Cities that kill poets

I was, as if I were between sleep and vigilance when I saw what the sleeper, the poet Munawar Samadah, saw, as he wandered in the streets of Tunisia and its ancient lanes with its dirty gray kit, with two extinguished eyes, and the features of the face of the pain of mental illness. The tragedy of the poet started when he wrote his poem about Bourguiba: (My covenant is very with him, so he was a joke/ began a victim and ended a thug), and that was in the year 1967, then Bourguiba ordered the man to execute the man morally, and it was done.

I don’t know whether the time is the end of the fall, or early spring. Behind the window of the train window, the lights of the northern suburbs, Sidi Boussaid, and Cartageneh. Nour and slender orange points in the dark darkness. The windy wind blows on the Gulf in this chapter in which the flaming birds are sweeping the coast of Lake Tunisia. I don’t know how I found me sitting in one of the bathroom vehicles of the winding of a wind (after independence, the nose bathroom, and I do not know where they came from this nose) in front of Munawar Samadah. I don’t know whether on that day that he took me with his friend Omar Fadda, in that colonial house, and he played the oud in front of the wide blue window that opens to the Firanda his poem, “Tell it that we have loved, we loved us into the fabrication and sings.”

Perhaps during that period, his thirty -year ordeal began until his death. I remember his talk about intuition and study as if it were Monolog. And now that time returns in a dream as if it is outside time. The image of the Italian vessel that comes every Wednesday, and it takes off the water of the canal with its large white, black and red chimneys, and its birds that sail with it.

We got out of the train and left the station, we had steps to the Netherlands Street, and they stopped a little in front of the “Botiniar”. Take me for a moment as he brings his eyelids as if he was looking at and devoting into my face. The last words were “responding to yourself.” Now I realize that it was the era in which the “mortar” began: security follow -up and harassment, and the police interrogation. This is how they brought him up in the dedication of mental illness. It was a form of death. They finished this great poet. He fell in an advanced state of paranoia, and with the days his facial features were distorted as a result of chemical drugs.

In extreme poverty, he spent the last thirty years of his life wandering in the streets of Tunisia, which he spent in hesitation to the mental hospital in the suburb of Manouba, spent in bitter isolation, spent in the darkness of the disease. Everyone abandoned him except his brother Abdul Rahim. They were busy ascending through that Stalinist institution called the “Union of Tunisian Writers”. In the same period, Ismail Al -Mahdawi, the Egyptian intellectual and fighter, had been thrown by Abdel Nasser in the Mental Hospital in Abbasiya, where he stayed seventeen years.

The features of his face are distorted due to the use of chemical medicines

After Munawar Samadah, the poet Reda Al -Jalali committed suicide in his third decade, and he left beautiful lyric poems, separated here and there. He said to me one day I tried to commit suicide, and I did not believe, and I jokingly answered him even in suicide! When I heard a suicide incident, I felt severe pain, and I cried a conscience that continued with me to this day. How do we feel the suffering of others?

We walked in front of the Roma Street Post to a coffee with the Athina approach, through a alley behind the central bank and as soon as we sat until he started reading his last poems. Al -Jalali was the example of the dreaded poet, as defined by the generation of Rambo and Paul Verlin. He lived free and paid the price of this freedom very expensive as it is always. In defense of the authority, they attributed its suicide to moral and personal reasons in exactity of the regime from his blood, as if this poet swims in space outside the social and political conditions of that historical moment …

The pens of the expense of power in the blood of the man were canceled, which has various accusations … after Ridha Al -Jalali. Habib Bouabana committed suicide. According to the narration of his nephew, they denied him one night while he was returning to his home late at night as is his habit. His house was required, he told me the shadow of a terrified Habib, full of time, waiting at every moment to come and carry him to prison. Even, on the day of Eid, he did not want to open the door to visitors. One day he left the house for his favorite restaurant, fell dead in his usual council, and carried him with a gray sacrifice to his last resting place in the Cemetery of the Dandan from the outskirts of Tunisia. On that day, the Tunisian radio was praising the virtues of this great painter in a dirty operation to wash the regime of Ben Ali.

* Tunisian poet and translator residing in Amsterdam