Jawdat Haydar’s - Dialogic Imagination

Jawdat Haydar’s

                           Dialogic Imagination

Writing in 1984, Haydar addresses the critic saying:
                                      Squeeze a glass of wisdom and have a drink;
                                      Perhaps you’ll have a better mental grasp
                                      Of what you may read criticize or think.

Much has been said about Haydar the man, the father, the humanitarian, but much is yet to be said about him as a poet.  Puzzled with his homage to diverse poets such as Gibran, Moutran, Naime, Frost, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and May Ziade, his readers find difficulty in pinning his poetic allegiance. Troubled with his addresses to oppositional political figures such as Napoleon, King Feysal, Hitler, Ghandi, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, readers have difficulty in identifying his political stand. Awed by his philosophic dialogue with Time, nostalgic for youth yet proud of his age, counting the years but not limiting the space, riding waves with the wrinkles of old age smoothed on the pages of poetry, readers are caught in his gyrating circles of years, of paradisal visions and graphic pictures of reality. Finally, tossed between the rocky faces chiseled on bedrocks riding Arabian thoroughbreds and frolicking verses sailing the aquatic lull of the oceans of poetry, readers are lost in ocean of literary isms trying to catch his reign and sail.

Haydar’s education, travel and work experience fermented a unique poetic discourse characterized by its dialogism exhibiting a unique kind of hybridity that draws on the poet’s experience that stretches from two world wars, Arab nationalist uprisings, wars of independence and civil wars, and wars of occupation in the name of independence; from Texas to Baghdad, from pre-9/11 America to post-civil war in Lebanon. Indeed, Haydar stands out among the array of Lebanese-American writers who achieved international fame and won worldwide respect, such as Amin Al-Rihany and Gibran Khalil Gibran, who, at the turn of the 20th century, calibrated what is called "Immigrant Literature" which is rife with East-West reconciliations and contestations. Two biographical facts, however, distinguish Haydar from his fellow Lebanese writers. First, he was not an "immigrant." Though he travelled a lot to pursue his graduate studies and for business or pleasure purposes, Haydar lived all his life in Lebanon, experiencing firsthand the cultural, political, and social changes in Lebanon and the Arab world. Second, his professional career for thirty years in the industrial sector couldn’t have been more inimical to writing poetry. Thus, his poetic output shouldn’t be assessed by the equivocal argument of literary influence.

As a poet, Haydar, with his penchant love for the universal yet with meticulous attention to the specific and particular, forges in the smithy of his imagination a distinctive type of poetry that resists categorization. Much of his poetry is peopled with different voices. In one of the interviews, Haydar says of his first volume, "I called it Voices because there are many people inside. I talk about Ghandi, Napoleon, and Frost." In fact, tens and tens of people—historical, literary, political, or social—are heard in his poetry. However, in such poems, Haydar doesn’t merely talk about them; he talks to them, engaging them in multiple discourses about life and art. Furthermore, the titles of his volumes (Echoes, Voices, and Shadows) indicate liminality of his poetic imagination. The lack of centeredness of the titles renders the poetic expressions centrifugal rather than centripetal: they diverge outward than converge inward which indicates the poet’s hybridity of consciousness. Moreover, these voices acquire a life of their own wherein Haydar’s persona becomes a ventriloquist assuming chameleonic personas: the lover and the cavalier, the didactic and the ironic, the environmentalist and the philosophical, the nationalist and the cosmopolitan, the Arab and the American, the Texan and the Lebanese, the flaneur poet and the poet of the people (to name only a few).

Nevertheless, most of the commentary on Haydar tends to be rather general, with a focus on the lyrical mode that is often tinged with an elegiac, contemplative, or melancholic tone . Others such as John Monroe align Haydar’s poetry with that of Rihani, Naimy, Gibran, and with "echoes from Tennyson" and a bit of Frost. Moreover, the prolific poetic modes of Haydar’s poetic style has been equally daunting as it ranges from the strict form of the sonnet to free blank verse, to predominant 24-line rhymed poems, to one-line verse. This variety, according to Jason Iwen, "boldly fuses the poetic styles and sentiments of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Periods of Anglophone Literature, while exploring issues of common interest to people living in regions as far apart as Texas and Iraq". True as these comments may be, they remain generalities whose truth is yet to be ascertained through scholarly critical analysis of Haydar’s poetry. Indeed, the above conflations of Haydar’s poetic achievement across cultures and history and the insistence on highlighting the romantic lyrical tone do not properly give credit to the poet. Neither does the focus on the surface similarities between Haydar and other poets allow us to properly appreciate the uniqueness of his poetry.

My approach to Haydar’s poetry will be through Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian thinker whose writings in the early 20th century changed the reading of literature drastically and have become a much coveted and debated industry in academia. Central to Bakhtin’s thought are two key terms: dialogism and multivocality (or heteroglossia) which are exclusive to the novel and not the poetry genre. According to Bakhtin, the novel, with its wide array of characters, each with its speech style, becomes a matrix of different voices, carrying with them different ideologies, all competing and negotiating for meaning. Thus, while the novel enjoys dialogical imagination, poetry is monological. Moreover, "in dialogism," says Holquist,"the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness." Dialogism takes it for granted that nothing can be perceived except against the perspective of something. Thus, when Haydar brings in a Tennyson, a Wordsworth, or any other poet, he is not merely saluting their achievement in as much as he’s sharing with them an event, an experience of reality from a different time and place. In many of the poems wherein Haydar addresses other poets or figures he sets himself in the same context. For example, "In Memory" he is, like Wordsworth, on Westminster Bridge; in "Birds Bereave Like Men" he is like Keats under a tree addressing a nightingale; in "Wash Wash Wash" he, like Tennyson, addressing the sea in almost the same words. This shared event, Bakhtin’s Sobtyie or co-being-as-event, involves a dialogue of two perspectives, both of negotiate the possible meaning or knowledge gained from this event. In Bakhtinian terms, neither you nor I possess a definite meaning and it’s only through the encounter with the other that our experience may gain a certain meaning. It is in this context that this paper will give an example of Haydar’s dialogic imagination of "In Memory of Wordsworth and His Sonnet Upon Westminster Bridge."

Adopting a Bakhtinian approach to Haydar’s poem recasts our reading into a completely different perspective. First of all, although Haydar is a competent sonneteer, he does not use the sonnet form. His 6 rhymed quatrains tend to subsume the 14-line sonnet and expand that tranquil moment of September 3rd, 1802, back to tumultuous crusades of medieval times and forward into the deafening bombardment of Lebanon in 1982.

The date of Haydar’s composition of the poem and the imagery used show that there’s more than meets the eye. Whether sheer coincidence or not, both poems have the same date as September 3rd. However, while for Wordsworth it comes after his visit to France with his sister in 1802, for Haydar it comes right after the end of the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. Visiting Westminster Bridge at this point of time, Haydar seems to have been attuned to the political and ideological messages permeating English poetry at the time of British imperial expansion which many Romantic poets, except for Byron, supported and advocated it. Nevertheless, Haydar the lover of English poetry and Haydar the Lebanese nationalist contest each other as they face yet another voice, Wordsworth’s.

Moreover, Haydar’s "In Memory" refutes Bakhtin’s charge against poetry’s inability of a dialogic discourse. In this poem Haydar shares with Wordsworth the same event: standing on Westminster Bridge and viewing London. However, Haydar’s experience forces us to reconsider the meaning of Wordsworth’s sonnet. In the very first lines of the Sonnet, Wordsworth invests all the beauty of the world in London at that single moment at early dawn: "Earth hath not anything to show more fair:/ Dull would he be
of soul who could pass by /A sight so touching in its majesty" and "Never did sun more beautifully steep/ In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill" (lines 9-10). Furthermore, London is not only personified with "The City now doth, like a garment wear,/ The beauty of the morning" (lines 4-5), but also metaphorized into a majestical vernal bride of nature whose "mighty heart is lying still."
This regal image of London which tends to preclude any mention of the mighty power of the British empire is brought to the front by Haydar’s poem."In Memory" is full of contesting voices. Haydar directly addresses the poet he has in mind: Wordsworth. Standing on the same bridge from which Wordsworth apotheosizes London, Haydar calls on him twice: the first to confirm that he is in the same spot and the second to recall Wordsworth’s power at painting the scene of the sleeping London. Thus, at first reading, one of the voices the readers hear is that of Haydar’s paying ‘homage’ to the great British romantic poet: the bridge is touristic site "in honour of [his] name" (line 4); Wordsworth is a "star" unmatched by any (line 5) whose poetry has conquered "fields of poetry" (line 10) and, though dead, his poetry lives on enshrined "Bearing the regal crown of prosody" (line 18). However, on a second reading, the readers encounter another voice and another London. The predominance of military tropes such as "conquest", "crusade", "armies of deathless thoughts" in "In Memory" stand in stark opposition with all the serene and silent status of Wordsworth’s London. Moreover, with the images of power embedded in words such as "emperor", "empowered", "stately", and "regal" Haydar is saying what Wordsworth leaves unsaid in his Sonnet.

Based on the above, the first reading and the second one seem to carry two paradoxical voices: Haydar’s admiration and admonition of what Wordsworth’s sonnet represents: the power of poetry and of Western power over countries such as Lebanon. A close look at stanzas 4 and 5 in "In Memory" shows that the mighty, epical heart of England is called upon to answer for the British stand towards the Israeli invasion that claimed thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian lives. The warlike images of stanza 3 accrue a political ideology that contests Haydar’s love and admiration of Wordsworth. Stanza 4 is an extended metaphor throwing the British poet’s words on a canvas to form "a tableau pranked by the life-like hue of his sonnet" (emphasis added). It’s the word ‘prank’ here that is irksome: it has several meanings, most of which are negative. A prank is a practical joke, a ludicrous or grotesque act done for fun; it also means ostentatious decoration, or to dress for show off. Is Wordsworth’s diction exaggerated in describing London? Is Haydar hinting at the powerwielding capital of 19th century colonialism? Is he thinking of the crusades waged against the East by kings and Popes whose armies looted the East to fill their chateaus? In stanza 5 another word is equally troublesome: ‘Yawp’. Yawp is similar to cry but of different connotation: yawp means to make a raucous noise, to cry out in complaint, to talk coarsely. Haydar’s stern and almost prosaic sentence: "Do you hear my far yawp through the years loud?" (line 18) sounds more like a reproach coming from the depths of the speaker’s soul that is asking for justice and peace. The yawp is uttered as the speaker looks at the Thames, questioning its "meandering to the sea to die, / And again into being from a cloud" (19-20). Being born from a cloud can hardly be an image of power, especially when London is pictured as an old woman "wearing a gray sky bonnet" (line 16). With the insistence on the "Here" (line21) and the use of the present tense, Haydar conjures Wordsworth’s Sonnet and the ideology behind it. Much as Haydar would want to give allegiance to one of the great poets of English literature, his Arab nationalism comes to the front rendering the poem a virtual matrix upon which different voices compete for meaning.

In conclusion, the plethora of writers Haydar refers or alludes to, the diverse topics he attends to, the different poetic modes he employs, and the paradoxical poetic voices he assumes demand serious effort on the part of the reader to uncover the multivocality in this poet whose hybrid consciousness thrives on dialogue. For example, it is worth juxtaposing Haydar’s "Wash, Wash, Wash" with Tennyson’s "Break, Break, Break" to uncover the dialogism of Haydar’s poem: both poems are tinged with a melancholic, elegiac tone that mourns the loss of dear friend (Arthur Hallam in the case of Tennyson and Bassam Haydar, the poet’s son in the case of Jawdat Haydar). Yet Haydar’s poem tends to have a different and probably a more philosophical attitude to humanity’s worst enemy: Time. In both poems the Bakhtin’s Sobytie, the cobeing-as-event, is the same yet the response is different: the loss of a dear person leads to philosophical questions about youth and age, about Time and the yearning for childhood. What is interesting in this poem is that Haydar, unlike in most of his poems that address Western or Eastern poets, does not mention Tennyson although he appropriates the same words, phrases, and some of the images. A careful reader should be attuned to Haydar’s substitution of the words in the title. Tennyson refers to the natural role of the waves (they "break" on the crags) whereas Haydar, using onomatopoeia, not only gives life to the waves, but also assigns them the metaphorical function that is needed to assuage man’s grief of loss. Also while Tennyson expresses his anguish by depersonalizing his grief through children of fishermen and sailors, Haydar personalizes to speak directly of what Tennyson modal "would" imply.

Another example that would challenge the reader is Haydar’s discourse with the nightingale in Keats’s famous "Ode to a Nightingale". A hint that may lead to serious discussion of poems like "Bereaved Birds Sorrow Like Men", "The Nightingales", and "Rome and John Keats is that Haydar reverses the role of the nightingale and the speaker, of the poet and his symbol of art, a reversal that signifies Haydar’s dialogic imagination that discourses with the poets he refers to, offering a new vision of the relationship between the poet and his art, between life and art. Keats’s nightingales are sonorous with immortal notes of art whereas Haydar’s nightingales are silent and it is the poet that negotiates his role in the experience of reality.

Haydar’s poems are not restricted to place or time; rather they tend to occupy a spatial matrix that crosses boundaries. The poet is not self-enclosed with topics that emanate from his own immediate environment cogitating sheer personal dilemmas. The expansive space which Haydar’s poetry tries to encompass is indicative of his distrust of the finality of identity or the fixity of subjectivity. The I in Haydar is not a finished subject that is defined by its national, religious, cultural, or spatial environment. It is an ever-changing self that develops as it interrogates its relationship with other national, religious, cultural or spatial contexts. It is up to us, readers, to excavate the subliminal messages and the negotiatory nature of this poet from the City of the Sun.

1. Ica Wahbeh, "J.Haydar—Contemporary Arab bard seeks eternal truth". Jordan Times. Sunday, April 12, 1992.
2. See Shaaban’s forward for Haydar’s Shadows, ii
3. See Monroe’s forward for Haydar’s Voices, ii
4. See Iwen’s forward for Haydar’s 101 Selected Poems, xv.
5. See Michael Bakhtin’s "Discourse in the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination: Four  Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas, 1981, 259-422.
6. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Routledge, 2002, 18.
7. Holquist, 24-25.

Some critics debate the exact date of Wordsworth’s return to London. See Stephen Bygrave, Romantic Writings, Open University, 2004, 25.

Jawdat Haydar’s - Dialogic Imagination

Jawdat Haydar’s

                           Dialogic Imagination

Writing in 1984, Haydar addresses the critic saying:
                                      Squeeze a glass of wisdom and have a drink;
                                      Perhaps you’ll have a better mental grasp
                                      Of what you may read criticize or think.

Much has been said about Haydar the man, the father, the humanitarian, but much is yet to be said about him as a poet.  Puzzled with his homage to diverse poets such as Gibran, Moutran, Naime, Frost, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and May Ziade, his readers find difficulty in pinning his poetic allegiance. Troubled with his addresses to oppositional political figures such as Napoleon, King Feysal, Hitler, Ghandi, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, readers have difficulty in identifying his political stand. Awed by his philosophic dialogue with Time, nostalgic for youth yet proud of his age, counting the years but not limiting the space, riding waves with the wrinkles of old age smoothed on the pages of poetry, readers are caught in his gyrating circles of years, of paradisal visions and graphic pictures of reality. Finally, tossed between the rocky faces chiseled on bedrocks riding Arabian thoroughbreds and frolicking verses sailing the aquatic lull of the oceans of poetry, readers are lost in ocean of literary isms trying to catch his reign and sail.

Haydar’s education, travel and work experience fermented a unique poetic discourse characterized by its dialogism exhibiting a unique kind of hybridity that draws on the poet’s experience that stretches from two world wars, Arab nationalist uprisings, wars of independence and civil wars, and wars of occupation in the name of independence; from Texas to Baghdad, from pre-9/11 America to post-civil war in Lebanon. Indeed, Haydar stands out among the array of Lebanese-American writers who achieved international fame and won worldwide respect, such as Amin Al-Rihany and Gibran Khalil Gibran, who, at the turn of the 20th century, calibrated what is called "Immigrant Literature" which is rife with East-West reconciliations and contestations. Two biographical facts, however, distinguish Haydar from his fellow Lebanese writers. First, he was not an "immigrant." Though he travelled a lot to pursue his graduate studies and for business or pleasure purposes, Haydar lived all his life in Lebanon, experiencing firsthand the cultural, political, and social changes in Lebanon and the Arab world. Second, his professional career for thirty years in the industrial sector couldn’t have been more inimical to writing poetry. Thus, his poetic output shouldn’t be assessed by the equivocal argument of literary influence.

As a poet, Haydar, with his penchant love for the universal yet with meticulous attention to the specific and particular, forges in the smithy of his imagination a distinctive type of poetry that resists categorization. Much of his poetry is peopled with different voices. In one of the interviews, Haydar says of his first volume, "I called it Voices because there are many people inside. I talk about Ghandi, Napoleon, and Frost." In fact, tens and tens of people—historical, literary, political, or social—are heard in his poetry. However, in such poems, Haydar doesn’t merely talk about them; he talks to them, engaging them in multiple discourses about life and art. Furthermore, the titles of his volumes (Echoes, Voices, and Shadows) indicate liminality of his poetic imagination. The lack of centeredness of the titles renders the poetic expressions centrifugal rather than centripetal: they diverge outward than converge inward which indicates the poet’s hybridity of consciousness. Moreover, these voices acquire a life of their own wherein Haydar’s persona becomes a ventriloquist assuming chameleonic personas: the lover and the cavalier, the didactic and the ironic, the environmentalist and the philosophical, the nationalist and the cosmopolitan, the Arab and the American, the Texan and the Lebanese, the flaneur poet and the poet of the people (to name only a few).

Nevertheless, most of the commentary on Haydar tends to be rather general, with a focus on the lyrical mode that is often tinged with an elegiac, contemplative, or melancholic tone . Others such as John Monroe align Haydar’s poetry with that of Rihani, Naimy, Gibran, and with "echoes from Tennyson" and a bit of Frost. Moreover, the prolific poetic modes of Haydar’s poetic style has been equally daunting as it ranges from the strict form of the sonnet to free blank verse, to predominant 24-line rhymed poems, to one-line verse. This variety, according to Jason Iwen, "boldly fuses the poetic styles and sentiments of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Periods of Anglophone Literature, while exploring issues of common interest to people living in regions as far apart as Texas and Iraq". True as these comments may be, they remain generalities whose truth is yet to be ascertained through scholarly critical analysis of Haydar’s poetry. Indeed, the above conflations of Haydar’s poetic achievement across cultures and history and the insistence on highlighting the romantic lyrical tone do not properly give credit to the poet. Neither does the focus on the surface similarities between Haydar and other poets allow us to properly appreciate the uniqueness of his poetry.

My approach to Haydar’s poetry will be through Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian thinker whose writings in the early 20th century changed the reading of literature drastically and have become a much coveted and debated industry in academia. Central to Bakhtin’s thought are two key terms: dialogism and multivocality (or heteroglossia) which are exclusive to the novel and not the poetry genre. According to Bakhtin, the novel, with its wide array of characters, each with its speech style, becomes a matrix of different voices, carrying with them different ideologies, all competing and negotiating for meaning. Thus, while the novel enjoys dialogical imagination, poetry is monological. Moreover, "in dialogism," says Holquist,"the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness." Dialogism takes it for granted that nothing can be perceived except against the perspective of something. Thus, when Haydar brings in a Tennyson, a Wordsworth, or any other poet, he is not merely saluting their achievement in as much as he’s sharing with them an event, an experience of reality from a different time and place. In many of the poems wherein Haydar addresses other poets or figures he sets himself in the same context. For example, "In Memory" he is, like Wordsworth, on Westminster Bridge; in "Birds Bereave Like Men" he is like Keats under a tree addressing a nightingale; in "Wash Wash Wash" he, like Tennyson, addressing the sea in almost the same words. This shared event, Bakhtin’s Sobtyie or co-being-as-event, involves a dialogue of two perspectives, both of negotiate the possible meaning or knowledge gained from this event. In Bakhtinian terms, neither you nor I possess a definite meaning and it’s only through the encounter with the other that our experience may gain a certain meaning. It is in this context that this paper will give an example of Haydar’s dialogic imagination of "In Memory of Wordsworth and His Sonnet Upon Westminster Bridge."

Adopting a Bakhtinian approach to Haydar’s poem recasts our reading into a completely different perspective. First of all, although Haydar is a competent sonneteer, he does not use the sonnet form. His 6 rhymed quatrains tend to subsume the 14-line sonnet and expand that tranquil moment of September 3rd, 1802, back to tumultuous crusades of medieval times and forward into the deafening bombardment of Lebanon in 1982.

The date of Haydar’s composition of the poem and the imagery used show that there’s more than meets the eye. Whether sheer coincidence or not, both poems have the same date as September 3rd. However, while for Wordsworth it comes after his visit to France with his sister in 1802, for Haydar it comes right after the end of the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. Visiting Westminster Bridge at this point of time, Haydar seems to have been attuned to the political and ideological messages permeating English poetry at the time of British imperial expansion which many Romantic poets, except for Byron, supported and advocated it. Nevertheless, Haydar the lover of English poetry and Haydar the Lebanese nationalist contest each other as they face yet another voice, Wordsworth’s.

Moreover, Haydar’s "In Memory" refutes Bakhtin’s charge against poetry’s inability of a dialogic discourse. In this poem Haydar shares with Wordsworth the same event: standing on Westminster Bridge and viewing London. However, Haydar’s experience forces us to reconsider the meaning of Wordsworth’s sonnet. In the very first lines of the Sonnet, Wordsworth invests all the beauty of the world in London at that single moment at early dawn: "Earth hath not anything to show more fair:/ Dull would he be
of soul who could pass by /A sight so touching in its majesty" and "Never did sun more beautifully steep/ In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill" (lines 9-10). Furthermore, London is not only personified with "The City now doth, like a garment wear,/ The beauty of the morning" (lines 4-5), but also metaphorized into a majestical vernal bride of nature whose "mighty heart is lying still."
This regal image of London which tends to preclude any mention of the mighty power of the British empire is brought to the front by Haydar’s poem."In Memory" is full of contesting voices. Haydar directly addresses the poet he has in mind: Wordsworth. Standing on the same bridge from which Wordsworth apotheosizes London, Haydar calls on him twice: the first to confirm that he is in the same spot and the second to recall Wordsworth’s power at painting the scene of the sleeping London. Thus, at first reading, one of the voices the readers hear is that of Haydar’s paying ‘homage’ to the great British romantic poet: the bridge is touristic site "in honour of [his] name" (line 4); Wordsworth is a "star" unmatched by any (line 5) whose poetry has conquered "fields of poetry" (line 10) and, though dead, his poetry lives on enshrined "Bearing the regal crown of prosody" (line 18). However, on a second reading, the readers encounter another voice and another London. The predominance of military tropes such as "conquest", "crusade", "armies of deathless thoughts" in "In Memory" stand in stark opposition with all the serene and silent status of Wordsworth’s London. Moreover, with the images of power embedded in words such as "emperor", "empowered", "stately", and "regal" Haydar is saying what Wordsworth leaves unsaid in his Sonnet.

Based on the above, the first reading and the second one seem to carry two paradoxical voices: Haydar’s admiration and admonition of what Wordsworth’s sonnet represents: the power of poetry and of Western power over countries such as Lebanon. A close look at stanzas 4 and 5 in "In Memory" shows that the mighty, epical heart of England is called upon to answer for the British stand towards the Israeli invasion that claimed thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian lives. The warlike images of stanza 3 accrue a political ideology that contests Haydar’s love and admiration of Wordsworth. Stanza 4 is an extended metaphor throwing the British poet’s words on a canvas to form "a tableau pranked by the life-like hue of his sonnet" (emphasis added). It’s the word ‘prank’ here that is irksome: it has several meanings, most of which are negative. A prank is a practical joke, a ludicrous or grotesque act done for fun; it also means ostentatious decoration, or to dress for show off. Is Wordsworth’s diction exaggerated in describing London? Is Haydar hinting at the powerwielding capital of 19th century colonialism? Is he thinking of the crusades waged against the East by kings and Popes whose armies looted the East to fill their chateaus? In stanza 5 another word is equally troublesome: ‘Yawp’. Yawp is similar to cry but of different connotation: yawp means to make a raucous noise, to cry out in complaint, to talk coarsely. Haydar’s stern and almost prosaic sentence: "Do you hear my far yawp through the years loud?" (line 18) sounds more like a reproach coming from the depths of the speaker’s soul that is asking for justice and peace. The yawp is uttered as the speaker looks at the Thames, questioning its "meandering to the sea to die, / And again into being from a cloud" (19-20). Being born from a cloud can hardly be an image of power, especially when London is pictured as an old woman "wearing a gray sky bonnet" (line 16). With the insistence on the "Here" (line21) and the use of the present tense, Haydar conjures Wordsworth’s Sonnet and the ideology behind it. Much as Haydar would want to give allegiance to one of the great poets of English literature, his Arab nationalism comes to the front rendering the poem a virtual matrix upon which different voices compete for meaning.

In conclusion, the plethora of writers Haydar refers or alludes to, the diverse topics he attends to, the different poetic modes he employs, and the paradoxical poetic voices he assumes demand serious effort on the part of the reader to uncover the multivocality in this poet whose hybrid consciousness thrives on dialogue. For example, it is worth juxtaposing Haydar’s "Wash, Wash, Wash" with Tennyson’s "Break, Break, Break" to uncover the dialogism of Haydar’s poem: both poems are tinged with a melancholic, elegiac tone that mourns the loss of dear friend (Arthur Hallam in the case of Tennyson and Bassam Haydar, the poet’s son in the case of Jawdat Haydar). Yet Haydar’s poem tends to have a different and probably a more philosophical attitude to humanity’s worst enemy: Time. In both poems the Bakhtin’s Sobytie, the cobeing-as-event, is the same yet the response is different: the loss of a dear person leads to philosophical questions about youth and age, about Time and the yearning for childhood. What is interesting in this poem is that Haydar, unlike in most of his poems that address Western or Eastern poets, does not mention Tennyson although he appropriates the same words, phrases, and some of the images. A careful reader should be attuned to Haydar’s substitution of the words in the title. Tennyson refers to the natural role of the waves (they "break" on the crags) whereas Haydar, using onomatopoeia, not only gives life to the waves, but also assigns them the metaphorical function that is needed to assuage man’s grief of loss. Also while Tennyson expresses his anguish by depersonalizing his grief through children of fishermen and sailors, Haydar personalizes to speak directly of what Tennyson modal "would" imply.

Another example that would challenge the reader is Haydar’s discourse with the nightingale in Keats’s famous "Ode to a Nightingale". A hint that may lead to serious discussion of poems like "Bereaved Birds Sorrow Like Men", "The Nightingales", and "Rome and John Keats is that Haydar reverses the role of the nightingale and the speaker, of the poet and his symbol of art, a reversal that signifies Haydar’s dialogic imagination that discourses with the poets he refers to, offering a new vision of the relationship between the poet and his art, between life and art. Keats’s nightingales are sonorous with immortal notes of art whereas Haydar’s nightingales are silent and it is the poet that negotiates his role in the experience of reality.

Haydar’s poems are not restricted to place or time; rather they tend to occupy a spatial matrix that crosses boundaries. The poet is not self-enclosed with topics that emanate from his own immediate environment cogitating sheer personal dilemmas. The expansive space which Haydar’s poetry tries to encompass is indicative of his distrust of the finality of identity or the fixity of subjectivity. The I in Haydar is not a finished subject that is defined by its national, religious, cultural, or spatial environment. It is an ever-changing self that develops as it interrogates its relationship with other national, religious, cultural or spatial contexts. It is up to us, readers, to excavate the subliminal messages and the negotiatory nature of this poet from the City of the Sun.

1. Ica Wahbeh, "J.Haydar—Contemporary Arab bard seeks eternal truth". Jordan Times. Sunday, April 12, 1992.
2. See Shaaban’s forward for Haydar’s Shadows, ii
3. See Monroe’s forward for Haydar’s Voices, ii
4. See Iwen’s forward for Haydar’s 101 Selected Poems, xv.
5. See Michael Bakhtin’s "Discourse in the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination: Four  Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas, 1981, 259-422.
6. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Routledge, 2002, 18.
7. Holquist, 24-25.

Some critics debate the exact date of Wordsworth’s return to London. See Stephen Bygrave, Romantic Writings, Open University, 2004, 25.

Jawdat Haydar’s - Dialogic Imagination

Jawdat Haydar’s

                           Dialogic Imagination

Writing in 1984, Haydar addresses the critic saying:
                                      Squeeze a glass of wisdom and have a drink;
                                      Perhaps you’ll have a better mental grasp
                                      Of what you may read criticize or think.

Much has been said about Haydar the man, the father, the humanitarian, but much is yet to be said about him as a poet.  Puzzled with his homage to diverse poets such as Gibran, Moutran, Naime, Frost, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and May Ziade, his readers find difficulty in pinning his poetic allegiance. Troubled with his addresses to oppositional political figures such as Napoleon, King Feysal, Hitler, Ghandi, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, readers have difficulty in identifying his political stand. Awed by his philosophic dialogue with Time, nostalgic for youth yet proud of his age, counting the years but not limiting the space, riding waves with the wrinkles of old age smoothed on the pages of poetry, readers are caught in his gyrating circles of years, of paradisal visions and graphic pictures of reality. Finally, tossed between the rocky faces chiseled on bedrocks riding Arabian thoroughbreds and frolicking verses sailing the aquatic lull of the oceans of poetry, readers are lost in ocean of literary isms trying to catch his reign and sail.

Haydar’s education, travel and work experience fermented a unique poetic discourse characterized by its dialogism exhibiting a unique kind of hybridity that draws on the poet’s experience that stretches from two world wars, Arab nationalist uprisings, wars of independence and civil wars, and wars of occupation in the name of independence; from Texas to Baghdad, from pre-9/11 America to post-civil war in Lebanon. Indeed, Haydar stands out among the array of Lebanese-American writers who achieved international fame and won worldwide respect, such as Amin Al-Rihany and Gibran Khalil Gibran, who, at the turn of the 20th century, calibrated what is called "Immigrant Literature" which is rife with East-West reconciliations and contestations. Two biographical facts, however, distinguish Haydar from his fellow Lebanese writers. First, he was not an "immigrant." Though he travelled a lot to pursue his graduate studies and for business or pleasure purposes, Haydar lived all his life in Lebanon, experiencing firsthand the cultural, political, and social changes in Lebanon and the Arab world. Second, his professional career for thirty years in the industrial sector couldn’t have been more inimical to writing poetry. Thus, his poetic output shouldn’t be assessed by the equivocal argument of literary influence.

As a poet, Haydar, with his penchant love for the universal yet with meticulous attention to the specific and particular, forges in the smithy of his imagination a distinctive type of poetry that resists categorization. Much of his poetry is peopled with different voices. In one of the interviews, Haydar says of his first volume, "I called it Voices because there are many people inside. I talk about Ghandi, Napoleon, and Frost." In fact, tens and tens of people—historical, literary, political, or social—are heard in his poetry. However, in such poems, Haydar doesn’t merely talk about them; he talks to them, engaging them in multiple discourses about life and art. Furthermore, the titles of his volumes (Echoes, Voices, and Shadows) indicate liminality of his poetic imagination. The lack of centeredness of the titles renders the poetic expressions centrifugal rather than centripetal: they diverge outward than converge inward which indicates the poet’s hybridity of consciousness. Moreover, these voices acquire a life of their own wherein Haydar’s persona becomes a ventriloquist assuming chameleonic personas: the lover and the cavalier, the didactic and the ironic, the environmentalist and the philosophical, the nationalist and the cosmopolitan, the Arab and the American, the Texan and the Lebanese, the flaneur poet and the poet of the people (to name only a few).

Nevertheless, most of the commentary on Haydar tends to be rather general, with a focus on the lyrical mode that is often tinged with an elegiac, contemplative, or melancholic tone . Others such as John Monroe align Haydar’s poetry with that of Rihani, Naimy, Gibran, and with "echoes from Tennyson" and a bit of Frost. Moreover, the prolific poetic modes of Haydar’s poetic style has been equally daunting as it ranges from the strict form of the sonnet to free blank verse, to predominant 24-line rhymed poems, to one-line verse. This variety, according to Jason Iwen, "boldly fuses the poetic styles and sentiments of the Romantic, Victorian, and Modern Periods of Anglophone Literature, while exploring issues of common interest to people living in regions as far apart as Texas and Iraq". True as these comments may be, they remain generalities whose truth is yet to be ascertained through scholarly critical analysis of Haydar’s poetry. Indeed, the above conflations of Haydar’s poetic achievement across cultures and history and the insistence on highlighting the romantic lyrical tone do not properly give credit to the poet. Neither does the focus on the surface similarities between Haydar and other poets allow us to properly appreciate the uniqueness of his poetry.

My approach to Haydar’s poetry will be through Mikhail Bakhtin, a Russian thinker whose writings in the early 20th century changed the reading of literature drastically and have become a much coveted and debated industry in academia. Central to Bakhtin’s thought are two key terms: dialogism and multivocality (or heteroglossia) which are exclusive to the novel and not the poetry genre. According to Bakhtin, the novel, with its wide array of characters, each with its speech style, becomes a matrix of different voices, carrying with them different ideologies, all competing and negotiating for meaning. Thus, while the novel enjoys dialogical imagination, poetry is monological. Moreover, "in dialogism," says Holquist,"the very capacity to have consciousness is based on otherness." Dialogism takes it for granted that nothing can be perceived except against the perspective of something. Thus, when Haydar brings in a Tennyson, a Wordsworth, or any other poet, he is not merely saluting their achievement in as much as he’s sharing with them an event, an experience of reality from a different time and place. In many of the poems wherein Haydar addresses other poets or figures he sets himself in the same context. For example, "In Memory" he is, like Wordsworth, on Westminster Bridge; in "Birds Bereave Like Men" he is like Keats under a tree addressing a nightingale; in "Wash Wash Wash" he, like Tennyson, addressing the sea in almost the same words. This shared event, Bakhtin’s Sobtyie or co-being-as-event, involves a dialogue of two perspectives, both of negotiate the possible meaning or knowledge gained from this event. In Bakhtinian terms, neither you nor I possess a definite meaning and it’s only through the encounter with the other that our experience may gain a certain meaning. It is in this context that this paper will give an example of Haydar’s dialogic imagination of "In Memory of Wordsworth and His Sonnet Upon Westminster Bridge."

Adopting a Bakhtinian approach to Haydar’s poem recasts our reading into a completely different perspective. First of all, although Haydar is a competent sonneteer, he does not use the sonnet form. His 6 rhymed quatrains tend to subsume the 14-line sonnet and expand that tranquil moment of September 3rd, 1802, back to tumultuous crusades of medieval times and forward into the deafening bombardment of Lebanon in 1982.

The date of Haydar’s composition of the poem and the imagery used show that there’s more than meets the eye. Whether sheer coincidence or not, both poems have the same date as September 3rd. However, while for Wordsworth it comes after his visit to France with his sister in 1802, for Haydar it comes right after the end of the Israeli invasion of Beirut in 1982. Visiting Westminster Bridge at this point of time, Haydar seems to have been attuned to the political and ideological messages permeating English poetry at the time of British imperial expansion which many Romantic poets, except for Byron, supported and advocated it. Nevertheless, Haydar the lover of English poetry and Haydar the Lebanese nationalist contest each other as they face yet another voice, Wordsworth’s.

Moreover, Haydar’s "In Memory" refutes Bakhtin’s charge against poetry’s inability of a dialogic discourse. In this poem Haydar shares with Wordsworth the same event: standing on Westminster Bridge and viewing London. However, Haydar’s experience forces us to reconsider the meaning of Wordsworth’s sonnet. In the very first lines of the Sonnet, Wordsworth invests all the beauty of the world in London at that single moment at early dawn: "Earth hath not anything to show more fair:/ Dull would he be
of soul who could pass by /A sight so touching in its majesty" and "Never did sun more beautifully steep/ In his first splendor, valley, rock, or hill" (lines 9-10). Furthermore, London is not only personified with "The City now doth, like a garment wear,/ The beauty of the morning" (lines 4-5), but also metaphorized into a majestical vernal bride of nature whose "mighty heart is lying still."
This regal image of London which tends to preclude any mention of the mighty power of the British empire is brought to the front by Haydar’s poem."In Memory" is full of contesting voices. Haydar directly addresses the poet he has in mind: Wordsworth. Standing on the same bridge from which Wordsworth apotheosizes London, Haydar calls on him twice: the first to confirm that he is in the same spot and the second to recall Wordsworth’s power at painting the scene of the sleeping London. Thus, at first reading, one of the voices the readers hear is that of Haydar’s paying ‘homage’ to the great British romantic poet: the bridge is touristic site "in honour of [his] name" (line 4); Wordsworth is a "star" unmatched by any (line 5) whose poetry has conquered "fields of poetry" (line 10) and, though dead, his poetry lives on enshrined "Bearing the regal crown of prosody" (line 18). However, on a second reading, the readers encounter another voice and another London. The predominance of military tropes such as "conquest", "crusade", "armies of deathless thoughts" in "In Memory" stand in stark opposition with all the serene and silent status of Wordsworth’s London. Moreover, with the images of power embedded in words such as "emperor", "empowered", "stately", and "regal" Haydar is saying what Wordsworth leaves unsaid in his Sonnet.

Based on the above, the first reading and the second one seem to carry two paradoxical voices: Haydar’s admiration and admonition of what Wordsworth’s sonnet represents: the power of poetry and of Western power over countries such as Lebanon. A close look at stanzas 4 and 5 in "In Memory" shows that the mighty, epical heart of England is called upon to answer for the British stand towards the Israeli invasion that claimed thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian lives. The warlike images of stanza 3 accrue a political ideology that contests Haydar’s love and admiration of Wordsworth. Stanza 4 is an extended metaphor throwing the British poet’s words on a canvas to form "a tableau pranked by the life-like hue of his sonnet" (emphasis added). It’s the word ‘prank’ here that is irksome: it has several meanings, most of which are negative. A prank is a practical joke, a ludicrous or grotesque act done for fun; it also means ostentatious decoration, or to dress for show off. Is Wordsworth’s diction exaggerated in describing London? Is Haydar hinting at the powerwielding capital of 19th century colonialism? Is he thinking of the crusades waged against the East by kings and Popes whose armies looted the East to fill their chateaus? In stanza 5 another word is equally troublesome: ‘Yawp’. Yawp is similar to cry but of different connotation: yawp means to make a raucous noise, to cry out in complaint, to talk coarsely. Haydar’s stern and almost prosaic sentence: "Do you hear my far yawp through the years loud?" (line 18) sounds more like a reproach coming from the depths of the speaker’s soul that is asking for justice and peace. The yawp is uttered as the speaker looks at the Thames, questioning its "meandering to the sea to die, / And again into being from a cloud" (19-20). Being born from a cloud can hardly be an image of power, especially when London is pictured as an old woman "wearing a gray sky bonnet" (line 16). With the insistence on the "Here" (line21) and the use of the present tense, Haydar conjures Wordsworth’s Sonnet and the ideology behind it. Much as Haydar would want to give allegiance to one of the great poets of English literature, his Arab nationalism comes to the front rendering the poem a virtual matrix upon which different voices compete for meaning.

In conclusion, the plethora of writers Haydar refers or alludes to, the diverse topics he attends to, the different poetic modes he employs, and the paradoxical poetic voices he assumes demand serious effort on the part of the reader to uncover the multivocality in this poet whose hybrid consciousness thrives on dialogue. For example, it is worth juxtaposing Haydar’s "Wash, Wash, Wash" with Tennyson’s "Break, Break, Break" to uncover the dialogism of Haydar’s poem: both poems are tinged with a melancholic, elegiac tone that mourns the loss of dear friend (Arthur Hallam in the case of Tennyson and Bassam Haydar, the poet’s son in the case of Jawdat Haydar). Yet Haydar’s poem tends to have a different and probably a more philosophical attitude to humanity’s worst enemy: Time. In both poems the Bakhtin’s Sobytie, the cobeing-as-event, is the same yet the response is different: the loss of a dear person leads to philosophical questions about youth and age, about Time and the yearning for childhood. What is interesting in this poem is that Haydar, unlike in most of his poems that address Western or Eastern poets, does not mention Tennyson although he appropriates the same words, phrases, and some of the images. A careful reader should be attuned to Haydar’s substitution of the words in the title. Tennyson refers to the natural role of the waves (they "break" on the crags) whereas Haydar, using onomatopoeia, not only gives life to the waves, but also assigns them the metaphorical function that is needed to assuage man’s grief of loss. Also while Tennyson expresses his anguish by depersonalizing his grief through children of fishermen and sailors, Haydar personalizes to speak directly of what Tennyson modal "would" imply.

Another example that would challenge the reader is Haydar’s discourse with the nightingale in Keats’s famous "Ode to a Nightingale". A hint that may lead to serious discussion of poems like "Bereaved Birds Sorrow Like Men", "The Nightingales", and "Rome and John Keats is that Haydar reverses the role of the nightingale and the speaker, of the poet and his symbol of art, a reversal that signifies Haydar’s dialogic imagination that discourses with the poets he refers to, offering a new vision of the relationship between the poet and his art, between life and art. Keats’s nightingales are sonorous with immortal notes of art whereas Haydar’s nightingales are silent and it is the poet that negotiates his role in the experience of reality.

Haydar’s poems are not restricted to place or time; rather they tend to occupy a spatial matrix that crosses boundaries. The poet is not self-enclosed with topics that emanate from his own immediate environment cogitating sheer personal dilemmas. The expansive space which Haydar’s poetry tries to encompass is indicative of his distrust of the finality of identity or the fixity of subjectivity. The I in Haydar is not a finished subject that is defined by its national, religious, cultural, or spatial environment. It is an ever-changing self that develops as it interrogates its relationship with other national, religious, cultural or spatial contexts. It is up to us, readers, to excavate the subliminal messages and the negotiatory nature of this poet from the City of the Sun.

1. Ica Wahbeh, "J.Haydar—Contemporary Arab bard seeks eternal truth". Jordan Times. Sunday, April 12, 1992.
2. See Shaaban’s forward for Haydar’s Shadows, ii
3. See Monroe’s forward for Haydar’s Voices, ii
4. See Iwen’s forward for Haydar’s 101 Selected Poems, xv.
5. See Michael Bakhtin’s "Discourse in the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination: Four  Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, Texas, 1981, 259-422.
6. Michael Holquist, Dialogism: Bakhtin and His World, Routledge, 2002, 18.
7. Holquist, 24-25.

Some critics debate the exact date of Wordsworth’s return to London. See Stephen Bygrave, Romantic Writings, Open University, 2004, 25.