Greatest Arabian poet Adonis: ‘The holy book is a trap’

Wether I felt like talking with Adonis? A public conversation in BOZAR? It was an old Moroccan acquaintance of mine who asked me. Of course I wanted to. Adonis is the greatest Arabic poet alive. If you live in Brussels, together with over a hundred thousand fellow citizens from North-African origin, you don’t doubt a second, do you?
It is true that most of them speak Berber, but even then, they are part of the immense Arabic region reaching from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean. We mainly hear sabre-rattling and threatening yells from that area. That the most enchanting poetry has been written in the region for centuries seems to slip our mind from time to time.
So there he was in the hallway of BOZAR, a little tanned man, clearly from Mediterranean origin, with a black coat, black hat, grey hair, glasses. He speaks a very careful French, with a slightly rolling ‘r’, properly taught. He was indeed born in Syria in 1930, when the country was still a French trust territory. And yes, the biggest contemporary poet of the Arabic language, one of the biggest ever, is very old. But that doesn’t make him less fierce and, in his calm friendly way, convinced. Soon he will be reading his verses for a packed hall. Reading? He psalmodizes. My god, what a power, what a force. I don’t understand a single word, but the Arabic language that often sounds awfully dull to me on the street or on television, now bursts with unsuspected musicality.  
Truly impressive. I clap like a madman. The public goes crazy, they adore him. People want to hug him, I don’t exaggerate. This isn’t the hysteria for a hyped pop idol, this is devotion, this is thankfulness, very touching, something you hardly ever witness. Adonis is a living legend.
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Ali Achmed Saïd are the names given to him when he was born. Ali Achmed grows up in a mountain village, his farther is a farmer, but a literate farmer, who recites the Koran and Arabic poems too. The little boy listens eagerly to the elderly of the village reciting sufi-poetry. The family of Ali Achmed is alawi, therefore belonging to a minority at the fringe of Islam and that fact plays its role.
In 1942, Ali Achmed is aged twelve, the president visits a neighbouring town. The boy wants to go but his farther forbids him. He goes anyway. In life one just has to know the right moments to disobey. At first, the bodyguard of the president chases him away. Ali Achmed loudly shouts that he wants to recite a poem. The president calls him. Today, such a little wise nose would be put in a hold and removed professionally and he should be happy not to get a beating on top of it. Not so back then. Trembling like a leaf, Ali recites his first verses. The president is very much impressed. How can I reward you, he asks. I want to continue my studies, Ali Achmed answered. 
And so it happened. He attends a secondary school, still a French school as that was the reality in Syria these days (1942), the Arabic wave came later. The secular logic of the Mission Laique will stay with him forever. Today for instance he is a fervent opponent to the veil. It hides more of the mind than of the head he thinks.
At the age of only seventeen he chooses the pseudonym he’ll use the rest of his life: Adonis. That name belongs unmistakably to the ancient history of Syria, centuries before the Islam establishes itself in the country.
Adonis belongs to the Greek mythology and the Greek at their turn adopted him from the Phoenicians. Adonis was a royal prince and a breathtaking beauty. Afrodite (or Venus if you like) the goddess of love herself, falls head over heels in love with this beautiful boy. But during a hunting Adonis is torn to pieces by a wild boar. From the blood of Adonises ripped body a flower came to bloom, the red anemone. According to one of the traditions, the deceased lover leaves the underworld every year in spring to join his great love Afrodite. He comes in springtime, like the anemone, and thus announces renewed, blossoming live.
The young student preparing his bac, his French finals, knows very well that his choice is heretical. He firmly steps on the core of Islam; its strict monotheism. If one chooses Adonis as pen name, you choose pro polytheism and for the true Muslim that is pure horror. Half and entire tribes have been slaughtered over these kind of issues. The young poet chooses resolutely the path of multiplicity, that means uncertainty, doubt, pro reaching, fumbling and against hitting, against branding as a heretic, against fundamentalism. He is for ever, the wanderer with uncertainty as only homeland, as he says in his own words
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That evening in BOZAR he says to me: ‘ It is an awful idea that after this one prophet, after this one book, everything would be said and written, isn’t it? If Mohammed would really be the last of the prophets, then no human word can be uttered anymore, and even much more frightening, no divine word either. The holy book is a trap closing in on us. Every monotheistic religion has the same problem. Christianity had the chance to avoid the trap but it didn’t. It identified itself with power and it embraced dogmatics.’
‘Constantine the Great, I react.
‘Exactly’, answers the old Arab.
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In 1956 Adonis leaves his home country. He settles himself in Beirut. Meanwhile he made himself familiar with French poetry. He read for instance Les Fleurs du Mal de Baudelaire. Spelling verse after verse holding a dictionary at hand. In 1960 he is invited by the French government to stay a year in Paris. He often joyfully claims that he was born for a second time into French poetry and the French language. He undeniable is a great connoisseur of French poetry but he keeps on writing in his so much beloved Arabic. He calls himself Arabic as a human and a poet. ‘We don’t have another identity but the Arabic one’, he writes.
From the moment you hear Adonis talking of identity, you should be careful. He stretches the meaning of the word in such a way it loses all certainty. The meeting with the other is always, fundamentally, necessary to become yourself. And he doesn’t shy away from a confrontation with the truly different, to the contrary. He also refused to bow to an ideology, a religion or party program.
In Lebanon he founds two literary magazines in which he creates a space for experimental Arabic poetry. Time and time again he will try to connect the grand Arabic tradition to the modern, western movements of twentieth century poetry, mainly French. To Adonis it are exactly the forgotten, the doomed and marginalised poets that are most important and to him it obviously doesn’t matter whether they stem from pre-Islamic times or not.
Lebanon is torn apart by a civil war. After a while Adonis has to fear for his own life. He flees the country in 1980 and settles in Paris for good. Thanks to the French translations he starts to break through in the West as well. He constantly kept building bridges, between East and West, between tradition and modernity. His essay on Sufism and surrealism is groundbreaking in that respect. According to Adonis, the age-old Sufism, that mystical school in Islam, and surrealism, that weird child sprung from the 20^th century, have not only their origin in common but also like purposes. Sufis and surrealists are looking for the hidden side of being via parallel pathways. Holy ecstasy and desperation of the senses are very close to each other.
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When I heard him recite his Arabic verses in BOZAR that night, I thought by myself, so yeah, I read this poetry in a doubtless excellent translation, but that can only come as close to the real thing as a black and white picture of a Rembrandt painting. You miss out on 80 percent. Translating always means betraying, not in the least if it comes to poetry like this, pure rhythm and music. Imagine having to translate Schubert for instance. It immediately explains why Adonis never received the Nobel Prize for Literature, although he has been nominated several times. If it was up to me Adonis can have the Nobel Prize 2010. He deserves it.