Fiving

Tamim Al-Barghouti

Critics spill a lot of ink discussing the relation between form and content; I have always found a difficulty to see the difference between the two concepts. The classical Arabic poem is made of lines of equal feet, all lines end in the same rhyme, and each line is divided into two symmetrical halves. The first half of the line is usually an incomplete sentence, the completion of which comes in the second half. There is no rhyming scheme for the first halves, though in terms of meter, they are identical to the second halves. The first halves are called “Al-Sodour”: the fronts, and the second halves are called “Al-A’jaz”: the backs. In a previous article I discussed the meaning of such a structure; the fact that the fronts have no meaning by themselves, but still are musically identical to the backs, allows them to act as reminders; once a person knows the first half of the line, the second half easily comes to mind. This was the standard form of any Arabic poem up to the eleventh century. That was the time of cultural flourishing, but political disintegration of the great Islamic empires. By the end of that era, the fact that kings and princes were more Turks and Persians than Arabs deprived a lot of poets from the luxurious lives they enjoyed, but also blessed poetry with a necessary distance from authority. Poets were now free to improvise and experiment without the continuous standardizing scrutiny of the academics and critics in the courts of princes. It was around that time that the art of ‘fiving’ came to existence. Instead of having a unit made of two halves, poets started writing poems the units of which were made of five “halves” with identical metrical structure. The first four “halves” rhymed together, and the fifth rhymed with all the other fifth “halves” in the rest of the poem. In other words, while the rhyming scheme of the classical poem was: a, b, c, b, d, b, f, b…etc. the rhyming scheme of the ‘fived’ poem became: a, a, a, a, b, c, c, c, c, b, d, d, d, d, b…..etc.

Now, at first glance this might seem to be an insignificant change in form. Yet, like everything in this tradition, there is more to the desert than sand and more to the sea than water. Poets were now able to quote a whole poem written two hundred years before their time into their own poems. A poet from the eleventh century would get a poem written in the eighth century, and, to every two halved line of the old poem, he would add three more “halves” that rhyme with the first half of the line in the original poem. The result would be a poem in a poem, written by two poets over two hundred years, yet owned entirely by the one who comes last. The poet would have then “fived” the ancient poem, turning the meaning of the old poem upside down in the process. 

Like any form of artistic innovation, “fiving” holds the fingerprints of its historical context. By the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the future seemed darker than the past, the whole Arab society was looking up to figures that had died hundreds of years before, an infinite requiem for the glory of the past was being played in the ears of men and women every day from dawn to dusk. Even among the scholars and jurists, an understanding of history as a linear decline from the time of the Prophet to the Day of Judgment ruled their theories of ethics and politics. And, since social and moral disintegration was at its worst, every day was a potential day of judgment. Everything seemed to be loosing its meaning. And, in time when meanings are lost, an obsession with forms prevails. Religion was reduced to a system of rituals; oratory and rhetoric were reduced to word plays, and poetry to experimentation with rhymes and meters.

Nevertheless, to every time its real artists, even confusion and disintegration could generate great art. “Fiving” was an attempt by the poets who invented it, whether consciously or subconsciously, to summarize and, some times, bitterly criticize the whole historical/hysterical scene. “Fived” poems were baskets of contradictions; on the one hand, they were conforming to the general fashion of glorifying the past, after all, the later poet was accepting, and poets rarely do, to take the second place behind the old poet. But on the other hand, the very form of “fived” poems was a rebellion against the tradition of old poetry. In terms of meaning, by adding three more “halves” to the two halved line of the old poem, the later poet could entirely change the meaning; everything from bitter sarcasm to infinite glorification became possible. In a sense, the poet, who at first glance seems to have accepted sitting in the back seat, is actually in full control of where the poem goes. Lastly, and though I doubt any of the “fiving” poets had that in mind, “fived” poems were a comment on the real balances of power in the societies that produced them. While a wave of full recognition of the authority of the old and ancient swept Cairo, Damascus and Baghdad, the Turkish and Mamlouk societies were bashing and destroying all the values of that old world they so much glorified. Moreover, that ritualistic glorification was part and parcel of the process of destruction, just as mummification is all about death, despite its claims of eternity and preservation.

Many poets and writers compare the socio-cultural circumstances in today’s Arab world, to that of the Mamlouk and Turkish eras.  The fall of Baghdad, just underlines the similarities, and amplifies the pain. Today, we know that the strategies we followed eight hundred years ago did not work, and it is up to us, to find new ones that will.

Tamim Al Barghouti