Short Book Review in my University Magazine

For professional poet Yahia Lababidi, BA ’96, writing isn’t a ritual of sitting at his desk at a preordained hour, during which brilliant verses flow like oil from a Grecian urn. His process is a more mystical one, mindful of the agency of words.

For GW Magazine
By Menachem Wecker

Even from the start of his collection of more than 160 poems spanning 22 years, it’s clear that Yahia Lababidi misses Egypt. He dedicates the book to “the real and imaginary Home I carry in my heart.” One poem has him “pick at the earth like a scab/ frantic, and faithful, like a dog,” having lost Cairo. Another tells of Alexandria’s “wild waking dream/ of a shoreless sea.” In yet another, he writes of Egypt: “Self-exiled, even after all these years/ I remain your ever-adoring captive.”

Mr. Lababidi, who is based in Florida and Washington, D.C., grew up in Cairo “surrounded by literature with a capital ‘L’” in the informal salon his parents arranged. “We would have the top writers, poets and philosophers there,” he says. “I was very young, and I had no idea what was going on. Why were these elders gesticulating wildly and reciting things?”

As a boy, he would sometimes serve drinks to the luminaries and then retreat to his room. But then as a teenager, he started to hang around and absorb, or as he puts it, to realize he was implicated in this world. “It was as a reader. I remain a reader first,” he says. One of those regular guests, Ahmed Ragab, a renowned and particularly witty writer, became an important mentor for many years.

“Some of it may have been passed intravenously,” he adds. He never met his paternal grandfather, who died when his father was young, but Mr. Lababidi bears the name of his grandfather, a celebrated Lebanese poet whose verse—often set to music—is still recited today. “For the longest time, I felt I hadn’t earned my name, because it was his name,” he says.

He’s published six books in English—one of aphorisms, one of essays, three of poetry and one of conversations—yet still he envies those who produce systematically. “I don’t sit at my desk at a certain hour or wear a certain hat to conjure the spirits,” he says. “I’ve heard of writers who go to the bar at 5 p.m., so that their muse knows where to find them. My muse must be directionally challenged.”

Instead, he tries to pay attention as he goes about his day and, he says, to blink as little as possible. “There are so many poems that are ripe for plucking if only one were in the right place and paying attention,” he says. He no longer scribbles half-baked ideas on napkins or the backs of receipts, as he once did, and he’s superstitious and fears that poems get shy around notebooks. The ideas that endure, he believes, are mature enough, while those that do not aren’t yet ready. It’s a mystical approach.

“If I’m struggling too much with the technical aspect of constructing a poem, I mistrust the poem. I think it’s not ready, or it’s not mine. Somebody else down the line will do better with it,” he says.

In the new book, one particularly beautiful image surfaces in the beginning of two poems, to which Mr. Lababidi added different endings. “The mind is full/ of elephants and mice/ scuffling in corridors,” he writes. “The air is dense/ with stray spirits [one adds “and ghosts”]/ swarming for soul.”

Reworking a poem isn’t typical for Mr. Lababidi, but he made an exception for the two poems, titled “Moment” and “Circumstances,” because he realized things could be “rotated differently” yielding equally valid results. “Normally, I don’t allow myself to go back and properly rewrite because of course the temptation is to entirely rewrite the poem,” he says. “Then you may as well write a new poem.”

(Art by Heather Oesterling,
Poem by Yahia Lababidi)