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Amjad Nasser

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The Slant of Day

The maiden with her enviable height arrived on foot
Sister of the pure morning
She crossed the meridian of eternity
And turned into an eye for a blind man carving in air
A retinue for the prince sleeping under linen

Of all her sisters
She was a gift to the zenith of the day
With her small feet
She stepped
In the direction of the bells.

    *

In the perfect spring
Came eulogists and genealogists
And the players of long flutes
And the smoke
Masked
The agitation of the rams

     *

Not fair-skinned
Or tattooed on a youthful arm
With the look of someone
Who has promised herself much
She weighed the air between summit and abyss
And left for the one lying awake
Over the treasure of sleeplessness
A golden dirham between her breasts

     *

This is her big day
The day when the maiden strikes with her heel
The long path of the westering sun
Ahead of her ring the very bells that sanctified
A new hill among the towering mountains.

This is the day of the sword
And the crown
And the pain that turns childhood into a memory.

The day the hand stretched to reach for her
Rising above his height who
When the maidens gaze upon him
Always see a horse with an arrow in his chest
And signs of the hour under his mane.

The day when the scent of youth
Is stowed like a treasure in its box
On the grass of the courtyard
The day of beauty, the ignorance of those who see,
More eloquent than a feast, closer than a jugular vein.

     *

Slave girls can no longer scheme at night
For she has come who with one look
Made the dangling fruit drop from the branches
And slept naked on the surface of waking

She breathes under the Seville orange tree
Next to the snake with the ten-day poison
Closing her eyes
She tries to gain her share of pain

      *

She whose name is an invocation
Took her time releasing her arrow
She let go
And hit the heart of day
Playing among the branches

      *

Delicate
The prince on the sofa in his flowing robes
Those nearest rush to his side with the same obedience
They use to reveal secrets

In the bedchambers of fever
The side
More hidden
The women
Rule
With the flimsiest tricks

     *

Like them, she caught the slant of day
As the afternoon light granted the date palm
Its clusters from the blood of the two sisters
With the hand that tames the tiger of the breath
She reads the void of the evening from its customary ringing
Giving an impression of how far the wind reaches
Among the trees

      *

The flood
Reached
Its peak
Measure
Was
For measure
But she was measured
On a double scale

     *

The malice which offers the nights its breast
Has broken down
The bones grow feeble
And the fuel
Has run out.

      *

Entreaty is like rain to him who
With sword in hand is near the walls
And him who, with key in hand, stands at the door

He therefore accepted silently what the days brought
Amid the din of those going away

     *

Sunset is not without weight
On the shoulders of those who hold up the day
The ones leaving the paradise of the wise
To the mercy of the blowing wind
Yet death in a drowsy mask
Is performing in the neighbourhood
Throwing his dice over lots in the air
And among the voices he has often rehearsed
He chooses the weakest

The groan
Came into light
And lit up
The eagle’s
Eyrie
On
The heights





Amjad Nasser writes: ‘The Slant of Day’ is part of a longer poem called
’Farewell to Granada’, which itself is part of a book of poems about
Andalusia. I didn’t write this book out of a historical impulse but an
existential one in the first degree. The idea of writing it came to me
during a visit to Granada in 1991, when we were still suffering the
painful consequences of the Gulf War at all levels. Perhaps it was this
tragic atmosphere, coupled with the effect of Alhambra Palace on the
Arab psyche, that led to the outpouring of this song celebrating childhood,
beauty, and loss. This loss is not that of land or property, but the
loss of a dream. In this book I tried to provide another portrait of Abu
Abdallah Al-Saghir [last Arab ruler in Spain], not as a traitor or a coward
or someone who sold out his country but in his capacity as a person (a
king) who was forced by circumstances to abandon not only his kingdom
but the places where he took his first steps, as well as the moment
of love and tolerance which characterised Granada then.

I wanted to publish this book in 1992, in commemoration of the five-
hundredth anniversary of the fall of Granada, but due to a complex set
of circumstances I did not do so then. The subject of Granada continues
to inspire many writers and poets, as we can see from Mahmoud
Darwish’s book on the fall of Granada, Eleven Planets. Ours will not be
the last writings on the subject.

Thus the book in its entirety constitutes an attempt to meditate on
what we can call the existential biography of Abu Abdallah Al-Saghir
and the Granadian space, away from proper names and already familiar
historical periods. It represents an attempt to enter into the existential
fabric of a historical moment, its characters, and its stage, rather than an
attempt at a history. History is written by historians, but for poets there
is another kind of history having to do with the soul and with existence.
Yet, despite all that, there are glimpses and hints pointing to specific
events touching on the last moments of the fall of Granada and the
surrender of its keys to the victors, the exit of the vanquished and the
transformation of their place to a memory.

The historical context of ‘The Slant of Day’, then, is the fall of
Granada. The place is both a physical location and a space in the
memory. As for the maiden who is the principal character in the poem,
she is a mixture of fact and imagination. She does not represent a specific
historical figure. My description approximates her more to the wife of
the Prince’s father, who, upon entering the palace, is said to have played
a role in the breakup of the family which had ruled Granada for several
centuries, and whose last king was Abu Abdallah Al-Saghir.



Translated by Ibrahim Muhawi

Page(s) 212-216

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