The Struggle: a reading and discussion with Hisham Bustani and translator Thoraya El-Rayyes

From the introduction to Hisham Bustani's poems in MPT 'A Blossom Shroud' by translator Thoraya El-Rayyes: Few poems better capture the cynicism of the infamously irate Hisham Bustani than these two odes to frustration. A poet, short-story writer, political commentator and veteran rabble rouser, Bustani’s eventful public life has been punctuated by various brushes with the police state – from harassment by the censors and security services, to arrests for his writing and involvement in political protest. Bustani’s poem ‘On the Brink Of’ revolves around vivid imagery from the urban landscape of the Jordanian capital Amman, where he lives. Through this imagery, the poem constructs a noisy microcosm of Middle Eastern post-colonial modernity in all its dysfunction – from urban sheep-herding to petrodollar-fuelled sex tourism. The other poem presented here, ‘The Struggle’, is a forceful portrait depicting the futility of individual human endeavour in the face of larger forces that shape our world. It conveys an experience of powerlessness no doubt familiar to an author from the would-be revolutionary generation of the Arab Spring, a generation whose years of protest and mobilization eventually proved futile in the face of geopolitical considerations and the power of the deep state.