Zakaria Muhammad “prowls” between life and language

The reading of the poet Zakaria Muhammad opens the door to delve further into a long and distinguished poetic experience that the Palestinian poet went through since his first collection, “Last Poems” in 1981. In each new group, the aesthetic addition of the poetic world of Zakaria, who announced her boredom of the sixties early and opened another path for her in World of Poetry. His new group, “Zarwand” (“Dar Al-Nasher” in Ramallah, and “Dar Meem” in Algeria – 2020) comes to narrate the long relationship of the Palestinian poet with poetry, and says many things about the experience of a poet who comes from another land to look from Palestine to the world in a language. Different. They are poems that inspire us to talk about them, that is why we enter with love to read a poetic world that Zakaria started from his first group asking about the usefulness of poetry, until poetry led him to the forest of “Zarvand”, which includes all your meditations. The language flows in an intermittent narrative of a world full of things, plants, animals and questions in poems that are attached to their dates, but each poem has its own different story that makes it precede the others, so the poetry is it frees from its titles and its prevailing form as well, to conform to its moment in time. This is what Zakaria Muhammad did in his two previous groups, “Koshtban” and “Alandi”, where poetry sometimes appears as a story that tells us something, but surprises us with some ambiguity and meaning. We pick it up, contemplate it, and keep looking for something else in another direction. Many things happen and many questions that go through normal events in simplicity that want us to see their depth. Here things are familiar and intimate, “a shame in pain is that it does not leave behind even a small scratch that is mentioned by it.” So Zakaria talks about pain, brings him closer to us as a normal person, and this is his way of redefining things and concepts, so poetry becomes his guide to give other meanings to things in the lexicon of the world.

In “Zarvand”, we enter the great dictionary of Zakaria in which we see “The night is a cat”, and the day is “a stray dog” and “life is an association”, but “death is an association” too. The meanings are multiple and expand where the ego is also multiple. Zakaria says, “I am a marble statue.” Then he comes back again and says, “I am a word written in chalk” and “I am a long row of grains of wheat for you.” Zakaria begins with something to find another meaning and takes poetry from the limits of knowledge to reach the area of ​​doubt, a region that makes the owner of the “horse go through Uskudar”, go beyond the limits of answers above all, and bring language to a state of playing with things as if it postpones wisdom and does not approach it, so Zakaria says, “I will come to you later, oh shop of wisdom, to sit under you, but now I am a young man kicking the ball. “The poet poses his poetic questions in a weak and humble tone, like this normal question that he does not know” why do parents cry in a dream? “Although we know that his poetic addition was important, he says of himself elsewhere: “All I have are quotes, I say the words of others.” In this way, he makes poetry his area of ​​expansion where he reaches the relationship of language with life and transcends words, ideas and the issues, when he addresses us with the p he asks: «You know? Poetry has no object or idea, it has no purpose or meaning, it is an act that is released between life and language ”. From this region, Zarvand looks out, bringing questions of poetry in his relationship with the world, which Zakaria likes to make come to us in another language that we know and marvel at at the same time, how to explain God’s love for him by saying : “God has put a great lake in my posts.”
Zakaria links unconnected things with her thread, as she says in a poem: “Life and scattered papers must be tied with a thread so that they do not escape us”, and “Poetry is a cursed thread that connects things that have no link between them”. Here we fall into a poem that wants to create strange and distant pairs that suddenly get closer. Some thanks to a strand of hair, for example, saying: “Crying is a genetic error.”
Zakaria Muhammad comes from a poetic region where there are no parents. His poem encourages us to move away from description. He is not satisfied with it, since he says: “The description alone is not enough, I must go beyond the description”, “I must bring from the middle of hell a rock Beyond the description and sit on it.” The author of “Last Poems” wants to find meaning in a journey in which he breaks his ego and transcends himself, confident that there is no prophecy in poetry, that is why he says: “Each one is his own prophet, time to go on and on has passed. “Here, Zachariah takes root in the place where he loves to reside, where the meaning appears with the eye closed, as poetry is” a blind hawk that closes its eyes to see, “and life also “begins with the eye closed and ends with the eye closed.” Life here is like poetry, and the relationship between them can sometimes become synonymous. In “Zarvand”, the relationship with poetry became the relationship of Zachariah with life itself, and he has not been able to escape poetry since his collection “The Fading Stones” (2008), as mentioned in his famous article “Poetry and Tomato” about his relationship with poetry when naming titles. Your groups.

The aesthetic added is evident in the world of Zakaria, who announced her sixties weariness early.

Death also has its part of the world of “Zaround”, “It is read in braille”. The philosophy of death comes close to becoming a conversation with the falcon, the bird that the poet mentions more than once, and tells him: “What a hawk you cannot understand your death in the bodies of others.” But this hadith also suggests the relationship of poetry and death together. Poetry is also a hawk, and it seems that they do not understand. Misunderstanding, as Zakaria says, is the logic of things, “because all things give rise to misunderstandings.” It is like poetry and love that is difficult to explain.
Questions about love also seem to be intertwined with poetry, so it always comes as a direction for the lover. He says to the beloved: “Hit me with your wing to turn the wheels of the arms.” But even the big questions of existence, Zachariah makes her ask in pet language, as if the dog were asking, for example: Why did man, Zachariah, exist? The poetic answer comes in the form of an unconfirmed answer, when she replies: “I don’t know exactly, Kiwi, but it could have existed to place its fingers in the seven holes in the reed.”
Silence is also present as part of the group. Many parts of the narrative move thanks to him, as if there was another hadith happening and it had not been said, and he says about it: “Silence is a dove and words are its chicks.” Zakaria digs tunnels of silence within her divergent language, then we feel that a sentence says many things and is condensed into short sentences that we see return to us in other scenes, so we are reunited with love, death, pain and poetry.
Life is immense in “Zaround” and the poetry makes her ask more about herself, in close scenes and in a language that resembles speech. “Zaround” is a forest in which poetry appears in all directions, where “the text has no points and the road turns.”

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