Arabic Pie: The Day the Language Died

Something is apparently wrong in Northern Africa, and I don't mean the Arab Spring. No. The Arab Spring is what's right in Northern Africa. The Arab Spring is the first hopeful season the world has known since the reunification of Germany and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1990/91 which amounted to the end of the WWII era of world history.

What is wrong in Northern Africa, if the scholars at the recent Germaine Bree Symposium "Arab Spring and the Humanities" are right, is a problem with language. And no, it is not a problem with the difficulty of Arabic, to which I can personally attest, not without shame. The problem, according to Columbia University professor Muhsin al-Musawi, is that language has been exhausted and depleted of meaning by lies. Now, says Musawi, "Action is the poem." The long regime of Mubarak, he states in that simple way that persuades so well of truth, "has so perverted discourse that words have become meaningless."

It is related to what the popular Egyptian poet known as el-Fagommi has commented about the January revolution. "These youth are writing the poem now. What you see is a poem." It is also related to what the great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote, "Poetry is to write this cosmic silence, final and total." One thinks of the Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi shooting himself in 1982. Is this where poetry must go now? Into that cosmic, final silence?

I confess to not understanding how this can all really be true since it still requires words to state that action is now language. But I'll be thinking about it and watching to see what is being born here. Could it really be, as Musawi would have it, the rebirth of a revolutionary lexicon? What would this mean?

One symposium is not

nearly enough to anchor me in what seems to me a rather painful if hopeful conundrum. But listen to Hawi's most famous poem, "The Bridge," set to music (and translated!) and tell me if it's not stirring.

The Arab Spring continues.