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Poetry used to roam in my Bedouin environment when I was a child. It was always around me.

I heard it from my grandparents and relatives, and from passing guests who came to stay a night or two, and who may never have come back.

Metaphor is a way of life for the Bedouin, and poetry is his summit.

Rarely does a Bedouin, in moments of inspiration or danger, answer your question directly. A direct answer implies either spiritual shallowness or a limited intellect (qualities associated with agriculturalists), or poses a danger to his family from a raid or a taking of revenge. Therefore, his answer usually takes the form of a line of verse, a story, or a parable. And it is up to you to arrive at an answer.

In this environment, saturated with Bedouin metaphor, proverbs and the recitation of the Quran, some of whose suras approach pure poetry, I was born and raised.

Metaphor was the lord of speech.

And language had other functions than the direct communication of meaning or setting out the limits of daily interactions. Language used to deviate from this line, finding itself on another soil, that of poetry, or close to it, where words lay the foundation of meanings other than the exhausted meanings current in daily use.

The poetry of the Bedouins, the parable, and the story whose meaning was other than what it appeared to be – these were my first contacts with poetry and my initial closeness to its soil. That was before I went to school and became acquainted with another shape for poetry, the poetry written in the standard language.

Bedouin poetry remains a spoken poetry even though its lexicon is close to that of the standard language, while some of its expressions and metaphors are derived from the old classical language and are no longer in use. A poetry whose origin is oral and improvised at a particular moment in time and later memorised and transmitted orally.

Thus, when I went to school, there was a kind of poetry waiting for me other than that which I heard at home. And from that moment it became necessary for me to privilege this poetry, given that it was the poetry of the elite culture, and to forget the Bedouin poetry, or at least not to allow it to become part of my creative endeavour.

For this is a poetry that has no place in the school curriculum. It is not published, and it is not available in the market.

Yet even the poetry I read in school was not in fact that which was current in literary life then. It was a classical poetry which was no longer being written, except by very few poets, particularly those who were ageing or conservative, or those very religious ones who rejected the developments which had begun to take place in Arab culture from the middle of the last century in the direction of unalloyed secularism.

The middle of the twentieth century saw the rise of what has been called a revolution in modern Arabic poetry, led by the poets Badr Shakier al-Sayyab and Nazik al-Mala’ika. Both these poets were influenced by English poetry, which itself was then still under the sway of TS Eliot. These two poets knew English well and were able to follow the poetry written in it.

By then the sun of the classical Arabic poem, or qasida, which had shone for more than twenty centuries, had begun to set.

And the sun of the new poetry, which was to give rise to what is known in Arabic as “prose poetry”, had begun to rise.

Arabic poetry was no longer to assume the form it had known for twenty centuries.

I belong to what is known as the poetic generation of the seventies. This is the generation that took upon itself the task of consolidating the achievements of Arabic poetic modernism, opening its horizon far wider than had been originally contemplated by the innovators.

Most of the poets of this generation were engaged in some type of left-oriented political activity, but they turned away from this after a series of breakdowns and defeats. They became very critical of this phase and its ringing slogans, and refused after that any direct connection between the poem and the slogan, regardless of how appealing or enticing it might be, though their poetry was never entirely free of political concerns. This generation undertook a severe critique of nationalistic poetry, accusing it of simple-mindedness. This generation, the generation to which I belong, knew well the superficiality of political poetry, its artificiality and its detachment from pressing political issues. And with this the connection of Arabic poetry with the sloganeering to which it had been tied for thirty years was cut.

Setting out from the perspective of this criticism of nationalist poetry the poets of my generation have called for opening the Arabic poem to the marginal, the quotidian, and the particular. For poetry no longer resided in the grandiose towers of major issues and questions of destiny, but on the sidewalks and with the concerns of ordinary people.

This trend did not lack a source of inspiration, for we found it in the Iraqi poet Saadi Yusif, whose poetry has remained far from ideological clamour and hullabaloo.

Further, the translation of some of the work of the Greek poet Yannis Ritsos by Yusif, as well as translations from other European and American poets, along with the new receptivity to modern narrative, have all contributed to opening Arabic poetry in the last quarter of the twentieth century to new horizons, putting it on an axis that intersects with world poetics.

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For reasons that have to do with politics and freedom of thought and expression in the Arab world I found myself in London, after having spent the most significant period of my life in Beirut, a period during which the city was a haven for Arab intellectuals and political activists who had escaped oppression and the restrictions imposed on daily life in their countries.

In London, and for the first time in my life, I found myself a stranger. Previously, I used to prefer the marginal to the dominant trend, and would voluntarily belong to it. But in London, without premeditation or choice, I found myself on the margin of the margin. It was therefore not by accident that I found myself residing in Southall, which is known in West London as “Little India”. But even there, I found myself on the margin of this marginal quarter. For linguistic and cultural barriers, and the inflexible rhythm that ties a human being to earning a living, made it impossible for me to gain a foothold that would enable me to acclimatise to the new environment. There was also the weather. For the first time in my life I saw how the sky can turn into a grey roof, and how this grey can penetrate into your depths and live there. And how you can turn into an easy prey to dejection.

I expressed some of these thoughts in the first collection of poems I issued in London in 1990, whose content, as we say in the Arab world, can be read from its title, The Arrival of Strangers. The subject of strangeness has always been part of my poetry, in the sense that I had come from Bedouin origins and had propelled myself into an urban environment. But that was only a limited kind of strangeness. There was not the strangeness of sky, land, and language as was the case in London.

The question of “identity’ was among the first put to me by this new place. But in my depths I did not feel it to be only a question of skin colour, religion, and cultural background; I found myself thinking of it as an existential question. The question of identity seen in terms of a different culture or skin colour is only fleeting. But understood in terms of our existence in this world, it is at heart everyone’s question, even when they do not ask it. It is therefore, in this sense, a lasting question. I do not feel that I’m above the question of identity as formulated by many of those who belong to religious or ethnic minorities in this country, and who see themselves from its perspective. Nor do I negate the appropriateness of this question. For how difficult it is to have a black hand among hands that are conscious of whiteness and employ it as a sign and an emblem! Yet I do not find that the issue of “colour” or “ethnicity” represents me completely. This is a question of “livelihood” and “equality”, for whose sake I struggle, while the question that my poetry would like to pose has more to do with “existence”, “life”, and “embracing”. These are the issues that I attempted to tackle, in a manner that may appear obscure to the English reader, in my collection, Happy Is He Who Sees You, in which a discriminating reader may be able to discern harmony and discord, embracing and separation between Self and Other expressed with reference to a journey of love with a mythical dimension.

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I am aware of my difference from the “Other”, and I strive to                                                                                         fraternise
I understand difference
And approve it, only if it does not turn me into
A stranger
I accept being a stranger
But not an absolute stranger!