Chapter 3: Dr. AbdulWahab Homad the Poet: Prison, Amal and Longing for Home
Dr. Homad had a gift for literature. As we have already noted, he enrolled in both the Faculty of Law and the Faculty of Letters at the Sorbonne, and earned a licence in letters from that university as well as a doctorate in law. He had also begun work on a doctorate in letters, having chosen the poet Hafez Ibrahim as the subject of his thesis, but his return to Syria after obtaining his doctorate in law kept him from completing it.
In his address on being received as a full member of the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus, he said that he was no stranger to the literary world he had known, for he had lived in its embrace for a time before the rigor of the law, and the stern features of its unyielding provisions, which do not always bring warmth to the soul, took him away from its shaded gardens and its moving melodies.
He left no collection of poems. We did, however, look through a number of poems in his handwriting, which his esteemed wife, may God prolong her life, kindly showed us, and I have chosen some of them to show the poetic gift he possessed. Leafing through these pieces makes it clear that Dr. Homad was a man of ardent feeling, lofty human sentiment and high values, which showed themselves at many points in the course of his life: in prison, in elegy, and in longing for his small family and for his homeland, and so on.
In the pages that follow we try to look at a number of the poems he wrote in the circumstances just mentioned.
1. In Prison
In Mezzeh prison, on 9 February 1952, he wrote a piece in which he recalled parts of his life: how he went to study in France, drafted the Syrian constitution, became a minister and judged with justice, and how people praised him for his integrity and uprightness. He made it plain that the most generous gift God had granted him was his wife, Amal. Here is what he says:
I wandered the first heavens and rode a sea like the hour of death;
I sipped the purest learning in law in the mother of kingdoms and states;
for the struggling people, on their march, I became "the example,"
a glory that bears the constitution as its patent, proud and yet shy;
I sat in the minister's chair, a master above the masters of old;
I was praised until odes and folk songs ran out of room to praise me;
I judged among people with a fair balance in a crippled age.
Yet the most generous gift God granted me is Amal,
my wife, the loveliest of women, who makes fine silk look proud;
the meaning of life and its soul, the madness of my verse, and its love.
Enraptured I entered her gardens; my love is hers, and is hers still.
Our poet was torn between two states when he was put in prison in 1963: the plight of a man arrested and thrown into prison unjustly and arbitrarily, for no offense he had committed, and the plight of his wife, grieving and in pain over her husband's fate in the depths of the prison. In a poem titled "A Visiting Phantom" he depicts his low spirits and his deepening anguish in his cell, and in this torn state the phantom of his wife appears before him, visiting him in his prison. Here is what he says:
Injustice decreed that I, guilty of nothing, be thrown into the depths of a tomb with no one to comfort me.
My chest grows tight there and my anguish deepens; my cell, like a cave, makes the eyes bleed.
Then he describes the visiting phantom, the phantom of his wife:
She came without warning and stirred my sorrows, as good news comes, and I did not know what had come over me.
It seemed my soul had been given back to me by her nearness, when I had been lying in despair.
And when she saw me crouched in the dark pit of the prison, chewing over the grief in my heart,
her tears ran, while the night let down its curtains, and they moved my tears and roused my affliction.
My blood would be your ransom, fairest of people in form and in character; how sweet are hopes and wishes!
All my love to your phantom, best of visitors; how it stirred my longing and soothed my mind!
You are the food of the soul; your image keeps my loneliness company while the days run on weeping.
To the sound of the groans of men tortured by the whips of torturers I while away the nights.
When will the night of separation end, and we meet? It has gone on so long I said we shall never meet.
We can imagine the tangle of feelings he endured in prison: sad, despairing, chewing over his grief. As soon as his wife saw him in that state, tears poured from her eyes, and his tears answered hers. How keenly we feel this cry from the depths of his soul, offering himself as ransom for his wife, beautiful in form and in character, and sending all his love to her visiting phantom, because it stirred his longing, soothed his mind and kept his loneliness company amid the rising groans of men tortured in the prison as they took the lash of their torturers. At the end of the piece he asks when he will leave prison, now that the night of distance and parting has lasted so long that he thought they would never meet.
In another poem, also from 1963, he describes how he was thrown into a dormitory deep in the prison. The oppressors had thrown a band of young men into prison with him, young men who had dreamed of achieving their aims of Arab unity, and what rosy dreams and sweet hopes they were! But the blows of fortune fell upon them, and they were cast into the depths of the prison, while callers summoned them out to face death, so that they might have their share of every kind of torment. The poet could only shed copious tears over their plight, saying:
Into a dormitory, a relic of injustice, we were thrown, and around us young men, fair as the houris, bring us to tears,
like lions a thicket has cast into a cage; how noble they were, bearers of our sweetest hopes!
Each proud one among them, whose blade never fails, was struck down by the nights among the blows that fell on us.
My tears for them flow freely, now that the callers have summoned them to be killed.
The poet depicts the condition of these prisoners thrown deep into the prison, in cells like graves, where the fierce heat burns the insides and swarms of bedbugs surround them at night on every side, over their arms and under their legs, as if their fangs were knives, swift in their raids like horses that have slipped their bridles. He says:
When the darkness stirred its flanks they came for us, and thrust us into cells like the grave;
their heat all but seared our ribs; we lost all patience with them, and so did our nights.
And the "army" of bedbugs marched over our shoulders, its fangs turned into knives,
over our arms and under our legs, horses without bridles raiding us in the night.
The torment these prisoners suffered was simply the result of their faith in the unity of their nation, their defense of the principles they believed in, and their singing of the songs of the union they sought to bring about. The union between Syria and Egypt had robbed the Zionists of their sleep, and so they worked to undo its bonds. But the poet remained hopeful that the union would return and the scattered family would be gathered once more:
O union that filled our hopes with fragrance the day we came together, and was stirred by our songs,
misfortunes fell upon you when the swords of your glory played at the jugular veins of Zion.
What we suffer now we offer to God for your day of glory, in defense of our principles.
The scattered house will be whole again, and the great union will flood our homelands.
These pieces, written in the depths of prison, thus show us how he portrayed his state of mind, the state of the prisoners around him, and the many kinds of injustice the torturers practiced.
Even while portraying this condition, he did not forget the national principles he believed in, in defense of his nation's unity, freedom and dignity.
2. To His Life's Companion (Amal)
Our poet did not believe in marrying foreign women, and said so quite frankly in his memoirs. When he returned home after six lean years in Paris, he decided to settle down and marry, and the life's companion he chose was Amal, daughter of Ahmad Subhi al-Kourani. On 28 April 1946 he wrote these lines about her:
Paris, I have been given something finer than your beauties, in a garden your hills cannot rival.
If you could see the heart's beloved within me, my soul in its rapture, your nights would go mad.
The smile of the Seine is not as sweet as her smile, nor are the clusters on your finest vines.
Your cups have become a memory I do not long for, and I am too taken up to think of the fair maidens of your valley.
There is something of Moses' magic in the eyes of the one who keeps me awake, and the sweet ring of her voice has made me forget your songs.
How keenly we sense the poet's joy in choosing the companion of his life's road, who filled his life and dwelt in his heart until she became his chief concern. Her smile grew sweeter than the smile of the river Seine, her sweet voice made him forget the songs he had heard in Paris, and her enchanting eyes kept him awake, as though they held a spark of Moses' magic.
After they married, she settled with him in Damascus and they had two children. Once she traveled to Aleppo with the children, and he stayed alone in Damascus for several days. In 1955 he wrote about her:
Desire of my heart, distance has stirred our complaint; how well could you and I have done without this parting!
Wasting has pressed hard upon me, and longing scorches it; but for my fortitude, my tears would have poured in torrents.
Your stay in al-Shahba, so long are its days, feels to me like coldness and desertion.
Ten days have passed, and in their maze I am like a man lost in the desert, sleepless, talking to the stars.
How often I thought you near when the nightingales of dawn sang me their sighs and melodies,
until longing crept into my vital parts and my ribs, and hurt them, and filled me with grief.
Only yesterday Damascus, in all her charms, was the gardens of Eden, an orchard for history;
now my loneliness in her tears me apart, while the flowers dance, petals and stems.
Who will give me your eyes, which wound me when they look and inspire, before dawn, a lovesick verse?
Who will give me your light, which quenches my thirst and makes me thirst, if a sunbeam can ever quench the thirsty?
Desire of my soul, a husband you have enchanted in the temple of love has suffered for you all he has suffered.
Come back swiftly, before dawn, on the wing of the east wind, so that light and dreams may fill our home.
Here is the poet's ardent feeling blazing at his wife's absence of ten days. He suffers a deadly loneliness and a buried longing, until he is like a man lost in the deserts, talking sleepless to the stars, and he weighs two states against each other: his wife near him, with happiness, contentment and joy, and his wife far away, with a tearing loneliness, burning longing and a sleepless sense of being lost. Were it not for his patience, tears would have poured from his eyes, and he sends out a cry from the depths of his heart, begging his wife to hurry back to him.
And if a ten-day absence of his wife tore him with pain and sorrow, what must his state have been in Rabat in 1965, far from his family in Syria? Let us consider that state, as he laments his days lost, now behind prison walls, now in exile. Far from his family, he feels lost, and life has no savor for him. He swallows the bitter lump of pain when he is invited to a reception where the finest food and drink are served while his wife is deprived of them because she is far away, for he wants her to enjoy every good thing with him.
His wife is the refuge he turns to in the misfortunes that befall him: near her there is calm and contentment, far from her there is pain and choking grief. What eases his weariness of life as he tastes the pain of parting and distance is the patience and the faith he possessed, a faith that calls for holding fast to patience in misfortune. The poet asks his wife whether she still keeps his love and affection, yet he values her noble stand at his side throughout his life, in good times and bad, without complaint.
Very beautiful, too, is his call to the night of Rabat to walk like Christ over the seas toward Damascus and gather bouquets of Damascus daisies to give to the mother of his two children. It reminds us of Ibn Zaydun's call to the east wind to carry his greeting to his beloved Wallada:
What has come over the days, striking with left hand and right?
My fate, O God, has been parceled out behind prison walls,
for I have reaped bitter aloes among "our conspiring comrades,"
or I am lost in exile, in a procession of the homeless!
But my life has no savor while you are far from me.
I feel a lump in my throat at what I am given and you are "denied";
in every good thing, in the evenings, I want you to have your share.
When the blows of fortune darkened and the brow turned pale,
you were my calm and my refuge, you were my faithful angel.
Far from your tenderness, I am lost among the lost.
Mother of our two children, fragrant as jasmine,
do you still keep my abundant love, or do you not?
As for me, my beloved, with nights that neither soften nor relent,
were it not for your love, and a grace in my soul of patience and faith,
I would have tired of the world and all it holds of blessings and ease.
Meeting you is rest and sweet basil; O Time, when will it come?
You have walked with me through ease and hardship, content, and never complaining!
Night of Rabat, now that I am safe from treachery in this secure land,
walk like Christ over the seas, with the darkness, your brow serene,
and pick bouquets of Damascus daisies for the mother of my children!
3. Longing for the Homeland
Poets have long sung of their longing for their homelands when they leave them, and this singing was not confined to any one period. In our ancient Arabic literature, the poets of the pre-Islamic age wept for their loved ones, stood at the ruins of their abodes, and called on their companions to share their weeping. When they passed by these places, what held them was the emotional meaning the places carried: the sense of departure and encampment, of setting out and halting, behind which glimmered the ghosts of loved ones whom distance and separation had parted.
That meaning is not tied to what these departed people left behind, the abodes they abandoned and the traces they left, but to the people themselves, to their very selves, to the beating of their hearts and the anguish of their feelings, to the hand reaching out for a hand while the eye cannot bear to look into the eye, as our teacher, the late Dr. Shukri Faisal, described it.
The Arab loved his land, and this land was bound up with his loved ones too, so that it became part of himself, the pasture of his memories and the stage of his imaginings: in every place a memory, in every spot a meaning, and every land with its own savor and taste, according to the events that mingled with it or took place upon it.
Longing for the homeland, for its land, its people and its memories, continued through every age of our Arabic literature. We see it in the words of Maysun:
A dwelling where the winds blow through is dearer to me than a lofty palace;
I want no substitute for my homeland; that noble homeland is enough for me!
And we see it in the words of Jamil Buthayna:
I am Jamil, and the Hijaz is my homeland: there lies my heart's desire, and there my sorrow.
And how tender is what one poet said:
A land we grew fond of whatever its state, and one may grow fond of what is not fine;
we find sweetness in a land whose air is not good, whose water is not sweet, but it is home!
How lofty are the words of Ibn al-Rumi:
I have a homeland I have sworn never to sell, never to see anyone but me its owner as long as time lasts.
Al-Sahib ibn Abbad holds that the finest glory a man can win is the glory he wins in his homeland:
Glory is sought and pursued, and the dearest glory is that won in the homeland.
As for distance from the homeland, to Ibn al-Wardi it is death itself:
Too great a distance from homeland and family is death before you meet your death.
And for the Prince of Poets, Ahmad Shawqi, nothing equals the homeland, not even the Garden of Eternity:
My homeland: were I distracted from it by paradise, my soul would pull me back to it, even in paradise.
And when he returned to his homeland after his exile in Andalusia, he says:
O my homeland, I found you again after despair, as though in you I had found my youth again.
How lofty is his call to love of the homeland! He says:
Hold to love of the homeland until death; whoever betrays his homeland one day will be betrayed.
And how noble are the feelings of Abd al-Majid Arafa when far from his homeland! He says:
If I am away from my country for a single day, I melt with pain, and care and restlessness swell in my breast.
So do not blame me if my soul clings to it, for the soul has clung to the body since the beginning.
How often longing for my country has tugged at me, how often wakeful nights and insomnia have plundered me!
In exile I live as a body, while in my homeland my heart lives on; distance does not part us.
When we turn to Dr. Homad's poetry, we find that longing for his country has a place in it. Here he longs for Damascus and its Ghouta, for the Barada and for Aleppo, and praises the upbringing his parents gave him and the sweetness of his country's character. He says in Rabat on 3 March 1965:
Where is Damascus, and all it holds for one sick with love of it, for the eye and the heart, for hardship and for joy?
Where are its two Ghoutas, to which the Barada sang the songs of a lover whom fate has struck with sorrows?
And where is the grove of my dreams, and all that my youth wove for me in the gardens of Aleppo?
There I drank in the love of my heart and my feelings from the best of mothers, in the lap of the best of fathers!
Tenderness of my land, how sweet are its ways, like a procession of light in the darkness for the Arabs.
To the poet, Damascus had been a great tree in whose shade he sheltered, where the birds sang joyfully in its gardens. Then everything changed after the crime of the secession: the people fell into grief, shuffling in chains and fetters, and the politicians broke the promises they had made. He made it plain that there was a gulf between word and deed, and that states are not built on killing.
Let us look closely at what the poet Homad says in a poem titled "On the Threshold of the Eid," written in Rabat in 1965:
O joy of the Eid! No wife, no child to shower with a love that burns like fire;
no remains of my father to whom I can tell my sorrow, no grave of a mother for whom my eyes have wept.
Where are the nights whose evening company I embraced, passing like a phantom moving through dreams?
Damascus was for us a great tree whose shade we sought, and the birds were drunk with rapture as if on wine.
Then fortune grew dark there, black with grief, and the reed flute took fright when fear shook it.
They said: socialism. We said: and how far they are from it! Their preacher has gone astray, and they feel no shame.
And the people, sunk in grief, gaze toward a joy that all their means and devices, in their chains, have failed to reach.
Tell those who stole the glories of their master: it is not by killing that states build their edifice!
The last line reminds us of the words of the poet Badawi al-Jabal:
No nation was ever built except on love, and no leader was ever mighty except through tenderness.
It is love, until the rich man honors the hard-pressed, and the destitute grieves at the sorrows of the rich.
In another poem the poet depicts his state in Rabat, far from Damascus, where he had left his soul and the two delights of his eyes, his two children, and his wife. In that state he had wearied of everything, of his pens and of his evening companions; a burning longing raged within him, and nothing could rein it in but the hope of meeting and the knowledge that fate had decreed this for him. He weighs the world of the people around him, full of joy and gladness, against his world in the dark, where he takes refuge in his sad heart and his painful secrets. He says on 10 April 1966:
My Layla! My verses do not quench my sorrows; I have grown weary of my pens and my evening companions.
In my loneliness I take refuge in the dream, which comes to my aid with every marvel in its naked world.
I confide what makes its dancing heartbeats bleed to nothing but the tears streaming down my cheeks.
Longing storms in my breast, ablaze, and my hopes and my fate hold the longing in check.
The world of other people is a life of delights; my world, in the dark, is my heart and my secrets.
My soul is in Damascus, and there the two delights of my eyes; in Rabat my only companion is the traveling star.
Longing for Damascus took hold of him at every stage of his life. He longed for it in Paris, in Rabat in Morocco, and in Kuwait. When he decided to return to Syria in 1983, officials at Kuwait University tried to dissuade him from his decision and from his wish not to renew his contract, but he held firm, so that he could devote himself to research, writing, articles and lectures, now that longing for Damascus had overwhelmed him. He says:
Kuwait, do not reproach me; I have my own reproach, and between you and me runs a bond of kinship.
But I ache for Damascus with a longing that keeps me awake, burning like a fire of ghada wood.
Its evenings are fragrant bouquets; if every lover renounced them, I would not.
Yet in you a stranger's feeling sweeps over me: how wretched, to be an exile in an Arab homeland!
How great was his joy on the wedding day of his son, the engineer Ghassan, a day he had awaited impatiently. On 25 February 1979 he addressed his son:
Ghassan, my heart's blood, part of my very self, joy of my soul in this world, my son.
Long have I waited for a day whose hero you would be, while age storms at my dreams and my body.
Beyond the oceans, in the hours before dawn, you keep me company, you, the object of a love still fresh in my homeland.
And my tears, when illness brings its pain, are fire running down my cheeks in grief.
This long-awaited event eased the pain of the distance he suffered beyond the oceans, now that age had advanced on him, the dreams he had striven for had been shattered, and illness had crept into his body, so that tears poured from his eyes like fire, so fierce was their heat.
Faithfulness seems to have been part of the poet's nature; he was made to be attached and loyal. In 1940, on the day France surrendered to its German conquerors, he addressed it in these lines:
France, an unjust page has been turned and folded away, like the dregs of a life.
I am of a people who climbed to the back of the faintest star and established justice among mankind,
a people that was, for the sword and for glory alike, a pearl on the brow of the age.
You inflicted on it, unarmed and powerless, in your folly, the cruel torment of an ingrate.
Ask history about its events, and you will find in them eloquent lessons.
It is fate that the sword should miss its stroke and the rider stumble in his hour of pride.
Here is Paris in her chains, complaining to time of the injustice of fate,
forgetting, in tears of humiliation, her own injustice: the curse of the broken wrongdoer.
Yet when he left Paris, his heart dripped with sorrow and pain, and he said in farewell:
The freshness of life was spent in your haunts; Paris, how sweet the world is in your valley!
The tears of angels, with the world on its threshold in the hush of the flowers, stir sweet sorrow in your outskirts.
Passion in her eyes, poetry her smile, and wine in the cup like magic in your mouth.
Evening and morning I am "without law or scruple," like the smile of "the Seine" in your loveliest nights.
You will leave my life desolate when the hand of distance and of hope pushes me away from your sorrows.
His poem rhyming in ra, which he addressed to France as it surrendered to its German conquerors, reminds us of the poem Badawi al-Jabal composed when Paris fell to the Nazi occupation, titled "I Exult over the Tyrant," which opens:
O night companions of the tribe, does our complaint mean anything to you? Iron has softened, yet they have not softened at our affliction.
And in it he says:
Leave reproach that is tears of no avail, and reproach the people with torn bodies and fire.
I exult over the tyrant when a despot fells him and crushes him with injustice and aggression.
I heard Paris complain of the arrogance of her conqueror; did you not remember, Paris, our complaint?
For twenty years we drank the cup brimming with harm; now drink it neat, to your fill.
It is a long poem that passed from mouth to mouth in Syria and Iraq, since the poet was then in exile in Iraq.
The noble feeling Dr. Homad possessed was not confined to his family and his homeland; it extended to his friends and companions. Here he sheds tears over his late colleague Dr. Abd al-Hayy Hijazi, dean of the Faculty of Law at Kuwait University, whose body was carried back to his Egyptian homeland. He says:
Do not blame me, my two friends, for my tears if they pour; perhaps they will put out a flame in my heart.
Nor blame the pipes on which a herald of death laments through the night, having drunk of their moaning.
I say to the bier moving toward its end on men's shoulders, without pride or vanity:
to Egypt, setting off above the clouds, you who pain the heart, be gentle with the one who has gone.
Only yesterday he was wine and song on the lecterns, enticing poetry and letters.
That is a bouquet of Dr. AbdulWahab Homad's poetry. It has shown us something of his qualities and character: his devotion and attachment to his family, his loyalty to his homeland, his nation and his companions, his adherence to his national and humane principles, and his stand against tyrants and despots.