There is no doubt that the biography of the Omani poet Zahir Al-Ghafri is full of many delights and amazing discoveries in front of the diversity of places in which he wrote his poetic texts, which makes the reader feel a kind of aesthetic shock towards the place.
In his poetry, he is plural, but he does not atrophied in his interior, except for the multiplicity and epistemic travel that characterizes the poet’s experience in his relationship with the world.
Small, medium and long poems, through which Zahir Al-Ghafri likes to celebrate reality and tame travel stories and the barricades of the language of exile.
In this reluctant existential way, in which the poet lives in himself, before the act of writing begins, Zahir works to explode the history of the body as he dissolves into the details of the day and celebrates the passing, the fleeting and the forgotten.
Al-Ain has a special place in Zaher Al-Ghafri's poetic experience, as it is the one who captures the small details and quickly transforms them from being events and facts to artistic poetic images that inhabit the mind and aspire to reside in the basements of the body and its desolate jungles with cracks, cracks and disappointments.
He has published many poetic works, including “White Coverings”, “Silence Comes to Confession,” “Flowers in a Well,” “In Every Land A Well Dreams of a Garden,” “One Life, Many Ladders,” and some of his works have been translated into Spanish, English, German and Swedish. Farsi, Hindi and Chinese.
On the occasion of the publication of his new poetry collection "The Creators of the Highs" (2021) by Dar Houtt in Jordan, Al-Jazeera Net had this dialogue with the poet.
The cover of Zaher Al-Ghafri's collection of poetry "The Creators of the Highest", published in 2021 by Dar Houtt in Jordan (Al-Jazeera)
Zahir Al-Ghafri, you have lived your life moving between Iraq, Morocco, Paris, London and Sweden, but you always return to the village of Sorour in the Sultanate of Oman, what is the secret of this existential return?
Yes, this is true. These migrations began at an early period in my life, from the sixties until the present time. I am a bored man and I do not like to settle in one place.
My passion is permanent travel and travel in the world. I may have inherited this from my father, as he was also constantly on the move, especially in his youth.
The journey began to Baghdad first for the sake of modern education, and then a life of long and long life, including readings, frequenting theaters and cinemas, attending art galleries, and writing, and this period continued until 1977, after which it moved to Paris, then Montpellier, then Morocco, specifically in Rabat, where I completed my studies in philosophy at the University of Mohamed V, after which I lived in Tangier for 5 years.
I have been and am still enchanted by the world, by places and cities, as if there was an invisible force pulling me or my steps towards theaters that provide me with energy.
In any case, all of the countries you mentioned in your question were an extension of the first trip and in every country or city I was learning and tasting new things.
In New York alone I lived close to 10 years and was also moving around many other states in the United States.
As for why returning to the village of Surur in Amman, it is because it was the starting point or beginner that took my steps to other horizons, and then because Sorour is connected with me to childhood, youth and simple life, linked to palms, springs and mountains, and poetry is the original, first source of childhood.
I lived in Morocco for very long years and was a witness to the most difficult travails that literary modernity passed through since the seventies of the last century. What does your cultural and literary memory keep from the image of Morocco today?
I lived in Morocco for 10 years and it was one of the most beautiful years of my life, and Morocco was at that time living the brightest years of the left. As for literary modernity, it was manifested in works of fiction, poetry and fiction, but also in composition, cinema and theater. And in poetry the works of Muhammad Bennis, Muhammad bin Talha, Abdullah Raja and others, and in the composition Muhammad Al-Qasimi, Fouad Balamen and Farid Belkahia, and in cinema and theater you find names such as Muhammad Al-Rakeb, Al-Buenaini, Al-Tayyib Siddiqui and others.
What I want to say is that literary modernity in Morocco at that time was rising strongly, noting that the cultural was mostly dependent on the political and partisan side.
However, the critical lesson in Morocco was strong due to Morocco’s location geographically with the latest waves that were appearing in France at all levels. On the other hand, writers and poets who wrote in French were presenting a new impetus to literary modernity in general, the generation that came after that came and is still presenting An amazing and soft experience in poetry and in storytelling, I will mention, for example: Abd Al-Rahim Al-Khasar and Alia Al-Idrisi in poetry and Anis Al-Rafei in the story.
Diwan "Clouds over April Bridge" by the Omani poet who enriched the Arab Library with more than 10 collections (Al-Jazeera)
The reader of your work soon discovers the size of the bitterness printed with cynicism, but at the same time, it tends towards joy and the pleasure of living, moving and traveling, how can you live this paradox in your body between pain, tearing and joy, before proceeding to explode its contents in hair?
Poetry expresses all cases, and the bitterness you talk about may stem from sadness about what is happening in the Arab world and the world.
Personally, I am inclined to joy, as for pain it is a special matter that always comes from multiple sources, from exile or from the departure and absence of loved ones and friends. Pain is an integral part of the life of the being, and poetry that does not go to the roots of pain in my mind remains superficial.
See, for example, the avant-garde dancer and dance theorist Isadora Duncan as if her body and movements creak between regions of pleasure, pain, music and the experience of nature.
Your poems are dominated by the short poetic soul, which makes them more like poetic stories. Do you think that this method may be effective in capturing the forgotten and the unthinking of the constantly fleeing moments of living?
Not at all. My poems are generally medium in length, but I have lengths such as the poem "Isolation Overflowing from the Night" and the poem "The Rave of Napoleon". As for the short poems they are condensed, they may take up a whole page. If you mean to invest the narration in poetic writing then yes, because the prose poem It takes advantage of multiple expressive fields including narration, color, and film montage.
What is known to Zahir Al-Ghafri is his ability to enjoy life with its full joy and tragedy, as well as its pleasures and the associated formation, cinema, music and dance, how can you crystallize this symbolic capital at the moment of writing the poem?
The issue is not symbolic investment, it is all about the art of living, because by my nature I cannot live in falsehood and deception, neither with myself nor with others, and the tragedy is in the end nothing but this life that we live with its full vigor, and my relationship with cinema and music is old.
Since my youth, I had a brother who played a musician and played more than one instrument, and we used to go to cinema halls and clubs, and since dance and joy are part of life, so I live my life according to it, you should not forget that Nietzsche was one of the great dancers in philosophy and the author of the book of cheerful science. God of wine in the ancient Greeks and inspired rituals of joy and ecstasy).
Your poem is like a laboratory for daily life, and it is always sensual and linked more to the body of the poet, unlike other Arab poetic experiences, which try to identify with the Arab heritage, an issue or context, so the poem is contrived and the level of poetry in it is low at the expense of prose, how do you view this matter?
My poem, Yes, of a sensual nature, because I do not try to live in abstraction even though I love the great abstractions in art, as Mondrian and Kandinsky and my friend, the abstract artist Samia Halabi, who lives in New York.
The poem has to hit the rhythms of the universe, most of which are sensual rhythms from the spheres, until raindrops fall on trees and sidewalks, and I have already said that the prose poem is completely different from traditional or classical poetry, as it does not have a transcendent voice over the foundations, but rather lives with the foundations with its own voice.
A collection of poems "In Every Land A Well Dreams of a Garden" by Zahir Al-Ghafri that includes various poems, some of them short (Al-Jazeera)
Why did you not like the novel, especially since your poetic texts possess a great artistic awareness of the peculiarities of narration, narration and description, which are elements that may benefit the poet to expand his work land and plow it through other literary genres, knowing that the novel has begun to overwhelm the contemporary literary field, causing many poets to move towards writing the novel?
I do not know, I admired poetry from the beginning, but nevertheless I can say that I am an avid reader of the novel, I mean the novels that have appeared since the middle of the nineteenth century, whether in Russia or in France, and to this day, and I live in Sweden, not a day goes by without reading a work of fiction .
The novel needs to build an integrated architecture without forgetting the details, and the novel in this sense is creativity and a conscious and thoughtful industry.
I previously wrote some fictional works and I am now working on my first long narrative work, which is a fictional biography under the title "Exodus from Paradise". This biography deals with my life experience since I was three years old until now. I hope it will be published next year.