The experience of the poet Rifaat Salam (1951-2020) belongs to the generation of the seventies of the contemporary Egyptian poetic scene, this generation that is considered a founding generation within contemporary culture, not only in Egypt, but also in all other Arab countries.
The importance of the poets of this generation appeared prominent and strong within the process of modernizing contemporary Arabic poetry and leaving it out of the structure of tradition, which some poetic experiences tried to consecrate, and despite the artistic and aesthetic practices of some of the sixties' experiences, they remain rare and counted on the fingers of one hand.
Compared to the wave of the seventies and the creative role it played in penetrating the imagined Arabic poetry, so that experiences such as Rifaat Salam, Abdel Moneim Ramadan, Abdullah Zorika, Amjad Nasser, Muhammad Bennis, and Qassem Haddad suggested poetic forms that break free from the grip of tradition and the authority of the model The ancient Arabic poetry by proposing more intimate visions and perceptions of itself and its daily concerns. It captures the transitory, the evanescent, the vanished, the invisible, the forgotten, and the unthinkable within the Arabic poetic text, whether on the level of language, form or imagination, it puts the "poem" on the edge of wound, question and experimentation.
The latter will become one of the most prominent aesthetic features that imprinted the poet’s experience. Raised peace and opened for her and Egyptian poetry new horizons at the level of imagination, and made the poetic text fundamentally stem from the self and its dark vaults and its passion for searching for a poetic language that escaped from the grip of the daily political dictionary, which it has been characterized by. Other Arab poetic experiences in that period within the framework of what has been historically called the "ideological poem", in order to nurture Arab sentiment and individual conscience towards some of the central issues that have swept the Arab region since the end of the sixties of the twentieth century.
Although the term "ideological poem" needs more than a critical review because of its generality and its projections on a generation for which "ideology" was not a choice but rather an urgent, existential and political necessity that made it physically involve in this practice towards the regimes and their repressive institutions, it will soon disappear in favor of a poetic text It takes into account the cognitive and aesthetic peculiarities that will appear more and more within the experience of Rifaat Salam since the mid-eighties.
Poetry, not ideology
All this came as an attempt to confront the various political, security and religious powers that hindered and receded the path of modernizing Arab literature, along with the pioneers of modernist enlightenment thought, especially the poets.
However, with the poet Raisat Salam's poetically belonging to this generation, he did not believe in the concept of boundaries and fences that restrict the course of the act of writing, and it digs its course deep in literary genres of all stripes and diversities, so that in addition to his poetic project he has always raised it every time that We are presented with a work that is a translation of one of the world’s poetic icons such as Rambo, Baudelaire, Walt Whitman, Yannis Ritsos, Cavafy and others.
Thus, the Arab press believed that it was just a passing literary whim, but soon it discovered that the poet Rifaat Salam carries a pure and unique project in translating these major poetic works, until he became in a short period of the most important Egyptian names that work in parallel with literary writing and translation at the same time.
Poetic and political
Despite the constriction that Rifaat Salam and his generation witnessed during the hot years, they remained attached to changing and modernizing contemporary Arab poetry and breaking it from the modern model constructively and imagining, and placing it in the heart of Arab societies, not only as a pressure and auxiliary force on the revolution, but also as a bet on the aesthetic dimension. Within the poetic text, in order to liberate it from the ideological character that has become a mark that distinguishes this generation from other poetic generations within the Arab world.
The Algerian writer Abdel-Razzaq Boukabeh says in this regard to Al-Jazeera Net, "When Rifaat Salam began writing with an elite group of poets, the prevailing Arab taste was immersed in the glorification of patriotic and national concerns imposed by the general conditions within the framework of the hegemony of the discourse of freedom and national independence, so the poem was based on the direct tone. And the collective obsession is the forerunner of the written and reading scene, the two factors that made it heavy with burdens that stripped it of the spirit of poetry and brought it closer to the spirit of politics, so it was a political document rather than an aesthetic document.
Boukba added that in light of this situation, "rich in poems and poor in poetry, Rifaat won an aesthetic, linguistic and philosophical victory, taking from it his starting point and end. Even the" Salafism "to which his text was linked was linked to modernist experiences in the Arab poetic heritage, especially the Sufis and the people of the symbol and the vision. This was a political position in and of itself from him and an elite group of poets from his generation, which was called the generation of defeat, but in reality it was the generation of attention to the emptiness of the national political discourse that exhausted all Arab systems, including the poetic system.
The intellectual and spiritual tourism that Rifaat Salam was undertaking in the Western poetry blog played a big role in his adherence to his anti-stage aesthetic choice and its flabby speech.
He translated from them experiences that Nasira saw as a partner in choice
Here, an important observation imposes itself in the context of talking about the experience of Rifaat Sallam as a translator of Western poetry, which is that he is one of the few Arab poets who expressed their fascination with Western poetry through translation and not through their texts themselves, since they remained pure and authentic in their drive towards modernization.
Continuous experimentation
In his recent poetic work “Raise the water over the water” recently published by Dar Khatt in Jordan, this critical review that Rifaat Salam has devoted himself to his poetic experience becomes evident. In this work the power of aesthetic experimentation is evident. He is keen here to make the poetic identify with the visual by making His poetic texts are intertwined with artistic drawings of eagles, crocodiles, banging wings, traces of walking, masks, wavy lines of shapes and other visual signs, which illuminate the space of the poetic text and make it enter into a process of debate with this visual heritage close to the Egyptian civilization, but without residing in this rich history, as much as What makes him always mere images and fantasies that proceed mainly from the reality he belongs to.
Rifaat says at the beginning of this new poetic work, "I am the crying crow, hovering over the ruins, happy and dazzled (Oh God, is it a feast? Or a festival), under me the ruins and ruins are blooming, under me the fires are glorious, body parts flying, and smoke rises from the police departments, the ruling party Armored and armored vehicles, informants and officers, newspapers and TV channels, banks, ministries, barracks, statements, songs, bad prose poems, the streets, rivers of blood in which blood fish swim and affirming dreams, in which children play barefoot, under the stars and yellow swords rust, eagles spend, On the shoulders of the soldiers rots, and under me a resurrection will flourish. "
This is what the Syrian critic Ali Safar understood, as he says in his private interview with Al-Jazeera Net that “absorbing poetry to the point of forgetting time, abandoning what it brings to the imagination of tying its crazy springs, and re-editing it time after time, is an adventure that raised the peace that I belong to. In terms of generations to the seventies, but was actually tried as if it was my ninetieth, and even belonging to the horizons of the new millennium! The poet ends with what he writes in the highest levels of the release of the energies of madness, but at the end of the second volume of his complete works he creates a memory for his history, which he called "hobo" or poems first!".
Creative chaos
On this basis, it seems to the critic Ali Safar that “when we remember that he published his first collection“ The Beautiful Rose of Chaos ”in 1987, this is late in the history of readers’ acquaintance with him as a poet! And it is also far behind in the obsessive youth activity related to poetry if it was through belonging and activity in a group. “Lighting 77” as well as the dazzling activity according to his time and place in “Kitabat” magazine! Fidelity to the experience with its artistic and perhaps political concerns as well, made Rifaat Salam one of the Arab poetic knowledge makers, especially since we cannot research the meaning of poetry within the standard of the present without contemplating his experience Continuing from the beginning, and until his book "Shepherd the Sheh on the Water", especially his combination of the text, the margin and the drawings, as if he is restoring the childhood of man! Likewise, we cannot ignore his translations of some of the most important poets around the world, including certainly the Greek Ritsos, who does not find a poet writing the prose poem. He reads something from his poignant texts! And the beautiful translation of Susan Bernard's prose poem!
Ali Safar concludes his speech to Al-Jazeera Net, saying that "many circumstances in the poet's personal life made him on the wounded edge, from the events that he lived in the last decade in terms of belonging to the revolution, facing the expropriation of its energy, and the coup against it by the military, as well as the long-term suffering from illness, when it is close together." With profound defeats, the reality of the situation cannot pass unnoticed, and within this horizon the poetic experience, with its revolutionary and depth of knowledge, becomes the refuge! It is the way to salvation! Although death does not accept defeat, it is possible to confront it, and this is what Rifaat did, so we made us remember His poems, so do not forget a poet through our lives, and we were left confused, where does such beauty come from in our dark days like this ?!