Levantine Surrealism

Back in the fifties and sixties, the name of the Lebanese poet Georges Shehadé was well-known among lovers of literature. Several of his plays were performed in Europe, among them "Monsieur Bob'le," "The Evening of Proverbs," "The Story of Vasco," or "The Journey."

In the plays, grotesque elements taken from the Theatre of the Absurd are mixed with decidedly fairy-tale-like, poetic, folksy and humorous tendencies.

Provocation and antimilitaristic polemic

Back then, some of Shehadé's pieces were found by some people to be provocative or even scandalous – for example, "The Story of Vasco," which offended people with its antimilitaristic polemic.

But Shehadé rather disappeared from the public radar after this period and it's now time to rescue his reputation from near-oblivion, and to give him his rightful place in the world's literary canon. So who was this dramatist and lyricist?

Shehadé was born in 1905 in Alexandria, Egypt, as the son of middle-class Lebanese-orthodox Christians. His family returned to Lebanon in 1920 after his father had failed in business. Shehadé studied law in Beirut, worked for the French High Commission there, then for the Justice Ministry and finally as General Secretary of the École Supérieur des Lettres (the university for literary studies) in Beirut.

Although he spoke excellent Arabic, all his works were written in French. He began to publish poetic texts as early as the mid-twenties.

In 1933 he visited France, where he met important poets like Saint-John Perse, Max Jacob and Jules Supervielle. He was also introduced to surrealism, which became a significant inspiration.

Even his early poems, published in 1938 – and even more a volume called "Rodogune Sinne," published in 1947 – gave evidence of the clear influence of surrealism. After he moved to Paris in 1949, Shehadé even became active in the Parisian surrealist group led by André Breton.

It was after 1951 that he enjoyed the most success with his plays, some of which he had written before the war. In 1969 he returned to Lebanon, but left the country again in 1977 when it seemed that the civil war there would never end.

In 1986, the Académie Française awarded him its Grand Prix de la Francophonie. He died three years later in Paris, and it was rumoured that he had left a huge number of unpublished works – plays, early poems, critical essays and letters.

Although his published poetical work is limited in quantity, this "poète des deux rives" ("poet of the two [Mediterranean] shores"), as he was known, was one of the most important and influential lyricists of the Levant.

Shehadé's "Poésies I – VI"

The volume, which includes the original French, covers all the six volumes of Shehadé's poems which were published in Paris during his lifetime under the title "Poésies I – VI" in 1938, 1948, 1949, 1951, 1972 und 1985, as well as the volume "Poésies VII" which was published posthumously in 1988 in Beirut.

Looking at the work as a whole in this collection, it becomes clear that Shehadé's poetical language became ever tighter and more reduced – more crystalline – over the years and decades. His friend, Saint-John Perse, described his work as having the "transparency of clear water."

Other French critics have referred to the "deep-running lightness" of Shehadé's lyrics, their grace and elegance, their surprising images. Shehadé moved increasingly towards his own aesthetic of precise, pointed images which were nevertheless laden with feeling.

Shehadé was not keen to theorize about literature. He was even less inclined to mix his writing and his life. The wider world, with the cruelty of the Second World War or the Lebanese civil war, was kept outside his poetry. His poems rather celebrate his Lebanese homeland, and above all his own childhood, as in the following lines:

There are gardens which don't have countries
And which are alone with the water
Doves fly through them, blue, without nests
But the moon is a crystal amulet
And the child remembers a great bright confusion.

Throughout his poems, there hovers a yearning – melancholy, occasionally mournful – for another world beyond our reality. It's a world which seems to have been lost and which can only be approached in dreams.

Shehadé often resorts to Christian images to evoke this dream world and that may be a reason why he moved away from the surrealists, who were known to be militant opponents of everything Christian.

Heribert Becker

© Qantara.de 2006

Translated from the German by Michael Lawton

Qantara.de

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