My Daisy

Erasing every wisdom /

            This is my fire /

            No sign remained – My blood is the sign /

            This is my beginning /

-          Adonis, This Is My Name

Adonis is famous for using elaborate brackets, jarring line breaks, and generally unconventional syntax. He joyously played around with the Arabic language. The above quotation was taken from Shawkat M. Toorawa’s seminal English translation of Adonis’s poetry collection, A Time Between Ashes And Roses (2004). Nasser Rabbart wrote the foreword to this text, and notes the following:

“A singular, intense, and profoundly cerebral sculptor of words and images, Adonis represents the epitome of Arab humanism. I stress Arab here not because of his birthplace, Syria, the cradle of Arabism, but because he intimately identifies with the Arabic language as his absolute and only homeland; and I use humanist here because Adonis mines history for some of its most paradoxical universalistic and chauvinistic moments and uses them to punctuate a revolutionary poetry […] In other words, Adonis carves his distinct poetic modernity out of a critical engagement with the past, an engagement that he qualifies as ‘emanation from the past’.” (ibid, xi-i)

Clearly, Adonis’s poetry is concerned with language, history and power. These concepts are closely related to the topics denoted in my “bedraggled daisy” which, in fact, is not a daisy at all (Luker, 2008, 82). In line with my research topic, I chose to work with an abstract flower image, Ya Rabb, done in the classic Arabic calligraphy style, ‘Khat-e-Diwani’ (arabic-artwork.blogspot.ca/2012_10_01_archive.html). My alterations included adding some of the colours historically associated with Arab humanism broadly; red, black, and green. 

References

Adonis. (2004). A Time Between Ashes And Roses. Trans. Shawkat M. Toorawa. Syracus, NY:

Syracuse University Press.

Luker, Kristin. (2010). Salsa Dancing in the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Info-Glut.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.