At the Hotel Commodore, the stronghold of foreign journalists, an American newsman questions me: “What are you writing in this war, Poet?”

—I’m writing my silence.

—Do you mean that now the guns should speak?

—Yes. Their sound is louder than my voice.

—What are you doing then?

—I’m calling for steadfastness.

—And will you win this war?

—No. The important thing is to hold on. Holding on is a victory in itself.

—And what after that?

—A new age will start.

—And when will you go back to writing poetry?

—When the guns quiet down a little. When I explode my silence, which is full of all these voices. When I find the appropriate language.

—Is there no role for you then?

—No. No role for me in poetry now. My role is outside the poem. My role is to be here, with citizens and fighters.

Some intellectuals found the siege an appropriate time for settling accounts and pointed their poisonous pens at their colleagues’ chests. In vain did we shout, “Drop these petty matters! It’s not the writers who have Beirut under siege, and it’s not their laxity or flight that brings these buildings down over their dwellers. At worst, these writings of yours are not literature, and at best they’re not anti-aircraft guns.” “No,” they said. “This is the first and final test of whether a writer or a poem is revolutionary. Either the poem is to be born now, or it will lose its right to be born.”

“Then why did you allow Homer to write the Iliad and the Odyssey?” we teased them. “And why did you give permission to Aeschylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Tolstoy, and others? Not everyone reacts the same way, writers! He who can write now, let him write now! And he who can write later, let him write later! And if you’ll permit me to say what I think—without accusing anybody—I say the wounded, the thirsty, and those in search of water, bread, or shelter are not asking for poetry. And the fighters pay no heed to your lyrics. Sing if you wish, or hold your tongue if you want: we’re marginal in war. But it is within our power to offer the people other services: a twenty-liter can of water is worth the Valley of Genius itself.^[20] What is needed now is human commitment, not beauty in creative expression. Therefore, enough of your character assassinations! So what if the nerves of the critic collapsed and he left Beirut? And if the dramatist was too scared to cross the street? And the poet had lost some of his rhythm? Is it because the critic was not an admirer of your poetry and plays that you’ve put him under siege and are now shelling him with slander?”

In response to cultural residues within us that link the war cry to stirring verse—survivals that assume the poet’s role is that of a commentator on events, an inciter to jihad, or a war correspondent—the Arabic literary milieu has become used to posing the question of poetry in the middle of raging war. In every battle they raise the question, “Where’s the poem?” The political conception of poetry has become confused with the notion of event, regardless of historical context.

And at this particular moment, with jets plowing our bodies, these intellectuals, hovering over a missing body, are demanding poems that match air raids or at least upset the balance of forces. If the poem is not born “now,” then when will it be born? And if it’s to be born later, what value has it “now”? A question both easy and difficult, in need of a complex answer, like being permitted to say, for example, that a poem may be born in a certain place, in a certain language and body, but that it does not reach throat and paper. An innocent question, needing an innocent answer, except that—in this company—it is filled with the desire to assassinate the poet who dares to announce he is writing his silence.

It is galling that we should be ready during these air raids to steal time for all this chatter, defending the role of the poet whose writing is unique because it is rooted in his relationship to the actual as it unfolds, that we should be doing this at a moment in which everything has stopped talking, a moment of shared creativity when the people’s epic is shaping its own history. Beirut itself is the writing, rousing and creative. Its true poets and singers are its people and fighters, who don’t need to be entertained or spurred by a lute with broken strings. They are the genuine founders of a writing that for a long, long time will have to search for a linguistic equivalent to their heroism and their amazing lives. How then can the new writing—which needs time enough for leisure—crystallize and take form in a battle that has such a rhythm of rockets? And how can traditional verse—and all verse is traditional at this moment—define the poetry now fermenting in the belly of the volcano?

Patience, intellectuals! For the question of life and death which is now supreme, the question of a will committing all its weapons to the battlefield, the question of an existence taking its divine and material shape—these are more important than ethical questions about the role of poetry and the poet. And it is fitting that we should honor the awe which these hours unfold, the hours of the transfer of human existence from one shore to another and from one state of being to another. It is fitting also that traditional poetry should know how to hold its humble silence in the presence of this newborn. And if it becomes necessary for intellectuals to turn into snipers, then let them snipe at their old concepts, their old questions, and their old ethics. We are not now to describe, as much as we are to be described. We’re being born totally, or else dying totally.

Yet our great friend from Pakistan, Fayiz Ahmad Fayiz, is busy with another question: “Where are the artists?”

“Which artists, Fayiz?” I ask.

“The artists of Beirut.”

“What do you want from them?”

“To draw this war on the walls of the city.”

“What’s come over you?” I exclaim. “Don’t you see the walls tumbling?”