Poetry Session – June 16, 2023

 

Collage of Readers on Zoom

We had ten poets represented, five American, three British, and one each from Russia and Argentina. The only translated poems were those of Pasternak from  Russian, and Borges from Spanish.

The poem chosen by Thomo, Rhapsody on a Windy Night, is from the 1939 book of poems by T. S. Eliot, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Its  presentation in modern times occurred when the book was turned into the 1981 musical Cats composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber. The most famous song in the musical was Memory, adapted from the Eliot poem with lyrics by the musical's director Trevor Nunn. Memory is sung primarily by the character Grizabella as a melancholic remembrance of her glamorous past, and as a plea for acceptance.

Elaine Page as Grizabella in the musical Cats

The enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges from Argentina is best known for his short stories in Ficciones and his essays on various subjects. Every reader will be transported by reading his short story The Library of Babel which begins:

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries. In the center of each gallery is a ventilation shaft, bounded by a low railing. From any hexagon one can see the floors above and below-one after another, endlessly. 

But at this poetry session we tasted a poem of Borges in which he successively refines the concept of a tiger, having never seen one,  

conjuring in my poem

is a tiger made of symbols and of shadows

– and thus

creates a fiction, not a living creature,

not one of those who wander on the earth.

The Other Tiger

The venerable Robert Frost who doesn’t like walls was about this very task of mending one. Each spring they find gaps from fallen boulders in the low stone walls between their houses and attempt to repair the gaps:

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

Robert Frost and a wall

Apparently the adage ‘Good fences make good neighbors’ urges them on to complete a task, which is actually redundant to the aim of trespassing for there are no cows to wander across. Frost philosophically reminds the reader

Before I built a wall I’d ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

Boris Pasternak, whose poems we’ve read before, reappeared when KumKum read a poem out of his famous novel, Doctor Zhivago. The poem is titled Parting and we are reminded of the line from our recent Shakespeare session when Juliet confides to her lover Romeo that 

… Parting is such sweet sorrow

That I shall say “Good night” till it be morrow.

But the occasion of Pasternak’s poem is the final parting, out of many in the novel, between Lara and Yury, the doctor, who also writes poems; he is left alone in the deserted house and muses –

In years of strife, in times which were

Unthinkable to live in,

Upon a wave of destiny

To him she had been driven,

…

And now, so suddenly, she'd left.

What power overrode them?

The last parting of Yuri and Lara in Doctor Zhivago

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar – May 23, 2023

In the Country of Men by Hisham Matar - First Edition

Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya is the background to this novel, set in the days after he had taken power in a 1969 coup against the monarchy backed by the West. His aim was to set up and implement an ‘Islamic socialism’, to which end he nationalised the western-controlled oil industry and used the state revenues to bolster the military and implement social programs like housing, healthcare and education. But power corrupts and soon he was in the dire business of squelching dissent internally and funding foreign militants.

Colonel Gaddafi in his golden braid

The novel is a kind of bildungsroman, and follows the plight of Suleiman, a young boy whose father, though a prosperous import businessman, supports anti-Gaddafi activities. His young mother, Najwa, is his comforter in the home, and outside it, his best friend Kareem and his father’s friend Moosa are the people he can look to for escape from fear and panic.

We are given a historical perspective by Usthath Rashid, a university professor who moves with his son Kareem next door to Suleiman’s home. Libyan history dates to  the time when the Phoenicians from present-day Lebanon settled in the north-west corner on the coast, and it was later expanded by the Roman Emperor Septimius Severus to form the port of Leptis Magna (now called Al-Khums) in 200 CE.

Leptis Magna – Severan Basilica

The dramatic highpoint of the book is when Usthath Rashid after public interrogations is led to his execution. The crowd are rabid, being incited by the regime to condemn a traitor to Libyan socialism. His own father has disappeared and that too induces a sense of panic in the young Suleiman’s heart. Ultimately, his parents smuggle him off to Cairo where he grows up and becomes a pharmacist under the care of Judge Yaseen, Moosa’s father. The book peters out in Cairo. There is no great return to Libya possible, nor any desire.

A Libyan dissenter Shaheed Sadiq Shwehdi executed in public at minute 2:10 of video

Clearly the autocratic regime of Gaddafi and the suppression of dissent are the thrust of the book, showing how it affected ordinary people, and caused the multitudes to fall in line. In the end we have to remember also that Libya was bombed in 1986, supposedly in retaliation against terrorism, and Gaddafi was killed by US, UK, and France acting in concert. They sowed the mayhem and civil war that continues to this day.