A heavy morning

Yemen

Yamanat

Mohammed Al-Mekhlafi

Today I woke up before morning, with a heavy head and a tired body. I opened my eyes with difficulty and tried to try my voice, but it came out hoarse, as if it was no longer mine. A voice that was lost yesterday between the screams, the fatigue and the long wait at the Aden Passport Authority, where I went not to ask for something exceptional, but rather for passports for my family.

The simplest right that a person can obtain with the slightest effort, but here it turns into a journey of exhaustion to a country that was once called (Yemen of Wisdom), and from the name only sarcasm remains.

I was trying to write about my third trip to Aden in less than five months. The journey is always the same, but the fatigue changes form each time: a longer wait, weaker nerves and a heavier feeling of being exhausted for no reason.

I started writing, then stopped and scrolled through Facebook, and an introductory article appeared about my friend, writer and writer Alwan Mahdi Al-Jilani. I read it and reread it, and found myself putting my journey aside and heading in another direction. Perhaps because writing sometimes seeks its outlet in people and not in pain.

I got to know Alwan first through text messages, then through sessions. Over time, we realize that we are facing a person who cannot be reduced to the title of poet, critic or researcher, even if he is all of these and much more. Alwan is one of those who walked quietly, without noise and without needing to raise his voice to be seen.

He was born in 1970 in Al-Jilaniyah village, Al-Qanawis district, Hodeidah. A simple village where the story began with the teacher, the place where the child learns letters, memorizes, makes mistakes, then tries again. From there, he moved between Al-Jilaniyya and Al-Qanawis schools, then to Al-Zaidiyah, where he completed his secondary education. The path was not paved, but it was clear: read, then read again.

When he joined the Faculty of Arts at Sanaa University, Department of Arabic Language, he was looking not only for a certificate, but also for tools. For him, poetry is not a passing mood, and criticism is not a platform for transcendence, but rather a platform for knowledge, understanding and participation.

His poetic voice appeared at the end of the 90s with his first collection of poems (The Rose opens his navel), then (The Wages of Intimacy) and (The Sun of the Forgotten Boy). They were old books, but they had clear characteristics, did not resemble mainstream books, and did not follow fashion.

After that, his works followed: (Singing in the Place of Distance), (The Book of Paradise), and some of his collections were collected into a single volume in 2004, at a time when the Yemeni cultural scene was more extensive and present.

But Alwan didn’t stop at poetry. He had a sincere fondness for heritage and forgotten texts, which is why he wrote the collection “Al-Hadrani” and worked on other texts, such as “Manthur Al-Hikam” by Muhammad bin Omar Hushayb. It was an effort to understand the roots and connect the present to what came before it.

He also read and wrote about others, the pioneers of Yemeni culture and the 90s generation, in books such as (Moon in the Shadow) and (Adjacent Voices). His readings are calm, without a tendency to assert superiority, like his personality outside of writing: an erudite, but not condescending, intellectual who sits with you as if knowledge were commonplace.

I knew him in many sessions, smiling and optimistic in his own way, despite all the devastation that surrounded us. He writes a lot and publishes a lot, not because he is protected or supported, but because he is stubborn in the beautiful sense of the word.

He does not break easily, nor display his pain, nor trade in suffering. He is good, calm and tolerant, and it is difficult to see him hurt anyone, even if they disagree with him.

In recent years, he has turned more to storytelling. He published the novel (The Forgotten Orpheus), then (Maalam), and wrote studies and stories such as (Keys to the Drawers) and (Geography of the Atlantic). He continued to publish collections of poetry, including (A Hand in the Void) and (A Pill of the Cold), and in (Strange Cases) he returned to prose poetry, tracing the transformations of writing from magazines to the screen age, without prejudice.

Alwan Al-Jilani is not an exceptional case because he published so many books, but rather because he remained an ordinary person in the midst of all this production. He writes, reads, laughs, listens and continues his journey without claiming heroism.

Perhaps it was precisely for this reason, as I sat through a heavy Adani morning, that I found writing about him a respite from my pain.

And in a country like this, in years like this, sticking together, writing, persevering, that alone is an achievement.

Yemen