SURREALISM IN THE ARAB WORLD
Printed in Arsenal: Surrealist
Subversion no.3, 1976
The
current resurgence of surrealism in the Arab world is a revolutionary
development of the greatest significance, demonstrating once more that the
strategy of the unfettered imagination is always and necessarily global.
We
publish here in English translation a manifesto in which our Arab comrades
express their unequivocal interventionist orientation, sharply defined against
their specific political and cultural background.
The Arab
Surrealist Movement was reconstituted in the early 1970s, but its origins
extend back to the mid-30s, when the Egyptian poet and theorist Georges Henein (who adhered to the movement in 1934 as a student in
The
Egyptian surrealists, who were also a section of the Fourth International,
organized the Art & Liberty Group in response to the Breton / Trotsky
Manifesto for an Independent Revolutionary Art, which announced the formation
of the International Federation of Independent Revolutionary Artists, commonly
called the FIARI. This
Georges Henein (1914-1973), one of the movement's greatest figures,
collaborated extensively on international surrealist publications throughout
the 1940s. His "Message from
Henein's sensitiveness to the many and wide-ranging problems of
human expression in the postwar period, and his
profound revolutionary integrity, give his entire work a special significance
today to the surrealists of all countries, and most especially, of course, to A.K.
El Janaby and his comrades, who are in the truest
sense the continuators of the effort begun by Georges Henein
and Ramses Younan.
The Arab
surrealists have produced many tracts and pamphlets, including an important
critique of modern architecture by Maroin Dib. In
1973 they took the lead in preparing a tract, Against Nationalist Illusions,
For the Internationalist Alternative, opposing all forms of nationalist
chauvinism and calling for the overthrow of all established regimes in the
The Arab
surrealists' journal, Le Desir libertaire,
which they describe as "the Arabic equivalent of Arsenal," has
provoked great controversies in the Arabic press. Because of its vehemently
revolutionary character, anti-nationalist and anti-religious, it is banned from
the mails and from bookstores in all Arab countries (being produced in
In a
recent letter A. K. El Janaby notes his intention to
issue an Arabic version of the manifesto Lighthouse of the Future, which
prefaced the surrealist section of the City Lights Anthology.
Manifesto of the Arab Surrealist
Movement, 1975
With
disgust we shove aside the dregs of survival and the impoverished rational
ideas which stuff the ash-can-heads of intellectuals.
1) We
incite individuals and the masses to unleash their instincts against all forms
of repression - including the repressive "reason" of the bourgeois
order.
2) The
great values of the ruling class (the fatherland, family, religion, school,
barracks, churches, mosques and other rottenness) make us laugh. Joyously we
piss on their tombs.
3) We
spit on the fatherland to drown in it the fumes of death. We combat and
ridicule the very idea of the fatherland. To affirm one's fatherland is to
insult the totality of man.
4) We
practice subversion 24 hours a day. We excite sadistic urges against all that
is established, not only because we are the enemies of this new stone age that
is imposed on us, but above all because it is through our subversive activity
that we discover new dimensions.
5) We
poison the intellectual atmosphere with the elixir of the imagination, so that
the poet will realize himself in realizing the historical transformation of
poetry:
a) from form into matter;
b) from simple words hanging on coat racks of paper into the
desirable flesh of the imagination that we shall absorb until everything separating
dream from reality is dissolved.
Surrealism
is nothing but the actualization of this surreality.
6) We
explode the mosques and the streets with the scandal of sex returning to its
body, bursting into flames at each encounter - secret until then.
7) We
liberate language from the prisons and stock markets of capitalist confusion.
It is
plain that today's language, instead of being an agitational
force in the process of social transformation and a vocabulary of revolutionary
attack, is only a docile vocabulary of defense
cluttered in the store of the human brain with one aim: to help the individual
prove his complete subordination to the laws of existing society - to help him
as a lawyer in the courts of everyday reality (that is, of repression).
Surrealism intrudes violently on this abject spectacle, annihilating all
obstacles to "the real functioning of thought" (Andre Breton).
When we
write, our memory belches this language from the old world. It is a game in
which our tongues become capable of recreating language in the very depths of
the revolution.
Our
surrealism signifies the destruction of what they call "the Arab
fatherland." In this world of masochistic survival, surrealism is an
aggressive and poetic way of life. It is the forbidden flame of the proletariat
embracing the insurrectional dawn - enabling us to rediscover at last the
revolutionary moment: the radiance of the workers' councils as a life
profoundly adored by those we love.
Our
surrealism, in art as in life: permanent revolution against the world of esthetics and other atrophied categories; the destruction
and supersession of all retrograde forces and
inhibitions.
Subversion
resides in surrealism the same way history resides in events.
Maroin DIB (Syria), Abdul Kadar EL
JANABY (Iraq), Faroq EL JURIDY (Lebanon), Fadil Abas HADI (Iraq), Farid LARIBY (Algeria), Ghazi YOUNIS (Lebanon)
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