The Desert includes selections from the poetic diary of Adonis during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and the siege of Beirut. The poem is dated “June 4, 1982–Jan. 1, 1983.” It is made up of 35 numbered (but not dated) stanzas in the bilingual edition Victims of a Map. The poetic diary also appeared in a slightly different arrangement in Kitab al-Hisar: Huzayran 82–Huzayran 85 (The Book of Siege: June 82–June 85), under the titles of “Sahara I” and “Sahara II.” Kitab al-Hisar also includes prose passages about the siege, which help readers to understand the poetry with its references to shelters, power failure, and so on.

In Desert Adonis does not name the enemy, nor does he directly describe the carnage wrought by modern war. Instead, he creates a series of snapshots of what it is like to live under such conditions. Lacking a linear narrative thread, the stanzas express—in their very structure—the fragmentation of life in violent conflicts.

Adonis writes a poetic version of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica by depicting the disjointedness of everyday life in a war zone. In a compelling image the poetic persona describes his alienation from time itself—by becoming a shadow—and says: “Daylight is a thread / Snipped by my lungs to stitch the evening.” Such strange, almost surrealistic imagery matches the unspeakable horrors of war. With bombing and killing marking the cityscape, even smoke is identified with people’s breath, and “Death alone has become our meeting point.”

Adonis perceives the relationship between militarism and capitalism in stanza 15: “He wears Jihad uniform, struts in a mantle of ideas. / A merchant—he does not sell clothes, he sells people.” This state of violent strife changes the very fabric of self and home: “The houses leave their walls / And I am / Not I.” The observant eye of the poet captures beautifully and tragically how everything is touched and tarnished by war: “Only some holes known as stars / Remain in the sky.”

Repetition and use of brackets mark the longer stanzas. Repetition is used for emphasis, as in stanza 29, with its incantatory “The Night descends . . .” at the beginning of each line. Yet each nocturnal descent is followed by a different bracketed scene, thus offering a variety of moments: “The night descends on the bed (the bed of the lover who never came) / . . . / The night descends (the wind whispers to the windows).”

Despite the gloomy and horrific atmosphere of this poetic diary, an inkling of hope manifests itself timidly: “The cities break up / The earth is a train of dust / Only love / knows how to marry this space.” Finally, like the long night of mystics that ends in dawn, the poet wonders: “Or should I say: the road to the light begins in the forest of darkness?”

The politics of the poem—its denunciation of Israeli violence and civil war—remain a subtext. The poem itself paints the scene of physical destruction and spiritual loss that applies to all wastelands.

Bibliography
Adonis. “The Desert: The Diary of Beirut Under Siege, 1982.” In Victims of a Map, translated by Abdullah al-Udhari, 135–165. London: Al Saqi Books, 1984.
———. Kitab al-Hisar: Huzayran 82–Huzayran 85 (The Book of Siege: June 82–June 85). Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1985.
Khatibi, Abdelkebir. “La poésie/La guerre.” Détours d’écriture (special issue on Adonis) 16 (1991): 235–236.
Meschonnic, Henri. “Le poète arabe contre le chant de la langue.” Détours d’écriture (special issue on Adonis) 16 (1991): 141–152.
Tannous, Jean. “Jadaliyyat al-nur wa’l-zil fi Kitab al-Hisar” (The Dialectic of Light and Shadow in the Book of Siege). Fusul (special issue on Adonis) 16, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 48–55.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, War Literature

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