MENA’s Unity in Diversity, Prose, and Literary Puzzles

  I was struck by the shared resonance of human experience between North America and the countries of the Middle East and North Africa during our expedition to MENA’s poetry reading. Writers like Yehuda Amichai and Rumi brought forth concepts like generativity and pursuit of God in ways that felt very similar to Western tradition, despite a cultural rift miles wide.

What I was struck by was the contrast between the sense of unity these poets’ work (and many others) evoked—and not just within their culture, but in entirely different ones as well—compared to the confusion and dissonance I often see when comparing the values of American prose literature. Just as often as I find myself in sync with The Way of Kings, I struggle to comprehend the rationale behind a work like Atonement. And if I gave one of these to a reader of a different culture, I can nigh-guarantee that there would be a less-than enthusiastic response to the espoused views—not because of their difference (MENA’s reading shows that we’re not so different after all), but because of their delivery. Why? How is the work of my homeland so much more dissonant than the work of a collective of completely foreign cultures?

The answer, I think, is in the difference of format. The poems we heard were both shorter and more clear. When a theme takes two or three re-reads to appreciate fully in Yehuda Amichai’s work, the collective time invested is still less than one read-through of a full novel. Novels, by and large, can be just as unwilling to give up their secrets as a poet, but the corresponding time investment to crack the code is so much higher when The Lord of The Rings is a thirty-six hour endeavor for just one trip to Mordor and back.

Well what of the hero’s journey? Doesn’t that guide the audience’s perception of the work to some degree, and serve as a reference to predict from?

To some degree, I think that’s a fair point. The problem I see with this is that novels bury the journey in clever ways. If art imitates life, novels are the literary attempt at realism structurally—they keep their themes hidden in passing phrases and recurring, innocuous symbols; like a magician, they redirect our attention to more intense emotional conflicts while the bread-and-butter—the thematizing—goes on under our noses. They are simultaneously a puzzle and a training ground, imploring us to look past the conflict-driven noise for the puzzle pieces, conditioning us to do the same in our own lives. This is an extraordinary process, but it doesn’t align with openly espousing values. Hence the separation between some poetry’s focus on clarity, and much of fiction prose’s focus on obfuscating clarity while paradoxically supporting a perspective behind the curtain.