I longed for her until I became her
Sufism is the belief that in our intense longing for the ‘Beloved’, we become one with the subject of our desire. In the vast pain of our pursuit to arrive where our longing calls us to, layers of ourselves are shed. Slowly, and through many deaths, we begin to understand that in the undoing of who we are, we become more of the one we seek. The subject of our longing becomes less of a place we are attempting to reach and more of an essence we become. What we burn for “ceases to exist as a separate entity and becomes nothing more than a lover loving the Beloved in perfect union.”
In this way, through this path, I have become Syria.
““When they ask me, “Why do you not write about the country?”I answer, and is the woman separate from the country?There lies no geographical border between the woman and the nation.””
Denied her love, the poet makes gun of his pen and cocks it against every tribal law that parted them.
He undresses each verse, frees it of fabric and permission, and releases it before the courtyards of mosques and dictators, the bullet-eyes of sheikhs and dictators. He is an architect of language — precise in his burning of the ruler that measures every violation, its consequences…
His war is announced and fought on paper. For that it never ends, whiles theirs, fought on earth, through hair and blood and books, collapses into cemeteries one by one.
For love of the land that sits beneath the tribe — his tribe, the painful mass of Syrian heads betraying him in the violence of their silent gaze, in the mouths that chose the safety of their dinners, the distance of their balconies — he leaves.
And with the freedom of a poet who has lost his most urgent longing — dressed in the impossibility of that love — he fires.
Nizar Qabbani births his poetry from a confessional womb, an ephemeral sack of life that spills truth through the parted legs of every line, the blood of birth and murder intertwining to confess that both are true: it is Syria he has lost, and Syria he possesses.
If woman is country, each lover he enters is a migration made home.
Each touch of her skin is repossession of the land.
Every whisper a call to prayer from the minaret of two bodies merging into one, unanswered prayer.
Women, Qabbani tells us, are occupied territory. Then, it is the poet’s job to occupy the occupation, to reclaim her through the defenseless, unrecognized borders of poetry. No in conquer, but to match the force that steals with a force that frees.
Their touch is one of possession.
The poet’s is of remembrance.
What Qabbani conquers is not the body, but the one who threatens the freedom of this body, and through verse and breasts, he reaches the one who holds her in chock hold, A tribe of hands is replaced with one. His hold is one that pours instruction into skin, guiding it away from his hand, blowing it off his paper, and into lasting freedom. He loves woman and country enough to remember that love is passage. It is a temporal meeting point before his poetic responsibility to sever, to return the gift and the grace of their time together.
But this longing is beyond him. Everything he touches becomes Syria. His words become her eyelids, the poem, her mind, her dirt, her conquered chest, poured into the London nights.
The shape of every confession falls into the shape of her.
Smuggled in the paper that lands on his table, disguised in the arrival of a new lover, he stumbles on her return — willing, wounded, desiring. He gathers the shape of her on paper, and writes her into freedom.