{"id":9387,"date":"2022-07-15T08:59:57","date_gmt":"2022-07-15T06:59:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/?p=9387"},"modified":"2022-12-25T11:22:43","modified_gmt":"2022-12-25T09:22:43","slug":"poetry-as-a-form-of-madness-review-of-a-friendship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldsite\/poetry-as-a-form-of-madness-review-of-a-friendship\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry as a Form of Madness\u2014Review of a Friendship"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"
A poem from Maged Zaher’s The Shadow that Doesn’t Leave the Shirt<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

 <\/p>\n

The Shadow that Doesn\u2019t Leave the Shirt<\/em>, poems by Maged Zaher
\nSplitLevel Texts<\/a> 2022
\nISBN 9780999570111<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Youssef Rakha<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

For nearly two years now, getting together with\u00a0Maged\u00a0Zaher at one particular\u00a0downtown\u00a0Cairo cafe\u00a0has been a semi-regular ritual.<\/p>\n

It takes place in the outdoor seating area, during the day.\u00a0Maged\u00a0always arrives with plastic bags full of books,\u00a0bought from the famous\u00a0downtown stalls. On one of the two smartphones he carries, he usually also has some new poems secreted. Sometimes he reads them to me.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Available from SplitLevel Texts<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once, inspired by something I said, he typed out a whole new micro poem as if he were\u00a0texting while we sipped our drinks: espresso for me, a teapot for him, sparkling water for both of us. Poetry as a natural extension of friendship,\u00a0just as it should be.<\/p>\n

But poetry is far from our only subject. The conversation is always extempore and wide-ranging. It is so relaxed I sometimes wonder why it isn\u2019t just pleasant. Because getting together with\u00a0Maged\u00a0is something else. It has the soul-stirring effect you might expect of therapy, but only if therapy were a two-way, cross-cultural confession,\u00a0with bookish references\u00a0and political commentary. What is it about our meetings that makes them that way?<\/p>\n

The last time we met,\u00a0Maged\u00a0gave me the first of his seven books of poetry to appear since he relocated permanently from Seattle,\u00a0The Shadow that Doesn\u2019t Leave the Shirt<\/em> (SplitLevel Texts, 2022). He said it was a qualitative leap in the trajectory of his writing. And, even though it overlaps with earlier work, and its contents have no direct relation with anything we\u2018ve talked about, the book feels like an aesthetic crystallization of the experience. It has the same soul-stirring effect, without the interpersonal immediacy but in a higher concentration.<\/p>\n

Something about the way he can be so astonishingly explicit without ruining his art strikes me right away: \u201cSex and language\/Two bad ways\/To fathom our thrownness here\/Some escaped those two paths though:\/Monks and porn stars.\u201d<\/p>\n

But\u00a0Maged\u2018s\u00a0writing is already familiar. It shares a lot with the Arabic work of the\u00a0group of poets known as the Nineties Generation, with whom both he and I are associated. It is written in the first person. It makes no distinction between the author and the speaker, or indeed the subject. And it combines a kind of emotional exhibitionism with intellectual wonder. Still, being in English and riddled with Western-inflected global references\u00a0\u2014\u00a0Schiele, Cavafy, Arendt, Ovid\u00a0\u2014 Maged\u2018s\u00a0work is its own phenomenon.<\/p>\n

On the first page, following a dedication, the poet explains that, together with his meds, these poems helped him through \u201ca major mental illness\u201d that first\u00a0hit in 2019. In the work itself he describes a \u201csense of exclusion from the planet\u201d that \u201ccomes after madness recedes.\u201d\u00a0He speaks of taking lithium, attending \u201cstrange gatherings\u201d where people discuss \u201cpainful fantasies,\u201d\u00a0and waiting \u201cfor the medicine to\u00a0undo the passage of time.\u201d\u00a0Towards the end of the book,\u00a0he writes:<\/p>\n

I look at these equations\u00a0
\nThat describe buildings\u2019 behavior\u00a0
\nAh, I used to solve these equations in my twenties\u00a0
\nNow I can\u2019t I came to the US twenty-five years ago\u00a0
\nBecause I was good at solving such equations\u00a0
\nMaybe it is time to go back<\/p>\n

The book speaks more to those\u00a025\u00a0years than their dramatic d\u00e9nouement. It does mention an arrest, a mental hospital, sending \u201cdick pictures to everybody.\u201d\u00a0But it\u00a0doesn\u2018t dwell on any of that. Once he was well enough,\u00a0it seems\u00a0Maged\u00a0came back to where he was born and raised. A\u00a0wiz\u00a0kid, he had started an engineering career without giving thought to his deeper needs. He arrived in the US only as a graduate student, and perhaps as a kind of refugee from the restrictive, oppressive society in which he grew up. \u201cEscape from Cairo while living in it,\u201d\u00a0he writes, \u201cis the craft of its inhabitants.\u201d\u00a0But now his stay in the land of sanity had run its course.<\/p>\n

During his time in the United States,\u00a0Maged\u00a0became a software engineer, a\u00a0scion of the corporate sector, \u201cdeep in the belly of the beast\u201d: \u201cYou are Jonah\/And you devour the beloved.\u201d\u00a0This clearly ate away at him. But he managed to hold onto a literary practice: \u201cthis awful business of poetry,\u201d\u00a0as he calls it, \u201cWhere I rearrange\u00a0my masks\/To peekaboo myself.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

In the afterlife, they will replace literature with mathematics.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As you read\u00a0The Shadow<\/em>\u00a0you will sometimes notice the syntax breaking down, evidence of a mind straining \u201cto be in two places at once.\u201d\u00a0Maged\u00a0has continued to engage deeply with\u00a0Arabic\u00a0but he only writes in English\u00a0\u2014\u00a0a language\u00a0he did not learn properly until he was an adult.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Maged Zaher is the author of The Consequences of My Body<\/em> (Nightboat Books, 2016), If Reality Doesn’t Work Out<\/em> (SplitLevel Texts, 2014), Thank You for The Window Office<\/em> (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2012), The Revolution Happened and You Didn’t Call Me<\/em> (Tinfish Press, 2012), and Portrait of the Poet as an Engineer<\/em> (Pressed Wafer, 2009). His translations of contemporary Egyptian poetry have appeared in Jacket Magazine, Denver Quarterly and Banipal. He has performed his work at Subtext, Bumbershoot, the Kootenay School of Writing, St. Marks Project, Evergreen State College, and American University in Cairo, among other places. Maged is the recipient of the 2013 Genius Award in Literature from the Seattle weekly The Stranger. Photo courtesy Youssef Rakha.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

He has also kept up his respect for the perfection and clarity of numbers, compared to the inadequacy and messiness of words. At the end of the book,\u00a0he prays that on leaving his body his soul \u201cbecomes a mathematical object.\u201d\u00a0\u201cIn the afterlife,\u201d\u00a0he says, \u201cthey will replace literature with mathematics.\u201d<\/p>\n

This and writing in English while learning it made him a master of the one-liner. \u201cLet us assume the innocence of dictionaries,\u201d\u00a0for example. Or: \u201cWhen you pack your bags you lose some poems.\u201d\u00a0But it is not clear how much any of this influenced his approach to form.<\/p>\n

Maged\u2018s pieces are almost always untitled, neither standalone poems nor sequences of a long poem. With rare exceptions, they live in the space between those two things. That way,\u00a0he can explore his interests in depth without committing to anything too dogmatically solid.<\/p>\n

More than in person\u00a0\u2014\u00a0but that too\u00a0\u2014\u00a0you can tell\u00a0Maged\u00a0has spent a huge amount of time, to quote Leonard Cohen, \u201cmeeting Christ and reading Marx.\u201d\u00a0A yearning for communist equity and Christian love form a kind of canopy for his thoughts and observations. But rather than denying or repudiating them, it\u00a0actually spotlights\u00a0desire and the body. Poetry as friendship turns into practical philosophy,\u00a0kinda. Then you remember that poetry itself, however sane the poet, is often a form of madness.<\/p>\n

I finished\u00a0Maged\u2018s\u00a0book in the course of one otherwise indolent day\u00a0over\u00a0the Eid break, but I haven\u2018t stopped returning to the poems in the midst of all kinds of busyness since. They\u2018ve certainly altered my view of a recently acquired true friend. But they have made me\u00a0all the more\u00a0eager to keep up the ritual.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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