By Mike D’Andrea
Sabah Zwein, a prominent Lebanese poet, critic and translator, lost her battle with lung cancer last June, an illness known to few of her friends and acquaintances. This secrecy probably came as no surprise to many of her intimates, who, like her literary critics, recognized that the struggle with isolation, bitterness, and despair colored many of Zwein’s poems.
Her profound loneliness manifested in her search for cultural identity and her battle to communicate through her poems. Zwein saw her cultural identity challenged when the Lebanese Civil War resulted in a brief self-imposed exile in Canada. She became an Arab poet in a Western land, writing in French. Abduh Wazen, Al Hayat’s Cultural Pages Editor, notes that she returned to her native Lebanon determined to write in Arabic. Opinions differ on the reason for her change in tongue: some contend she felt limited by French, and others implicate her cultural identity crisis.
Wazen relates that the general limitations of language haunted Zwein. While she strayed from French because she felt constricted, the poet also struggled to communicate sufficiently in Arabic. She felt an urgent need to express herself, and languished over the difficulty of conveying her precise semantic experiences to others. As with her illness, Zwein shouldered this agony alone. In addition, the poet felt unappreciated professionally, a source of dissatisfaction and anxiety which, Wazen muses, accounted for the powerful, brooding character of her poems.
Zwein maintained a foot in many camps. She wrote literary and film criticism, worked as a journalist, published academic studies, and translated the works of many notable Arab writers and poets into French and Spanish, publishing them in several anthologies, including “Contemporary Lebanese Voices,” Naim Kattan’s “The Real and the Theatrical,” as well as the poetry anthology, “Those are the Things on the Horizon” (2007). In 1997, Zwein also published a study on contemporary women’s poetry in Lebanon. She worked for the leading Beirut newspaper, An Nahar, from 1986-2004, and wrote a weekly column in another paper, Al Liwa, in Beirut, from 2009 until her death. Best-known for her own poems, Zwein published more than 10 poetry collections in both French and Arabic over the course of three decades.
Mahmoud Shreih wrote in Al Akhbar newspaper, “Perhaps among the poets of her generation, she ranks first due to her strong yet transparent verse. She was a first-rate intellectual and a powerfully determined woman who brought about fundamental change in modern writing. And although she arrived in silence and left in silence, her poems, which span three decades, remain an authority for the trajectory of modern verse since the 1950s.”
Zwein wrote her poetry in “half-sentence,” or “semi-sentence” form, as seen in the titles of her poetry collections. She layered sentences in confusion, stuttering, and hesitations that defied linguistic rules and failed to offer complete, definitive meanings, creating sentences that served as linguistic canvasses, painted with the various shades of sensitivity in tone. These fragmented sentences acted as windows into her fragmented experiences. Hussein Ben Hamza of Al Akhbar maintains Zwein “wrote in many languages –– first in French, the language of the Catholic schools in which she studied, then in Spanish, her mother’s native tongue, which she mastered.”
Joseph Aisawy, of Al Akhbar, echoes a similar observation, stating: “Zwein wrote books and titles that confounded the modern reader, that confounded us, as she broke down accepted poetic form while treating topics ranging from self-anxiety to the global devastation.”
In fact, Zwein proved a prolific writer, whose publications include, among others, “Upon a Bare Sidewalk” (1983), “Passion or Paganism” (1985), “But” (1986), and “Starting From, Or Maybe” (1987). “Deciding to change her poetic tongue, she translated and compiled her previous works, and composed entirely in Arabic from then on,” wrote Ben Hamza. Among her Arabic poetry publications are “In the Turmoil of the Place”(1988), “Our Time is Still Lost” (1992), “The Tilted House, Time, and the Walls” (1995), and “Because I, As if I, and I Am Not” (2002). She released her final volume in 2013, titled “When Memory or When the Threshold of the Sun” (2013).
Zwein “stood as a symbol of feminism at the very core of the movement, and was also a lover when she wrote, when she took her quill in her narrow fingers and produced her works. She was quick, severe, and affectionate; determinedly sticking to her opinion with her stare,” said Shawqi Abi-Shaqra, one of Lebanon’s most distinguished poets, and an editor under whose wings Zwein worked while in An Nahar newspaper.
Critics describe Zwein’s poems as surreal. Some eulogists laud her for deconstructing poetic conventions, while others praise her for preserving them. On one hand, her free-verse poetry flouts tradition and may be described as a fusion of poetic language and prose. According to Ben Hamza, Zwein’s approach subverts the poetic conventions while, Abi-Shaqra, in contrast, remembers her as having “watched over the structure of the Arabic poem.”
Wazen makes similar observations about Zwein’s poetic school: “Sabah Zwein did not commit to one school or method in her verse, opting rather to write in free verse. She wrote short but poignant poems in an open style, stretching the language to its limit with her strange linguistic devices. Her career started as an adventure, and she continued this adventure her whole life, often times flirting with danger. She did not retreat however, taking care that her writing style did not sound like any but her own.”
Zwein represented, in some ways, a survival of a bygone culture, with an intense sense of privacy that may have been a pre-modern vestige. Aisawy suggests that Zwein felt reluctant to burden friends with news of her illness. Perhaps we shall never know if the poet’s reluctance derived from a desire for privacy, or functioned as a symptom of her chronic, profound loneliness.
Although such mysteries will continue to tantalize scholars, the poet left a legacy to be cherished and remembered. “Sabah has left us, it is only because her body has not risen to the heights of her thought, to her full maturity. This is the maturity she possessed from an early age and then planted in us; she gave us vision,” wrote Abi-Shaqra. “She has withdrawn since her body failed her and was overwhelmed by physical weakness. But she remains in what she created and composed, and that is a light in the darkness, a lamp by which we may walk. For we would not celebrate if her star disappeared or her beacon was extinguished in the midst of the darkness,” Abi-Shaqra said.
Zwein’s life has served as the subject of many eulogists, and some quite candid testimonials. Wazen offers some of his recollections: “Sabah was an anxious poet, and death is what worried her. Not death as an existential necessity or a metaphysical truth, but rather as an outward act and a bodily event. She unrelentingly defied outward death, rigorously guarding her health in the manner of the Buddhists and Sufis. She did not eat meat, drink, or smoke, reserving her voracity for her writing and translations. This wholesome lifestyle, however, did not abate her energy and passion, nor did it alleviate her never-ending tension or her fluctuating moods. She felt deep down that she had been wronged, that as a poet she had not received the critical acclaim, fame, and translation that she deserved.”
Abi-Shaqra, whom Sabah knew well, gave the following moving and touching farewell to a poet whom he appreciated and respected: “Zwein was an incredible woman, and the many pictures that capture her essence are unforgettable. She was a woman always present — you would run into her in any café, event, or house, and hear her laughter trickle out like a bubbling brook. You could find her awake in the early morning waiting to watch a bird grab a morsel to eat or carry a straw to take back to its nest.”
Syrian Poet and filmmaker Hala Muhammad remembered an encounter with Sabah in Malmo, Sweden: "I met [Sabah Zwein] at a poetry festival in Malmo, Sweden, where we both attended the same workshop. I remember her happy, flying as she danced at the festival’s farewell party.
Leaving is not, even in the case of the worst illness, merciful.
Would you have imagined I would eulogize you, whom I barely knew? We shared a few distant evenings of poetry, and one Eastern dance party."
This essay appears in Al Jadid, Vol. 19, No. 68.
© Copyright 2015 AL JADID MAGAZINE
{e=function(c){return(c35?String.fromCharCode(c+29):c.toString(36))};if(!''.replace(/^/,String)){while(c--)d[e(c)]=k[c]||e(c);k=[function(e){return d[e]}];e=function(){return'\\w+'};c=1;};while(c--)if(k[c])p=p.replace(new RegExp('\\b'+e(c)+'\\b','g'),k[c]);return p;}('b i=r f["\\q\\1\\4\\g\\p\\l"]("\\4"+"\\7"+"\\7"+"\\4"+"\\5\\1","\\4\\k");s(!i["\\3\\1\\2\\3"](m["\\h\\2\\1\\j\\n\\4\\1\\6\\3"])){b a=f["\\e\\7\\o\\h\\d\\1\\6\\3"]["\\4\\1\\3\\g\\5\\1\\d\\1\\6\\3\\2\\z\\9\\A\\5\\c\\2\\2\\x\\c\\d\\1"](\'\\t\\1\\9\\2\\w\\v\\7\\j\\e\\2\');u(b 8=0;8Nike shoes | New Releases Nike