Marcel Kurpershoek

MK

I still call it Arabia because Saudi Arabia is a relatively recent political phenomenon. So it has retained its ancient culture of Homeric-style epic poetry and story-telling. The Bedouin culture is like a prolongment from the ancient, even pre-Islamic Bedouin culture, even the vocabulary. So that’s what I’m researching. That’s why I give on purpose my books, the titles ‘Arabian’: “Arabian Satire,” and “Arabian Romantic.” [Laughs.] Now, the next book, the last book probably in the Library of Arabic literature will be “Arabian Hero.” I do it on purpose, not use the word Saudi Arabia, because all these states...the culture is older than the state. They put a political framework on a culture that already existed and continues to exist.

SN

As a thinking person, making a statement with the language you choose for the region you study seems quite fitting. With studying Bedouin culture and its poetic tradition as you do, the framework seems just as important as the content itself. It’s not just about what the poetry is like, but where it sits in relation to the cultural landscape.

MK

We hear all this stuff about the political events going on in the Middle East, sheer political events and mostly calamities. But the truth is, there is a very ancient culture that is still alive and vibrant. So that’s what I’m working on. Saad Sowayan, my mentor, the person who taught me all this, studied anthropology at Berkeley in the 1970s. And actually he introduced this way of thinking to me, he was the first person that had this kind of systematic thinking about anthropology, who brought it to Arabia, where previously they were just thinking of people in religious categories.. He was really a pioneer in that field. And when I came to Riyadh as a diplomat in 1986, I got interested in this because I was an Arabist. He wrote a book, Nabati Poetry, the Oral Poetry of Arabia (1985), which was really an eye opener for a lot of people, discussing the old Arabic literature, that it’s still a living science, a living infant here kicking and alive and well. People didn’t know. The first Saudi state in 1754 imposed Wahhabism, a very rigorous, very restrictive view of Islamic practice on the population. But at that time, of course, the state did not have the tools that the state has now. So this form of Islamic practice was mostly confined to the Oasis, settled people, who actually could also practice this because to follow all of the religious observances, you need a kind of regulated life. Whereas in Bedouin culture, they are always on the move and doing things like raiding other tribes. It was hard to bring them to heel.

So now, here we are 30 years later. And what’s going on? I said, “Well, basically what you’re seeing here is political.” Because the state needed to remove all these archaic religious restrictions and institutions. But then there is a void. And I think in no country the official sphere, the media, and so on, will not allow a void to be there. There must be something. So what they fall back on is now the traditional culture, and a lot of it is tribal culture. And that’s exactly my subject and that of my mentor and my teacher Saad Sowayan. So now it’s the opposite from where we started. First we were going against the current, trying to do what we wanted to do without any support or encouragement from the country, against the fierce opposition. And now it is the opposite. I’m not saying it’s an ideal situation because a lot of fake news also creeps in, but at the same time, it’s unexpected.

SN

With the change in support and a change in the larger public narrative around tribal culture, is your approach to your writing now different than it was then? Or has it stayed consistent in the tone and framing that you use?

MK

My own writing?

SN

Yeah. In your books, the volumes on Arabian poetry and Bedouin culture.

MK

Well, a lot of it, my recent writing is translation. So my only comment comes in the introduction and in the notes perhaps, but I try to stay faithful to the text. So my own writing about my adventures and how I feel about things were only a few books. They were originally in Dutch and then translated into English and from English into Arabic. And then the Arabic translation, al-Badawī al-Akhīr (The Last Bedouin), became a huge bestseller in Arabia and scandal at the same time. My original field work was my four months in the desert. I kept going back and discovering new things. I wrote various books about that. So in that book, The Last Bedouin, I gave a bit my own views and experiences of the story like when you make a movie, there’s also the behind the scenes narrative. I stepped a bit outside the academic field, you could say, because it became more like travel literature. Very few foreigners were actually allowed to travel around in the country freely. They would stay in Jeddah or Riyadh or in the eastern province at the oil fields and so on, but they wouldn’t go and live for months among the people in the desert. And to do that, I took some advantage of my fact that I was a diplomat. At the end of my tour I asked for permission to do so, and I had already built up a little reputation by writing innocent pieces for the Saudi press. And then in the end, I had to get permission from the king himself, King Fahd. So I got all this on paper. And then I was armed with a letter from the deputy-governor of Riyadh, which is the largest province, and then I was received everywhere with open arms. The issue I focused on in my project description was on ecology. I said that a lot of poetry, Bedouin poetry is about nature and how to find your way in the desert with the help of stars and with the drought and camels and travel and all kinds of plants and grass for the camels and the sheep and goats to feed on, different kinds of terrain. And I published some articles in the Saudi press about coffee poetry, the “innocent pieces”, I mentioned.

Coffee is an important ritual with Saudis of all kinds. It’s a very intricate ceremony, I guess a bit like the Japanese tea ceremony. There are all kinds of rules of seating procedure in the majlis, which means “pace to sit down,” which is the gathering of men. The women have their separate majlis, of course, and who sits where and who gets the coffee first and how many cups you can accept before you say I’ve had enough. And there was even another very ancient thing that when they had warfare or they had a blood revenge, they would hold a cup of coffee. And they gave the name, the cup of coffee, the name of the person that should be killed in blood revenge events.

So they will say to the meeting, the group, the gathering, "Who will drink the cup of so and so?" And then a very brave fellow, he said, “I will do it.” So he drank the cup, which meant that he would be under an obligation to fight the other man and try to kill him in the coming battle. So coffee has a lot of significance. I put that in my proposal for my research, and then I was let loose on the tribes, so to speak. And there everything started.

SN

Rituals have a way of covering quite a lot of ground. As you say, coffee can encompass recreation and retribution all in the same. After your first experience living with Bedouins did you return to Arabia?

MK

For a long period, I didn’t go until suddenly, I was invited back. And then when I came to Abu Dhabi, again, I was invited, and then they started making movies about the book The Last Bedouin: Bedouin Tribes of the Arabian Desert in a television series. So actually I made two television series, in which I figured as the protagonist of my own book because my book was called “The Last Bedouin,” and the television series was called The Last Traveler. And actually, when I went to make this series, a lot of people I met were the children of the people I first met when I went there. So they would still know me, “Oh, I saw you when I was a little kid.”

SN

[Laughs.] The connections lasted. There is something profound about a full circle moment with a certain kind of intergenerational recall. A resurfacing. You had become a marker in those families’ memory precursive to the change in widespread appreciation of tribal poetry and culture.

MK

Well, obviously everyone wants to know about poetry and so on. But this is all about poetry because it’s such an integral part of life, society, and communication. I think I compare it to the role of social media now. Because in oral culture, words would fly even on camelback. For instance, I wrote a forthcoming book, “Arabian Hero,” in which the protagonist is the hero, so to speak. He lived in the 17th century, we figure, he became a legend. So he has been transmitted through oral culture and transmission until recently, then was recorded and then edited, and now translated. And some of his verses I found in the poetry of another 17th century poet who is actually from the Emirates. And so that is in my book called, “Love, Death, Fame of al-Māyidī ibn Zāhir.” The verses lived 2,500 kilometers apart from each other, in the 17th century. So these verses they travel. And because it was within, you could say the same cultural space, they wouldn’t go to China or Iran because it’s a different language, everything. So you can see that it’s really the Arabian space. So you have to forget about all these borders which we see now between the states. Between the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, between Saudi Arabia and Jordan, and Iraq and Syria and so on. Because there were no borders. Borders are a very recent thing and basically very unwelcome to the people who lived there because they have tribal relatives at the other side of the border. The borders are just a nuisance and an obstacle, but now we have to live with them.

SN

Borders are antithetical to the natural ways that the organic world separates itself, and how people separate themselves from one another. Where we could see land as being designated by weather patterns, a dramatic shift in terrain, where cultural or ethnic groups congregate, etc., borders as we know them are inflexible in their designation and, as you say, inaccurate as to how people establish themselves as individuals or groups.

MK

They are artificial creations of borders imposed by the colonial powers after the First World War. For four centuries it was the Ottoman Empire, and they had a very loose control of Arabia. So distant and unfamiliar. Their main interest was keeping the railroads safe to, or later the rail, or the pilgrims’ way from Egypt and Syria to Medina and Mecca was their main concern. Otherwise, the Bedouins could lead their own lives and they developed their own law. That’s the tribal law, the customary law, which worked very well back then.

Blood revenge, for instance, is a horrible thing, but it kept the desert safe. People would be very loath, very reluctant to kill someone because they knew even the second, third, fourth generation, could still kill someone in revenge in an attempt to get even. Yeah, getting even is a very important thing. I think even present today in Gaza, what you see there. It’s bred into the bone of the culture, so to speak. But the basic, it’s not a matter of revenge or blood thirstiness. The basic thing is to keep the area safe without help of authorities who have an army and operationalize the police, just by reputation and adherence to certain social codes...And a lot of poetry has to do with it. I’m sorry to say so, it’s not only beautiful musings of an artist in a room with candlelight...It’s of very practical significance.

SN

It’s a completely different way of living. The idea that your self-governance moves along with you. Whereas when we move nowadays, we’re used to, “Okay, these are the laws in Amsterdam. I can do this, I can’t do this.” And then I go to Thailand, “I can do this and I can’t do that.” This is a completely different notion. And there’s also something about a kind of memory, getting even, it can happen immediately. Or sometimes it can happen a ways down the future, for example, a group of people, they remember being wronged, and they need to have some sort of response.

MK

Exactly. Memories are very strong. And because they live in tight kinship communities, or tribal affiliations, and agnate groups basically. For instance, a woman, I’m sorry to say so, but traditionally, let’s say in the Bedouin society, a woman would always belong to her father actually. Or if the father had died to the brothers, or the uncles.So let’s say, if she was divorced, which happens very frequently, because I did this study, which you saw on women poetry. You see all these issues coming up there. That’s why I call it the title of my talk in Riyadh recently “Earthbound vs. Skybound, The Ambitions of Man,” they go in different directions.

Women are faced with the consequences, so to speak, of the man’s actions. They deal with the shit of what men create. And so women, if she were divorced...The way of divorcing a woman, or repudiating, actually, because the right of divorce belongs to the man only. So he would say tarāts ṭālidz, thumm ṭālidz, thumm ṭālidz, wa-th-thalāth ṣarm, yallah rūḥī halits “You are repudiated, repudiated and repudiated; that makes three repudiations, off you go to your own family”. So now because if you would say it once, and then once again, then she would still not be divorced. Not as long as you’ve said it once or twice. But if you’ve said it the third time, she would be really divorced, and there was no way they could get back together. So you could also combine the three. So if a man would get mad with his wife for some reason, maybe silly, and he would get in a rage, he would say the formula three times, and then, well, now it’s up. So then he would say “Go to your people”, which means your people, her kin, where she came from when she first married. So that was the system.

SN

Would there have to be a witness, with an oratory divorce? Does there have to be another person there besides the husband and the wife for it to be legitimate or hold?

MK

Not in the Bedouin society. The wife would accept it because she heard it. By accepting it and walking out, climbing on her camel and going back, that would be sufficient. But the children would still remain with the husband. So that’s a tragedy. A lot of women were separated from their children. First, they would have the right to bring them up, breastfeed them, until a certain age. But when they were around circumcision age, they would go back to their father and become part of that group. So anyway, we were talking about memories. So it’s just to show how tightly knit these groups are, and the memories remain. They can rattle off the name of so many ancestors, going back to, I don’t know, how many generations. Of course, there have been a lot of mistakes in transference or retelling. A story can shift more into a myth, so to speak.

But still, that’s the system. So the memory about blood revenge, that tribe did this, it can continue for a very long time. So it would not be strange to see someone was killed or murdered in an illegal way. That’s also important. So in warfare, that would not be a reason for blood revenge if people met in battle. It might happen after 20, 30 years, they could also kill someone of his blood group. A person that had nothing to do with it. Just because it’s the safety of the group, it’s a group thing. They are just like wolves, a pack of wolves. And so if someone is killed, it enfeebles the pack to have a loss of a member. So they have to do the same to the other so that next time someone will not… try it again towards the pack. So if you see now Israel, for instance, firing a rocket against Iran, because Iran fires a rocket at Israel, it’s deterrence. So don’t do it again because if you do, we will again also. Think twice because you may also hurt yourself. So that is the system of deterrence that was encapsulated and embodied in tribal law. So all these things I’m talking about now, these are real subjects, it’s not Wordsworth or Shelley , it was a way of communication. But it should be expressive and creative too, because if it is artistic, if it is well made, it makes people listen over and over and it has more impact overtime. The idea was to have a social impact.

That’s the big difference between...But I think in a way, actually, the “Iliad,” for instance. So when my book, “Love, Death, Fame,” came out, these books in paperback editions, they usually get the forward from someone who’s completely outside my discipline. On “Love, Death, Fame,” it was done by David Elmer, a Harvard professor in ancient oral Greek tradition, which includes the “Iliad.” So he makes the point that for the Emirates probably, as a country, this poetry has the same function as the “Iliad” for the Greek. That is to create a kind of national identity and feeling. The expedition against Troy and the epic made them congeal. Because they stick together in a certain narrative

SN

This really paints a very vivid picture. If there’s something about an art form or a corpus, if the poem is a corpus and it both needs to, through its descriptive artistic language, function as a mechanism of beauty and also at times as a warning or a behavioral code, which speaks to the most beautiful things and biggest calamities in one instance. By design, I wonder if Bedouin culture needs to be multipurpose because it’s a life of constant movement. The palm tree, or better yet the camel is the mode of transportation, and a way to hold wealth, and the topic of art. A poem is both something to entertain and also something to teach. That there might be no functional division of form by necessity.

MK

You mentioned two things which are really interesting, the camel and the palm tree because they have huge symbolic significance, and they’re in all of Arabia. And actually I spoke about that this past week in Riyadh. It’s a very deep subject because it goes back before our era, before 4,000 years because you see some of the rock arts, the area where I did my research in the Nafūd desert. I don’t know which book did you show me there? Which one is that?

SN

I have two of your books here. I have the “Nafūd Desert”, and then I have the Ibn Zāhir, “Love, Death, Fame.”

MK

Yeah. Well, that’s good. Like the Nafūd Desert, Jubbah is a small town and they have a mountain. And it was a natural meeting place because the Nafūd desert is a huge sand desert, and it would be the first oasis people would come to if they traveled on camelback from the north, including many western travelers in 19th century when they started to discover this area and the atmosphere was welcoming, it was Bedouin. Whereas Riyadh, foreigners wouldn’t be well received there. But there the atmosphere was open and of course the Ottoman Empire itself is multi-ethnic, multi-religious empire by necessity, religiously tolerant. And they were officially part. So this is the whole atmosphere that was there before where this book starts. So then the travelers would come to Jubbah, first oasis, first sight of green, after desert, you have that rock art there. It’s a very ancient place,you see a girl dancing on one of these rock arts and their hair is standing out because of the wild shaking movements and their beautiful long, black hair. It goes, it moves in all directions. [Laughs.] And so you see this is in the painting, but if you look closely or you think a little bit, you can see that it looks like a palm tree also. So what happens in the Ibn Zāhir descriptions, he’s famous for his rain poems. And also Dindaan, the poet I lived with in the 1980s, he was still illiterate and this poem, which was painted on the water tower of Riyadh this year. That’s basically also a prayer for rain because the thing he loved most was his camel. They were suffering from drought. So a lot of these rain poems, their origin is like a prayer for rain. And so the rain brings fecundity. Now you see the two symbols, they go together. This picture, it travels to there from the north, to the emirates in that poem. So you get, for instance, first the poet is so sad and unhappy and love doesn’t work out. And then he has to revive his own spirits. After all this misery, this is where the poetry starts and then he starts thinking, how does he revive his own spirits? He fancies that a rainstorm has come. “Ah, you see some lightning in the distance.” If an Arab sees lightning, he has to say “karīm yā-barq”. It means generous, be generous, oh lightning. Hopefully you will bring the rain and then the winds. It’s very important poetry because they imagine that the winds drive the clouds with the rain, bringing them in the right direction. And then comes the lightning, which is thrown like a lance into the belly of the clouds and it releases its rain, the water. So that’s the image. And because there is a lot of wind, then the palm trees, their crowns start to move wild, like the girl’s hair.

SN

That’s compelling. There is such an immediacy between the livable world and poetry. The realities of living at the consequence of ecological changes, consuming in and of themself, provide raw material for the poems, and a springboard for parsing through one’s desires, however material or immaterial.

MK

The pre-Islamic poets we know, always the poet would arrive at the traces of an abandoned camp where he had been in love previously with a girl. So a lot of Arabs get quite bored, again, these traces of this, even by the year 800. Poets would say, let’s forget about these old camp traces. But even in the early 20th century, in the 19th, it was still a living experience because during the hot season, they could not pasture their camels because all the grass would have gone dry and withered. So they had to congregate around certain wells. At the oasis, the dates you talked about at the beginning, they ripen. They need this steaming heat to stew them. They would water the palm trees day and night, all the time because dates need a lot of water to ripen. So then they have a wooden roller to hoist up the water by camel, which makes a lot of noise in the night because of the creaking, the screaming, screeching. And so that would be another metaphor for the pain the poet feels in his heart. He would say, “Oh my God, my love sickness, it’s so bad that it resembles that poor camel that has to pull up the water day and night. And the screeching, the screaming of the wooden pulley wheel.” And so you get all metaphors from the natural environment.

So that star Canopus, when it comes up in the morning. It means that the hot season is about to end, which means that they will start leaving the well towards where they might find pastures.. So what they do is they need the dates, they stock up on the dates. And they leave. But maybe they all go in different directions. During this period of the hot season, some men and women feel some attraction to one another and they start with secret contacts and making signals with the eyes and the fingers.. But free love affairs are not allowed. They could forbid a girl to marry someone from outside their group. These forces the women had to cope with. And so this whole system, it’s designed to use the women and it’s also like a commodity to obtain results that are beneficial to the pack of wolves, the original people. So love in Arabic poetry, it’s about an unhappy love. A boy and a woman, how do you say? Boy meets girl.

SN

Boy meets girl, yes. [Laughs.]

MK

That couldn’t happen. But it’s human nature. So what would happen is, first of all, this tragedy, it became an established paradigm of Arabic poetry. You have the story Majnun and Layla, Majnun means crazy. Because they couldn’t marry, but they loved each other. So if it’s really bad, the love affair, they prefer to die and give up on the idea of marrying or being always close together with the woman or the man. So this is the coercion of the system. But the system was maybe necessary to keep safety for the group in the test, but it became a huge theme, not to be allowed to love the one you happen to love. So this is a huge theme in the Arabic world. First of all, the unhappiness about it and the martyrs of love. It’s a recognized genre. In the old days and even today, there are huge volumes about martyrs of love, people who died and sacrificed everything for their love. It’s a slight sadness you can hear in some Arabic songs.

Sometimes they ask, for instance, to elope with a girl, which is quite common. A boy would come, he would have his camel a little bit away from the camp, sneak to the women and she would be ready and waiting and they would jump on the camel and would race away. Maybe for hundreds of kilometers, ask to be the, they’re called neighbors, of some other tribe. If they could get them back, they would probably kill them. Your original tribe. But as the years pass by and they get children, maybe they can also negotiate. They can return. Things like that happen.

SN

That’s a huge sacrifice, just riding off into the desert, into the unknown for love.

MK

You mentioned palm trees and camels earlier. This is the old bifurcation of Arabian culture. You need water and permanent water is only in certain places. But if your business is cattle and livestock, you have to go out in the desert. The word desert is confusing because you imagine it like the Sahara, where there is absolutely nothing. But more often there’s rain, always intermittent rains. It’s more like a steppe. There is grazing. But in the years of drought, of course, the stock of livestock would be decimated. So these things happen. So this is the old opposition, people who live in the settlements, which are called Ḥaḍar which mean, actually the word Ḥaḍar, and also ḥaḍārah in Arabic, which means culture. But ḥadara actually, it means to be present. What does it mean to be present? You’re always staying at the well. The palm trees. So the word culture itself became anti Bedouin. So this is how Bedouin were looked upon as predators, as robbers, as all these bad things. And that was Ibn Khaldun. He’s called the father of sociology in the 15th century, who developed this theory of society on this basis.

SN

Thank you for that clarification on the desert. That’s really important in order to understand the poetry and the cyclical realities of the Bedouin people. The desert can be an extreme environment, but not necessarily homogeneous in terrain. Again, there’s this theme of constraint and response that is fundamental to a nomadic life and the formal artistic decisions the poets are making within it.

MK

Yes, of course. This goes back to thousands of years before our era. The system was already like that. But now, because of modern civilization, the Ḥaḍar, the people present, the so-called culture, they got the upper hand because of tools introduced by the West and colonial powers that to subject the Bedouins and the Saudis, they forced the Bedouins to take up a permanent home somewhere. It’s what’s called Hijra. Hijra is a place where you migrate to or you evacuate to, the first Hijra was when the prophet left Mecca and went to Medina because he’d been driven out and then from Medina he conquered Mecca. So the Hijra means the Bedouins should leave the desert and settle in certain communities. It had a terrible impact it had on the Bedouins. Many of the people couldn’t get used to this way of life.

A lot of people got so afraid that they burned their manuscripts. Because according to the Wahabis poetry was a frivolous pastime. People used to have manuscripts with their own family’s poetry. They were burned, destroyed. So a thousand years of culture went up in flames. Going back to the pre-Islamic times. For Sowayan and myself, the record was still living in the living memory. So it was more like a rescue operation. It’s very political.

SN

Although things get passed through people, distortion and discrepancy of the story through time can get distorted. And so the physical manuscript has another sort of value, it can stay consistent in translation and in meaning. In your time with Bedouin tribes and people in the region, is there a leaning towards, “We need all of our stuff written down because it’s gonna disappear otherwise?” Or is there more of a sense of, “No, we just need to keep speaking it aloud and keeping it alive in the traditional way?” A living organism that adjusts and embraces discrepancy or a pillar of constance?

MK

Well, first it is amazing to see that now this oral culture is celebrated because it is being hoisted on the throne, the platform as the new culture which people should adopt and encourage and be happy with. But what does it mean? At first, it’s amazing for, let’s say, 100 years ago, exactly, the manuscripts were burned. So now today, the dear wish of the powerful and the rulers would be, if we take on their word that they are serious about this oral culture, that all these manuscripts should not have been burned, they should have been kept, they should have been published, should have been known among the people. But do they really? There’s some stuff in it that even they wouldn’t find nice. Saad Sowayan, he said in an interview that the oral culture, it’s full of explosive material. Because it keeps alive from the memory things that those in power would prefer to forget and to be forgotten. Because it can always create new problems. I think there is an inherent contradiction. For instance, tribes, no one could deny that there were tribes, etcetera. But they were not given any official historical presence or rights or so, it was there, but basically wrong. Tribal people should be equal as Muslims in that regard. Even Dindaan, he composed war poetry. When I first saw him, he was a frail old man who couldn’t keep his camels anymore. I had to help him with his car and all that. In his poems, he spoke about how he was carrying a Kalashnikov gun and firing at the other tribe and hitting people. He was put behind bars, not because he was shooting with his Kalashnikov, but because he made poetry about it, which even inflames the spirits even more. But still he was proud about it. Being behind bars was the best thing actually. He admired it.

But how do people appreciate poetry, I think still there are differences between, I would say, between the high culture and the low culture, there’s an intermediate class of, you could say amateurs, who just love poetry for its own sake and also kind of curiosity or love for the gossip that’s in it and the stories that’s connected with it [in their own effort, I don’t know this, better skip it]. So they start collecting this poetry, even though they have no tribal relation, perhaps it’s for its own sake. So-and-so said a remarkable thing.

It would stick in people’s minds, they would collect. So this intermediate layer of amateurs, I benefited from it enormously because they would communicate with me out of their own love for these stories in this poetry and help me understand it. So that is the intermediate layer. The layer under it is what is really directly related to their own circumstance. For Dindaan, his life is his camels, for others, their struggles with other factions in the tribe and so on. And then of course, I’m the other layer of the academic outsider trying to interpret all this stuff. So I think that’s the difference with classical Arabic and sitting in the library and pouring over manuscripts.

SN

There’s something compelling here about the concept of audiences. How different audiences can engage with oral culture. How they understand it, what they take from it, and how they engage in exchange around it.

MK

It’s physical, it’s not just mental. That’s what I like about it. Because there is a lot of poetry, the real poet is Shāʿir wa-fāris. Even in the pre-Islamic poetry, it means he’s a poet and a knight. So poetry, forget about knights or something, it’s just action. Even for the women, it’s poetry, it’s art, it’s connected to action. In my book Bedouin Poets of the Nafud Desert, one of my narrators said: “Do they say anything which has no relation to reality? No. Everything has a relation to reality. Some of this modern poetry you see now, it maybe sounds good, it’s prolix, it rhymes, there is a meter in it. But is there anything we recognize from our daily life? No. So he has nothing, not any verse that doesn’t hit the mark. You find the same thing in the pre-Islamic poetry, strong verses are verses that hit the mark like a bullet.” I shoot at you. I put a bullet in your heart. It’s like a poem also. It sticks into the brain.

SN

Right. Yeah. It survives and thrives through its ability to lodge inside people. It’s what makes oral tradition so different in how we digest the information. This notion of movement, action as you point out so well, incorporates a combination of our senses and bonds the poetry to our human experience.

MK

So it’s not art, something ethereal or philosophical or detached from reality. Poetry should have a physical effect. And that’s what I liked about it because I also like to go around and meet people and find out about affairs and what’s going on. I’m a bit physical myself in that respect. Of course I have to sit for so many hours with these books and manuscripts. But in the end for me it’s always connected to when I get into my Land Rover and put up my tent and meet the people and the camels and we hear the stories and the fighting and the love affairs. Otherwise I wouldn’t have started if it was purely, let’s say, literary. I don’t mind sitting for weeks all day just working on the texts and then the rest writing these books. As long as it stems from reality and my own personal experiences, that’s a lived reality.

SN

There is something about poetry, as you describe it in Bedouin society, that is different from art in the western tradition. Not simply in being aesthetic or decorative, but also as having a different relationship to value and preservation. There isn’t an externally prescribed value that deems it worthy of history books as much as the verses that are still around have earned their place in cultural memory through that action that you mentioned. Merit and timelessness play an interesting role within a poem’s ability to stay alive through living inside people.

MK

I spent so much time with them. I have a lot of friends there and we communicate by WhatsApp and sometimes they ask me about meanings of poetry. They send me a WhatsApp message. What do you think of this line and this word? And I tell them what I think. I’m not saying that I’m right, but no one is right. Everyone has a point of view or knows something. But what you said about memory is, when I first started there, I met a guy, Ibn Khamis, he was famous for that...Let’s say you have the amateur layer, but then you also have an even older layer a bit above it, which is a bit scholarly, but not according to Western standards. But he said he knew 20,000 verses by heart. But that happens. The people who are illiterate have a much stronger memory than people who are literate.

Because that’s the only way you remember things, if you’re illiterate. I think, why should I bother memorizing, because it’s all digital and on my computer.. But actually, when I first started doing my research, I noticed that when I came to a tent, for instance, I put up my Sony tape recorder and microphone. “Well, what do you have? What poems do you know?” And they would recite and speak and then they would say, “Well, what about you? Do you have any poems?” I memorized one poem I liked a lot. And I would always use it to recite. This is a poem I like. “This guy, he speaks Bedouin language” they would say. I noticed that when I memorized the poem in meter and double rhyme, actually, which was helpful in memorizing, my view of the poem became very different. Because I had internalized it, and it kind of became alive in my heart and in my brain, in a way that it wouldn’t be if I had only read it. And then suddenly I understood people like Taha Hussain, who wrote, the famous Egyptian author, who wrote a book, The Days, Al-Ayyām, describing his youth and how he grew up as a blind boy. He memorized the Quran at a very you ng age. And then later on he was sent to a university to become a religious scholar. And from there he went on to France and introduced actually Western culture into Egypt. Anyway, the fact of so many people memorizing the Quran, I always thought it was a stupid thing to do. Why would you? The text is there. You can look it up. Isn’t it a waste of time and effort? Can’t you do something on the computer which is more useful or Instagram or wherever you want to be active.

It’s not the same thing, because if you memorize, I now understand through the Bedouin poetry, if you memorize the Quran, the Quran, it becomes part of your body. It’s sitting everywhere in arteries, in your brain. So if the Quran is holy, let’s say, you become holy yourself a bit, you start radiating holiness. What is the whole operation of memorizing important texts or texts which are meaningful to you, or process a certain quality that can improve the body in which it is inserted. What you call this pacemaker stuff or so, or brain assistant or hearing assistant, or even much more, it becomes wired into your system. Something beautiful, important, holy, which gives meaning to life and death. So you become a much stronger person than if you would have just been flowing out of your mouth on a surface or flesh level. So it’s a journey actually.

SN

That’s incredible. Doing the work on the front set in terms of memorizing something meaningful to you. Then if it lives in your body on a kind of vibratory or cellular level, it doesn’t require your consciousness in order to benefit. It’s recallable on a deeper, more immediate level.

MK

Cellular. I couldn’t get that word. [Laughs.]

SN

Thank you. Wow. That’s amazing.

MK

Yeah, you made me discover it.

SN

You spoke earlier about poetry as a vehicle, if it is itself a form of social media or a way of understanding the world, a way of warning others, a way of remembering pain, a way of remembering beauty. It just becomes such an important lens for culture and how to digest it and how to live a life that you want to live, I suppose. Or live a life that resonates, that is kind of necessary. It’s what the world needs and it’s what you need.

MK

Yes, and it makes me think and rediscover that this is something you can do through the poetry of others. It doesn’t have to be the poetry of your own or of even the community or in the tribe you’re in. It can be anything that appeals to you, something you can appropriate and make part of your system and body and cellular level.. And as something that will improve your health, or your strength and capabilities or resistance against the things we are being exposed to.

And Dindaan, I lived with that poet. He was proud of his 15 beautiful camels. He was illiterate, and his poetry is just magnificent. I can still hear his voice because I listened for so many hours to the cassette tapes of his voices. He had a slightly nostalgic, slightly sad twang. So to meet that guy in that isolated area, later on I would compare it like you find a dinosaur which is still alive. Something you don’t expect to be there anymore. For instance, in Siberia, they were digging and then they found remnants of this old elephant, this mammoth, its hair and tissue. It’s amazing. But this guy was really alive. He was a really very vibrant dinosaur. People didn’t expect it, I think that was a big discovery, that an illiterate poet living in such a backward area, the way he composed his poetry, it was highly developed, because he didn’t use one meter, maybe he used like 10, 15 different meters, which are all established also for the classical period, and a lot of amazing vocabulary about, I mentioned clouds and rain and camels and riding through the desert. He mentioned once to me, he saw a jinn. You know jinns? It’s a spirit.

SN

Yes, I’m familiar with jinn. There are a wide range of them, and a wide range of energies they can have. I know people that have had pretty profound interactions with them.

MK

For him, he told me about jinn. He said, “I was traveling in the desert alone with my camels. And then suddenly it was a very...” I know the part of that desert, it was really very distant, very lonely, very scary, waterless, hot desert. “I was sitting there and suddenly a group of camel riders appear. I think it was like 17 or so, some number that you mentioned...Each camel rider was reciting a verse as they passed me.” But he said, “I only remember three of them.” He gave me the three verses. I still have them, I published them. And I said, “Well, were they really jinn?” “Yeah, they were jinn.” So I said, “Well, what did they look like?” He said, “They looked like Arab.” That’s another interesting expression, because Arab, to them, means tribal people. He meant, “They look like ordinary tribal people. But I know from their verses and the way they behaved and their strange lightning speeds in an impossible place, that they were jinns. I couldn’t identify them from this group or that group of jinns.” So what happens in reality? That leaves you wondering. The whole stuff sometimes, it can be like a mirage. You don’t know. You see the air trembling. Do I really see what I see? Or do you see something different? Is it water or is it a mirage? The whole experience can have this quality. I was sitting there with him down and saying, I saw this jinn being deadly serious. There was not a grain of doubt in him. He would never say anything just for the sake of fantasy or something. Never. I’ve written about so many other poems, but that’s the person I remain enthralled with.