(Excerpted from The Universe, All at Once, poems selected by Salim Barakat and translated by Huda Fakhreddine, out now from Seagull Books)
After having written about him for years without direct contact, my first collaboration with Salim Barakat was The Universe, All at Once, a translation of auto-selections from his later poetry, followed by a long conversation which extended over several months between fall 2022 and summer 2023.
I anxiously waited for him to pick up. It was our first phone call and as the phone rang, I prepared myself, worried I might make a grammar mistake. For some reason, I imagined the conversation would be in fus̩ḥā, in Barakat’s clamoring fus̩ḥā, but of course, it wasn’t. His voice came to me soft and distant, and, I would even dare say, shy. He was happy to go on and on asking me about my family, my daughter, what I liked to cook. He enjoyed describing his world, now turned entirely domestic, telling me about his recipes, his trips to the market, the family rituals. And when I asked a pretentious question like: what do you see as the goal of your literary project? How do you define the Arabic prose poem? What’s your relationship with the Arabic poetic tradition? Your position on meter?…he hesitated, evaded, and changed the topic to the more personal and friendly.
Nevertheless, I did later receive his responses to these questions and many more in writing. Although we spoke a few times on the phone, he preferred to write, or rather hand-write and then Cindy, his wife and our guide in this process, scanned the papers and sent them to me by email as attachments. A complicated multi-stepped yet very fitting process, for one would not expect Salim Barakat to make anything easy! I received pages filled to their edges, as if meticulously embroidered with Salim’s beautiful tiny handwriting. Keywords were always fully vocalized and phrases he thought important were underlined. And often, he’d interrupt his responses and insert messages to me, scribbled in the margin, such as “Huda, I answered your questions and now I’m off to barbeque in the garden” and “By the way…today is Cindy’s Birthday!”
Salim Barakat, the writer, is intimidating, complicated, and even aggressive. His desires are boundless, and his plans grand; nothing short of “capturing the entire universe, all at once!” Salim Barakat, the man, is quiet and humble. He has managed somehow to hold onto the child in him, despite the defeats, the many exiles, and the utter loss of hope in the world beyond his garden fence.
Our correspondence ended in August 2023, before the horrors in Gaza began. I still receive messages from him and Cindy every now and then, checking in on me and the family, especially when the news is dismal beyond the usual onslaught of miseries since October 2023.
And even though Palestine didn’t come up in the interview published in the book, Salim Barakat’s work and life reveal much about refugeedom, exile, displacement, and the agony of lost homelands. He chose to leave Beirut in 1982, to Cyprus by sea, along with the Palestinians who were forced to do so in the aftermath of the murderous Israeli invasion of Beirut and the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The opening of his novel, Arawāḥ Handasiyyah, 1987 (Geometric Souls), chronicles this episode.
For years after that, while in Cyprus, Barakat was the executive editor of “Al-Karmel,” the most significant, Palestinian, literary magazine, whose founder and editor-in-chief was Mahmoud Darwish. Barakat also oversaw “Bīsān,” the Palestinian publishing house, affiliated with “Al-Karmel.”
Salim Barakat’s language itself is resistance against erasure and insistence on presence and agency, on a homeland even if thus far only present in a defiant language that transforms reality in its wake. For ultimately, to quote his friend Mahmoud Darwish, the Palestinian, like the Kurd, “has nothing but the wind.” [1]
-Huda Fakhreddine
Introduction:[2]
Salim Barakat is a Kurdish-Syrian poet and novelist, born in 1951 in Qamishli, an ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse city in northern Syria. He lived in exile in Lebanon and then Cyprus, before settling in Sweden where he has resided since 1999. He has thus far published over fifty works of poetry and prose, including three autobiographies, a memoir of wartime, and several children’s books. He enjoys a peculiar celebrity and following in the Arab world, among critics, scholars, and other poets.
Barakat is known for his provocative persona and his confrontational relationship with the Arabic language. He insists on presenting himself as a Kurd who writes in Arabic. He is blunt in describing his transgressive relationship with the language as both an insider and outsider. Arabic is not his first language, but he plunders it, and lays claim to it. Other poets and writers have validated this claim. In the blurbs on the back of the second volume of his collected works, al-Dīwān, which came out in 2017, the following endorsements by a host of Arab poets and writers appear. Mahmoud Darwish states: “Since he invaded the Arabic poetic scene, Salim Barakat has heralded a different kind of poetry.” Nizar Qabbani addresses Barakat in his blurb and pleads: “Mawlānā! What have you left for us? Release Arabic poetry from your grip.” Saadi Yusuf does not hold back, proclaiming Barakat to be “the greatest Kurd since Saladin.” It is Adonis, however, who puts it most succinctly when he states: “This Kurdish poet carries the Arabic language in his pocket.”[3]
Throughout his career, Barakat has rarely conducted himself as other poets of his generation do. Quite the contrary, a very private person who rarely appears in the media, whether intentionally or unintentionally, Barakat has acquired the reputation for being not only a “difficult” poet but also a “difficult” man. His isolation and reluctance to engage with literary circles pre-date his move to Sweden. Even while in Beirut, friends and acquaintances tell stories about his idiosyncratic and often unruly behavior. Mahmoud Darwish remembers the following incident in A Memory for Forgetfulness:
He has taken the cultural life of Beirut by storm, overnight. He defends his writing ferociously, with his fists, because he doesn’t believe in dialogue among intellectuals, considering it mere babble. Taking his pistol and his showy muscles, he goes into the appropriate coffee shop and lies in wait for lesser critics who write for the cultural pages of daily papers, and he doesn’t mince his words about what they’d written against him. One time I said to him, ‘Vladimir Mayakovsky used to treat his critics the same way in Gorky Street’. ‘This is the only true criticism of criticism’, he answered.[4]
Salim Barakat achieves the “poetic,” both in his poetry and prose, through a deliberate occlusion of meaning behind the veil of language; language intentionally textured and thickened beyond recognition. We are always at the cusp of understanding, exceedingly conscious of ourselves not as readers/speakers of Arabic but as explorers of what has thus far eluded us of it.
Dear Huda, I have answered your questions and I’m off to barbeque in the garden.
Huda j. fakhreddine (HJF): How do you remember yourself as a child?
salim barakat (SB): I was probably never a child. I never walked on the ground with a child’s feet. The adults around us forced us to be men or adults—old men even. As children, we led lives that lacked a true sense of existence.
HJF: Was there a relationship that had the biggest impact on you in your family?
SB: Yes. The crowdedness in the house. The household was chaotic, with no traffic signs.
HJF: How would you describe your relationship with your mother—what is her name? What remains of her in your memory?
SB: My mother’s name is Fattoum (nickname for Fatima). I do not remember her clearly, but I shall never forget her fondness for sweets, especially for shʿaibiyyāt and qat̩ayif (popular desserts, made with dough and sugar syrup, often served with nuts). I had to chase the travelling sweets-seller to buy them for her. He carried the large metal tray on his head and roamed the streets. He tired me out.
I also remember my mother’s fondness for fried chard with onions. Every spring, I had to wander in the wilderness with a basket and a small knife in search of the wild plant. A large basket of this plant when fried was barely enough to fill one plate. Yes, I remember how I spent hours in the wilderness, day after day, harvesting chard for my mother.
HJF: What was your relationship like with your father?
SB: There was nothing special. My father was a simple, religious man who was preoccupied with feeding all eleven of us. Sometimes, I accompanied him on hunting trips. He’d bring his 12-mm gun. Unfortunately, he was not a good hunter.
HJF: How many brothers and sisters do you have?
SB: We are nine. Four sisters, four brothers and me.
HJF: What was your relationship like as siblings?
SB: It was like a circus. Eleven people in a two-room house, a wide yard, and an olive tree that never grew.
HJF. What has survived of your relationship with your brothers and sisters?
SB: Nothing. They are closer to each other than they are to me. I left the house in my early twenties, driven by rebellion and the need to escape the suffocation of that house. Today, my brothers and sisters are scattered across the globe—two of them have found refuge in heaven, where we hope souls find shelter.
HJF: When did you leave home for the first time?
SB: I left Qamishli for Damascus in 1970. My family later joined me. A year and a half later, I left and escaped to Beirut.
HJF: What do you remember from the village?
SB: What remains in my memory of the village is what remains in my memory of myself. Am I not the memory of the village? I am not a villager, but I am most likely a village.
HJF: What did you read at home?
SB: My father had a small collection of religious books—some interpretations of the Quran and some Sufi poetry. But I used to read everything in the school library, and the translated fiction, mostly classics, that were collected by my cousin who was obsessed with them. And of course, I devoured all the modern poetry at the cultural centre in Qamishli. These were my early sources.
HJF: Which languages did you speak at home?
SB: We only spoke Kurdish.
HJF: What was school like?
SB: School? You mean hell. Children usually complain about going to school, even if they go to the best school. Can you imagine going to a slaughterhouse of humiliation? Sometimes I close my eyes and imagine myself as a bulldozer demolishing every school I ever entered.
HJF: Your family spoke Kurdish and the Arabic school was hell—why did you decide to write in Arabic then?
SB: There were no Kurdish books available to me, and the spoken Kurdish did not tempt me to write. Moreover, Kurdish was banned in Syria. My father’s small library had only two books related to Kurdish—one was a Kurdish translation of al-Busiri’s The Mantle Ode, the famous thirteenth-century Arabic poem praising the prophet, and the second was an Arabic translation of Ahmad Khani’s Mem and Zin, a seventeenth-century Kurdish epic poem.
HJF: At what age did you start thinking about writing? Do you remember the first text you wrote?
SB: I had written some poems when I was fifteen—influenced by classical poetry. The creative spark was first kindled at the age of seventeen with a poem titled ‘Nashīd al-anshād al-ḥuzayrānī’ (The June Song of Songs) in 1968. I had almost fainted with joy when it was published in the al-Thawrah newspaper, on half a page with a drawing by the famous artist Nazir Nabʿah.
HJF: Do you remember any lines from the poem?
SB: I only remember the first line. ‘Your fiery face, my lady, is ice and spears.’
HJF: How do you recall your first visit to Damascus? What were the circumstances?
SB: Damascus was the escape to the “big world. I was driven by all my obsessions with art and freedom. To me, Damascus, the capital city, meant all the writers, the newspapers, the magazines and the publishing houses I had dreamt of. And, how miserable my dream was! I found the city rather dreary and repressed in every way. The fear of authority was palpable, there was panic in the air. I needed the violence of freedom, so I left for Beirut after a year and a half in Damascus—the bleeding wound.
When the capital city bleeds, it means that the whole country is a wound, and we are nothing but wounds walking on feet.
HJF: How did you spend the year and a half in Damascus? Were you studying or working? What did you take away from your experience?
SB: I was supposed to study Arabic literature at the university, but my passion for and obsession with poetry became my true calling. I rebelled and got carried away with drinking, relationships and poetry competitions, and all that distracted me from university. I did not attend a single class!
Then came the final awakening blow—the regime. Back then, every policeman in Damascus carried a pair of scissors in his pocket and was given the authority to ‘discipline deviants’ by cutting young men’s hair when it was perceived to be inappropriately long. The freedom we dreamt of in poetry was met with scissors of censorship too. I had no choice but to escape to Lebanon, in search of freedom. The first thing I did when I got there was to wear my hair long, down to my shoulders.
I even had a photograph of me with Mahmoud Darwish, both of us with long hair. It was taken by the journalist Samir al-Sayegh in 1973 at Adonis’s house. My younger brother had borrowed a photo, and later when I asked for it, he said that the Syrian police had raided our house and confiscated it along with other items that belonged to an older brother of ours who was active against the regime. The brother disappeared as did the photograph, never to be seen again. He was killed, as was another younger brother of mine.
HJF: Did you arrange to move to Beirut or was it an unplanned escape? Did you have any friends there?
SB: I arranged for this final migration with a Syrian-Armenian friend of mine. He left Syria a few months before I did. He rented a small room with a kitchen from people who were originally from the region of Ḥawran in Syria and worked as porters in Beirut. He, my friend, found work at a bakery. When he settled down, he sent word to me, and I joined him. This was in 1971 and I have not been back to Syria since.
HJF: Do you remember your arrival in Beirut, your first encounter with the city? Did you have any connections or acquaintances in the literary scene?
SB: When I first arrived in Beirut, I looked for that bakery in Bourj Hammoud, the Armenian suburb where my friend lived. We ate roasted chicken in a restaurant and drank Pepsi. I remember how sweet it was—a sublime sweetness!
The next day I visited the office of al-Anwar newspaper to meet Samir al-Sayegh, who was on the editorial board of the journal Mawāqif. We knew each other because Mawāqif had published my poem ‘Quns̩ul al-at̩fāl’ (The Consul of Children) which I had mailed to them from Damascus. When they received it, Adonis, who was editor-in-chief, wrote to me saying, ‘Your poem surprised me, and I am rarely surprised.’
I met Samir al-Sayegh in the office of al-Anwar and he took me to Adonis’s house. Adonis, Khalida Saʿid and their daughters, were surprised. ‘O how young he is!’ They all kept saying.
My only prior connection with Mawāqif was that poem I had sent to them from Syria. They knew my poetry. And when I arrived in Beirut, they welcomed me.
Salim Barakat, Beirut, Lebanon, circa 1980
HJF: Your first collection, Kull dākhil sa-yahtif bi-ismī wa kull khārij ayd̩an (They All Shall Hail Me, Those Who Enter and Those Who Exit) was a thunderous debut. Tell me about the circumstances of publishing this collection? When did you write the poems? Did you deliberately arrange them in a certain way?
SB: I wasn’t thinking of writing a book when I wrote the poems, but Adonis insisted that I put together enough pieces to make a collection. So, I selected the poems myself and designed the cover. That’s how my first collection came together, and Mawāqif published it. Almost all the Lebanese newspapers and magazines praised the collection. One sentence by the poet and critic ʿIṣam Maḥfouz still rings in my mind. He opened his review with the line, “Salim Barakat is a name to memorise.”
HJF: Could you tell us about the poet or the poem that had the deepest impact on you from these early readings in modern poetry?
SB: The initial excitement, in the late 1960s, was triggered by the idea of renewal or rejuvenation that we, as rebels, sought to bring about in modern poetry. I read poetry collections that I borrowed from friends and others which I found at the cultural centre in Damascus. The poets we read back then were those who are labelled, due to a lack of critical discernment, as “pioneers.” They were the subject of our readings before we stumbled upon their sources, such as T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. I have written about this in an article published in al-Hayat newspaper in 1995. I think it was titled “Poetry without Pioneers.”
Our writings and experiments stemmed from our deep interest in, or perhaps, fascination with various schools of thought such as Surrealism, Symbolism, Dadaism, Romanticism . . . We devoured everything.
However, I was soon disillusioned with the Arabic modernist movement’s claims of renewal. The game of tafʿilah, the experiments with line breaks, and discarding some metrical restrictions were easy moves. The real challenge of innovation required much more than that. The alluring depth of this modernizing project was elsewhere, in the works of American poets as well as the English, the French, the Germans and the Spanish poets.
HJF: Is your objection to classifying poets of the early modernist movement in Arabic as ‘pioneers’ due to your discovery of the foreign influences? And does this deny their pioneering role in Arabic poetry?
SB: I do not want to appear ungrateful by denying the efforts or pioneering role of some poets in modern Arabic poetry. Among the early generation are both ‘pioneering’ poets with hesitant steps as well as poets who were still submissive to the old methods. The translations of poetry from other languages that were done in the beginning of the twentieth century revealed that our modernists did not possess a coherent project or vision.
HJF: Who were the modern poets who caught your attention in the beginning?
SB: At first it was Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, the Iraqi poet. Sadly, his life and career were short-lived. Eventually, I became interested in the works of Adonis, Khalil Ḥawi, and even Nizar Qabbani.
HJF: Adonis supported you in the beginning and had an influence on your early works. How do you relate to him or his work?
SB: I admired Adonis when I was young, but later I found his poetry and his approach too easy.
HJF: What do you mean by “easy” here?
SB: I define ease in writing as a disregard for the reader’s critical abilities. This occurs when the author neglects to assess their own poetic integrity before sharing their work. This disregard may stem from arrogance or an assumption that their language and imagination suffice and will undoubtedly produce something readers will accept, and perhaps even be grateful for. That’s what I mean by ease in writing. It’s when poets write without concern or anxiety, fueled by the confidence in their reputation or the credit they already possess with their readers.
HJF: Is difficulty or ambiguity the counterpart of this ease you’re describing? I’m sure you are aware that your writing is often described as difficult. Is that something you aim for?
SB: I don’t aim to be difficult or deliberately seek complexity. However, my imagination, my relationship to myself—whether clear or ambiguous—and my exploration or interrogation of language, may create a sense of convolution when they converge in a text. I am aware of this. I don’t hesitate to push language towards forms or configurations that reveal something already embedded or dormant within it. It is my prerogative to stretch language to its limits. Every creation is a complex construction, and nothing is more intricate or complicated than the simple cell—the origin of all creation.
HJF: In your first collection, you experimented with meter and rhyme. What did you want to achieve in terms of form in that first book?
SB: To speak of form alone is to split the spirit of the poem arbitrarily and violently. The poem is a unity, a whole.
HJF: OK, perhaps not form, but structure. It’s clear that you are occupied with structure and design.
SB: A poem is an edifice I strive to build on a deep foundation, steadily expanding upon it—much like adding weighty extensions to a cathedral, without fear of collapse.
HJF: I’m interested in these cathedrals of yours, the long poems like Syria and All the Doors, for example. How do you structure them?
SB: I prefer long poems. I have a desire to capture the entire universe, all at once. I know that that is an impossible ambition to set for a text, but I won’t give up. I’ll keep trying. In novels as well as poems, I want each one of them to be a meticulously design, yes, like a cathedral. In both poetry and prose, I commit myself to a strict architecture, without compromise. I know my readers well. They are bright. I cannot trick them.
HJF: You insist that you have no ancestors in the practice of writing. I don’t think that’s possible, especially since you’re a voracious reader. So why do you resist placing your poetic project in a larger context or legacy of sorts?
SB: Why am I never asked about my mother in writing or my tribe of women writers or ancestors? But I understand your question, and I will surprise you. I do have a father who is no one’s father really. No matter how much I insist on this lineage, this father will never be mine. He is not a father to begin with. And I can deprive him of his fatherhood. If I want, I can make him my son instead . . .
Let me tell you a story. I was four years old when my cousin took me to the cinema for the first time. It was a western film. Another time we saw a horror film.
After that, I made use of every possible way to save money to go to the cinema. I tried to watch every film. When I went to Beirut, I compensated for the films banned in my country by going to the cinema every single day, without fail. I watched three on Sundays. Except for some days during the civil war, I never slept without watching a film. I do not hesitate to claim that I am a “film encyclopaedia.”
I know that by “fathers” you meant the works of master writers before me and their influence. I understand that. A week after my arrival in Beirut, I found a job in one of the publishing houses, first as a copyeditor, and shortly thereafter as an editor with Dar ʿAwda, the well-known publisher that produced the collected works of many of the major Arab poets of the time. This gave me access to a treasure trove. As an editor, I was able to buy books from other publishers at a discount. I was voracious like the sea foam which gifts every rock on the shore a little bit of its pain. I had come from a country whose regime was ingeniously adept at forbidding, with its colourful methods of restriction and censorship. Still, the library I had left behind in Syria, while not large, had a selection of seminal works of philosophy, theatre, literature and translated novels by luminaries, and a few poetry collections. In poetry, my taste has always been difficult.
I believe what will surprise you with regards to ‘literary lineage’ which holds every writer on earth to a belonging or allegiance to an origin of some sort is that I feel deeply connected, in some way, to the magic of cinema. I feel that I owe something to the magic of the moving image when it becomes its own language, when it possesses its unique poetic patterns.
I know that it’s an adventure or perhaps a risk to claim to fashion a father from clippings of images and photographs. But I am convinced that every great film I’ve seen was a bridge allowing me to crossover to poetry.
There are pathways to what lies beyond the rainbow of ‘origins’, pathway that hasty criticism in its classification fails to notice. Perhaps I do belong to the nineteenth or the eighteenth century. That’s how I feel.
So, who, then, is my father, dear Huda? And which mother is my mother?
Salim Barakat, Nicosia, Cyprus, 1986
HJF: Where did you meet your wife?
SB: Cindy and I met in Cyprus. I had complimented her eyes and invited her to dinner, but she declined. I tried again a few months later, and this time she accepted. Here we are, thirty-five years later, still at that dinner and I’m still admiring her charming green eyes.
HJF: What’s the language you share with your son? Do you feel that like he knows you? Are you afraid of this distance between parents and children?
SB: We are a tribe of friends in this house. Ran has never called me “Father,” ever in his life. He just calls me by my name, bare on his tongue. I never asked him to or even hinted that he should abandon the word. But I’m happy. The word “father” is an address of authority, patriarchy. And since his early adolescence, I have tried to be Ran’s closest friend. There is utmost honesty between us. I listen to him, and he is discerning in his moral and social criticism. He has his own world, possessing abilities and tools I never had. He plays football, and he’s very good. He has a bunch of friends. I made him a wooden closet with my carpentry tools, to keep all his sports gear. He is a thirty-two now.
Salim with Cindy and Ran
Nicosia, Cyprus, September 1991
HJF: When did your passion for cooking start? Tell me about your relationship with this type of composition?
SB: I began learning to cook in Cyprus. In Beirut, we lived in a building next to a restaurant owned by a friend, so I relied on them for food. However, when we moved to Cyprus, the capital of the island felt more like a village with only a few restaurants, and everything closed on the weekends. I started preparing simple meals and barbecued a lot. Even after we moved to Sweden, I continued to enjoy barbecuing. I still do it about once every week or two, and round the year. I have a shed in front of the house where I keep bags of coal and the barbecue tools. I also have a full carpentry set along with some paint buckets and brushes, so I can paint the house or work as a handyman carpenter if needed.
HJF: Tell me more about your writing process? Do you have writing rituals?
SB: I don’t have specific writing rituals or a structured writing routine. For me, a strong drink is enough to awaken the appetite for words, for devouring images and savouring meanings.
HJF: In our correspondences, you hand wrote all your responses. Is this how you always write, by hand? Why don’t you consider other means of writing which might be more practical?
SB: I admit, Huda, that I regret my stubborn and deliberate resistance to writing on a machine. It would have saved me so much time and effort. However, there’s no point in dwelling on regrets—it’s too late now.
HJF: How much time do you spend on revisions?
SB: I write with a pencil at noon, and I transcribe with a pen in the evening. Usually, what I write requires little editing.
HJF: Does this differ between poetry and novels?
SB: To me, there is no difference between a poem and a novel except in length.
HJF: Do your publishers intervene in the text? Do you consider their suggestions if they offer any?
SB: No publisher has ever intervened in my text, since the very first book. No one has offered suggestions. Even the book covers, I design them all myself.
HJF: Do you consult with anyone on your drafts and take their opinions into account?
SB: My loneliness is my only counsellor. I consult it and follow its advice.
HJF: Is there a text that you still dream of writing?
SB: I don’t have a specific text in mind that I dream of. I write first, and then I dream. I dream of my characters as they venture beyond my novel, pursuing their dreams in their own worlds. As for poetry . . . to write poetry is to swim in the explosion of the universe.
HJF: Is there something you are still waiting for?
SB: What is life but waiting, and we are its creatures—the ones who wait and the ones who are awaited.
My handwriting used to be beautiful. My hand shakes a little now.
[1] “The Kurd has Nothing but the Wind” is a poem Mahmoud Darwish dedicated to Salim Barakat. See Mahmoud Darwish La ta‘tadhir ‘ammā fa‘alt [Don’t Apologize for What You Have Done], Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes books, 2004.
[2] Excerpted and adapted from Huda Fakhreddine, The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice, Edinburgh UP, 2021.
[3] Barakat, Al-Dīwān 2 (Damascus: Dār al-Madā, 2017). Most of these blurbs are excerpted from a special issue of the journal Hajalnama featuring Salim Barakat: Hajalnama11-12 (2007), pp. 181-223.
[4] Darwish, Mah̩mūd. Memory for Forgetfulness, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), pp. 78-9.
