Tombeau of Ibn Arabi and White Traverses

129 Pages·2010·0.48 MB·English

by  Abdelwahab Meddeb

Tombeau of Ibn Arabi
and
White Traverses

ABDELWAHAB MEDDEB
Tombeau of Ibn Arabi
and
White Traverses
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW YORK 2010

Preface
On Tombeau of Ibn Arabi
and White Traverses
This Tombeau is not a question of praise or homage.
It means to show how a text that maintains a link
with the dead can be written at the present day. Of
those dead, the living remember Ibn Arabi, who has
neverstopped speakingtousthrough thewordsthat
weave his phrases. From this privilege I draw an-
other:hissurprisingclosenesstoDante.Theyarethe
two symbolic figures who through history confirm
mytwofoldspiritual genealogy, ArabandEuropean,
Eastern-Western.Thisdualityrequiresgoingbeyond
creeds and polarities so that one ceases to be only
fromtheWestoronlyfromtheEast(liketheKoranic
olivetree).
What becomes evident upon reading Ibn Arabi’s
Tarjuman al-Ashwaq1 and Dante’s Vita Nuova is the
poet as interpreter of his own text, a text that places
at the center of the poem the love inspired by the
Lady: Niz’aˆm for one poet, Beatrice for the other.
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With them is linked the name Aya, enriched by the
long history of the exaltation of women by men,
where the plurality of experiences remains marked
bythesinglenessoftheName.
My own experiences are channeled by all this po-
eticmemoryintoasingularitywherecertainpilgrim-
age sites between Paris and Carthage should be
recognized, along with Italian (Siena, Florence,
Rome),Andalusian(Ronda,Almeria),andMoroccan
(the High Atlas) places, and other locations about
whichI willhavetoremainsilenttopreserveamea-
sureofsecrecy,mentioningonlyinpassingthemany
deserts that appear throughout the stanzas—real de-
serts in Africa and Asia, the conventional desert
brought to us by the first impressions of the early
poetry of the Arabs before Islam, the desert of the
roomwhereintheMallarme´anartifactgleams.
What else can I say about the foregrounding of
theirregular(inheritedbothfromIbnArabiandfrom
Dante)? This irregularity becomes manifest through
a prose haunted by alexandrines hidden between
commas: in the flow of prose is hidden the elusive
scansion of syllables. The twelve syllables that form
the alexandrine get thrown off track, going under or
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over, for no other reason than to outwit the fixed
countofsyllablesandtowelcometheruleoftheodd
number. In this rhythmic scansion lives one of the
mysteries of the comma, which has an unexpected
usage, heredeliberately rebellious tosyntactic order,
as if to signal by its mark the presence of a voice
intended to give life to the poem. So the comma is
the sign that, in the heart of the written text, there
soundsthe phantomof thespoken word.Know then
that, from contraction to dilation, the breath, in its
movements and its rest, will overflow grammatical
logic.Sothereadershouldknowthatthesepages,in
their fullness and their emptiness, ought to be heard
accordingtolisteningtothediscontinuousandtothe
discordant,asiftokeepfromglossingoverwhatever
doesnotrunsmoothlyinthisworldthatabsorbsus.
Here, evil and sickness are portrayed in all the
theatricality of love. They nourish the attributes of
beauty according to the role assigned to them by re-
ality. And theyare present only inthemselves, with-
out being driven away by the good. The duality of
good and evil is here interlinked, with no loopholes
or evasions. Here contraries are united according to
a tension that varies from maximum to minimum.
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