The Sentence

 This year sees the centenary of the 1916 Rising. My grandfather was a friend of Patrick Pearse, and was one of those, being revisited by revisionists, who fought in the G.P.O. After sentence had been passed on the signatories of the Proclamation, he spent time on the run, delivering love letters to my grandmother, that were hidden under milk churns, and arrived with the dawn. Years later, his administration of medical aid to a downed British pilot during World War Two resulted in the loss of his post as Army Doctor. Sentences and their aftermath hang like theatrical backdrops in the landscapes of much literature and family lore, not just in Ireland, but all over the world. The beginning of this year has witnessed a death sentence passed on the Saudi artist and poet, Ashraf Fayadh.,on charges of apostasy.
  I had just submitted a poem to a magazine. that has The Rising as a theme, and was in a state of pleasant relief as I surfed the net. The request from Amnesty to sign a petition to release an imprisoned poet seemed a little too synchronous. Unusually for me, I then received a request to read at an event that PEN had called for.
 Over the Christmas period, a copy of Robert Jay Lifton's 'Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide-The Nazi Doctors' had fallen into my hands in the rather excellent Universal Books, the second hand bookshop in the town in which I live. Authors disseminated the anti-principle of euthanasia in published works such as 'The Permission to Destroy Life Unworthy of Life'. Two distinguished German professors jointly published the latter,and turned out to be prophets of direct medical killing. Freedom of expression became synonymous with expression of a terrifying world view, but one that resulted in The Holocaust, or The Devouring, as gypsies call it. In this new century, there are words and views that are deemed politically incorrect and most countries in the West have laws that legislate against Incitement to Hatred. Admittedly, these laws are rarely if ever acted upon, but they exist. I have always believed that the words that drum up hatred are as much emotionally incorrect as politically, in that they create borders that the heart can be afraid to ever cross.
Apostasy is a loaded word. It could be argued that all the disaffected are apostates, if not in a religious sense, then in a metaphorical sense. My grandfather was an apostate of sorts. He wanted change, and he was prepared to engage in direct action for it. In the sense that the Shariah law of Saudi defines apostasy I do not see Ashraf Fayadh as an apostate. And, it is in the construct of that law that his defence must be lodged. The terms of reference demanding his release are using 'freedom of expression' as their catch call. Ashraf Fayadh himself is a poet in his infancy. The philosophical turns he attempts in the poems that I have read are reflective of the internal anguish the pursuit of faith can bring, and are not a rallying call to atheism, although many here would prefer if that were the case. I think of him in a cell in a country I have never visited and have only imagined facing his death. I find it difficult to sleep thinking of his terror. Last year I had a cancerous tumour removed from my breast, and death and my fear of it hovered like the Halloween ghost over my days. I think of the signatories of The Proclamation, and of the school trip to Killmainham Gaol when I was eleven, and the prickles of terror that ran along my spine. Saudi Arabia has the right to is self determination, and Ashraf Fayadh never expressed a wish to leave. He hasn't advocated for change. The way in which we read a story very often has nothing to do with the story itself. We, in the West, are taking these poems of his, and placing our definitions of freedom of expression onto them. If I were he, I'd be tearing my hair out. It seems to me that it is the twisted words of a begrudger that placed those lines in a different light to the ears of the Judge. And unless we defend him in the language that is culturally appropriate to that place and mindset, we may make things worse.
Kahlil Gibran is best known for The Prophet(1920), a spiritual best-seller translated into more than twenty languages. He is now recognised as one of the founders of modern Arab literature and the Arab Renaissance.When he died in 1931, he left all of his book royalties to his village in Lebanon. He was buried there, and a museum was erected in his honour. Some of his gift was stolen to buy arms in the Lebanese civil war, which would have appalled the poet, as he hated factionalism. The same fate may happen to the Fayadh line, unless we poets go out of our comfort zones to try and reach across the cultural divide to add our voices to a chorus that clamours for another different reading of the Fayadh line, one that will free him from the executioners sword. The Middle East are appalled at our 'freedoms of expressions'. That we know. Why then make the case against him worse by reading in venues all over the world the poems that are going to have him executed? Would it not be better to show our solidarity by writing detailed defences for those poems, in a culturally appropriate way? It is 'the road less travelled' but the aim must be, surely, his freedom, even if that freedom means we have to temper our own mouths in some way.
The angel Gabriel dictated some of the verses in the Quran. The angel Gabriel features strongly in Judeo-Christianity. This is a meeting point. I have never written a blog before, and I am not sure whose ears this will reach. In the years I spent advocating for clemency in the courts for Travellers, I won more often than I lost. It often necessitated breaking away from the jargon of a party line. This case too is one that I believe needs to be aware of the pitfalls of antagonising those to whom we are appealing. I offer this ghazal, the first that I have ever written, as a plea for clemency. A call to let this man answer his own case in the lines of future poems. I do not believe it is anyone's interests, let alone his, to not have time to develop his thoughts. I do not know that he and I would like one another, were we to meet, and as I am female, I cannot enter the court, but perhaps someone who reads this blog will tranlsate it into Arabic and enter it as my contribution to this appeal. Our humanity is measured in the end by how we treat those we deem unfit to exist, or how we treat those we have been told to hate.

The Sentence

All light moves in waves. All sentences are calligraphies of line,
are two dimensional, but their subjects breathe off the line.

In the prejudices we eat, all Ali Babas have bad ends.
A post about a poet and a sword is almost standard line.

I am friends on Facebook with humans who think freedom is free.
Like them, I've read about but not faced the firing line.

Do falcons fly through the gaps that lie between words?
Or does Gabriel drop his feathers to soften hard line?

All religions were birthed by nomads looking up at stars
from hills of desert sands carrying worlds in caravans of line.

Some poets move energy from one place to another
in simple harmonic motion around the ways to read a line.

All poets are called, but few see the dark side of the moon.
These sentences of Deirdre Hines ask time to grow the Fayadh line.