“Real poetry is under threat” — An interview with Mohamed Metwalli (Egypt)” – curated by Ming Di


Mohamed Metwalli won the Yussef El-Khal Prize by Riyad El-Rayes Publishers in Lebanon for his poetry collection Once upon a Time in 1992. He was a participant in Iowa’s International Writing Program in 1997 and poet-in-residence at the University of Chicago in 1998. His other collections of poetry include The Story that People Tell in the Harbour (1998), The Lost Promenades (2010), and A Song by the Aegean Sea (2015). He compiled and co-edited an anthology of offbeat Egyptian poetry, Angry Voices, published by the University of Arkansas Press in 2002. In 2011, he attended Semana Poetica, hosted by Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.  In 2018 he was commissioned by the British Museum to render their conference publication, Asyut, Guardian City, into Arabic. With Gretchen McCullough, he translated A Song by the Aegean Sea (Laertes Press, 2022). He lives in Cairo, Egypt.

Ming Di: Why is Sun feminine and Moon masculine in your poems? Is it due to the influence of Arabic language or Egyptian mythologies?

Mohamed Metwalli: In Arabic, sun is feminine and moon is masculine, unlike so many other languages. If you write in Arabic, you cannot defy gender, unless you want to prove a point. Arabic readers might think I want to make the sun a trans-gender being if I call it masculine or the other way around with the moon. As for the ancient Egyptian mythology, Ra was a masculine god of the sun, but we don’t write in hieroglyphs anymore.

MD: I remember the open dialogue we had at Semana Poetica festival back in 2011 and how we talked about the different genders of sun and moon in different cultures. Then I read about sun goddesses in ancient Egypt such as Wadjet, Sekhmet, Menhit, etc. But anyway I got your point. How do you define yourself? An Egyptian poet or Arabic poet or African poet? And what does it mean to you? (I ask this question because I’m interested in how language, culture, geography and mythologies influence a poet in regards to self-identity.)

MM: I define myself as a poet in general for a reader with no specific nationality, but my Mediterranean and Egyptian influences are more overpowering than other influences, especially Arab. Indeed, I find myself lost between cultures: East and West, English and Arabic, Mediterranean and African, which I suppose is fruitful to my writing since I don’t write to represent a specific culture. I dislike nationalism and I think it just paves a rosy road to chauvinism. In that sense, I picture myself as a poet of the world, rather than a representative of a specific region or ethnicity.  

MD: I got various responses when I asked a few Egyptologists the same question. The one who explained to me the hieroglyphs on the Temple columns in Kom Ombo said, “I’m definitely Arab.” The one who showed me around in Luxor said, “I’m not Arab or African. I am Coptic-Egyptian. You won’t see women like me in Cairo.” But then the one who took me to Memphis said, “I was born in Cairo but I speak Coptic and Arabic. What am I? I have a master’s degree in Hieroglyphics but I can’t find a teaching job as a minority woman.” The one who showed me the pyramids said, “I’m a descendant of the Pharaohs and I believe I’m rooted in black Africa.” Anyway, which city or cities had an impact on you and shaped you to what you are now?

MM: I was born in Cairo and have always lived here. A neighborhood in Giza called Dokki, which was my childhood playground. My childhood visits to my father’s village Kafr Awad have also played a major role in shaping my views of things as a child. Yet Alexandria was always my poetic muse.

My affiliation to Alexandria is profound since all of my maternal uncles and aunts live there. Not only because of that, but I also love the city because it has its own flavor that Cairo doesn’t have. Alexandria was the only city in Egypt that possessed its own currency under the Ptolemies. It’s the bastion of Mediterranean culture, a breath of fresh air and a genuine city that I only have enjoyed and honored, but also C.P. Cavafys, Lawrence Durrell, E.M. Forster, among plenty of others. Alexandria, again, Cairo, Izmir, San Francisco, Seattle and Chicago have influenced both my life and my writing.

MD: Most of these places have their images or shadows in your poems. How did you become a poet? What inspired you to write your first poem?

MM: I wrote poetry first as a school kid at the age of thirteen, as a love poem to a female classmate.

A poet for me is like a magician and since I was a child, I have always been fascinated by the circus and the movies (the alternative reality). In a sense, words in a poem are like the balls of billiards. They acquire different meanings and interactions with each other, depending on the way you stroke them.  A poet is always on a stage, trying to impress the audience with his or her tricks. However, the best tricks in poetry have to be subtle. It’s a trick of linguistics, imagery, and thought sophistication. Poetry, for me, was an attempt to create my own perfect order of objects, of words, of dreams, of fantasies and of the world of reality as well like I craved to behold. I feel now that real poetry is under threat, since everyone claims to be a poet on Facebook and other media outlets. It’s become very prosaic, mundane and trifling. Gen. Z., Gen. Y or W, whatever you opt to call them, they don’t read printed books. They think we are retro because we read newspapers and printed material. That added to the danger of artificial intelligence, which the young generation has embraced, makes me think that we will get to some cock-n-bull literature written by robots and whoever is using the robots will claim it’s their poetry or fiction or even their nuclear discovery. What makes me smile and fret at once is the notion that these AI Robots will wake up to smell the coffee at some point and shoot the plagiarists as a fair sort of revenge. That’s what I think is truly scary. But we should keep fighting to preserve the non-AI aesthetic values.  When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.

MD: Your remarks about AI remind me of a discussion in China where many poets are saying that AI will never beat poets in creative writing. I actually have a different opinion about AI. When more and more people are writing the same kind of poetry, I think AI will bring a new voice to outshine homogeneous poetry. I had a long online chat many years ago with Xiao Bing, the first AI poet. I found her poems very interesting but I also saw her limits at that time, for instance, she started repeating herself after we typed about 300 chats back and forth. But AI can learn at an amazing speed and will change the world. Anyway, I totally understand your point. You won a big award in 1992, the year you graduated from college. Have you changed since then and if so, in what way?

MM: The Yousef El-Khal Prize was sponsored by El Naqid Magazine in Lebanon for the best first book of all the Arab world. The first prize included publishing the book and a thousand dollars in cash. Oh my dear that was thirty-two years ago. Thirty-two years of travelling and exposure to the world have definitely changed me.

Experience changes you, travelling changes you, different cultures that you encounter all over the world change you, your relationships change you, the reading process itself changes you, the writing process changes you. You can try to attain maturity of thought, vision and writing through all of these processes.

MD: Who are your favorite poets and writers? Who has influenced you most? Or who do you take as your literary father if any?

MM: As for Egyptian writers, my influences were Salah Abdel Sabour and Salah Jaheen, from Lebanon, Khalil Hawi and Wadih Sa’adeh and from Iraq, Saadi Youssef.

From France, Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire, and from Italy, Eugenio Montale and Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, who are filmmakers but I consider them the poets of modern cinema. 

From Greece, C.P. Cavafys, George Seferis, and Theo Anglopoulos, who is a filmmaker, but a piece of poetry on his own.

As for Portugal, Fernando Pessoa, and from Spain, Frederico Garcia Lorca and from England, Peter Redgrove. I was also highly influenced by Mark Twain’s fiction, which I consider highly poetic. I deem these writers and artists to be my literary godfathers.

MD: In a scenario of literary patricide, who would you like to “kill” in order to have your own voice?

MM: Oh I don’t want to “kill” anybody. But many people should think carefully before they publish their poetry, especially the people who rehash the tradition of classic Arabic poetry that has to rhyme, and sound sonorous. It has become so calcified but they still insist on reproducing it.

MD: Can you talk about the current poetry scene in Egypt? Any other interesting poets you would like to recommend to the readers?

MM: In terms of the poetry scene in Egypt, I march to my own drum and don’t follow the bandwagon. But these are good poets on the scene right now: Alaa’ Khaled, Fatma Qandeel, Yasser Zayat, Ahmed Yamani, Mahmoud Kaheir-allah, Sadeq Sharshar, Nagat Ali, and Tamer Fat-hi. In addition, Lana Abdel Rahman, the Lebanese novelist, whose fiction teeters on poetry.

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