Abd al-Khaliq Kitan, bearing his pain and his poetic destiny

“An Iraqi is a wonderful being formed from destructive destinies, from unparalleled cruelty. An Iraqi is always burned in blood, so how do you want him to be convinced of a place?” So spoke Iraqi immigrant poet Abdul Khaleq Kaitan, author of the “Displaced” book collection, which won the late Abdul Wahhab Al-Bayati prize in 1988. The jury at the time described his poetry as “a hair that sticks out, a text naked of poetry that is not soft, but that is blessed with the love of speech given at random. ” He is Abd al-Khaleq Kaitan, this poet who does not say when he speaks words but says poetry. He is the one who said that “he was obsessed with experimentation, but the war came to upset the balance and life became more important than poetry and poem, so the poet actually looked for stories that could be poems.” As he put it: “I wasn’t alone with sharp language, but reality was sharp.” Thus we see in his poems the reality without falsifications, that reality mixed with creativity and pain.

Abdul Khaleq did not carry Kitan in his bag and travels except for his pain and poetic destiny, as life ambushed him many times that he would not have survived had it not been for the poetry he chose as a port to recreate Iraq that he said was it was while hating life. But Australia brought his love back to life, as it didn’t feel alienated for being the homeland of immigrants, it may have resurrected Iraq back to itself while he’s obsessed with Arab issues.

This poet returns with a new Diwan in 2020 full of crises and disasters, which paralyzed the movement of people and turned them into a forced exile within their homes indefinitely. Before getting into the poems of his new poems “Sleeping in the bus station” (The workshop house – Bagdad), we stop at the title, which is a very important threshold to introduce the text to the symbolism it carries.
Anyone who has read his previous collections and knows little about his life and poetic experience is certain that “sleeping at the bus station” sums up a phrase that Abd al-Khaliq said in an interview with him that “he is fleeing from something that is not it knows what it is ”, that is, it is not linked to a place, but is in a state of flight. And she waits permanently, willing to go to a place that does not fit the horizon of vision, and perhaps her imaginary place is the Iraq she wanted and wanted.
When you read the poems on this couch one by one, our vision is formed, and the scenes become evident to us, or to convey the scenes that the author tried to draw through poems through which the space of vision, and says of himself that he learned from his first teacher Badr Shaker al-Sayyab the space of vision. This space that allowed us to overlook the Iraq of today and the Iraq of yesterday through poems that speak about life and its futility, that deal with illegal immigration for those whose homelands are small: “This life is a deposit of manipulation and violence / And only you, oh wave, can protect our children. ” He also wrote, who is Iraqi, a poem that narrates the pain in his painful sincerity entitled “A longing in the streets of Iraq”: “I do not swear by corpses and severed heads / but by the homeland that is addicted to oblivion. / I swear by the maids, / by the Koran, / that the country is pure depression … / A constant occasion of tears ».
And because loss is one of the concerns that torment the poet and make him write poetry, Kaitan described the loss with a phrase that is more trusted by presence than loss: “Every day I inspect my head to be sure that you are still residing and do not leave your place ”. In all his poems he deals with war and its effects on humanity and what it can leave behind, especially on the individual who has forcibly left his homeland. He will always be devastated by a pain that he does not know how to inhabit it or when he will be afraid: “We can reach a tomorrow that can be without dead / or perhaps put a wreath of flowers on the grave of a soldier who has inspired him with slogans: wars go , the planes take off and the projectiles fall like red dust / But you don’t see that ».
In his poems a realistic and truthful description of the Arab policies that destroyed entire towns without blinking. The person familiar with his poems is fully aware that he has identified this moral breakdown in more than one place: “The place, despite the civilians, becomes a battlefield that has nothing to do with honor.”

He learned from his first teacher, Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab, the space of vision

There is no doubt that whoever reads Kitan’s poetry and watches his dialogues is fully aware that in front of a true poet, he writes realistic poetry that starts from the diary. Fictional poetry, a bit like an autobiography. Poetry says a lot about a world full of autopoets and Facebook. He recently said in an interview that poetry has become difficult, especially with the huge information space in which poets have become more than readers themselves. He also mentioned in the same dialogue that autobiography is not age-related as we used to imagine it, but rather is a literary and poetic color in itself. This is what we touch in his book “Sleeping at the bus station”, a poetic autobiography that portrays reality with a kind of fantastic magic that we enjoy and brings us back to the fragmented Arab reality. As he himself put it: “Poetry is taking something from reality, but you have to recreate it.” Perhaps the exile revived that fragmentation and that representation of reality for Kitan to write poetry. He also wrote about love and women, although he described himself as a failed lover, as he said: “I am a lover who fails because of my bad luck and my bad heart.”
See how many scars it takes to write poems in such a painful way that the reader lives them as if he had written them: “For your scar to bloom, you need more tears.” He said in his office:
“These people gave birth to them out of necessity, so you see them screaming a lot.”
But poetry alone was Abd al-Khaleq Kitan’s bus stop, where you can’t sleep because it always takes us to regions where we wouldn’t think we would travel to poetry and literature. This is the poetry that makes us tremble, a poetry that affects us from within and makes us write. The poetic experience of Abdul Khaleq Kitan starts from reality, to shade poetry and literature. He is truly an Arab talent that deserves a lot of consideration and we are witnessing the renaissance of poetry through this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, which celebrated poetry with the victory of American poet Louise Gluck.

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