Maram al-Massri’s A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor
Born in Latakia, Syria, Maram al-Massri moved to Paris in 1982 and currently resides there. Her first poems appeared in Arab magazines in the 1970s and have been translated into many languages. Today, she is considered one of the most fascinating female voices in contemporary Arab (diasporic) poetry. Her poems, as I will show, grapple with loss in myriad ways, thus amplifying the affective cost of her severed relationship with the Syrian community. As Adrienne Rich notes, “Whether her or his social identity, the writer is, by the nature of writing, someone who strives for communication and connection, someone who searches, through language, to keep alive the conversation with what Octavio Paz has called ‘the lost community.’”1 Al-Massri’s poems, however, are not nostalgic and sorrowful compositions; rather, they are quotidian and deeply sensuous poems in Rich’s sense of the term, “poems good enough to eat, to crunch between the teeth, to feel their juices bursting under the tongue, unmicrowable poems.”2
Included in the 2004 bilingual collection A Red Cherry on a White-Tiled Floor translated by Khaled Mattawa, the poems discussed in this chapter are short and labeled with numbers from 1 to 100, which were composed, respectively, in 1996 and 2000. Al-Massri talks with frankness about physical love and female lust, represents the female lover in rather unconventional ways, and challenges romantic fantasies of wedded bliss. In particular, the poet spoils the performance of deference and loyalty expected not only from the faithful wife but also from the submissive citizen, thus breaching the traditional separation between the private and the public domain. In line with other post-1967 Arab writers, al-Massri unrelentingly exposes the silent complicity between patriarchy and authoritarianism, while also showing how affects such as shame, blind loyalty, and fear perpetuate what Tuula Juvonen and Marjo Kolehmainen have termed “affective inequalities” in both the private and public domains.3
A defiant funambulist, al-Massri’s female speaker audaciously walks on the tightrope of love, training hard to find a precarious balance between two opposite poles: the pursuit of her own sexual pleasure and the social constraints that limit her liberty. The tension between sensual passion and the rigidity of social norms is exemplified in the title through the image of the red cherry—a symbol for carnal love and sensuality—placed against the background of a white, aseptic tile. The reference to the sanitized, germ-free floor evokes what Judith Halberstam has defined, with reference to the cycle Alguna Parte by photographers Cabello/Carceller, as “the clean and hygienic spaces of hetero-normative domesticity.”4 Like Cabello/Carceller’s photographs, showing the debris of human interaction in empty bars (e.g., the stickiness of the floor, the broken glass, the dirt), al-Massri’s lyrics disturbingly lay bare the failure of love to last and, by extension, the failure of political hope. The collection reads like an archive of “broken intimacies,” to borrow an expression from Heather Love, in which love is never romanticized or idealized but foregrounded in all its contradictions, disappointments, and failures.5 The poet indeed represents a series of occasional encounters between two clandestine lovers, whose infatuation is ardent but most of the time short-lived.
Al-Massri’s poems, as I will show, are poems in chiaroscuro: they describe relationships between light and dark, where shining moments of euphoria and optimism make darker affects such as loss and delusion really stand out. Her poetry, despite its intensity and beauty, frustrates fantasies of eternal love and makes palpable, in Halberstam’s own words, “the failure of love to last, the mortality of all connection, the fleeting nature of desire.”6 In that sense, it contradicts the ideology of love in societies governed by religious norms, where (indissoluble) married life is seen as the only regulated and socially acceptable context for love and sexuality.7 On the other hand, since it underlines loss and the suffering that comes with it, al-Massri’s poetry further challenges the ideology of love in neoliberal societies governed by commodification, in which, as Alain Badiou notes, “relationships are made and remade in the name of a cosy, consumerist permissiveness.”8
Al-Massri’s poetry, I claim, is not only thematically but also stylistically innovative. Her straightforward, bare language, her emphasis on the quotidian, and her use of simple, unsophisticated metaphors set her at odds with the conventions of classical Arabic love poetry. The poet breaks with the stylistic artifices and formally stringent rhyme scheme of traditional poetic love forms, particularly the pre-Islamic qaṣīda, with its binding tripartite structure, and the ghazal, grounded on syntactically and grammatically complete couplets.9 She further breaks free from the fixed gender roles that frequently characterize these two forms, with the male poet-speaker lamenting and articulating the severity of his love in clearly audible words, and the female beloved relegated to the role of an impossibly beautiful and habitually unattainable object of love. By contrast, al-Massri’s female speaker has an active sexual role and is animated by physical desire, which has no cathartic or elevating power but rather functions as a shattering and destabilizing force. And yet, despite these formal breaks, al-Massri’s lyrics keep the typical somber and emotionally intense mood of canonical love poetry in Arabic intact.
Few women poets before her had taken the courage to turn their back to the classical tradition. Among them, as Muhsin J. al-Musawi claims, Nazik al-Mala’ika (the female pioneer of the free verse) and Fadwa Tuqan, who had put herself in a direct line of descent with classical male poets yet had also expressed the urgent necessity for female poets to engage with more pressing, everyday concerns and to develop an honest style freed from the affectation of her male predecessors.10 To quote Tuqan: “The pre-Islamic, the Umayyad and the Abbasid poets lived with me. They ate, drank, did household chores and bathed with me. They talked to me and I talked to them. . . . From that time, I turned my back on the Abbasid style, my main ambition being to write poetry deriving its beauty from simplicity, flexibility, truthfulness, and poetic expression free from affectation.”11
Like Tuqan’s poetry, al-Massri’s writing is simple, unadorned, and crystal clear. This is why she has also been associated with the ancient Greek poet Sappho, particularly for her refined and essential language, her intense and candid imaginary, her spontaneous style, and her colloquial tone. Exiled to Sicily, Sappho’s plainspoken verses had received incendiary attacks from Christian censors in Alexandria, Rome, and Constantinople.12 Despite having been the target of vehement condemnations, Sappho’s verse fragments outlived the cries of the censors and were unearthed by a group of archeologists in Egypt during their excavations in Oxyrhynchus (1898–1907).13 Quite ironically, they were brought back to life, thanks to some ancient papier-mâché coffins that contained some of her verse fragments.14 This was poetry that had been consigned to the grave and that had sprang up again against all expectations.
Opened on Valentine’s Day in 2017 in the crypt at the St. Pancras Church in London, the art exhibition Radical Love: Female Lust presented the paintings of forty-eight contemporary female artists from around the world, whose works had been inspired by poems written by premodern Andalusian and Arab female poets who had unapologetically addressed the topic of female lust.15 As in the case of Sappho’s fragments resumed through excavations in an ancient burial spot, these long-forgotten poetic fragments were recovered and publicly displayed in a London crypt. The generative force of these poems functioned as a source of inspiration for new radical artworks created by contemporary visual artists. I suggest that a similarly underground and regenerative force can also be found in al-Massri’s lyrics.
Female lust and the body play a key role in al-Massri’s collection, where physical love is outlined as a surprise, in Laurent Berlant’s sense of the term, “the encounter with what disrupts our expectations by breaking through the defensive barriers associated with routine.”16 Since it is a driving force that cracks open customary habits and traditional standards of morality, physical love is perceived by the speaker as silly and ill-advised. Poem 2, in particular, manifests love as hazard and folly.17 The speaker’s availability in this poem reveals a dangerous exposure, an imprudent openness; the internal dynamism, resulting from the swift actions performed by the speaker’s heart, increases the liveliness and exuberance of the whole scene. In this strikingly succinct and terse poem, al-Massri outlines female lust as an experience that overwhelms the speaker; in Elizabeth Grosz and Elspeth Probyn’s terms, hers is a sexuality that “spills the boundaries of its proper containment, the unease of bodies breaking and flowing over the limit.”18
Al-Massri’s female speaker does not only voluntarily open the doors of her heart to her occasional lovers but also deliberately ignites their passion. As in Sappho’s fragment 105, where the red apple embodies sensual passion, in poem 64 al-Massri displays a consuming desire, epitomized by the red cherries, which the lover wears as an ornament to embellish herself and arise her lover’s lust.19 The poem is based on the tension between passion and short-lived satisfaction, hunger and voracious appetite, which highlights the ephemeral and deceptive nature of love. Poem 1, which opens the collection, exemplifies these tensions:
،أنا سارقة السَكَاكِر
أمام دكانك
،دَبَّقْتْ أصابعي
ولم أنجح
بوضع واحدة في
.فمي
I am the thief
of sweetmeats
displayed in your shop.
My fingers became sticky
but I failed
to drop one
into my mouth.20
Through a figurative language that combines eroticism with stealing and associates the speaker with an inveterate shoplifter with sticky hands, al-Massri ambiguously describes the speaker’s unrestrained sexual appetite. A “sticky” element, physical love remains visible and persists on the surface of her fingers through its gluey texture, thus activating contradictory affects such as attachment and disgust, which pertain both to the individual and collective spheres.21 The skin, in particular, is reconfigured here as a border, a boundary that separates the subject from its object of desire but also from the rest of the community that shuns her, as the reference to the social affect of distaste indirectly indicates.
Trajectories of modernity and tradition intersect in this poem. Al-Massri clearly writes here against the traditional image of the male poet-speaker weeping at the memory of his virginal love as in the pre-Islamic qaṣīda but also against the construction of the female body as a “pure,” almost angelic object of love, as in the troubadour lyrics of the Middle Ages and the romantic poems of, among others, Jibran Kahlil Jibran.22 The female speaker in al-Massri’s poem does not mourn the absence of her beloved, nor does she abandon herself to nostalgic remembering. Rather, she is an active agent who makes concrete, albeit unsuccessful, attempts to satisfy her sexual hunger. This is a radical performance even for modern times. Indeed, as Rosella Dorigo Ceccato notes with reference to the Arabic theatre of the twentieth century, “in a strongly male-oriented society such as the Arab one, the role of the lover had to be assigned basically to the man. The woman could appear either as a defenseless victim of male desire, or alternatively, she could be presented as the clever instigator of his desire, the astute dominator of his naïve mind, the enemy to be fought. She rarely appeared in an actively sexual function.”23 It is precisely against this tradition that al-Massri writes, by refusing to compose a poetry of platonic adoration and by preferring instead to celebrate female lust and the contradictory affects (i.e. euphoria and delusion, confidence and self-deception) that come with it.
Desire of the senses and the imperatives of the body are the fulcrum also of poem 3, where female lust emerges as an inflammable and devilish amalgam.24 Originally created as an angel according to the Qur’an, the Devil later lost its privileged status due to its disobedience, becoming a jinn made of fire. The association of the Devil to fire is also present in “Stories of the Prophet,” which narrate that the Devil was created from fire, and in the New Testament, where the devil is thrown in the fire as a punishment for its disobedience and misdeeds.25 Al-Massri therefore mixes in poem 3 sacred and profane literary sources as well as tropes belonging to overlapping poetic traditions of premodern times. The representation of love as an inflammable substance that burns the heart is indeed a widespread religious image but also a trope in premodern (Arabic) love poetry, which traveled to al-Andalus, the Aquitanian courts, and the Kingdom of Sicily under Norman rule, as clearly documented in the verses of the Sicilian Romance poets Giacomo da Lentini and Guido delle Colonne.26
The combination of images belonging to both religious and secular sources is particularly evident in poem 52. Here, the poet uses typical rhetorical turns and a set of Qur’anic references—the holy spirit as a source of prophetic and divine revelation, the anonymous “he” blowing his holy spirit into a human body, thunder and lightning as signs of divine power that inspire reverence—combining them creatively with mundane acts and a lexicon related to the body.27 In this poem, the figure of the speaker oscillates between innocence and guilt, shyness and immodesty, self-control and unrestraint. Initially represented as a cautious and diffident creature, the speaker metamorphoses toward the end of the poem into a fervent devotee and zealous believer.
One finds another direct reference to the Qur’an in poem 59, where the speaker admits having stumbled while advancing on a “straight” path:
كنت أسير على الصراط
المستقيم
عندما اعترضت طريقي
اختل توازني
ٳلا أنني
.لم أقع
I was on the straight
path
when you blocked my way.
I stumbled
but I did not
fall.28
The poet performs here formal and religious discontinuity, by separating with a line break the expression “straight path” (ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm), a Qur’anic enunciation that is conventionally continuous. She further enacts a gender suspension. Indeed, the “you” mentioned in this poem by al-Massri, who chooses not to qualify its gender, is voluntarily left unmarked. The “you” blocking the speaker’s advancement and forcing her to lose her balance cannot be unequivocally identified as either male or female; the gender of the “you” remains forever unknown.
The idea that female lust provokes moral downfall and sociopolitical havoc has a long tradition both in Islamic as well as in Jewish and Christian thought. Drawing on the works of Fatima Mernissi, Samira Aghacy clarifies this point, stating that “woman is a source of fitna possessing an active and insatiable sexuality that if unchecked would release chaos . . . not only in the domestic space but also in the public sphere, thus constituting a threat to the patriarchal social and political order that determines male/female behavior.”29 The conviction that eros represents a threat to the subject’s personal equilibrium, particularly to her rectitude, is a widespread belief since antiquity. As Adriana Cavarero notes in her introduction to Inclinations (2016), “In the library of the West, whenever discussion turns to the dangers of inclinations, women are regularly in the mix.”30 Sexual and emotional inclination on the part of women, Cavarero observes, has historically stirred serious apprehension, particularly among philosophers, who have blamed female lust for being “a threat to the subject’s equilibrium—a deep quiver, a slippery slope.”31
Since it is most of the time performed outside the regulated channels of marriage and family life, physical love in al-Massri’s poetry is seen as a threat not only to the speaker’s own personal equilibrium but also to the stability of the patriarchal family and to that of the larger society. A ripe, mashed cherry on a white-tiled floor thus anticipates the loathsome destiny of the transgressor, the exemplary punishment for those who follow the imperatives of the body and their passions, as exemplified in poem 72.32
What happens—I ask in the next section—both on an individual and collective level, when the erotic as a vilified and repressed resource is finally released?
In Love and Sexuality in the Arab World (1995), Hilary Kilpatrick underlines the tight connection between intimacy and public life, sexual self-expression and the social order. As she claims: “The search for love is intimately connected with the individual’s desire for freedom and fulfillment, while the frank affirmation of sexuality, of whatever kind, represents a challenge to a rigid and hypocritical social order.”33 Throughout the collection, al-Massri emphasizes the connection between physical love and personal freedom, addressing globally sensitive issues such as gender inequality and domestic violence with extreme frankness. Poem 14 is a clear case in point.34 In it al-Massri breaches the usually impenetrable walls surrounding the domestic space, thus providing readers with a representation of marital life that challenges romantic fantasies of wedded bliss. The repetitive image of the silenced and repressed women in particular echoes Cavarero’s idea that since antiquity for patriarchy “the perfect woman would be mute—not just a woman who abstains from speaking, but a woman who has no voice.”35 The poem reads like a choral denunciation, in which the speaker (and perhaps the reader, too) joins the rank of these abused and vilified women, who are just like her (al-nisā’ mithly), thus offering to her audience a new vocabulary to talk about gender violence not as a private disgrace or shame but as a social and cultural malaise, the result of distorted because unbalanced intimate relations.
Poem 20, with its insistence on hallucination and a phantasmagorical reality, suggests that the possibility of pursuing personal and collective liberation can only happen in dreams.36 The speaker in this poem avows having killed her father and buried him in a beautiful shell, as if he were an immaculate pearl or an aquatic sleeping beauty. What is initially represented as the innocent victim of a terrible parricide metamorphoses toward the end of the poem into a cruel and frightening ogre. The patriarch’s true nature is revealed in bright daylight: he is no candid gem, but a scary even if ghostly Bluebeard. The story is set in a fairy-tale time, where the boundaries separating past and present, day and night, innocence and cruelty are blurred, and in a fantastic universe, where aquatic and terrestrial worlds intermingle. In contrast to Charles Perrault’s canonical tale, however, this poem has no moral lesson to teach its supposedly naive female readers. Moreover, in opposition to Angela Carter’s feminist rewriting of the famous fairy tale, there is no maternal figure who comes and rescues the heroine. Al-Massri’s feminism indeed fails to save her speaker (let alone other women), and readers find her antiheroine trembling under her bed in total solitude.
A liminal figure, simultaneously fragile and cold-blooded, childish and mature, the female protagonist in this poem openly confronts a ghostly paternal figure that haunts and torments her. Her temporary escape from his grip offers moments of euphoria and liberation, which are, however, not destined to last.
In al-Massri’s collection, insurgent acts can only happen at night and belong mainly to a nocturnal, underground world, in which the speaker spends her insomniac nights running on untamed horses in wild open spaces—for instance, in poem 24. As soon as dawn breaks, however, this utopic world ends, with the speaker inexorably going back to her customary rational and sober behavior.37
Since it is the undiscussed reign of the patriarch, the home in al-Massri’s poetry offers no relief, let alone any space for personal freedom and fulfillment. This representation confirms Geraldine Pratt and Victoria Rosner’s statement on the oppressive nature of many intimate relations: “Intimacy, after all, is equally caught up in relations of power, violence, and inequality and cannot stand as a fount of authenticity, caring, and egalitarianism.”38 In poem 91, the speaker bluntly reveals the affective imbalance that reigns in her relation and the macroscopic extent of her delusion:
مللت البقاء
على هامشك
في مسوداتك
على أدراجك
.أمام أبوابك
أين
!فسيح جنانك؟
I am bored with being
in your margins,
in your notebooks,
in your traces,
before your doors.
Where
are the wide spans of your heavens?39
Here, the speaker contrasts her marginal and dependent condition, underscored by the repetition of the possessive pronoun “your” with its persistent Arabic rhyming sounds, to the immense breadth of her lover’s false promises. The caesura, separating “your heavens” from the speaker’s hellish condition, makes the antithesis between the two lovers really stand out. Everyday and spiritual dimensions, sacred and profane worlds, intermingle once again in this poem to emphasize the magnitude of the speaker’s frustration and the death not only of romance but also of an illusion.
By and large, al-Massri’s poetry contradicts Abdelwahab Bouhdiba’s interpretation of sexuality in Islam as “a full positivity,” showing instead that the hierarchy of sexes and the inequalities produced by patriarchy engender misrecognition, domination, and abusive behaviors, which clearly falter that indisputable positivity.40 In the attempt to alter these distorted because asymmetrical relations, al-Massri provides readers with an unconventional representation of femininity, one that boldly defies the social norms of docility, blind loyalty, and reverent fear, while also destigmatizing adultery. Poem 48 is particularly telling in this sense, since it represents the adulterous woman neither as a sinner nor as a miserable and failed creature, as happened previously in iconic nineteenth-century novels such as Effi Briest, Anna Karenina, and Madame Bovary.41 Al-Massri indeed troubles the innocence vs. guilt binary, refusing to represent the woman at the center of her poem either as an evildoer or as a “celestial body,” to borrow the term from the title of a recent Omani novel by Jokha Alharthi, that is a woman who is sublime, self-contained, and forever gravitating around her male partner.42 In poem 48, the female figure has no beatific qualities and follows only her carnal desires without any hesitation or second thought.43 In doing so, the poet boldly removes associations of sin and shame from the figure of the adulteress, talking frankly about a kind of love that, as Cavarero rightly notes, since antiquity had been historically “forbidden to women and tolerated in men.”44
The woman portrayed in poem 48 is neither a happy wife nor a good mother, but just a woman following her own desires. The poet privileges erotic adventure to the stability of domesticity and family life, deemphasizing the institution of marriage as a stronghold against social chaos. Al-Massri further writes against traditional constructions of the female body as inherently vulnerable and fragile, refusing, for instance, to represent femininity as in need of masculine protection and guardianship. Accordingly, in poem 103, unloving men are equated to “grains of salt,” shining yet also melting fast, while in poem 99 the speaker appears to possess an autogenerative force, with her beauty incrementing steadily after each loss.45
Far from being simply positive and generative, al-Massri outlines in poem 8 femininity as a mercurial category—active, daring, and at times even nasty, thus contributing to bend the classical representation of women as being bred for silent endurance, self-denial, and mothering.46 Desire in this poem has no redemptive or generative function but, rather, a disruptive force; in Halberstam’s words, it “devours rather than generates, obliterates rather than enlightens.”47 In this sense, it contradicts the religious imperative of creation and procreation, thereby situating female sexuality outside this traditional paradigm.
I argue that al-Massri’s poetry plainly expresses her social critique by representing a queer femininity, one that deviates from the established heteronormative and patriarchal order and shifts the ground upon which binary constructions are based. Al-Massri’s political radicalism, by contrast, is expressed in latent rather than straightforward ways: it is tightly enmeshed with her complex poetics and mediated through intricate poetic choices, as I show in the next section.
In al-Massri’s poetry, the domestic space is imbued with estrangement and simulation; the home is reconfigured as an unheimlich place, where the body feels at odds with itself and unappealing affects such as boredom and weariness circulate. Married life, in particular, emerges from the collection as a still life. Like Giorgio Morandi’s achromatic paintings, which were completed under the shadow of Fascism, al-Massri’s poems are, emotionally speaking, arid and plain.48 Poem 34, in particular, with its emphasis on moldiness and disaffection together with its oppressive repetitions, reveals the shortcomings and monotony of domestic life.49 A pervasive sense of loss runs through the poem together with the idea that the relationship between the two partners has inexorably reached its end station.
Through monotonous repetitions and ghastly metaphors, al-Massri brings to light the speaker’s emotionally sterile domestic life with its stagnant and musty atmosphere, thereby killing the very fantasy that happiness can be found in marriage and the family, while also adumbrating the iconic image of the happy wife. This is clearly a feminist act, since, as Sara Ahmed reminds us, “feminist genealogies can be described as genealogies of women who not only do not place their hopes for happiness in the right thing but who speak out about their unhappiness with the very obligation to be made happy by such things.”50
There is no space in al-Massri’s poems for the feel-good qualities of successful resolution or absolute mediation, and little space even for dreams of reconciliation; hers is a poetry in Audre Lorde’s terms, “as a revelatory distillation of experience.”51 Feelings of disillusion and loss abound also in poem 87, where the speaker is confronted with the debris of love, when it turns into apathy, loneliness, and affective detachment between the two (ex-)lovers:
عندما تخرج
من حذائك
وتتركه
وحيداً
على عتبة الباب
أو تحت السرير
يحتله الضجر
.وأقدام الانتظار الباردة
When you take off
your shoes
and leave them
lonely
on the doorstep
or under the bed
they are filled by boredom
and the cold feet of waiting.52
The empty shoes left on the doorstep or under the (marital) bed become the symbol of the gulf that separates the two lovers; they epitomize a presence that has inexorably turned into an absence. I suggest that the speaker and the reader share an affective disorientation, since they both feel vaguely confused and unsettled by the lack of goals expressed by the passive act of waiting, with which the poem ends. Indeed, the dominant affects mobilized here do not express vehement passions, as one would expect from a love poem, but a lack of intentionality that leaves the reader disoriented. Drawing from Sianne Ngai, I suggest that “the unsuitability of these weakly intentional feelings for forceful or unambiguous action is precisely what amplifies their power to diagnose situations, and situations marked by blocked or thwarted action in particular.”53 There is nothing sublime or heroic in the two poems; what we witness here is a lack of intent and a feeling of suspension and hopelessness, which reveal the home—and, by extension, the nation—to be loveless and unlivable. The poet’s insinuation that happiness cannot be found in the domestic space combined with a hinted desire for liberation breaks the image of the happy wife and, by extension, of the happy citizen as joyous and fulfilled. This rather hidden act of denunciation, as I will argue in the conclusion, irrevocably breaks the public façade of harmony and unity, exposing the illegitimate (and detestable) character of both intimate and social relations based on subordination, as bonds backed up by a general consensus that may seem granitic but is in fact volatile. Indeed, as James C. Scott notes with reference to the subtle ways, both covert and bursting, in which subordinate individuals and groups express their discontent with the state of things:
the initial act that publicly breaks the surface of consent owes a part of its dramatic force to the fact that it is usually an irrevocable step. . . . If it is not beaten back, it will fundamentally alter those relations. Even if it is beaten back and driven underground, something irrevocable has nonetheless occurred. It is now public knowledge that relations of subordination, however immovable in practice, are not entirely legitimate. In a curious way something that everyone knows at some level has only a shadowy existence until that moment when it steps boldly on stage.54
All in all, al-Massri addresses in her collection controversial topics, such as female lust, adultery, physical love, thus awakening women—as Nizar Qabbani did back in the 1970s—“to a new awareness of their bodies and their sexuality, wrenching them away from the taboos of society, and making them aware of its discriminatory treatment of the sexes, of its inherent cruelty.”55
Al-Massri writes about these issues in Arabic, using a vocabulary, style, and imaginary deeply rooted in the tradition of Arabic classical love poetry but also breaking free from its most binding conventions, particularly those concerning stylistic artifices and stereotypical representations of gender norms and roles. In doing so, she joins a long line of literary predecessors thereby confirming Fadwa Malti-Douglas’s conviction that “consciousness of gender and arguments about the roles of men and women were not brought to the Arab world by Western feminists, like serpents in the Garden of Eden. These issues have always been major and fully conscious preoccupations of Arab writers who have filled their literature with chapters and books on women, their roles, their problems, and the like.”56
What is new in al-Massri’s treatment of femininity, I argue, is her skepticism about the old feminist credo that sees feminist agency as fully progressive, empowering, and, in the end, triumphant. She indeed shows readers that agency can sometimes take, as Kathleen Stewart notes, “unpredictable and counterintuitive forms,” and that, most importantly, “it’s lived through a series of dilemmas.”57 Liberation, for instance, can be followed by moments of regression, and even revolutionaries must expect potential pitfalls, as Love shows in Feeling Backward.
Far from being a clear “call to arms” to end women’s subjugation under patriarchy, al-Massri’s minimal poems have no glorious mission to accomplish or (moral) lesson to teach. Al-Massri is indeed not interested in investigating the psychological, moral, or religious aspects of love in order to educate her readers about its virtues and complex codes, as was the case with the exemplary medieval treaty The Neck-Ring of the Dove (1022) by the Andalusian poet Ibn Hazm.58 Her delicate and withdrawn lyrics further diverge from more contemporary and daring literary experimentations, such as Joumana Haddad’s explicit and blunt equation of writing about love as “an orgasmic act of ejaculation.”59 Finally, since al-Massri’s poems play heavily with obscurity, allusion, and ambiguity, they deviate from the recent trend in Saudi novels to display female sexuality in a rather blank, straightforward, and uncomplicated way, thus providing readers with the perhaps pleasurable yet ultimately barren position of the voyeur.60
In Al-Massri’s poetry, on the contrary, the erotic is performed as a powerful affective tool to concretely alter unbalanced power relations both in the intimate and public spheres. In this sense, her writing is closer to the short stories of Yusuf Idris and Layla al-Uthman and to Ghada Samman’s poems and novels, which employ surrealistic tones to express a corrosive yet latent social critique involving, among others, the institution of marriage, the idyll of the couple, and the supposed happiness of the nation.61
Since Al-Massri is a poet-funambulist who holds herself stoically on a rope stretched taut above the globe, her poems further include debates and preoccupations about love and the nature of relationships that are relevant not only in the here but also in the elsewhere. Consequently, by representing love both as surprise and risk, al-Massri simultaneously rejects more traditional conceptualizations of love as an arranged matter and an imposed duty, while also joining Badiou’s critique of a neoliberal, consumerist form of love, where partners are meticulously selected online and love is “comprehensively insured against all risks.”62 Badiou’s interpretation of love as a quotidian reinvention, a commitment to a construction that is creative, effervescent, and potentially breakable yet that ultimately defies separation, echoes al-Massri’s mercurial representation of love as a never-accomplished act, as a process always in the making, and as an intense engagement with what is different, perhaps refractory, and in the end unwilling to lose itself within a symbiotic union. Her representation further resonates with the Surrealists’ celebration of love as “a magnificent poem of the encounter,” and as a “potential support for a revolution in existence.”63
Negativity in al-Massri’s poetry is indeed not the opposite of a radical politics, but a practice of detection and contestation to challenge social norms and values that perpetuate structures of inequality both in the intimate and public spheres. Since it relies on a conceptualization of love as a recalcitrant and insubordinate substance, her poetry inspires and supports acts of rebellion at the private level and perhaps at the public level as well. Al-Massri, I claim, lays bare the risks and perils of a love that has been conceived in unequal terms as submission, domestication, and reverent fear, on the one hand, and as domination, control, and violence, on the other.
As Wilhelm Reich (1933) notes with reference to the Fascist regime, sexual repression went hand in hand with authoritarianism: the patriarchal family mirrored the power relations between the authoritarian leader and its people.64 To quote Reich: “The authoritarian state has a representative in every family, the father; in this way he becomes the state’s most valuable tool, since he in turns reproduces submissiveness to authority.”65
Shifting her attention from Fascism to authoritarian regimes in the Arab world, Samira Aghacy argues in her latest book that in contemporary Arabic fiction since 1967 “there is a clear correlation between authoritarianism, censorship, repression and patriarchal sexuality.”66 Shifting her attention from masculinity to femininity, al-Massri performs in her work a shrinking politics, one that reveals the frustrations, misery, and submissiveness of women in the private domain, while also hinting at the oppression of citizens at the political level. The moldiness of the speaker’s home and her lover’s abandoned shoes, for instance, evoke the immobility and sense of impotence of the citizens under authoritarian rule, as expressed, among others, by the protagonist of Hanna Mina’s Journey at Dusk (Al-rahīl ‘inda al-ghurūb, 1992): “We do nothing, because we don’t have the courage to do anything. They have domesticated us.”67
Al-Massri’s intimate poems offer a privileged though furtive and oblique peek into the political, enabling readers to observe how distorted social relations based on domination and violence transform the home, and even the nation, into a real inferno. Her audacious poems contribute to make audible “what has historically had to be whispered, controlled, chocked back, stifled, and suppressed” in the domestic space.68 By disturbing the very fantasy that happiness can be found in marriage and family life, whenever they are conceived in unequal terms, the poet shows readers how much there is to be unhappy about the patriarchal family and, by extension, the “neopatriarchal state”69; both are indeed “the product of arbitrary power, violence, control, surveillance, and physical confinement.”70
Neither the domestic space nor the existing political can be experienced in al-Massri’s poetry as a site of comfort, where mutual recognition and personal fulfillment can take place; they are both intolerable, hostile environments, the personal fiefdom of a terrible (hereditary) marquis. I see al-Massri’s poetry as opposing this feudal interpretation of love as blind attachment and fidelity at all costs, which are extorted through control, coercion, minimal concessions, and the fantasy of protection. Her poetry, I suggest, contributes to the realization of what Nadine Naber (2012) has called a project aimed at “ending injustice and oppression” and at forming “new definitions of family and kinship, new ideas of affiliation and belonging, new grounds for the fostering of community.”71 These alternative forms of affiliations, I wish to add, should be based on the understanding of trust as in Annette Baier’s apt formulation: a “vulnerable good, easily wounded and not at all easily healed.”72
As we have seen, al-Massri’s female speaker is neither a model wife nor an exemplary citizen: she is no obedient pawn and refuses to participate in the cult of the patriarch or the national leader. Despite her indisputable active role, al-Massri’s speaker is not a model activist, either: she expresses her opposition to the status quo latently rather than overtly, not in the chaos of the street but on the whiteness of a blank page.
Like the queer fairy-tale heroine of poem 20, Al-Massri forgets family and biological ties but also national, sectarian, and class connections in the attempt to forge alternative forms of affiliation that are less violent and potentially more liberating for all.73 Her female speaker, like the protagonist of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s novel Summer Will Show (1936), as Heather Love describes her in Feeling Backward (2007), “waits for the revolution as one waits for the beloved: with hope and with despair, but without certainty.”74 This is why, in the end, al-Massri clings on to the poetic word to (re-)create that vital, perhaps tumultuous, and always insecure hope:
حيث الأحصنه
.لا تستطيع الركض
حيث لا يوجد
ثغرة
تسمح
.لشعاع من الضوء أن يدخل
حيث لا عشب
ينبتُ؛
أتشبث
بأقدام الكلمة
Where horses
cannot gallop,
where there is no
crack
to allow
a beam of light to pass,
where no grass
grows,
I cling
to the feet of the word.75