Texts used in this course:
1.M.M.Badawi, Editor; Arabic Writing Today: The Drama. (Princeton, New Jersey: Arabic Research Center in Egypt. 1977)

2. Salma Khadra Jayyusi, Roger Allen, eds.: Modern Arabic Drama: An Anthology (Indiana Series in Arab and Islamic Studies) 1995 (9780253209733):

3. THEATER THREE (No. 6. Spring 1989) there are a number of essays on the drama of the Arab World.


Mohamed al--Maghout, 1934 - 2006
The Hunchback Sparrow (Al-ousfour al ahdab)

Mohamed al-Maghout’s difficulty for a 'western' audience is that he reflects the Arab predominance of poetry over other literary forms. THE HUNCHBACK SPARROW really is a dramatic poem. He is well known and respected among Arab readers as both a poet and playwright – evidence, therefore, of an Arab theatre audience receptive to complex and surrealist drama.

Despite its surrealist density, I think THE HUNCHBACK SPARROW still conveys its power in English translation. Maghout is recognized as a somewhat unique poet in the Arab world. One Arab critic has written of his work:

"In his poetry al-Maghout has fashioned a strange and unusual poetic imagery. His images are exclusively his own; he has made them, he alone has devised them. They are bitter, vicious images, fragmentary and evocative; they spring up and slap you in the face. This kind of imagery intensifies the richness of the poetic experience in his works. He is a fugitive, forever being hounded down, a Bedouin with no tent, a vagrant with no pavement."

Salma Jayyusi, in the Introduction to her anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry says of Maghout:

" His prose poetry concentrates on describing the condition of the victims of the repressive internal establishment. It is important to note here that all contemporary poets voice a loud protest against the repressive political order that stretches like a dark cloud over the Arab world. However, al-Maghout speaks as the trapped victim whose wings have been clipped by the grinding political machine and who has been left wounded and bleeding, alongside a dusty road....Al-Maghout's voice is the voice of terror; when he changes his tone a little, his deep-rooted fright is mixed with disdain and sometimes a sarcasm that enables him to advance a comic representation of contemporary evil in the Arab world."

Andrew Parkin in the anthology Modern Arabic Drama, also has some fine words about THE HUNCHBACK SPARROW, likening it to the work of Jonathan Swift.

THE HUNCHBACK SPARROW is grotesque in the extreme; but so have been the events of the 20th century it reflects: two devastating world wars, the Holocaust, Stalin’s death camps and exterminations, Korea and Vietnam (and now the IRAQ invasion), the continuing sufferings of Palestine, Lebanon, Bosnia, Rwanda and Zaire, Darfur; and the destruction of our environment out of greed - nearly all of these find a place in Maghout’s play.

Maghout’s might be the only theatrical language adequate to contain these events: an indignant language more extreme than Jonathan Swift or mad King Lear on the heath who similarly descends to a poetry of the grotesque and revolting, of a savage sexual and political satire. And this whole human ghastliness is watched over by the Birds and by the Wind who seem not so much pitying humanity as appalled by what it is capable of.

2 From the very opening, with 'The Voice of the Wind' we are faced with a powerfully disturbing poetic vision. It has been compared to the French poet, Rimbaud who similarly created a poetry of incongruous juxtapositions. al-Maghout’s writing makes absolutely no concessions to our ideas of normalcy. It's distortions of 'reality' resemble the violent paintings of the Expressionists: of Edvard Munch, Picasso of ‘’Guernica’. or the German painter, Max Beckmann.

The succession of Acts and Scenes is the progress of the play from the desert edge to the center. (The play progresses, Act by Act, like Dante's circles of hell, to the center, )

ACT ONE is in the desert, on the outskirts of society, in a ‘mancage’ in which the prisoners are driven insane. This is the Scene of the extreme victims, the political prisoners, locked up and tormented by the repressive system. The language of this Act is the most violently extreme in the play.

ACT TWO is the Scene of those neglected by the repressive system, the impoverished Village, closer than the desert jail to the center of power, but still distant from it. Here the repressive system sends out its callously indifferent Commissioner, with his violently polluting automobile. The act closes with the suicide of the Grandfather.

ACT THREE enters center of the repressive system, the Prince's palace to which the Village people have come, as a petitioning crowd. Here three figures from the mancage of Act One, the Old Man, the Dwarf and the Bachelor re-appear.

ACT FOUR displays the totalitarian system in full power: its savagely grotesque dispensing of 'Justice', ending with the execution of the two small children.

It seems only the most violent imagery can do justice to the inhumanity and violence of the events. Max Beckmann’s paintings are similarly filled with images of vulnerable human bodies being tortured by armed men and executioners. All the elements of Al-Maghout’s drama, SCENE, CHARACTER, ACTION, DIALOGUE are rendered in extreme terms. That is, the scenes are harsh, the characters are savagely grotesque, the actions they perform are nakedly brutal, and the language is filled with an imagery of bizarre opposites violently linked together. This extreme imagery is the poet's indictment of the world he is dramatizing.

DIALOGUE
The prose and verse passages in the play are surrealist, juxtaposing things that are bizarrely unlike; of private memory and general poetic observation.

"How would your protruding fangs...enjoy the grass of children's eyelashes"

A bird might be "a teardrop covered with plumes"

"all those easy livers who carry their shrouds in one hand and their combs in the other..." (578)

"The hair of my wrist is as dry as straw, so send me a cloud of migrating teeth." (579)

583 "Her eyes were like two blue birds that had just alighted below her eyebrows."

584 "bubbles of blood were showering down like a false red rain on to crushed breasts and fingers turned upwards."

Much 17th. Century Spanish Gongarist poetry and drama, especially Calderon's, has something of this quality. (Cf. ‘Life Is A Dream’)

Maghout's poetry also recalls what Samuel Johnson wrote of the Metaphysical Poets of 17th England: they create:

"a combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike....The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together; nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and allusions..."

Johnson concedes, "if their conceits were far-fetched, they were often worth the carriage. To write on their plan it was at least necessary to read and think. No man could be born a metaphysical poet or assume the dignity of a writer by descriptions copied from descriptions, by imitations”

English metaphysical poetry came at a time of cultural crisis, of loss of traditional faith and fear of violent Civil War. Yoking different ideas by violence together would be trying to pull together a world falling apart. And in Maghout, this seems even more desperately the case. In his first play and in his poems, he creates his own lingual and imagistic world, with no borrowings from The Thousand and One Nights, folktale, or European realism or absurdism. This makes his dramatic world at first difficult to get into.

The whole of Act One is an extended metaphor of imprisonment and suffering. A definite acting style needs to be established to carry it off. We see the manifestation of tyranny from inside the prison. The other three acts present (1) the totalitarian bureaucracy extending to the countryside of the peasantry; (2) the State itself, the Prince’s Court, (3) the Court of Justice and its tyranny, leading to the execution of the children.

Characters are reduced to the utmost level of suffering, degradation. Physically and mentally they are on the verge of breakdown, and speak and act in desperation. Not only for their present situation, but from what they've seen before, and how they conceive the world itself to be. They are products of this environment, their imaginations sharpened and distorted by it.

In the play, the repressive power is so secure in its savagery it does not bother to disguise itself. The mancage, the Jailer with the whip, the degradation of the prisoners, all suggest a triumphantly established violence that likes to display itself with open brutality.

The play's action begins at the outer perimeter of this triumphant power, the mancage in the desert.

The Voice of the Wind already sounds the note of a universal suffering in an oblique imagery, heard by the prisoners. Their reactions are each highly individual, private, solipsist. The extremely bizarre imagery is the expression of people in an extreme situation, madmen or prisoners, whose imaginations are perversely inflamed almost to delirium by the physical and mental torture they are subjected to. Being driven back into themselves, they hardly communicate with each other. And they have driven each other to extremes of expression.

Act I scene ii
VISIT OF THE BIRD-WOMAN
An astonishing effect (like the arrival of the Angel in Tony Kushner’s ANGELS IN AMERICA) And this was written over 60 years ago. Does she represent Mercy? Compassion? Or simply a dimension of existence free from the world of human cruelty? Birds usually symbolize freedom denied to humans, but here the prisoners imagine, hopefully, it is a bullet and can give them the freedom of death.

The episode of the Bird is the occasion for the most eloquent and bizarre rhetoric in which the Old Man recollects the gigantic slaughters of history: Attilla the Hun destroying Rome; Bonaparte burning Moscow; Hitler disappearing beneath the destruction of Germany.- a wider and greater insanity that surrounds the 'Mancage'. It is not just the Arab world, then but the entire world outside the cage that is an arena of insanity.

The Student and the Shoemaker are the victims of archetypal authoritarian oppression: of arrests, imprisonment, torture. The Shoemaker’s story is of being the innocent harborer of political posters and being arrested. The Student’s story is of screaming out his humanity in an existentialist revolt.

SUMMARY: Act One enacts the distorted and disordered consciousnesses of prisoners under torture. The strange Bird Woman witnesses human misery from the perspective of another species, from another dimension of existence.

ACT II
As Act I depicted mental states under extreme suffering, Act II visits a human community desperate under the extremity of poverty. The Village's devastation reveals another form of human cruelty through bureaucratic indifference and injustice. The oppression of the village is due to the policies of the Prince’s palace, of centralized and absolute power. Though more ‘realistic’ in setting this Act is nevertheless surreal, the dialogue searching out imagery rather than dramatic situation: a histrionic weakness of the play, but also part of its poetic interest.

The villagers await the 'saving' arrival of the Agricultural Commissioner who merely drives by without stopping. Instead, they get the Industrial Commissioner with his massively polluting automobile, who delivers a pompous and meaningless speech of bureaucratic indifference and destructive industrialism - a parody of all such 'five year plans'. And with no relation to the situation of the Village

The Grandfather, as predicted, is servile to this official and, after the long speech, he meekly picks up a page of paper the Commissioner drops, illustrating the peasants’ heartbreaking servitude before urban and central authority. Out of shame, the Grandfather kills himself - the bleak conclusion of ACT II. Later, we learn the villagers will march to the city to protest, carrying their ears of corn and where many will be killed.

Act III takes place at the center of the State Power that caused the tragedies of Acts I & II. Here the characters of I and II re-appear: the Old Man, the Bachelor and the Dwarf who alone remains true to his humanity and identity. The others have themselves become the repressive institutions of State (Old Man) and bureaucracy (Bachelor) and their power and untruth.

The Prince, Courtiers, Equerry. This Court is a modern seat of authoritarian power, the central authority that locked up the prisoners in Act I and tyrannized over the peasants in ACT II. The sympathetic Old Man of Act I. has become the tyrant Prince of Act. III.

There is no attempt to account plausibly for the Old Man’s ascension to power, nor for the Bachelor’s elevation to Holy Man. Going back to Act I. one discovers the Old Man loved the Whip and admired Attila, Napoleon and Hitler, suggesting he thirsted for power; but the play does not explain how he acquired this power.

The drama works by manipulating images; not by logical plotting but by the horrific depiction of the human condition seen from different perspectives; much like a nightmare version of August Strindberg's similarly fluid sequences in A DREAM PLAY. The Prince refuses to recognize his former prisoner friend, the Dwarf, nor to recognize a common humanity between them. The Dwarf responds, somewhat like Maghout himself, with the language of poetic imagery to set against the official language of power

The Prince represents absolute power; even the death of his best friend, the Equerry, cannot interfere with the his state plans - the arrival of the Saint or Holy Man to keep the people in awe: a ploy that fails as rocks are hurled through the window. The Holy Man is an instrument of repressive state power just as the Judge (Law) will be in the next Act. The Act ends with a violent confrontation between the Mob and the Monarch in which the Dwarf, who speaks for the people, is shot. In the next Act characters from Act III will be executed, along with their children, in a triumph of totalitarian power.

Act IV - 'THE LAW'
After the Court and State power we enter a Court of Justice perverted to serve state power. Every totalitarian power has its obedient legal system for the staging of sham trials. Here 'Justice' keeps its files on people, in a ‘1984’ form of tyranny. The Shoemaker from Act One is now the Accused with his Wife. Their crime: the wheat-ear procession of Act III, of making displays of affection in public, and objecting to the murder of their little son.

The charge and the sentence: the brutal absurdity of the process reveals a state apparatus of absolute inhumanity. The very arbitrariness of the law establishes the absoluteness of power that feels no need to justify itself. The grotesque sequence is in no way preposterous as an account the modern world. Maghout depicts a totalitarianism that does not bother to disguise itself - that has total contempt for its victims.

By making the charge and the punishment grotesque and absurd, the totalitarian state does not try to prove its case or even offer plausible reasons for punishment. It punishes to consolidate and display its power. The more preposterous the charge and the more arbitrary and undeserved the punishment the more the power of the state is confirmed and displayed .

The details of the charge, the wheat-ear procession, also picks up the conclusion of Act II when the villagers decided to make this procession to the Prince. We learn the Boy and the Grandmother have been shot dead outside the Prince’s palace.

629-30 A fine scene of summoning the Autumn and the Wind to court as a witness: Is the Autumn wind indignant Nature or, like Shelley's West Wind the breath of potential revolution? ("If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?") It blows about the court disturbing papers and terrifying the Judge, but is unable to change the course of human action.

Scene ii
The play always hovers on the verge of macabre and grotesque comedy but, like the comedy of Swift and Brecht its satire is savage, never genial, as in the Policeman’s testimony.of his 'humiliation' and 'suffering' after he murdered the little boy.

CONCLUSION
The execution of the Children and the hanging of their Parents.
The children, out of consideration for their tender years, are shot with "small bore rifles". The play concludes with the Voice of the Wind and finally of two birds – disregarded natural perspectives upon the human suffering.

The play’s angry, grotesque imagery is extreme but probably the only adequate reaction to the recent history of the world.

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Two poems by Mohamed al-Maghoud

The Postman's Fear

Prisoners everywhere,
send me all you've seen
of horror and weeping and boredom--
Fisherman on every shore, send all you know
of empty nets and whirling seas--
Peasants in every land,
send me all you have
of flowers and old rags,
of torn breasts,
pierced abdomens
and wrenched-out fingernails.
Send them to my address
in any cafe on any street in the world:
I am preparing a huge portfolio
on human suffering
to present to God
as soon as it is signed by the lips of the hungry
and the eyelids of the waiting.
But oh, you miserable ones everywhere,
I have a fear
that God may be 'illiterate.'

The Orphan

Oh, the dream ...
My glittering carriage smashed,
all of its wheels scattered like gypsies
to the world's end!
I dreamt of spring one night
and when I awoke
my pillow was heaped with flowers.
I dreamt of the sea once
and in the morning
my bed was filled with fish fins and seashells.
But when I dreamt of freedom,
spears encircled my neck
like the morning's halo.

You will never find me again
in the port or awaiting trains ...
You will find me up
in public libraries
sleeping on the maps of Europe
the sleep of the orphan on the sidewalk,
where my mouth spans more than one river
and my tears flow from one continent to the next.

.