Exile is like the Desert, a homeland for God. *
The Desert’s nakedness is borrowed from the sky’s. *
Freedom is like the Desert: we only dwell in it in order to transcend it. *
The Desert’s enchantment is borrowed from that of eternity. *
The Desert, homeland for the spirit, exile for the body. *
We go to the Desert in order to quench our thirst for freedom.
—Ibrahim al-Koni, A Sleepless Eye: Aphorisms from the Sahara

When I lived in Cairo, Egypt, over a decade and a
half ago, I would head to the desert periodically: to empty
myself of the city’s noise, overhear myself, and then lose myself.
I approached these desert pilgrimages with the
earnest intention and passionate belief that I was going
to encounter that part of myself not entirely accessible in
other circumstances. In the desert, there is nothing to hide
behind, nowhere and no one to turn to. It is where all those mad
hermits and mystics—my people!—had their visions.

It’s an extreme environment, and I suppose I felt that if I
 flirted with that extremity, in a committed, honorable way, a
breakthrough might be granted to me. (If you were somehow
avoiding yourself, and you went to the desert, somehow you
would meet.) The rumblings of Eternity were there, if you could
just be still enough, quiet enough, and indifferent enough
to your self, your many selves, your many frivolous selves.
Walking, reading, musing, I felt outside space and time
and came to realize the necessity of aloneness: Aloneness as a
prerequisite for the sublime sensations or epiphanies I sought.
Sure, you could be alone around people, alone in your living
room, but if you reached toward this elemental aloneness—one
with the sand, the rock, the water, the stars, and the sea—you
could experience a deeper innocence and purity of perception
and as a result become a better witness to the life inside you
and around you. The desert doesn’t, really, care much for you.
It may, perhaps, want you there, but it doesn’t need you there. It
doesn’t seek to appease you in any way. It only wants to declare
its harsh, bold truths, and if you can stand it, then you might stay.

What you hold in your hands is a slender packet of
yearning; poems inspired by my desert retreats over the years.
I did not, fully, recognize at the time the nascent thirst in these
poetic meditations, or how the profound spiritual longing in
these reflections was to mystically point for me the way towards
a spiritual and religious life—a path I am exploring with wonder,
and humbly deepening, nearly two decades later. It means a
great deal to me that this poetry collection is bilingual and that
my words will return to the part of the world that inspired them
in its native language. I’m, especially, grateful that the Arabic is
rendered by Osama Esber, a respected Syrian poet, translator and
publisher whom I’m fortunate to call a friend and who, previously,
has translated poetry of mine for Jadaliyya. All of the remarkable
photographs accompanying my poems are by a gifted young
Moroccan photographer I admire, Zakaria Wakrim, a kindred
spirit who knows well the mystery and magic of the desert.

Thank you, Rowayat, for bringing my words back Home,
to my beloved Egypt.

Yahia Lababidi, 2021

Solitude and the
Proximity
to Infinite Things

The Desert is a cemetery
picking its teeth with bones
littered with brittle stones
marked by a grave air.
Mourning its myriad souls
it murmurs threnodies, while
winds scatter desert lament.

Guarded, hostile growths
defensive and aggressive
martyrs to their desert mother
they all wear crowns of thorns.
Tortured trees break desert skin
protruding stiff, bloodless veins
blades of grass, yellow and dry
shuffle from side to side, rigidly.

Wanderers travel to see and hear
Death-in-Life and Life-in-Death
To see Stillness, to hear Silence
Nothingness-punctuated-by-Space.
Pitting its stare against the Sun
the Desert returns it, pitiless
unblinking, exchanging secrets
of terrible, Eternal matters.

Indifferent, like Time,
to time resigned, without heart
proximity to infinite things
sets apart, makes remote.
Underfoot, twigs and rocks crumble
crack with ill humor and dry wit
taking perverse pleasure in pain
like one past suffering, yet bitter.

The desert has its dark jokes
over which it smiles alone,
Mirage is the word for desert humor.

Yahia Lababidi is an Egyptian author of ten books. His most recent work is: Learning to Pray, aphorisms and poems (Kelsay Books, 2021), and Desert Songs, a bilingual photographic account of his mystical experiences in the deserts of Egypt (Rowayat, 2022) You can learn more about his work, here: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/205852.Yahia_Lababidi 

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