Night and Horses and Deserts and Camels and Scorpions and Dates and Palm Trees and a Jackal and Some Bugs

The Arabs have always been a people in love with poetry. Before the coming of Islam, in the period known as the Jahaliyya or “the time of the braying jackasses”, it is said that when a poet emerged in a tribe, all of its members would celebrate, howl, dance, drink, beat themselves with joy and dash their heads against volcanic rocks in the desert. Other tribes would send gifts of seasoned sand-lizard, and the sheikhs of the tribe would collectively toss all the eldest women into the air for hours on end while the children pelted them with gobs of fermented goat's cheese. For with the poet, and him alone, came to rest the made-up reputation and history of the tribe.

This love of poetic eloquence lasted well into the hey-day of the Islamic period. It is late in the caliphate of the Badassids, however, that the most beloved of all the Arab poets was born: Abu-Banal of Nablus. There is not an Arab alive who, despite how pragmatic, ignorant, mean, malaodorous, penny-pinching, or xenophobic he may be, will not quote, amidst a flood of tears and sobs, the opening lines of his “Ode to Adidaz”:

My Adidaz, walk with me through the halls and the song tents,
Funky fresh, no string binds your hair...

Abu-Banal was not without controversy in his own day, however. The life of a court panegyrist was always a perilous one, and yet for him the danger was quadrupled by his penchant for back-handed insults to his own patrons. Take for instance this line from his “Ode on the Victory of Keftah Al-Shukran, Governor of Egypt, Against the Greek Mongrels”:

All men say you are weak and doddering eunuch, that your cheeks

Are flecked with the spittle of lapdogs, and you know not the sword.

Were these Greeks not then defeated by a sissy? A brave man’s sword cuts but once

A sissy’s gash will cut you for the rest of days....

Note that although the convention was to address the patron as a lover with the masculine pronoun, Abu-Banal addresses Keftah in the feminine. He left his court shortly thereafter, pursued by a pack of hunting dogs and scimitars.

It is not only the patrons which caused Abu-Banal trouble. He was also an unstinting racist, a fairly decent misogynist, and a tribalist, who believed only in the traditional Bedouin virtues of bravery, eloquence, and stabbing. It was said that the Persian poet Va’ari Rumi In’Heer struck Abu-Banal in the face with his key at court after Abu-Banal recited him the following verse:

But what are Persian rugs good for in the desert?

Collecting sand, and beating them out never learns them.

Give me a hide of Camel hair

And I will smother Khorosani perfumes

With the true stench of the Bedu.

Unfortunately it is very difficult to translate the full effect of this verse. Indeed, much of Arabic poetry is more resistant than usual to translation of any sort; whereas even Chinese poems can be made into something pleasurable, if not quite accurate, Arabian penchants for allusion, obscure desert vocabulary, and quadruple inverted sentence puns make all attempts to Anglicize the stuff futile from the outset; consider the term ha’bool, which means exactly a desert antelope whose left leg is speckled in the shape of falcon droppings.

Yet such was the high eloquence needed to please the fierce courts of the Badassids. It was not uncommon for a city-born poet such as Abu-Banal to spend some few years of apprenticeship with his nomadic cousins; there he picked up the untainted accents and vocabulary of high poetry that only a race of sand-creviced brigands could come-up with; he also picked up a handy technique for keeping scorpions in his dishdash that would prove to more than once save himself from certain comfort.

Yet who could have suspected that the bravado of Abu-Banal’s war verses would be his undoing? Safely stuffing his face with baklaweh in the courts put Abu-Banal in a mood to compose belligerent verses. One could say that these came to bite him in the ha’bool like a misplaced scorpion. As he and several servants were crossing the desert, they were set-upon by an angry gang of bedouins whom Abu Banal had listed unflaterringly among others in his infamous “Ode to the Top Ten Gayest Tribes”.

Setting his camel to “flee” mode, Abu-Banal took off...But was stopped in his tracks by the eloquent appeal of his head servant, who so movingly chanted Banal’s own famous couplet right back to him:

I pity the fool who runs away from sword and spear and stabby things like a little girl

Especially when he’s outnumbered; by Allah such a one is truly a wuss. Seriously.

Considering the awesomeness of his own verses, Abu Banal turned around and charged the attackers, thrusting his sword and spitting scorpions left, right, and center. His last words were supposedly “By the balls of Iblis, that smarts!”

We append as epilogue a famous Qasida of Abu Banal’s, which draws on all the traditional romantico-bestial themes of the Jahili poets:

Wait a minute! Stop. I said stop! Kick the camel-y!

Just hold on a bloody minute. Here friends...

The spot was somewhere here I remember

Where the colocynth was bit, its bitter taste

Now makes me gawp like a weeping ostrich

Plunging its head in Ed-Dakhool’s  yummy sands.

Yes, ‘twas here where dots the twinkling sands

The poops of the lurgy-struck camels

I rode the wing of the scurrying ostrich

And met in the night my starry browed friend.

Ah, how sweet did her plump calves taste;

Her flavourish saliva will I always remember.

Her jaunts are still cruel to remember:

“Dismount, put your feet to the nightblack sands!

Is it only the ghoul’s wind you would taste?

Yet it was you who tickled the backside of my camel.”

Sotfly, softer still, they kill, the jokes of a friend

As a wolf  the cowardly ostrich;

The ride is long, and I am no fleet-flooted ostrich!

Yet this my horse is more like to remember;

He knows the desert ways better than I, my friends,

Or you yourselves, who suckled at the stars and sands.

Speak not of such-and-such a fine camel,

Nor of a bridle fitter to my mount’s taste!

Aches and weariness increase the date’s taste;

But halt again and behold the brother ostriches!

They flee from the lightning; Up rear the camels.

Let us settle between the rocks, for a storm to remember.

The djinn stir the unblinkable sands;

Have I not stirred your hearts, my friends?

I have sung to your taste, I, the ostrich,

My friends, grant me some camels!

Nothing better, on the sands, to remember!