A nation of words

Feature In part two of his series, Youssef Rakha meets poets from the final four emirates: Dubai, Fujairah, Abu Dhabi and Umm al Qaiwain.

Abu Dhabi. 12th August 2008. Writer Tariq Obeid al Ali, at his home in Abu Dhabi. FOR ARTS & LIFE. Stephen Lock  /  The National.  *** Local Caption ***  SL-writer-006.jpg
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A poet in Dubai is like a needle in a haystack. With nearly 1.4 million residents, Dubai is the largest emirate by population, but though it may boast as many Arab men of letters as Abu Dhabi, they are all but evanescent in the multicultural multitude. Despite the scarcity of oil, Dubai's superlative architecture and embrace of international capitalism make it a worthy experiment in future metropolitanism, but only 40 years ago it was little more than a string of fishing villages on the Arabian Gulf. Today, natives are an even smaller minority than elsewhere in the UAE. Walking into the Spinney's shopping complex in Jumeirah - where I am to meet Khaled al Budoor, a respected Dubai poet who maintains a visible profile against the odds - it occurs to me how strange it must be to have been born here in 1961, to have grown up in tandem with such mind-blowing development and, after three years in Ohio obtaining an MA in scriptwriting, to have come back to find your teenage haunts transformed beyond recognition. "Let's meet at the Starbucks," he says on the phone. "Jumeirah is where I grew up. You know Jumeirah, don't you?" And it is as if, asking me, he momentarily doubts how sure he himself is. "One feels a kind of estrangement," he says now. "The places of childhood are no longer there." Budoor is a man of less than average height in a spotless white khandoura, slight but sturdy, with an incredibly trim light moustache going from grey to white. His bearing reflects years of working as a radio and television anchor, notably with Dubai TV, where he settled for early retirement some five years ago. He has written films and for the press and presided over seminars and an all-Dubai sophistication comes through in his conversation: cosmopolitan, aloof, slightly technocratic. "One feels fortunate to live in a city like Dubai," he intones, "because it offers the writer everything he wants - books, films, equipment, contact with the contemporary world..."

He started out writing in classical verse, quickly making the transition through the modern, modified metres into prose, but he has always written in the Emirati dialect as well as standard Arabic. Some of his vernacular poems have rhyme and rhythm, but the extended metaphors out of which he forges a text are comparable in each case. So far he has published three books: Night (1992), Winter (2002) and (in Emirati Arabic) Ink and Dalliance (1999). Several more volumes, including collected articles on folk literature, are upcoming in the next year.

He seems at home enough in Starbucks, but his poems would never be. They emerge, rather, from "a simple fishing village" where "PE classes at school consisted of swimming in the sea" and old men gathered in the moonlight to listen to each other's stories and verses, their laughter unencumbered by the absence of a dining table, their knowledge of the outside world all but fantastical. Part of this village may once have occupied the space of the multinational outlet where we are talking, but Budoor does not seem to mind.

And it is precisely the ability not to mind, and the contemporary idiom he writes in, that allow his poems to preserve those nostalgic images as places of beauty to which Arabic readers everywhere can return. Yet his true achievement, paradoxically, remains the way he has managed to depart - from the Emirates, Ohio, even his career - returning, painfully but exultantly, through the creative act. What he feels for the old Jumeirah, far from homesickness in time, is "an escape-return relationship," as he puts it, "escape and return". These days he recognises his birthplace only "in the faces of some friends, or else in recorded songs of the sea"; sometimes, he adds, matter-of-factly, "I feel in tune with its spirit".

But Dubai's architecture does not help induce this feeling, "even if the human being tries, in his own house, to provide a more merciful space". Still, Budoor's principal concern is with "estrangement in language", a literal reference to the fact that few people in Dubai speak Arabic. It is a fate he seems resigned to as part of the city's contemporary character, what makes it a great place to live. "But at other times," he sighs, as if making a delayed confession, "I have the urge to run far into the desert - or the sea."

The trip to Fujairah never materialises. As is the case with Umm al Qaiwain, for the longest time I am told one of two things: there are no poets; or what poets there are, "classicists", are not contemporary poets. "There are poets," the Ras al Khaimah master Ahmad al Assam finally declares. "They may not write in prose, they may use Emirati Arabic. But there are poets." And he picks up his mobile phone...

After a few days' worth of toing and froing, one sultry evening I take a taxi to the Shangri-La Hotel, on Sheikh Zayed Road, Dubai, to meet the Nabati poet Khaled al Dhahnani, who shows up a little late at 11.30pm, straight from the studio where he was a guest juror at a teenage Nabati poetry competition. "When you have been a juror on so many competitions," he explains, "it doesn't feel right to participate in the Millions Poet." Within hours, Dhahnani is due at the airport for his summer holiday in Europe, but he has not only made the effort to show up, he also pays for dinner and provides over an hour of engaging conversation.

A tall, dutifully groomed figure with an easy-going, slightly distracted air, Dhahnani was born in 1972 to a family so involved in the politics of Fujairah - and so close to the Al Sharqi family - that he compares them to the Baramikah, viziers to the Abbasids and their empire's true movers and shakers for hundreds of years after the ninth century. "Except that, unlike them," he adds, "we do good." Although he keeps his house in Dubai as well as Fujairah, Dhahnani feels he is wholly a product of this most mountainous of all the emirates, which commands stunning views of the Gulf of Oman. And, at 130,000 people, it is the second least populated emirate, with active mining and tourism industries but high unemployment rates among Emiratis.

A major media official in Fujairah (he organises the bi-annual International Monodrama Festival) Dhahnani stresses his connection with nature and the conscious effort to "reinforce talent with reading", developing his own instantly recognisable style. He may write in the vernacular, he says, but he uses "a white language" comprehensible to all Arabs. And he is so concerned with the future of Arabic among Emiratis that for months he struggled to rid his speech of the word "OK", but ironically - in a high-end setting potentially more alienating than Jumeirah - he feels no estrangement whatsoever.

At 67,340 square kilometres - 86 per cent of the country's land area - Abu Dhabi is too vast to picture all at once. First, there is the coastal city housing most of the emirate's 1.3 million residents: in itself, a layered amalgam of worlds, as multinational as Dubai, but with more stress on Bedouin heritage. Then there is the original desert spring, Al Ain, population 614,180: the agricultural, educational and camel-racing centre whence settled members of the emirate's powerful tribes, the Al Nahyan included, invariably hail. Between and beyond the two cities, oil fields, palm forests, luxurious resorts and construction workers' camps frame the legendary Empty Quarter.

The mythic journey from Al Ain to the city of Abu Dhabi - originally a seasonal fishing and pearl-diving pilgrimage - has come to symbolise the formative years of the UAE, with the centre of gravity shifting from one to the other in the course of Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan's lifetime, to coincide with the genesis of the federation. It is a journey the director of the Union of Writers and Authors of the Emirates, Hareb al Dhahiri, made at the age of 12, during a historical juncture, he says, "bridging two eras". Moving from one city to the next was like "replacing the desert with the sea". Together with Abu Dhabi's cultural initiatives of the 1980s and 1990s - lectures and exhibits in the Tourist Club, the establishment of the Cultural Foundation, liaisons with Sharjah about founding the Union - it remains a central reference point in his life. "Abu Dhabi," he says, "was a trail blazer."

A Romantic poet better known as a short story writer, Dhahiri lives in Battin, an older enclave with one of the lowest skylines in the city, not far from the Old Airport Road. His spacious villa is furnished in the Second Empire style prevalent among the Arab bourgeoisie. Joining him in his salon, I remember that he is not only an intellectual, but also an Adnoc manager, and reportedly an effective juggler of priorities in the vexed arena of Abu Dhabi cultural policy. A critic of "mixing tourism into culture", he brings the views of Abu Dhabi literary figures, like the poet Ahmad Rashed Thani, and the novelist Ali Abur Rish, the latter originally from RAK, into the public sphere. "Countries work on their artists until they become international," he declares. "They do not import foreign artists, paying them millions of dollars they wouldn't dream of earning in their countries."

Dhahiri's house bespeaks comfort and safety. And so, in a sense, do his poems: easy expressions of a "philosophy of love" informed by the work of visionaries like Blake and Gibran Khalil Gibran. He has written four books: Mandoline (1997), A Kiss on the Cheek of the Moon (1999) and Puppets' Night and Soul Pulse (2004). Only two are collections of poems. In the others, narrative plays a smaller role than exploration of the psyche; and the same "philosophical way of writing" produces a layered, sometimes arcane short story similar to a prose poem. Only very subtly do Dhahiri's social concerns rise to the surface: the disintegration of the fabric of society, dependence on the West, and the receding tide of cultural as opposed to tourist initiative.

A dark, round man with slow gestures and an easy smile, Dhahiri sits gingerly in an armchair to delineate his literary trajectory: from traditional verses through khawatir, or thoughts, to short stories. "For Arabs and especially Bedouins," he says, "the connection with poetry is born with you when you are born. So it is only natural that even a short story writer should take this course." Gradually, as he warms to his theme, his back slumps further into the cushion, his arms relax, and what strikes me as a conversational technique peculiar to Abu Dhabi - slow, measured but eventually revealing - begins to operate.

Dhahiri speaks of Scarborough, England, where - at his own initiative, at the age of 15 - he spent three months living with a local family to learn English. He speaks of his three years studying business at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon, where his writing teacher - a tremendous support to him - turned out to be a Jewess, and how people had discouraged him from going to America under the impression, gleaned from action movies, that whoever lives there will end up dying in a shooting. He speaks of "the simple and old place", Al Ain, "that stays with you as you grow up"; and of the inscrutable mysteries of poetic inspiration.

But imperceptibly, deftly, he steers the conversation back to Abu Dhabi. "When I first got here, there was an empty sand lot where we used to play, the present al Rawdha: people would come over and ask after a specific person. We were small then, but we could always tell them where that person lived. That's how closely knit life was. But these days it reminds me of Scarborough. Now we are big," he laughs, "but we don't know the names of our next-door neighbours."

I have been in Umm al Qaiwain for nearly 24 hours when I realise the person I am here to see is actually in Abu Dhabi. So the interview is postponed till my return, and my observations are promptly recorded before I head back, smoking to my heart's content in my first unmetered Emirati taxi. Tariq Ebeid, a member of the Al Ali clan of which the Al Mualla sheikhs are a subsection, is a former police officer currently training as a school teacher. Periodic changes of career, he believes, are necessary for a rounded view of life. Born in 1967, Ebeid started publishing his Nabati verses in 1985; and urban discomfort notwithstanding, he has always worked in Abu Dhabi, spending the weekends and holidays at home, where he still has the greatest audience base, frequently holding poetic evenings in an atmosphere where "everyone is family and friends".

The least populous emirate, and in some ways the least developed, Umm al Qaiwain recalls the hinterlands of the Sahara and Sinai by turns. It has few public amenities, no real centre, and a vastly spread out miscellany of beach-orientated establishments, among which the garland-dispensing, dancing-girl-on-stage "Indian nightclub" is particularly popular. Patronised mainly by sailors and jet skiers, the emirate "has few resources", Ebeid says, but "boasts a glorious tradition of learning and the old, affectionate way of life".

It has contributed much skilled labour to the bigger emirates, he goes on, producing a portfolio of magazine clippings out of which he reads a few samples. Ebeid is an admirer of the Millions Poet, from which he says he learns a lot, but the opportunity to participate has not presented itself. In reality, he belongs more firmly in a humorist tradition of zajal, less emotional and rhetorical than the kind of work showcased in the programme, and more concerned with everyday life.

A small, dark, eminently hospitable man, Ebeid meets me at his Old Airport Road apartment while it is being packed in preparation for travelling to Umm al Qaiwain, and he repeatedly apologises for nonexistent inconveniences. "This is only a place to stay," he says, "so that the children who go to school in Abu Dhabi should have a home here too. But the quiet, comfortable life is back there in Umm al Qaiwain, where there is neither traffic nor noise - and we keep travelling back and forth. One day, God willing, you will come and visit me there. And then you will see the difference for yourself."
@email:yrakha@thenational.ae