reach o f memory lined with houses Its first names lost Washed by the whiteness o f memory The stream is still flowing since childhood one ceiling after another into ditches I move about inside them That old woman, *Nanunta Nana, Storming like a night dangles her toes with their yellow toenails in Fashioning stairs out o f my words its waters Voices too faint to be heard by anyone We come to guide her to her dilapidated hut beyond the river In anna weaves the fog o f sleep for me there Slowly we walk her to the end o f the with her severed hands neighborhood Tonight I am a master over no one Her old dress flowing in the wind [Translatedfrom the Arabic by Sinan I always find the house in the dream AntoonJ I open the door * Grandmother in Assyrian
Sargon evokes ancestry and family in the context of home. As the title implies, this poem is melancholy and a faded memory or perhaps many faded memories of places he called home, when he writes: “There is a street somewhere/ Lined with houses/
Washed by the whiteness of memory,” referring to all the houses, doors and furniture that could be anywhere.
Bachelard believed that “an entire past comes to dwell in a new house.”32 All his past abodes are now lined up in a row and he is floating from one to the next. Just like his restless self, so are these fragmented thoughts of movements and words, which is another way for saying memory. “Fashioning stairs out of my words” could be that he is building on memories, recreating them before the memories completely disappear. Using
32 Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics o f Space. 1969, p. 5 27
the symbol of rising stairs evokes a sense of dependence and support from one step to the next, from one memory to the next, especially here as it is used to show how memory and imagination can be used.
In Inanna, part of the Assyrian collective ancestral heritage, Sargon is referring to the Sumerian goddess of war, love and lust, Inanna. In the epic of Gilgamesh, Inanna is also associated with rain and storms and evening star like the Greco-Roman Aphrodite.
Sargon believed, as Yeats and Borges before him, “that all poets have been elaborating the same ancient epic, of which each poem is a fragment.”33 But now she is in Sargon’s poem and due to exile, she is powerless, just like her descendants, and “master over no one.” Even the goddess, like a Nanunta, grows old and can’t escape death, “to the end of the neighborhood.” Sargon’s work resonates an anguish of the exiled and their eternal quest for existential significance. Does he feel a responsibility, a purpose to dignify his past when he writes, “We come to guide her to her dilapidated hut beyond the river?” The reference to the dilapidated hut is a recollection of his home in Habbaniya juxtaposed to a lasting impression of eternal memory of her flowing dress in the wind, perhaps an implication of hope and life full of grace and dignity. Could this Nanunta be Umm
Muhammed if she had never been exiled from her home and she continued to live until she reached old age.
33 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener, page 20 28
Chapter 2: Continuity and Translation
Poets continue the work of past poets and Sargon, as we have seen, considered himself part of that chain of privileged messengers of words. The combination of a rich
Assyrian-Iraqi heritage and exposure to a variety of literary classics enabled Sargon to develop a unique poetic style and a worldview that was uncommon in the 1960’s Iraqi poet community. At first his style met a tepid reception, as did a handful of other mid 20th century poets, in part due to their departure from the traditional poetic structure of their contemporaries. While free verse poetry had been in use for hundreds of years in English, it was modern and unconventional in Arabic. One Iraqi poet who preceded Sargon and was known as the first Iraqi poet to use free verse was Nazik Al-Malaika (1923-2007).
Coincidentally, she died the same year as Sargon. It is very common to see their names together in art and poetry exhibitions since their work was very similar in style and reflection on the history of their native Iraq.34 Al-Malaika was also influenced by English poetry and pioneered the free verse style, diverging from the strict classical methods of poetry that had dominated Arabic poetry for centuries. She argued that traditional Arab
34 Art Exhibit in Washington, DC. February, 2016 https://arablit.org/2016/02/04/night-and-the-desert-know-me/ 29
forms of verse inhibited Arabic poetry from attaining the heights of other world literatures.35 The free verse format empowered both poets to renovate Arabic poetry.
While both Sargon and Al-Malaika had great admiration for the old Arab masters of classical poetry, they were drawn to the creative freedom of expression in English poetry. Sargon’s inspiration emanates from the work of poets spanning from ninth century Abu Tammam to Wordsworth, Yeats, William Carlos Williams and Henry Miller just to name a few. Abu Tammam (805 - 845 A.D.)was bom in Syria and lived in Mosul,
Iraq most of his life where he eventually died. He shared the same pioneering innovations as the other poets who influenced Sargon. He believed in the conservation of words when composing poetry saying, “poetry is a glance, a glimpse of which suffices; not a sprawling long speech.”36 Abu Tammam was also a poet critic who contributed a great deal to the philosophical dimension of poetry. He was recognized during his lifetime for his command and clarity of the Arabic language as well as his use of parallelism, repetition and antithesis as poetic devices. In an example of parallelism from an elegy,
Abu Tammam echoes the cultural traditions of repetitive wailing as he writes “The adversity has increased the importance of tears; the misfortune has enhanced the prestige of weeping./ The internal aspect of weeping is that it gives refuge in to distress; the
35 Clark, Peter. Nazik al-Mala 'ika. The Guardian, August 5, 2077 https://www.theguardian.com/news/2007/aug/06/guardianobituaries.poetry 36 Abu Tammam Habeeb ibn Aws At-Taaee (circa 796-843 AD). Collection o f Poems. 30
external aspect is a sign of faithfulness.” The last line contains antithetical concepts, which is a common style in Sargon’s poetry. In the poem, The Letter Arrived, Sargon wrote, “You said/ that you write while the bombs/ rain down, / erase the history of the roofs, / eradicate the faces of the houses.” Writing and erasing history are contrary concepts in one thought sequence, underscoring the tension caused by war and a sense of urgency to record history before it is eradicated.
From English language poetry, Sargon’s talent for confronting human tragedy with such defiance echoes Yeats’s passion for creating energy in every poem that speaks to the human condition. In The Tower, Yeats laments old age and begins with, “What shall 1 do with this absurdity—/ O heart, O troubled heart—this caricature, /Decrepit age that has been tied to me /As to a dog’s tail?” In his declining years, Yeats is expressing his own psychological pressure from the ultimate tragedy of death. He is reaching out to be saved from this humiliating “caricature” and from this horrid “decrepit age.” It is a shift away from the romanticism of William Wordsworth, who was committed to simplicity and a state of tranquility in poetry. The domain of poetry can be a solitary one in which Sargon perhaps looked to other poets’ creative spirit for emotional and artistic inspiration.
Sargon believed he was echoing the sentiment of the past, he said “when I write, 1 am actually remembering, not the past itself, not a person or a place, a scene or sound or song, but first and foremost I am remembering words. Words and their reverberations in 31
memory.”37 Sargon is implying that to fully partake in the complexity of life, historical awareness is just as important as acquiring the trade to communicate with words from poets who preceded him. He learned from Yeats the vitality of imagery in poetry to express passion through parallelism, metaphor, symbolism and rhythm. Transcending
Yeats, who never acquired second-language skills, Sargon was conscious of applying his poetic style in two languages since he wrote in both Arabic and later in English.
Among the Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, Turkmen and Assyrians, Sargon could communicate in the two languages spoken at home, Assyrian and Arabic. He preferred to write in Arabic which was the language he was most comfortable with. Sargon believed in the economics of words to the point of being stingy with his words and he made sure every word plays an important role in the poem. Sargon believed a poet needs to be economical with his words when writing in a “language like Arabic which is always too full of decoration, unnecessary words and fat - linguistic fat. I’m cutting it like a butcher and I’m trying to show the bones behind the flesh and I think that’s something worth doing.” He wrote: “when I write my poetry in Arabic, which is seventy percent Assyrian
(Aramaic and Syriac), I feel I am intoning all these voices, for I believe that any given language contains all the memory traces of the communities that contributed to it. For a poet, nothing is lost” (Boulus, p. 17). He believed that “Arabic is like some kind of cover
37 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009, page 15 32
for what’s beneath it - meaning all these ancient languages never really die.”38 Sargon proudly recited his poems in Arabic, a branch of the Semitic language family (Syriac,
Neo-Aramaic, Hebrew, Amharic and Tigrigna), assuming that he was collaborating not only with all the Semitic languages but also with the Armenian, Urdu, Turkoman, and
Kurdish vernaculars, languages that impacted the evolution of the language. In an interview with Lebanese writer Rayyan Al-Shawaf, Sargon was asked to discuss his poetry within the context of exile and longing for a different place and time. He stated that “The Arabic language, which is the umbilical cord that ties me to my people and my history, is the only true home I have. So, I tend it with care and nourish it like a rare, magical plant.”39 In this sense language becomes his identity, carried across borders and always a reliable refuge for Sargon’s nomadic existence.
Sargon discusses his knowledge of the Turath (Arab classics authored by seven writers that date back to pre-Islam), commenting, “It all is from here and there, especially from Iraq and Syria where the tremendous movements of classic poetry took place, the revolutions of Abu Tammam (9th C. AD) in Syria and Al-Mutanabi (10th C. AD) in Iraq, these movements just dragged with them all the past of mixed origins, mixed languages, mixed knowledge, mixed terminology - and this past is all there in the poetry and the prose. I think that’s what most of the poets, throughout history, have done. Because what
38 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Margaret Obank, Schoppingen, Germany, August 1997 39 Boulus, Sargon. “An Interview with Sargon Boulus.” Interview by Rayyan Al-Shawaf, 2006 33
finally counts is not the language, it’s what the languages say.”40 Sargon believed that some of these great Arab poets were in fact Assyrians who had merely changed their names, similar to the mutation of his own last name from Poulus (derived from St. Paul) to Boulus (the Arabic pronunciation—there is no “P” sound in Arabic). He added, “Emr
Al-Quais was Assyrian and Nabi Al-Dhubiani, who was the poet of the kings, of the palace, was actually Assyrian.”41 Thus Sargon feels he is a participant in a trajectory of poets perpetuating the dialogue to decipher humanity.
Sargon became known for his translations as he mastered his technique in both
Arabic and English. Sargon was perhaps even better known as an accomplished translator into Arabic the English and American poets like Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, W. S.
Merwin, Shakespeare, Shelley, William Carlos Williams, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath,
Robert Duncan, John Ashbury, Robert Bly, Anne Sexton, John Logan, and many other poets including Rilke, Neruda, Vasko Popa and Ho Chi Minh. He was particular to the point of stubbornness about the translations of his own poems as well as other poets’ works. To Sargon, how he tells the story is more important than what you say. His fellow poet, Rick London remarked, “Sargon’s interest in translation was deep”42 and it didn’t come without struggle. Although translated poetry “has become an important feature of
40 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Margaret Obank, Schoppingen, Germany, August 1997 41 Ibid 42 Interview with Rick London, San Francisco, California 34
Western modernism,” proposes Saadi Simawe, Associate Professor of English at Grinnell
College, in the introduction to Iraqi Poetry Today (2003), it is “a phenomenon that has not yet been significantly explored.”43
Sargon wrestled with problematic issues of semantics and aesthetics while trying to convey the author’s intent in his translations. As is true with most languages, Arabic is polysemic and since English is not a mirror of Arabic, this presents a dilemma for translators. Another issue is producing an aesthetically pleasing interpretation in terms of meters, without losing the meaning in translation. “Sargon pressed on tirelessly until he was satisfied with the translation, at times contemplating over one word for hours.”44
Sargon consulted with Bay Area poets like Rick London, not for their knowledge of
Arabic but for their sensitive perception of English poetic expression. An example of the difficulty in translation from Arabic to English is in his poem, Knife Sharpener (Boulus, page 90). Below are two English versions of the same first stanza (in Arabic on the right): a literal translation from Arabic and the final version in the book, Knife Sharpener, as translated by Sargon himself in the final version in the book:
43 Simawe, Saadi and Weissbort, Daniel. Iraqi Poetry Today. 2003. 44 Mammo, Michael. Personal Interview with Assyrian Poet, Michael Mammo, from Sweden. 35
Literal translation from Arabic Final version in the book JU-Ua/liLJI The world is an opening An opening O V J pJUJt guarded by laced with splinters splinters o f mirrors of glass, where llj* JJ-S on top o f a mound o f mud creation bodies forth through which they pass its myriadforms: myriad forms everyone comes o f creation: to enter this alley- everyone comes it is a world to enter 1 this alley o M i J\
In the translation of the Knife Sharpener, the difficulty comes with the multiple meanings of certain Arabic words like nurtured; it could mean the act of caretaking or respect or the abundance of, depending on the emphasis and placement of the word. The same applies to mirror and glass; they are interchangeable, but each conveys a different image. Another dilemma is the sequence of thoughts as it pertains to the delivery of the image as a whole. In the first line of the literal translation the world is revealed as the subject of the opening, which means that the source language allows for the association to occur immediately. Alternatively, in the English version it was more effective to create the image and then announce that the subject is the world. The last component of the translation is the meter sequence and the range of emphasis on specific words.
If the translator is unaware of the cultural significance of an accentuated vowel or a metaphor in the origin language, the essence of the poem may result in a distorted translation in the target language. For example, since Arabic pre-Islamic poetry was not 36
recorded until the 8th century C.E., oral tradition through memorization and shared recitation was essential. Arabic poetry was perpetuated through admired reciters called
Rawi, who not only recited the rhythmic lines of the poems, they were also expected to explain the circumstances under which the poem was conceived. Although modem
Arabic poetry does not follow traditional rhyming styles, the prose is still recited in a manner similar to the ancient oral tradition where the vowels are exaggerated, particularly when the line ends with a vowel. There is a lingering almost echo like emphasis by the reader. For example, in the second line, tahrasooha (U-* ), the “a” sound at the end hovers to a pause to embellish the state of a passage obstructed by splinters of glass. When translated into the English language, it is nearly impossible to express the same emotion as the original Arabic. In reference to a translation question,
Sargon replied, “Translation almost becomes an alchemical experiment with words. A whole language is suddenly called upon to render something totally alien into a form that not only makes sense but touches the reader’s imagination at its deepest level. A very tall order, of course, but that should be the translator’s goal. And then it’s achieved, as it is every once in a while, then there’s the sense of a small miracle taking place, at least for
45 Boulus, Sargon. “An Interview with Sargon Boulus.” Interview by Rayyan Al-Shawaf, 2006 37
A literal translation does not transfer the original meaning of the poem which makes it virtually impossible to communicate the equivalent intent. Knowledge of both the source language and the target language is not sufficient to achieve a successful interpretation of the poem. Furthermore, in poetry there is an added component of the structural aesthetics; in Arabic, the meter is based on vowels as opposed to syllables in
English. A successful translation would transfer a foreign element in the source language into the culture of the target language and can attain this result only by a complete understanding of the poet’s intent. In my conversation with another Assyrian-Iraqi poet,
Dunya Mikhail, she remarked that, “The translated poems do lose the original rhythm to one extent or another, but they gain some new inner rhythm in the other language
(English, in my case). They just get a second life with its new risks and possibilities.”46
At the time of his death, Sargon was eager to finish his only book of poetry in
English translated from the original Arabic by the author himself. The book, Knife
Sharpener, was published posthumously in 2009 as a tribute to Sargon Boulus, celebrating his life with poems written between 1991 and 2007.
Sargon paved his own road and never strayed from his beliefs, never being seduced * by fame or financial gain: he was loyal to his own emotional reality. Walt Whitman
(1819-1892), one of Sargon’s heroes, expresses his renouncing of style, “The greatest
46 Mikhail, Dunya. Personal Skype interview with Dunya Mikhail. 38
poet has less a marked style and is more the free channcl of himself,” he further writes that a poet “swears to his art, I will not be meddlesome 1 will not have in my writing any elegance or effect or originality to hang in the way between me and the rest like curtains.
I will have nothing hang in the way, not the richest curtains. What I tell I tell for precisely what it is.”47 Like his life, Sargon’s thoughts were fragmented, and he was unwilling to deviate from the purity of his own experiences by adhering to others’ expectations. His poetry captures the simple motion of the human condition by carefully weaving words into poetic messages of universally shared experiences. Sargon, like a master weaver, entwined his turbulent past, Assyrian culture, Iraqi nationality and Western literature in a stunning “Persian carpet with brilliant patterns”48 to reveal a theme of native peoples unmoored from their homeland.
He had an allegiance to his poetry, to proper and aesthetic use of the language and to conveyance of a universal truth. Nothing else was more important. A permanent relationship, children and family were not in the plans for Sargon. He lived as a recluse most of his life, yet he would often reach out to his friends in distant lands for companionship. From a young age, Sargon chose to be an uncommitted wanderer, in the physical and worldly sense, gravitating to wherever poetry demanded his presence. He was restlessly seeking “home” to rest his weary self, a perfectionist eager to express his
47 Whitman, Walt. Walt Whitman's Leaves o f Grass: The First (1855) Edition. 2005. 4S Boulus, Sargon - Knife Sharpener. 2009, p. 94 39
complicated inner self. Sargon said, “writing poetry is very crucial, a very intimate thing and deeply connected with my inner making, my inner life.”49 Sargon expressed his personal experience of frequent movement between multiple homes both as a child and as an adult reflecting a universal theme that connects deeply with our common human experience. Perhaps he also longed for alternate or multiple forms of art to communicate his most inner feelings of pain, loss, passion and hope. In the next section I will discuss
Sargon’s short interlude with painting and the common themes shared with his poetry.
49 Ibid 40
Chapter 3: Ut Pictura Poesis
Throughout history poets have occasionally turned to other forms of art for inspiration and expression. Since the time of Roman poet Horace’s (65 - 8 BC) proclamation that “ut picturepoesis”- “ as is painting, so is poetry,”50 the two arts have been perceived as complements of each other. In more detail, Horace declared, “Poetry is like painting: there are pictures that attract / You more nearer to, and others from further away.”51 Unlike poetry, painting is a form of expression that does not require translation, which was always a laborious process for Sargon. Toward the end of his life Sargon turned to painting and carried similar messages of dislocation and internal turmoil as in his poetry. Perhaps Sargon felt restricted in having to rely solely on poetry and he was searching for an alternative form of expression that didn’t require proficiency in multiple languages or in poetic forms. Sargon’s poetry, just like his life, was foreign in the new language (English) to a new audience. He may have been famous at home, but he was an orphan with no past to his new English readers.
Sargon realized that painting, like poetry, is another form of language that can create order out of chaos. We can only surmise why Sargon gravitated to painting since there is no written or spoken evidence about it. As Sargon’s archives are released and
50 Horace. Poem: Ars Poetica. 18 B.C. http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/HoraceArsPoetica.htm 51 Ibid 41
more research is completed, it is conceivable that we will be able to understand his methodology as it pertains to painting. For now, we are fortunate to have a sampling of his paintings as another portal into his mind.
The Illusion o f Man Perpetual Embrace
Both paintings are small in scale, as are the rest of the eleven pieces in this series.
“The Illusion of Man” is 20” x 24” and “Perpetual Embrace” is 24” x 28”, both oil on canvas. In “The Illusion o f Man” Sargon uses a vertical canvas with a horizontal theme suggesting a tension at first glance. The background is almost all red, depicting blood, juxtaposed to green, which accentuates the richness of the red color throughout the painting. There are obvious body parts like teeth, fingers, penis and internal organs signifying dislocation, dismemberment and a scattered confusion. All the parts seem to be loosely held together in a white handkerchief of surrender. I feel that this painting is to
Sargon as Howl is to Allen Ginsberg. A line from Howl reads, “with the absolute heart o f 42
the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.”52
Emotions of dislocation, identity, exile and hope are reoccurring themes in Sargon’s paintings as in his poems.
Sargon is insinuating that it is difficult to claim an identity when one is disjointed with no hopes of ever being whole again. He may be expressing not just his restless life experience but the misguided human values and disregard for the artist who exposes his soul to write or paint but is shoved aside by society. Sargon said of his poetry “It’s long work, always thankless. After a while, after writing for 30 years, you feel a little bit of frustration because here is a whole world where idiots are taking over things and some rich sheikh, with billions of dollars and oil can live such a fabulous life and own all the papers and magazines and here is a poet sweating and laboring to advance the language.
You know what that means, I think that is one of the most honorable missions in life, and they’re totally neglected, so sometimes a poet, if he gives up, he is really justified. But then you try to fight against despair.”53 That fight against despair is his salvation of hope.
In an uncanny approach, there is hope in the blue color, which is found minimally in most of his paintings among all the depictions of dislocated body parts. In general, blue tones are associated with calming and soothing affects. Blue is the color of a clear sky and the sea, with the latter being a positive memory in Sargon’s life growing up at Lake
52 Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems. 1955 53 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Margaret Obank, Schoppingen, Germany, August 1997 43
Habbaniya, then Kirkuk on the Khasa River, Baghdad on the Tigris and finally San
Francisco on the Pacific Ocean.
The painting also includes hints of sails on a boat summoning a state of constant motion and never mooring. In this sense he is evoking the philosopher, Michel Foucault, from a 1967 lecture to a group of architects on heterotopia in reference to spaces as
“placeless places.”54 Foucault is describing a state of being, spatially, that does not really exist... a form of purgatory that has no past or future. It is the simultaneous dual existence that Said described when discussing exile as a contrapuntal perspective in Reflections on
Exile: “Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home; exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that—to borrow a phrase from music— is contrapuntal.”55 Sargon is expressing an intangible condition of exile, experienced by millions, with a canvas rather than a poem. The placement of human body fragments on multiple levels of draped risers seems to be an attempt at organizing a chaotic situation, perhaps in an effort to make some sense of it all.
However, I also find similar imagery of bewilderment caused by uprootedness in
Sargon’s poem, A Few Moments In The Garden, when he is describing his own dilemma
54 Foucault, Michel. O f Other Spaces, Heterotopias. Based on a lecture given in 1967 and translated for publication in English in 1984 55 Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. 2000, p. 186 44
of being in America while realizing America is preparing to annihilate his homeland.
From a suburb of San Francisco, he writes “I sit here to count/ the seconds,/ to understand/ what it means to leave,/ or stay in my place,/ dreaming without/ the need to pursue my dream,/ silent when I wish/ to scream.”56 Sargon is documenting his plight as a human condition that remains to be conquered. It is an alien concept, contrary to our human nature, and may require a number of generations to pass before we can reconcile with it.
In “Perpetual E m brace Sargon uses circular lines, soft colors (not characteristic of his other paintings) and precise strokes to evoke motion while embracing a concept of home that he has desired for decades. There is a perpetual yearning that is both internal and external occurring simultaneously. Sargon was in turmoil and this painting, more than his other pieces, exemplifies such sentiment. Like most of his poetry, this painting is an outcry from his inner self. Sargon utilizes opposing elements to accentuate the inner and outer turmoil and the precise lines with chaotic motion. The circular movement may be expressing his perpetual desire to be on the move, to seek comfort and acceptance.
Again, the blue color of hope appears in this painting in a balanced relationship that seems to slow the perpetual motion.
56 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009 page 98 45
He especially enjoyed meeting other Assyrians in diaspora since it only happened on rare occasions. In reference to a talk arranged by a group of young Assyrians living in
London, he remarked:
“It was emotional, and I was touched and deeply proud that young Assyrians would
spend time listening to someone like me. The emotional part comes from this.. .that
I always feel sometimes pity when I meet Assyrians far from their land. It’s very
rare to meet Assyrians. So, when it happens, one should consider it a celebration.”57
Poets use language to recount memories in new and innovative ways to arouse, to startle and to challenge us. Sargon’s love of language inspired him to refine his craft of poetry to convey the truth with precise metaphor and imagery. His poetry resonates with us in a way that validates our existence by memorializing one of the most familiar places in our past, our homes. Memories of a part of a home are the experiences in the space as opposed to the memory of the physical space itself. “The great function of poetry is to give us back the situations of our dreams.”58 The house may be gone but the memories and dreams will always be imprinted in our thoughts.
The poet Maya Angelou once said, “The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” Conversely, home may engender an awareness of confinement from a creative perspective. In Sargon’s poetry, J
57 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Michael Mammo. London, 2003 58 Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics o f Space. 1969, p. 15 46
perceive that he finds solace in diaspora, to observe from a distance, while he depends on his words for sanctuary. While home can be comforting and safe with familiar surroundings, it can also be creatively restrictive confined within its borders. A poet crosses borders to break the barriers of inspiration and cultivate knowledge. Although
Sargon was in perpetual search to belong, to settle into an identity that was accepted by all (family, friends, poets, scholars and bums), words were eternally present and ready to oblige. In Hymn to the Walls there is a sense of conflicting awareness between the physical comforts of home “lined with bookshelves/ of his favorite poets” and “iron- grilled windows (protection from thieves)/ where he lies half-drunk on words.” The prose are analogous to Butterfly Dream where he depicts a “butterfly that fluttered as if tied/ with an invisible thread to paradise.”59 Even paradise can feel confining, consequently compelling the free soul to escape.
Although Sargon had melancholy reflections of his own plight for being away from his beloved Iraq, he knew that living in diaspora was the only way he could pursue his passion for poetry. A nomadic life in search of comradery and mutual connection seemed to calm his mind and revive his creative soul. Exilic life has inspired the imagination of poets, like sculptors, in the way they use their art to interpret the human condition of longing for home. Poets use language analogous to a sculptor’s choice for a medium to
59 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009 page 73 47
best convey their message. Like a lover’s dance, there is synchronization between Sargon and his words in a manner that is both redemptive and unreserved. In the poem Notes from a Traveler60, Sargon writes, “Free to choose/ how to begin/ our journey,/ we are/ chosen at last,/ and there is/ no other way/but the way.” Sargon is reflecting on life as a choice we make in the beginning and the end chooses us where death becomes a journey.
60 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009 page 78 48
Chapter 4: Conclusion: Poetry and a Sense of Home
Sargon considers identity and homeland as inseparable concepts and as his guiding inspiration to create. When asked if he ever thought about writing in Assyrian, the language of homeland, he replied, “Yes, many times... I have [written] in Arabic transliteration. For me I think all languages are interchangeable. Many times, 1 felt a need to write in Assyrian but in Arabic alphabet.” Sargon did not have command of the
Assyrian written language compared to Arabic and therefore felt “inadequate.. .[and that] language will betray you, if you write in a language you have to master it.”61 Sargon did not want to be limited to expressions of extreme nationalism and a restricted audience, which was expected of any poet in the Assyrian community; he was grasping for an elsewhere and it was evident in his nomadic lifestyle revealing a restless soul.
Sargon wanted to reach out to all people, regardless of their nationality. Sargon considered it “chauvinistic” to write to a limited audience for self-righteous reasons: his passion was to illustrate a broader more comprehensive expression of human emotion. He desired to express the truth about all human struggles without the influence of racism and religious tension. Sargon was a universalist, loyal and concerned for others without regard to national or other allegiances. Sargon did not want to be branded as an ethnic or
61 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Michael Mammo. London, 2003 49
political writer, but rather as a humanist “mining the hidden areas of what has been lived through.”62 in a conversation with Michael Mammo in London, he said, “Writing is scary because you are alone with a white sheet of paper, you have to expose yourself and see the world fully naked. When I am doing that, 1 am nothing more than a human being...not an Assyrian, not a Middle Easterner, not a politician.”63
Poetry, in any language, is a vibrant force capable of conveying momentous perceptions of reality. Periods of oppressive ruling governments, like Iraq’s Ba’ath party from 1970 to the fall of Saddam in 200364, have marginalized poets and narrowed the prospect of publishing in Iraq. Years of such subjugation and lack of publication opportunities have deprived the writer/poet/artist of an unencumbered environment to create. At times silence became a form of protest. Dealing with historical trauma, passed down through DNA65, poets have a keen sense to not repeat the victimhood but to face it head on. Exile presented an outlet for a poet to document freely and to remain as the
“keeper of the flame.”66 Edward Said once wrote “for an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.”67 By confronting these dual realities of the past against the present
62 Boulus, Sargon. Knife Sharpener. 2009 p. 15 63 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Michael Mammo. London, 2003 64 Al-Rasheed, M. The Myth o f Return: Iraqi Arab and Assyrian Refugees in London. 1994 65 Yehuda, et al. Holocaust Exposure Induced Intergenerational Effects on FKBP5 Methylation. 2016 66 Mikhail, Dunya. Interview by Cathy Linh Che. April 2010. 67 Said, Edward. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. 2000, p. 186 50
homes, the memories become intense and reachable. Perhaps poetry transcends the boundaries of language to deliver a universal message of loss and reassembled memories.
It is not always the intention of a poet to write about exile or displacement, yet it is ubiquitous in Iraqi poetry. Dunya Mikhail explained “it’s strange how your memories survive with you, live with you in the new place and interfere with almost everything you do— even with your writing.”68 Aspiring to reach a state of resolution rather than conflict, the poetic tones examined in this essay echo a sense of nostalgia and passionate attachment toward the poets’ homeland.
Sargon once said about poets that, “he is faced with an endless experience which is writing itself, and when a writer is satisfied, he is dead.”69 He preferred the search for inspiration, to think without interruption and to be left alone like most writers. Sargon dreamed of writing a masterpiece and in 2003 he was in the process of writing what he thought would be his chef-d'oeuvre. In a video interview, Sargon said, “[he] is working on it and it was about immigration of Assyrians to America and how they discovered another type of life, how they discovered who they are, their identity and the central figure is the Ashurbanipal Statue in San Francisco. The title of the book is Ashurbanipal
San Francisco.”10 The reference to Ashurbanipal shows that Sargon was always
68 Mikhail, Dunya. Personal Skype interview with Dunya Mikhail. 69 Boulus, Sargon. Interview by Michael Mammo. London, 2003 70 Ibid 51
conscious of his heritage and the tragedy of its near extinction as it became more evident that most of the Assyrians in the world live in diaspora as compared to their native land of Assyria in Northern Iraq. He felt a moral responsibility to document the experiences and poetry was the essence of that experience. As the last king of the Assyrian Empire, Ashurbanipal was a patron of the arts establishing the earliest known library with more than 20,000 clay tablets at Nineveh (currently southern Mosul, Iraq). Hence the statue’s placement beside the San Francisco Main Library
(currently the Asian Art Museum). Since its erection in 1988, the monument has become a destination for Assyrians from around the world since King
Ashurbanipal represents the hallmark of the Assyrian identity. Sargon said, “They
[Assyrians] have to know who they are because self-knowledge is a great thing, not only exist but knowing who you really are.”71
Sargon was always true to who he was and the rich history that preceded him which was apparent in his poetry. When asked that while writing in Arabic does he feel like an
Arab or an Assyrian, he replied, “in most of my poems you will find that there is an
Assyrian speaking, or someone using another language, because I try very hard to be myself and doesn’t mean only using Assyrian subjects, but particular to a language are
71 Ibid 52
certain emotions, certain characteristics which can be romancing it, in a way like translating. Like things I dream, things I say to myself in Assyrian, then into Arabic poetry. That’s why my style is different from the rest of the poets.”72
Although Sargon never returned to Iraq and he never stopped his nomadic life in search o f home, his memories and experiences expressed through poetry became his salvation. When asked to comment in an interview about a reference to nostalgia as the consequence of exile, he said, “I can safely say that most of my writing since I left Iraq has been an effort, stretched over hundreds of poems, to deal artistically with what you call nostalgia. As a poet, I’m wary of falling into a trap of sentimental effusions, and yet
I’ve never stopped thinking of my country or longing to see it. America for me is a place to live, a home, but not a homeland, you can’t have that twice. And at the same time, as
Thomas Wolfe knew, you can’t go home again.”73 For Sargon, Exile and home became allies like complimentary colors that define the best of each other. He turned to poetry and painting for comfort and now I turn to Sargon’s poetry for healing.
2 Ibid 73 Boulus, Sargon. “An Interview with Sargon Boulus.” Interview by Rayyan Al-Shawaf, 2006 53
BIBLIOGRAPHY Books:
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Al-Rasheed, M. The Myth o f Return: Iraqi Arab and Assyrian Refugees in London. Journal of Refugee Studies, vol. 7, no. 2/3, 1994, pp. 199-219. https://sfstatc-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/primo- cxplore/fulldisplav?docid=TN proquest57623966&contcxt=PC&vidN) 1CALS SFR&se arch scope=EVERYTHING&tab=evervthing&lang=en US
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Boulus, Sargon. “Sargon Boulus Talks About His Life in Poetry.” Interview by Margaret Obank, Schoppingen, Germany, August 1997 http://www.banipal.co.uk/selections/15/ 167/sargon-boulus/
Boulus, Sargon. “An Interview with Sargon Boulus.” Interview by Rayyan Al-Shawaf, via email while Sargon was living in San Francisco, January 1 2006 https://www.questia.com/read/1P3-1074498621 /an-interview-with-sargon-boulus
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Online:
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