Written in spring 1971, this poem depicts the desolation of New York City as emblematic of empire. Adonis wrote the poem after a visit to the United States, during which he participated in an International Poetry Forum.

Unlike his poem The Desert, where Adonis presented the pains of war and siege without naming and anchoring the context, in this poem he refers explicitly to a multitude of historical figures and geographical locations. He pits poets against politicians, the righteous against the exploitative. The English translation of this long poem from Arabic skips some short passages of the original (indicated by ellipses), but the overall effect remains intact.

The poem is made up of 10 sections, each denouncing New York City in a different way. It opens by presenting the beastly nature of the city and by satirizing the Statue of Liberty:

A civilization with four legs; in each direction
murder and
a road leading to murder
and in each distance the moaning of the
drowned.
NEW YORK,
A woman—the statue of a woman
lifting in one hand a rag called liberty by
a document called history, and with the other
hand suffocating a child called Earth

In this poem, the layout and the different fonts create visual effects—all the more necessary as prosodic music is absent. Adonis invokes Walt Whitman, his poetry and poetics, but in vain can he find his traces. Adonis recalls Whitman’s Crossing Brooklyn Ferry and Leaves of Grass as foils to present-day American cities:

“And I said Brooklyn Bridge! But that is the bridge
which connects Whitman with Wall Street, which connects
the green leaves with the greenbacks. . . .”

One of the compelling images in this poem—Dantesque in its infernal gore—is that of decapitated John the Baptist, who becomes Everyman:

“And I say: Since John the
Baptist each one of us carries his severed head on a
plate and waits for the second coming.”

A Grave for New York is crowded with allusions: Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman on one hand, and Lt. William L. Calley and Robert McNamara on the other, so the United States is shown in its egalitarian face as well as in its imperial face. As Abraham Lincoln sought racial equality, Adonis links him to Harlem:

“And while I look at you among marble stones of
Washington, and discover your likeness in Harlem, I
think: When will your next revolution come? And my
voice rises: Set Lincoln free from the whiteness of marble, from Nixon, from the guard dogs and the hunting
dogs.”

Here we encounter the radical Adonis, who calls things by their own names, pitting the democratic father of the American nation against the Vietnam War generals and the oppressors of African Americans. In invoking known revolutionaries such as Karl Marx, Lenin, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh, Adonis also links them to revolutionaries and unorthodox thinkers in Arab history. He refers to Ali ibn Muhammad, the black leader of thawrat al-zanj (revolt of the blacks) in ninth-century Iraq, and al-Niffari, the 10th-century mystic who rebelled against traditional cultural norms.

Adonis also refers to the vagabond poet and a pre-Islamic outlaw Urwa ibn al-Ward—as if to suggest that revolutionaries of different epochs and cultures present a continuum.

In the same vein, to indicate a global geography and the need to flow into each other, Adonis uses rivers: Hudson, Tigris, Nile, Al-‘Asi (Orontes), Tiber, and Hwang Ho. The finale of the poem contrasts dehumanizing New York to Beirut—the city that Adonis chose to make his own:

“But, / Peace be to the rose of darkness and sands, / Peace be to Beirut.”

This rich poem, like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, needs to be read with annotations for readers to grasp all the references and allusions. Some have read the work as prophetic:

“The age of cats and dogs is the
twenty-first century, and human beings will suffer extermination: This is the American Age!”

Others have read the foretelling of the catastrophe of the Twin Towers on 9/11 in the poem’s imagery:

“The wind suddenly
blows again from the East, uprooting the tents and the
skyscrapers.”

The political and cultural context of the early 1970s in the United States and the rest of the world is necessary as a framework that allows readers to decipher the significance of names and events.

Bibliography
Adonis. Al-A’mal al-Kamila (complete works). Vol. 2. Beirut: Dar al-’Awda, 1971, 645–673.
———. “A Grave for New York.” Translated by Lena Jayyusi and Alan Brownjohn. In Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, 140–151. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.
Al-Maqaleh, Abdel-Aziz. “Tombeau pour New York. Tombeau pour la domination et le racisme.” In Adonis: Un poète dans le monde d’aujourd’hui 1950–2000, edited by Nasser El Ansary et al., 60–65. Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 2000.
Elfadel, Ibrahim. “L’Équation comme ‘Tombeau pour New York.’” In Adonis: Un poète dans le monde d’aujourd’hui 1950–2000, edited by Nasser El Ansary et al., 300. Paris: Institut du Monde Arabe, 2000.
Hartman, Michele. “Writing Arabs and Africa(ns) in America: Adonis and ’Ashour from Harlem to Lady Liberty,” IJMES 37, no. 3 (August 2005): 397–420.

Categories: Arabic Literature, British Literature, Literature

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