I will just begin with my section
from an essay that's in my book of essays
and just to get us started.
I was in Cairo in August 1990, when
Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait.
Like many people there, I accepted the UN efforts
and the strong international response I knew the west--
strong international response.
I knew the west acted quickly, only because Kuwait
has important oil reserves, because Kuwait is not
Cambodia or East Timor.
But I also know that Saddam Hussein was a vicious man.
And the idea of the world gathering strength
to squash his totalitarian regime appealed to me
and gave me some hope.
However, my assessment of the events in Kuwait
changed within weeks of my return to the United States.
On the radio and television, reporters
did not question the war's purpose,
but instead referred to pundits, who, in so many words,
declared the current conflict a natural byproduct
of the inherently violent Arab mind.
This is their thinking.
On the streets, there were the grotesque displays
of patriotism and the Arab bashing, mosque burnings, bomb
threats, beatings of Arab-Americans, events
that never made the news, which is happening, sort of, now.
Or this was beginning to happen now
with the most recent presidential election.
Then there was a long telephone conversation
with an Arab friend who said, the Arabs
must learn to accept their small place in the world.
This stunned me.
I had heard many Arabs expressing
self-deprecating, even self-loathing remarks
about their race and nationality.
I understood these remarks as angry expressions
arising from a people's inability
to achieve their ambitions.
But I never heard resignation such as my friend's.
Did my friend's attitude result from living in America
and from being exposed to the US media and government
propaganda?
Though directed at the American people,
could the propaganda have led a proud Arab such as my friend
to feel inferior?
And I mean, so the propaganda or the stereotypes
that are spread by American media
and in the American establishment arts,
if you will, about minorities and different races
do sometimes bleed into the minds of the people
of these minorities.
So how did my friend come up with that sort of notion?
And I did not know then, and I still don't know the answer
to these questions.
I did, however, know that the gap between my friend's
attitude and mine and the even larger gap between my attitude
and that of the majority of the people of the country in which
I have chosen to live, these gaps
demanded an explanation, a bridging and an epic of sorts.
I called the cable company, which
was airing all of that hostility,
and canceled my subscription.
I sat down to write.
I've gone back to get cable again.
And I use it now to repress.
Watching a lot of British soccer.
Maybe not an explanation but a response
to the dehumanization of the people I had grown up amongst
and to whom I still belong, a people
who have been stereotyped as incompetent boobs forever
fumbling for their fezzes or bloodthirsty primitives,
backward scheming fanatic terrorists who
are dirty, dishonest, oversexed and corrupt
to have a record of what Hollywood--
Hollywood has provided this.
There is a great documentary called Reel Arabs,
R-E-E-L Arabs, which just, it's a--
I don't know if people know what this is--
film called Cinema Paradiso, was at the end
this reel of like kissing scenes.
So it's almost like all the--
it's the cinema inferno for the Arabs or the Arab leaders.
It's like all of this crap that Hollywood has put out.
So it's a nightmarish films for the Arabs,
but it's something that has been happening
for a long time, this stereotyping.
It was difficult not to take these representations of Arabs
personally.
And it was as a person, that is, a spokesman
of the tribe that I wanted to speak.
Again, all of these terms are kind of relevant,
because when we're talking about an epic,
an epic is in many ways a poem from the inside.
And here's perhaps the idea that you-- and I'll
get to this-- that your time to write an epic from the outside
to an outside audience.
The representations of the Arabs were a lie,
and I knew something better, something closer to the truth.
As an artist though I distrusted quick reactions.
An artistic endeavor must go beyond the initial stimuli
for it and endure for it to become art.
Though I'm primarily a poet, I still
try not to limit my options to that genre.
OK, so I begin to write this poem, and I think of this poem.
And I begin to think that I'm going to write an epic.
But anyway the essay is called "Epic Temptations
on an Unwritten Poem".
I didn't write that poem.
And here, perhaps why.
The goals and approaches I set for the poem
would have easily disqualified it
for what has been traditionally known as epic.
The poem I had in mind would violate the general conception
of an epic as a narrative of its audience's own cultural,
historical, or mythic heritage.
So when I talk about the long poems,
I'm talking about historically.
And epic poems are like Homer, like "Paradise Lost".
These are poems from a sort of from the nation.
They're about the nation.
A lot of the great Yugoslav or Serbian epics,
I mean, that's how Serbian nationality is preserved.
Some of them about martyrs.
Some of them about great heroes.
So in essence, these are poems that
are narrative of the audience's own cultural, historical,
and mythic heritage.
And here you're thinking, I need to write a long poem that's
sort of contrary to these.
So it is a tale of the tribe told by its members.
While I consider myself a de facto member
of the American eclectic tribe, I
intended to write a poem that would introduce
one people to another, a function that was never
associated with the epic.
The epics don't tend to say, let's get together.
And let's be nice, like how we beat you up,
or you killed so many of us.
That's what epics do.
Another aspect of the epic is Ezra Pound asserted epic cannot
be written against the grain of its time.
The writer must voice the general heart.
And in turn, I understand the idea
of the voice, the general heart.
That seems like similar to what we had said before.
But what does he mean that it should not be
against the grain of its time?
Perhaps it should anticipate further.
It should-- it's very difficult to actually think of what Pound
meant by that, because he envisioned--
I can say envisioned a return to the past that
may be part of what Eliot had wanted, T.S. Eliot had wanted.
So but there's a certain sort of synchronicity, sort of the epic
maybe can move a society.
But it is, maybe it's a part of that it's something that
fills a need that society is anticipating
or that an intellectual feels that the society needs.
So this is all to say that it comes
from a sense of belonging, or at least it has come from that.
The epic, third point is the epic
addresses the citizen, not the individual
in his or her absolute inwardness.
This is from a critic named Bernstein,
to affirm values that the citizens believes
to some level.
So there has to be a sort of a ground, a firm
ground of agreement.
I had this discussion once, there's
a great book called Teaching With Your Mouth Shut.
Some of you might know this book or professors.
It's about pedagogy and how all you need to do is in some ways,
just sort of let the text speak for the students.
And the students sort of [INAUDIBLE]
But the text he used was Homer.
Actually for example, when I'm teaching Homer, you know,
this is-- the students will get engaged and get the--
reason the students might get engaged in Homer
is that they've drunk versions of Homer
in their mother's milk.
I mean, so there's that history of heroism
of the sort of man of the others that sort of need to be fought.
There is a certain way in which we know Homer
before we read Homer.
There's a pattern in the stories.
There's a pattern in the characterization.
There's a pattern in which these people are ours.
They're not others.
So yes, you can teach Homer with your mouth shut,
to some extent.
Because the students are going to-- waiting to talk-- blah,
blah, blah, blah.
And when you're talking about, even something
like Things Fall Apart, which people
have studied in high schools and so on, you
could see that this is not--
the people in these books are not their people.
They're not people that they're sort of used to.
And it's not easy to teach Things
Fall Apart or Mahmoud Darwish or a book about a Muslim woman
or a man with your mouth shut.
How do you have that conversation?
So there is a sense in the book, which
is that the epic is addresses the citizen, not
the individual, but also addresses his or her values.
And there's a level of identification
that we have with the epics, that we have with these epic
figures, that may not be readily available with texts that
are outside the Western canon.
And this is again, this is different.
So to think of an epic being there
to introduce a different people to another
or to humanize the others.
That's not the traditional approach,
let's put it this way.
Furthermore, a sense of hope and heroism
are associated strongly with the epic.
Pound wrote that for 40 years, I have schooled myself
to write an epic which belongs in the dark force
across the purgatory of human error and ends in light.
Considering the war that was taking place in time
at the time, the story I wanted to tell
was more an act of desperation than hope.
As for heroes, and epic is considered a storehouse
of heroic examples and precepts by which
later generations would measure their own conduct.
That would have been a hope--
I didn't want to--
I wasn't going to undertake this project
with some element of hope.
But I think, I wasn't sure that I could actually
have that hope.
Now, I want to sort of-- here are
some things that sort of also put a slowdown in the project.
There were perhaps technical generic issues
that time may have passed.
So there are certain ways in which the drama of the epic, we
may have surpassed it.
But with the contemporary practice,
I learned that there are many more ways in which you
could write the long poem.
But there are certain concerns that
must be addressed for the writing to continue.
One of these, I think, is that the poet --when the decision
to write a poem takes place, there's
an element of self-definition or self possession, if you will.
Robert Hayden explains the idea of writing "Middle Passage",
how it came to him, which is a poem about the journeys
of African slaves from the Western shores of Africa.
They had been stolen, kidnapped, and then placed
into these storehouses in various ports
around West Africa.
And then from there, they are taken
to New Orleans or Savannah or Mobile or wherever that may be.
And of course, you've seen these diagrams
of what these boats look like.
You essentially had-- essentially,
it's almost like people are packed
in exactly like sardines.
And many died and so on.
So he wanted to write about that.
So the idea of writing his poem, "The Middle Passage",
which is not very long, but came to him from a Stephen Vincent
Benét poem that prophecies a poet who will write
a black-skinned epic, epic with the long black spear.
Hayden said, I dare to hope that I might be that poet.
Similarly, Walt Whitman decided to cast himself
in the role of his own epic hero.
His eyes would be turned both inward and outward,
and his voice would be both personal and public.
Whitman wrote Leaves of Grass with the notion of himself
as the American prototypical persona.
But with Hayden and Whitman mythologized themselves
into the role of their audiences' spokesman.
These poets do not simply insert themselves into history,
rather they emphasize that their people's history must
be processed through them.
The epic poet must have a sense of
self-importance, if to some degree, even some
delusions of grandeur.
I had to compensate for this by developing the first person
omniscient voice in the poem I was working on.
To assume omniscience, I had to believe
that all the facts and fictions I wrote
and that proved to be somewhat difficult text.
So there's a kind of positioning of yourself as a poet.
I'm going to write the big poem.
Who am I?
What is it, my mission that I have?
So there's a certain self-mythologization.
I mean, even if you're writing all in third person,
you have to mythologize your role as an operator.
I'm looking at something like this,
which is a great, great book called,
by Charles Reznikoff, Testimony, which
is an American history based on court records.
He was a lawyer.
He studied about 30 years of American court records.
He would write one record of maybe 100 pages,
and he may come up with a paragraph.
And this is a book that's about 600 pages long.
And it is full of stories of people on railroads.
The book is divided into a lot of working stories, Blacks,
Mexicans, north, south, stories of shipping,
stories of railroads.
It's a great, great document.
So even though Reznikoff is absent,
there is [INAUDIBLE] of ambition and ambition for the book
and a certain kind of self-mythologization
to sustain.
I'm going to write a book that will do something.
And I think that maybe it's a claim of agency.
Let's not over call it as mythological.
So there's a claim of agency that the big poem demands,
that perhaps the shorter, more innocuous or spontaneous lyric
poem doesn't demand.
So here's Testimony.
Reznikoff also wrote a great book of poetry or lyric poetry
called The Holocaust, which takes the documents of--
what is the city in Germany where the trials were held?
Nuremberg.
The Nuremberg trials that also renders them
into these sort of testimonies of Holocaust
survivors and so on.
So a great documentary poet.
So there's another aspect which is
juggling history and fiction.
Paul Merchant, a critic, argues that the epic poet
uses historical materials for his own ends.
I, on the other hand, wanted to write a history using poetry.
The difference between these two approaches
may seem artificial, considering how epic or fictional history
is.
Regardless of whether the writer wants
to emphasize history or fiction in the epic,
the writer must possess encyclopedic knowledge or close
to it of the culture she or he is writing about.
Adrienne Rich addresses this point in the following
lines of one of her poems.
Suppose you want to write of a woman braiding another woman's
hair, straight down or with beads and shells in three
strand plaits or cornrows.
You had better know the thickness,
the length, the pattern, why she decides to braid her hair,
how it is done to her, what country it happens in,
what else happens in that country.
You have to know these things.
So if a poet-- this is the long poem.
You may want to begin with the lyric image, the precise image.
There's a great haiku about my dead wife's comb,
my cold dead wife's comb in my bed.
And he discovers-- his wife had died,
but her iron comb on a cold night is still in the bed.
And it pricks his foot.
So that image of the lyric moment.
In a longer poem, it has to be surrounded--
it has to be filled with so many other aspects.
Urgent demands from the writer, contextual knowledge,
even if one is to write a lyric.
For me, the problem was the opposite.
I had a broad sense of Libya's history
but not enough of the details, such as the quotidian scene
Rich describes.
History does not give these details.
And as a writer, I would face problems
if she or he tries to fill these gaps with imaginary or overly
imagined situations.
So I had one story, which I rewrote
several times, which is the story
of the birth of my father.
When my family had to leave Libya in the 20s
after the Italian colonization, they
had to walk maybe 1,500 miles through the desert.
And my father was born somewhere on that trip.
So just the idea of this birth somewhere along the road,
maybe he was conceived during this long journey.
If that's an image that I had that I could feel,
but there's so much else that happened.
There are so many details--
to know the country's history but to not
to know the little bits, and to know
that your family had also many gaps in the stories
or reluctant.
People who've had a difficult life,
they don't want to always share the details
and not the family end up at the comic, happy ending
towards the end of all that exile.
But they didn't reveal the hard parts.
They were not going to detail them.
So the details were not there.
And so it was difficult to bring them together.
And then access, the last point which has really what
my poem to an end is access.
I was a political refugee in Libya still in 1991.
I did not really have much access
to many books about Libya or to go to Libya itself to find out
these stories.
So there is also the issue of geographical access.
I found it difficult to visualize scenes and speakers
having not visited Libya for 14 years.
Imagination is rooted in memory.
If one's memory of a place dies, so
does the ability to write imaginatively about it.
In other cases in which I was not
going to write poems based on memory,
I needed physical access to certain settings,
in order to accurately describe the scenes of the poems.
Places always adjust the cadences
in which the poetry about them is to be written.
I needed access to Libya to feel the cadence
and to tell the stories according to the rhythm.
So this is essentially why a poem was not written.
You needed a certain--
the epic sort of the long poem is contrary, at least
traditionally, contrary to the aims of descent,
to some extent.
But that's not always true.
And then there's a kind of a sense of belonging
and self-definition and access to information
that was necessary.