I first learned of Abdel Wahab Yousif when he died, from an obituary article called “Trading Misery for Death: The Tragic Death of a Sudanese Poet,” by Adil Babikir, published in ArabLit on August 27, 2020.
That article begins, “A young Sudanese poet’s prediction of his fate came true last week when he drowned in the Mediterranean. Abdel Wahab Yousif, better known as Latinos, died when a rubber boat packed with African immigrants sank into the sea shortly after setting off from Libya on its way to Europe.”
I’d been researching, and writing, on the problem of human migration and its horrible, mostly silent tragedy, for a few years when I read the news that day, so I read every word twice and printed it up among the documents for what would become Fugitive/Refuge. But I didn’t want simply to write another vampiric elegy, a poem that would use this story to make something beautiful and do nothing for Latinos and the likes of this man, whose gifts most of us did not know until he’d drowned. We were in the throes of a pandemic, and the Black Lives Matter protests that had gone national in the summer of 2020, and so I filed it away.
Less than a week later, the gadfly-muse Chris Doucot, an old college friend who co-founded the Hartford Catholic Worker house, had read the piece and shared it on Facebook, tagging me, saying: “Please write a poem about this, and/or have your class write poems about this. So evil, so tragic, so many parallels with what is going on here.”
So I tried. Draft after draft, trying to get closer to the mystery and beauty and tragedy of this Sudanese poet, whom fate and empire and the global economy had turned into a forgotten headline. At the time, I was reading about the Aisling, an Irish poetic form that featured a dream-visitation, usually a woman in distress, often a coded figure for Ireland herself.
Born into poverty in Darfur, Latinos had, like so many others, found it impossible to earn a living in his home country, even after receiving a university degree at the University of Khartoum, so he set out for Libya, hoping to find a way to cross the Mediterranean into Europe and the chance to work.
And then I had a dream, a dream of getting caught beneath the surface of a lightless water, trying to thrash my way to the light. And below me, I saw him—his arms reaching up, but too far down and falling. When I crested the surface to the air, I awoke. I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d stopped breathing.
It was the dream that was the opening. But at some point, I decided that the Aisling form was not quite the right fit. After all, who was visiting me, and why?
I’d been studying, as well, the Arabic form known as the qașīdas, inspired in good measure by Khaled Mattawa’s qassidas (his spelling) in his underappreciated masterpiece Fugitive Atlas (2020). This form astonished me, for the way it felt both ancient and utterly modern. What I understand is that the qașīda’s origins lie in the poetry of the Arabs in the Arabian desert. It’s so old that by the ninth century, Ibn Qutayba already wrote a book on its laws, called Book of Poetry and Poets. It was, in his telling, a three-part poem that begins with the poet happening upon the remains of the encampment of his beloved, whose caravan has moved on. It sounds almost like the poetic version of “Missed Connections” on Craigslist I saw you at the campfire, and your face was lit like the moon, and fell in love with the moon that was your face, but when I turned you were gone, and the moon is a pale reminder, etcetera.
The qasida begins with human longing. The moderns didn’t invent it! It was in the human heart. This is the nasīb, which means “fate,” the poet is in a nostalgic mood. Sometimes, pursuing the beloved, the poet will come upon the remains of a camp, the beloved’s caravan, causing a consideration of what has passed. If it begins with longing and its endless distances (thanks, Robert Hass), it doesn’t stay there, but rather moves into the trouble of the world. In the second section, the rahīl, the poet travels outside of the known, outside the tribe, facing the cruelty of the world. In the first and final section, the poet makes a return of sorts–to praise either the tribe (fakhr) or its leader (madīh), satirize its enemies (hija), or offer moral precepts (hikam).
It’s a movement that feels like the origin of half the world’s stories, and I found myself drawn by its structure. The classic qasida, of course, like most classic poems, had a powerful linking rhyme, something that many modern iterations have abjured before Mattawa’s resurrection of the form.
In 2014, Rodney Koeneke explored the qasida and a lovely little book by Harold Schimmel on the form that mesmerized him. He notes Schimmel refers to the form as “an articulation of motion, a Kama Sutra of positioning.” In Koeneke’s words,
Form becomes less a shape for containing experience than a possible way of moving through it. It’s the “redundance” of images and metaphors in the qasida—its highly conventionalized, almost ritualized formal features—that activates its capacity for intricate, braid-like variation. Schimmel puts it better: “A surfeit of transformations against the ground of the changeless, as in a sex manual.”
Form is, of course, at the heart of poetry, and it’s that friction between the laws of a form and the fresh take on it that provokes frisson, that outpouring of feeling in us. Koeneke, again: “And if the qasida’s essentially a study in motion—oscillating between experience and memory, trace and presence, campsite and camel ride, desire and resignation, abasement and boast—its progress depends, paradoxically, upon its boundedness.”
In the case of “Qasida for Abdel Wahab Yousif,” I realize now, I situate myself as the bereaved, seeking out this dazzling, fugitive poet whom I will never get to meet. I wanted to smuggle in this poem a translation of Yousif’s poetic vision of his own death, so that it would reach the shores that he will not. I wanted to imagine “a kingdom beyond/the kingdom of empires… a floating place, a garden… a garden of words / beyond words.”
