The Lebanese writer Issa Makhlouf, since his first book, "A Star in the Front of Death, Slow Down," published in Beirut in 1981, has been blaspheming against the current, tweeting out of the flock, alienating from classification, professing wisdom and philosophical and mystical contemplation, and mastering writing based on erasure, sculpture, symbolism and intensification.
His compassion in all of this is his poetic, delicate, transparent sense, his love of letters and words, his unification with the language of flowers, birds and butterflies, and his hunting with the steps of the narrator, rhymes and seas with the first breezes of dawn and the rain of showers and the opening of the morning
For all this, this last child, dreamer, poet and mystic, was addicted to this beautiful intense linguistic delirium, hoping to reach the realm of the ascending essence, and evoking the theory of the Sufis and Al-Nafri's saying: "Whenever the vision widens, the phrase narrows," and in search of "the effect of the butterfly that does not see and does not disappear .. On a journey of luring And exploring the meaning, "as Mahmoud Darwish put it.
The dictionary of alienation, loss, travel, travel, migration, exile, asylum, search for self and identity is strongly present in the writings of Issa Makhlouf.
Poetry is a permanent travel in the self and in reality, and an eternal spiritual alienation towards the unknown, and Makhlouf himself carried his bundle of thoughts on his back and migrated early, compelled as a result of the Lebanese civil war to Caracas, Venezuela, then addicted to traveling in the east and west of the earth.
From Latin America to Europe, to North America, and finally settles in Paris, where he now resides.
Issa Makhlouf has published many creative works in various forms of saying poetry, prose, criticism, theater, translation, meditation and philosophy, including "The Solitude of Gold" Beirut 1992, "Hayamat" Paris 1993, "Ain Al Sarab" Beirut 2000, and "Message to the Sisters" Beirut 2004, “A City in the Sky” Paris 2014, “Their dreams fell asleep and swung on the waves” Paris 2016, “Waves” in Paris 2018, and “Masks of exoticism” Toledo 2018.
In the theater, he released "In front of the embassy door, the night was long," with the artist Nidal Al-Ashqar, and also the play "Shorouk".
In critical studies we mention “Beirut or Infatuation with Death” Paris 1988, and his reference book “Levantine Dreams… Borges in the Labyrinths of a Thousand and One Nights” Beirut 1996, the second revised edition of which was published in 2019 by Dar Al-Tanweer, and “Paradise Apple… Questions About Culture Contemporary Beirut, 2006.
Issa Makhlouf with the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (Al-Jazeera)
As for translation, he published "Stories from Latin America" on Spanish, "Petra ... the Words of Stone", and George Shehadeh's play about the French "Immigrant Brisbane", presented by director Nabil Al-Ardhan in "Baalbek International Festivals, Summer 2004. It was translated into French the group." The poetry “The Forest of Love in Us” by Adonis, Paris, 2009. On the language of Mouliard, he translated “The Troubles Area” by Abdel-Latif Al-Laabi in 2014. Most of these books were translated into international languages such as Spanish, English and French, and were published in many editions.
Next month, he will publish two books on Dar Al-Rafidain;
They are "Other Shores", which is a long dialogue with him by the Iraqi poet Ali Mahmoud Khudair, and the second book is "Van Gogh committed suicide in society," in a translation from French by the writer Antounan Arto.
On his poetry collection "What will remain" recently issued by Dar Al-Tanweer in Beirut, the distinctive features of his creative body and his vision of some burning immediate literary and cognitive issues;
This was a private meeting on Al-Jazeera Net with the Lebanese writer, in addition to several other important Arab and humanitarian issues.
So to the dialogue:
Can the amulet of the poem, literature and spirituality counter the strong current of globalization and wild capital?
Arts and literature do not claim the ability to fight wars, and to face the current and current economic pattern, and their response is not usually an immediate response.
It is a digging process in the depths that starts from reality to go further than it, and it sometimes helps to bear its conditions and woes.
It is - originally - an entity of a human and aesthetic nature that includes visions and starts from questions.
There are precise and focused questions that help advance human societies more than all ready-made answers.
Your poetry is distinguished and your poems are based on artistic and symbolic condensation, erasure, wisdom, and philosophical and mystical meditation, why?
Art - in general - including poetic and literary art in general, is a journey into the unknown, not only stopping at the tangible apparent, but also trying to go in the direction of the invisible of beings and things.
This may intersect with Al-Nafri's vision, but without necessarily becoming a mystical literary text, no matter how intense it is and drenched in contemplation, otherwise many writings in which the beyond and the philosophical contemplative dimension will be present in Sufi writings which are not so, and among these experiences - for example - the writings of Hölderlin and Rayner Maria Rilke.
Issa Makhlouf with the French international plastic artist Asador (Al Jazeera)
You are influenced by the visual and scenic arts, cinema, plastic art, the movements of nature, and its language is evident in all of your paths, especially in the book “What will remain”, so what is the symbolism of this selection and employment?
The arts in general, including the plastic and scenic arts, as well as music and engineering, are part of my cultural composition and my writings, and they are not decorative at all because they are also part of the internal structure of the text, and cannot be separated from it.
The book "A Letter to the Two Sisters" begins with a song by Bach, and music and talk about it become part of the literary body itself.
Writing - like all creative work - is the outcome of an inner experience that is inseparable from what we read, hear and watch, and from our encounters with people, nature, world conditions and their impact on us.
From the reality of your understanding of alienation and displacement, and about the alienations and torments of the contemporary Arab world, have the Arab people written about the reality of displacement, tyranny, injustice and wars?
- In Gabriel García Marquez's book dedicated to Simon Pulver, a phrase came to me that is the spirit of the book.
One of the characters in the novel said, "I am living a fate that is not my destiny."
This is how I felt when I left Lebanon at the age of 19 due to the civil war.
This is what hundreds of thousands of people like me have lived when they scattered across the earth in search of an oasis of safety.
Most of the Arab countries have not transformed - after more than half a century of their independence - into actual states, and most of them are also dependent countries, which do not have a modern educational policy, and they have not established schools in the modern sense of the word, but in them the freedom of research and thinking is denied in order to become with them a monolithic society. Consideration and thought, away from the realization of the mind and critical sense.
Issa Makhlouf's book "What will remain" was published by Dar Al-Tanweer for Publishing (Al-Jazeera)
The question is: What progress can be made in the midst of all these trends?
Rather, any progress can take place within societies that pursue their actual thinkers, writers, and intellectuals of free objective opinion;
Arrest them, kill them, or drive them to flee?
The demise of pluralism and freedom of expression in any society is the transformation of this society into a large prison and open cemetery in which people die even before they are born.
The Egyptian writer Youssef Idris says, "All the freedom available in the Arab world is not enough for one writer." So do you think that creativity, thought and Arab culture fly one wing of freedom in the sky of literature and global cultures?
Creativity is impossible in a climate hostile to freedom, freedom of expression, criticism, and publicity without fear for one's life.
It is also impossible in the absence of multiple thought.
I give an example.
The role that Beirut represented in the Arab world until the mid-1970s, and the beginning of the civil war, the Lebanese capital was a laboratory for thought, science and culture with its schools, universities, libraries, media, publishing houses, cultural forums, exhibitions and festivals.
It was "a feast" as Ernest Hemingway said about Paris, and "Paris is a feast" became the title of one of his books.
And if Beirut reached this role, it is because it enjoyed a margin of freedom and pluralism that allowed the writer to write, the thinker to think, and the dancer to dance, and the city became a home for Arab creators fleeing from despotic tyranny.
The book "Levantine Dreams: Borges in the Labyrinths of a Thousand and One Nights" is one of the most accurate Arabic translations of the international Argentine writer (Al-Jazeera).
However, the despotism that had tightened its grip on Lebanon since the civil war, in addition to the backward sectarian system, has dissolved and continues to pounce in an orderly manner on the margin of freedom that once characterized Lebanon within its surroundings and in the world.
In this context, a large number of Lebanese intellectuals, writers, and journalists have been killed, the last of which is the writer, researcher and publisher Luqman Salim.
These political assassinations are among the factors that strip Beirut of its role and the live presence of which it is known, and make it join the ranks of tyrannical countries that betray any different freedom and accuse him of working abroad in preparation for his liquidation.
How do you evaluate the revolution of the Lebanese people on the injustice that took off the garments of sectarianism, tribalism and partisanship and went to the squares in revolt?
Do you think that this revolution failed to overcome the minefields planted by the movements and the anti-revolutionary classes?
What is the future of the Lebanese revolution if its embers are still burning under the ashes?
Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese young men and women took to the streets and squares, an important historical moment in the modern history of Lebanon, and they demanded a change in the sectarian system based on corruption, clientelism, favoritism, and the birth of civil wars, and the building of a secular, democratic state that accommodates Lebanon's plural formation and preservation and explodes its positive energies.
From the first moment of this great move that held the political class in Lebanon responsible for the destruction of the country, this class accused the youth who represent the future and the true face of Lebanon of being agents of the outside, and sought by all means to undermine their revolution.
In addition to the violence of the existing regime and its exploitation of the sectarian formation, the Corona epidemic came to counter their movement throughout the Lebanese territories.
And if the revolution has not yet been able to form its solid core, it has planted the first seed of change that can not be uprooted anymore, and which will inevitably bear fruit.
The poet Issa Makhlouf with the international plastic artist Etel Adnan (Al Jazeera)
Recently the second revised edition of your book "Oriental Dreams: Borges in the Labyrinths of a Thousand and One Nights" was published. Why was the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges able to develop his creative experience by relying on the Arab and Islamic heritage, especially "The Book of One Thousand and One Nights", unlike most advocates of modernity from Arab writers who see in this heritage an obstacle to the development of Arab culture and societies?
The answer to this question lies in cultural awareness;
Cultural and cognitive decline in the Arab world does not help to reveal the faces of creativity in books such as "A Thousand and One Nights" and other Arab cultural heritage, or products of the modern world, except for a small group of creative and educated people.
As well as the negative role of censorship and the basic books it confiscated, whether they are Arabic or in other languages.
Some of these books cannot understand Western modernity without reading them and carefully considering their theses.
What happened with literature tells us in other fields, including the plastic arts.
Reading heritage with a modern eye also needs freedom and reason.
I conclude by saying that the European West began its new era since the 16th century, when intellectual, philosophical and even theological "conquests" occurred that changed the general direction of culture, and refuted the prevailing view of the Earth and its true position in the universe, in a form that differs from the perceptions based on myth, as it determined the actual position of man among all beings Other live.
Just as I confirmed in a scientific way that the earth is not the center of the universe and is not static, but rather that revolves around the sun not the other way around, it also confirmed that man is part of living creatures, and if he mishandles these organisms and with the environment, he puts his life in danger, as is the case now.