Change is a word which pops up often when Adonis speaks about poetry. It is not the popular, lofty idea of changing the course of the world with a few verses that he talks about, but changing the mindset and viewpoints of individuals.
This constant need for change has found him in constant tussle with the conservative religious establishment in the Arab world.
Though one of the greatest living poets from that region, he has spent much of the later part of his life outside.
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“The purpose of poetry is change. People are born as poets and they are living as poets. Everything they do is for the betterment of their conditions and they try to change the world accordingly. Their poetry might not be written in any of the world’s languages. It could be anything – construction of buildings, agricultural farming, or even building of social relations. I see poetry in such a wider sense as an action which changes one’s surroundings,” says Adonis, in an interaction with poets and writers at Kayikkara, the coastal village where poet Kumaran Asan was born.
On Sunday, he was presented with this year’s Kumaran Asan World Prize for Poetry, instituted by the Kumaran Asan Memorial Association. Born Ali Ahmad Said Esber, Adonis has been a perennial contender for the Nobel Prize for many years.
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His wish
Reciting a part from his long prose poem Body , he expressed his wish to return to his country of birth.
The poet, who in the 1950s was imprisoned for a while because of his affiliations to a secular, nationalistic political party, spoke at length about the continuing struggle between modernity and conservatism in the Arab world.
“Islam hasn’t changed at all because the belief is that the Prophet’s words are the final truth and that the believers have no right to change it. The basis of modernity is in acceptance of various progressive streams of thought, which hasn’t happened in the Arab world. This explains why we have had no great universities.”
“All deep changes are resisted. This is against Islam, against freedom and against humanity. In Syria, you can see people’s throats being cut. But the establishment or anyone else is not ready to say that cutting throats is against Islam. They have also been unable to provide equal rights for women,” says Adonis.
He says that humans are the creators of their own past and not the other way round. “As long as they keep on harping on the past and refuse to move forward, the struggle with modernity will continue. Poetry should help people in telling them the things they are unfamiliar with, not the things that they know of.”
S.R. Praveen