Colombe raggomitolate

The lessons of the great critics help us understand how difficult it is to listen closely to poets' verses, and harder still to follow their steps.

The global world of communication brings us texts by authors whose work, in other times, reached us late or was circulated only after their death. Travel brings us closer, draws us in and allows us to encounter places and peoples completely unknown to us.

Reading in Italian verses originally written in different languages is the gift Mohamed Ghonim has reserved for his readers in Colombe raggomitolate. A renewed force of language becomes a metaphor for a thousand emotions drawn from the daily rhythm of existence within the original “paradise lost”: Eden.

Alessandro Ramberti is right when he writes in his introduction: “Only through love can we make our condition beautiful.”

The purity of the dove, offered in sacrifice to the divinity presiding over earthly affairs, is folded into the coil of the journey towards becoming. Curled upon itself, purity seeks life through the power of the word:

“I urged you to set the word in motion in your mind; I led you back towards the origin.” (p. 13)

In the beginning was the Word: purity can thus be read in the poem “The Breast” (p. 51), where the analogy with the body is transposed into the “milk” of knowledge that gave rise to Solomon's wisdom. Nourishing oneself on the “nectar of love” to overcome the difficulties imposed by the journey and a new condition of life.

An endeavour worthy of the great poets of his native land, Egypt, expressed in the collection in different ways and voices:

“[…] She is ashamed to be born into a community of those who can read, while she cannot.” (p. 58)

And again:

“How sad it is to be born of the same amalgam and then to part.” (p. 28)

The whole collection pulses with places and dimensions perhaps unfamiliar to the West: Indian swords, turquoise, lavender, the rose of purity, the Nile, “Khandra”, the trembling dance, the desert, the falcon (Horus), frankness, the Merciful One and the endless forms evoked by the river of words becoming poetry.

Where does the poet/traveller stand at this moment in his poetic account?

“In the life of numbers I see myself: zero.” (p. 44)

The figure of nothing and everything, the beginning and the end of Being, present in the world.

It becomes unthinkable to read this collection just once and understand it fully. The fascination of being carried away, the biblical symbolism and the great suffering of making verse emerge together as an anaphora of conception.

It is beautiful to read these verses because they prepare us to mediate between different yet similar lives, to enter the secrets of that extraordinary civilisation which never ceases to astonish us, and to understand fully the painful legacy of Africa in our civilised times.

Montoro Inferiore, January 2005 Vincenzo D'Alessio

These verses express a passion for life, human relationships, the value of every encounter and the difficulty of saying goodbye.

There is a sensual concreteness and a visionary capacity; there is attention to detail and concern for “global” questions.

Ghonim is a son of his homeland, Egypt, yet he has become an excellent part of our community, bringing into our language the rhythms, assonances and rhetorical figures of Eastern poetry. The comparison between the dialogue poem “My Song” and the Song of Solomon is inevitable: “Wait for me there, beside the slope. / Far away, where there is nothing, / only the light of the moon. / We shall speak a different language…”; “Oh, if I could / tear my heart from my ribs / draw pearls from my entrails / to shape the rose in clusters of tears.” These are indeed the verses of a poet who vibrates, puts himself on the line, immerses himself in the human reality of mud and spirit, recognises the divine and knows that only through love can we make our condition beautiful.

For us Western readers, the experience can sometimes be unsettling, but it leaves traces in the soul, touching strings with a deep, echoing, enfolding resonance.

Let us take a few examples:

“They gather / and push away the blanket of isolation” (The Legs).

“They sleep in the embrace of the soles / dozing in the clasp of the palms” (The Nails).

“It dances on the wedding night” (The Womb).

“We, here, blow dust, / breathe its exhalation, / ask the air for meaning, / utter an unanswered prayer” (Letter from an African Friend).

Is the line “Images have become legends” not full of incisive beauty? In a few words we reach a reckoning: a world, the Western world, that lives by appearances and illusions, built and preserved, moreover, with “bullets”…

These verses remind us of the power of the word when it is not abused, used merely to deceive and flatter until it becomes meaningless breath.

Poetry is making: these pages make us think, move us and give us pleasure.

In 2004, Colombe raggomitolate was a finalist in the Anguillara Sabazia – Città d'Arte International Prize.

“For his literary work, a mirror reflecting the mysterious magic of being and of thought born in the soul.”