Excerpts from Mozaffar Al-Nawwāb's "Night-Strings"

44 the minnesota review Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard Excerpts from Mozaffar Al-Nawwäb's "Night-Strings" Introduction: The Cassette as Samizdat It is not easy to find Muzaffar Al-Nawwäb's poetry in print, either in the Arab world or abroad. Available exceptions are easily listed: the poet Adonis ('AH Ahmad Sa'it) saw it fit to publish one of his poems in the Beirut journal Mawäqif in 1969; there was an early collection of poems in Iraqi dialect (next to impossible to locate) which Al-Nawwäb published when he was working as a journalist in Iraq (also 1969); there is, more recently, a photocopied collection edited by someone writing under the name of Abu Khaldùn which appeared in Beirut, with a short introduction and a glossary of obscure geographical allusions and dialectical terms which dot his text; shortly afterwards, Matba'at Al-Diyär published a slightly different version of the same poems, deleting the introduction and notes ("Night-strings: first and second movements," Watariyyat layliyya: al-haraka al-'ülä' wa al-thàniya 1970-75 [Beirut: Matba'at Al-Diyär, n.d.]). This is about the extent of his published work:1 we have not been able to locate enough texts to triangulate on the editio princeps of the last two items, but we suspect that the written material has its origin in transcriptions of his poetry readings, cassettes of which circulate extensively without copyright or official legal status of any kind, particularly among Arabs outside the Arab world. Muzaffar Al-Nawwäb is not anthologized with the other avant-garde poets, and yet he is at once among the most popular and sophisticated artists to be heard anywhere Arabic is spoken. He has accepted the refusal by established communication networks to distribute his writing, and has utilized the medium of the cassette to search out his own public and create a style which levels down the difference between elite and popular culture. The cassette recorder was not high on Marshall McLuhan's list of consciousness-changing media; perhaps it was not yet visible as a political technology when he wrote Understanding Media in 1964, but since then its subversive mobility has put it in a category completely apart from the more sophisticated technologies.2 The official systems of communication (television, radio, popular magazines, films) are all readily subject to licensing and government control. We might think of the cassette as the other end of the spectrum from the political poster. As colorless, anonymous, haydar and beard 45 seemingly interchangeable objects, they travel into every corner of a traditional society. Like radio, they require no particular level of literacy or cultural experience to operate; unlike radio, the cassette is adaptable, responsive to the interest of the powerless and unrepresented, enfranchising the literate and illiterate indifferently. (Frantz Fanon writes somewhere of colonial radio programming with its domestic drama, its incessant making public of personal life, as an embarrassing invasion of privacy in the Arab home; with the cassette we begin to learn what that programming might have been like if the colonized had been allowed a voice.) In Iran, cassette tapes made possible the dissemination of Ali Shari'ati's radical reinterpretation of Shi'i doctrine among what was previously an inert, atomistic public. Tapes of Khomeini's sermons subsequently reached an even wider audience. In occupied Palestine, tapes become an antidote to accepted, official accounts of recent history. One anonymous poem, recorded in Nazareth, has become famous: it reinstates the erased geography of the official map by naming nineteen Arab villages, now bulldozed over, which become by this means accesible to future generations .3 There is a case in which a Palestinian prisoner, like Joe Hill imprisoned in Utah, made his will public in the form of a poem smuggled out by cassette.4 A 1978 novel by the Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, "The Search for Walid Mas'ud" (Al-bahth 'an Wañd Mas'ud), a long episode presented as the transcription of a cassette recording. Nawwàb's commentary on history could be said to describe the history made possible by the cassette: My country has taught me...