The absolute must be undermined: Mustafa Stitou forces a clash of concepts

18 januari 2006 In ‘Het zingen vergaat je’ (No Urge to Sing), the first poem in Mustafa Stitou's collection Varkensroze ansichten (Pig-pink Picture Postcards), the first-person narrator sits down on the café terrace of his French hotel: “The proprietress, / notably unfriendly. My complexion probably did not appeal to her, and my name,/ which I mentioned when checking in,/ undoubtedly clinched it. Mustafa.”

In his apartment on the third floor of a building in Amsterdam, the young poet (1974, born in Tetouan, Morocco, raised in Lelystad) explains: “I deliberately introduce the name Mustafa several times in the collection. I’m not referring to myself, but rather to the name Mustafa. To many people, that name says something about my essence, and evokes all kinds of associations as well as prejudices. Two or three of the hijackers on 11 September were called Mustafa. To Muslims, it is one of the two most cherished names, Mohammed being the other and that is why there are so many of them. Muslims associate the name with purity and faith. My name makes people think I have more in common with Mohammed than with Heidegger. But the opposite is true.”

It was not without reason that, at university, Mustafa Stitou changed courses from Arabian History to Philosophy. Now he is a poet: “To me, poetry is the ideal way of thinking.” He began to gain recognition as a poet during his student years. He debuted while still very young, in 1994, with Mijn Vormen (My Forms). The collection was enthusiastically received and celebrated as the first poetry by a poet of Moroccan origin. He partly discarded the laconic and candid teenage poetry (“I felt free”) when writing Mijn Gedichten (My Poems), which was published in 1998 (“I deliberated too much, planned too much”). His third collection, Varkensroze ansichten, which combines the best of the first two publications, appeared at the end of last year.

In the meantime, the collection has been nominated for the VSB Poetry Prize and looks like the favourite for the award which will be announced in May. Each of the five selected collections has a strong philosophical or poetic tint, but none of them can compete with the uninhibited, light touch that Stitou demonstrates. [Ed. As predicted, the VSB Poetry Prize 2004 was indeed awarded to Stitou.] His style, which he himself refers to as being ‘chatty’, is loose and all-embracing without losing its precision. Stitou can be efficient, observing and amusing, as well as repetitive and overwhelming or didactic. In compositional terms, the collection is compact. Islam and Darwinism, East and West, Arabs and Jews, the holocaust and clones, fathers and sons: they all form a subtle web of themes.

‘Het zingen vergaat je’ is a remarkable opening poem for a poet who has indicated that he finds it irritating when his Moroccan background becomes a topic of discussion. “In the past few years, the gap between immigrant and indigenous has grown. One currently refers to Dutch people of Moroccan origin simply as Moroccans. I can’t escape that”, he explained on the subject of his reversal. “I was completely confused by 11 September. Reality was extremely politicized. Prior to that time, I wasn’t particularly productive, but I didn’t write any poetry at all in that year.” The fact that people again began to think compartmentally led him to reflect on how people regard one another. “To me, identity is a question of putting on masks and, in particular, of having masks put on you by other people. That idea resounds through the collection.”

The narrator in the poems is not only occasionally called Mustafa, he also refers to himself as being a “conceptual-anecdotal, at the very least an anti-metaphysical poet” and someone with a “love for the conceptual”. But what is a conceptual-anecdotal poet?

“The conceptual element of my poetry is the fact that I stage the situations. This is a reasonably spontaneous activity. To me, poetry is an adventure. I do not conceive everything in advance. I put heterogeneous things on the table and move them around; then I knead an anecdote around them, which I narrate as if I were in the pub. It excites me to write a poem with, for example, the words ‘9/11’, ‘Arab’, ‘golden goddess’, and ‘NSB’. This was how the conceptual-anecdotal poem ‘Anton’ was generated. All those words carry their various charged meanings, and I place them in a commonplace setting.”

He calls this preference for grouping ‘a personal obsession’. “It is a question of evocation: evoking the banal in the sublime, the unutterable. You can’t write a poem about 11th September. There are no words for that. What you can do, however, is to allow such charged concepts to clash with one another in the hope that it will begin to effervesce in the reader’s head.”

“There are people who read my collection and say: these are stories, not poems, that’s not what I’m looking for. But my poems only work if there is a certain sensitivity to ideas, religion, art, the soul, death, mystery. On the other hand, I do want to write lines that sing out, like: ‘As desolate as Libyan state television.’”

Stitou explains his ideas on the basis of ‘modern sensibility’ combined with his background. “I was raised in Islamic tradition, but by the time I reached twelve I had lost my faith.” The germ of his disbelief lay in a video tape belonging to his family and containing a long, vehement sermon by the imam. “The imam tripped over a word. That was shocking. Everything changed. His entire sanctity, his whole authority was unmasked. His words did not come from another world, but from this one. That was shown in something as simple as a slip of the tongue. Since then I have realized that Islam continually belies its pretensions. The system does not hold water, Islam does not have all the answers. That’s where my obsession with the commonplace comes from. The absolute ought to be undermined.”

Stitou’s manner of working is clearly visible in the poem ‘Afstudeerproject’ (Graduation Project). The first person narrator presents his poems, in which he unites “the unutterable with the banal”, to his Jewish fiancée. She is busy with her thesis on the Holocaust but is suffering from writer’s block. Suddenly inspired, she jumps out of bed to work further, leaving the poet with frustrated sexual yearnings. Stitou: “In the meantime, they have skipped the Holocaust. It is similar to a situation where, at a congress, a group of men have heard a series of edifying, moving speeches and then move to the bar and try to seduce the nicest internee. Most people find it too difficult to remain serious for some time, people have little talent for the sublime. That’s only possible with violence, either physical or emotional.”

There is a lot of emotional violence in Islam, there is the threat of exclusion, he claims. Even now he is still busy trying to escape from the emotional pressure. “There is a splendid passage in Gesloten Huis by Nicholaas Matsier in which he talks about going to church with his parents when he is a student, even though he had abandoned his faith when he was thirteen years old. When he tells his parents the truth, his mother bursts into tears. He feels relieved but also something of a coward. I recognize myself in this passage. I have never been able to openly discuss my lack of faith with my parents, I could only show it. My parents tried everything during my adolescence – asking if I had said my prayers, mentioning that I disappointed them, that I was a nail in their coffin, etc.”

In Stitou’s opinion, many young Muslims struggle with a similar dilemma. “I am sure that they do not believe that Islam can answer all their questions. They feel a kind of confused loyalty to their parents, in combination with a superficial, half-hearted religious perception. Ach, all those girls with headscarves. Is there a run on religious writings? It is just a huge identity crisis.”

There’s nothing wrong with a world without God, Stitou maintains. “A hundred years ago, people claimed that, without God, all certainties in life would disappear, there would be no basis for our moral system, the world would lose its beauty. The opposite is true. Islam wants to curtail and demolish the feeling of wonder. To me, beauty and wonder precede religion. I can surprise myself with all kinds of commonplace things simply because they form no part of a system.”

In his latest collection, Stitou explores the modern answer to religion: science. In the person of Charles Darwin, the man who formulated an alternative for the origin of man. “If you’re talking abut tradition and modernity, about religion and the Enlightenment, about science – and if you want to make that the theme of your collection, then Darwin is extremely important.”

In ‘Het zingen vergaat je’ there are the lines: “And keeping in mind that we are all descendants/ of the same clique that lived in Africa 170,000 years ago.” That is one side, the soft side, of Darwinism, says Stitou. In ‘Bestseller’, he presents another side. The short poem contains no more than the reminder that in the nineteenth century Darwin’s book was particularly popular in Germany and that a catalogue or bibliography on ‘Darwinismus’ appeared every two years. By isolating that fact, Stitou coaxes the reader from the survival of the fittest to the Holocaust in one fell swoop. “Darwin introduced a new way of looking. He extracted the soul from mankind. Darwinism was applied to underpin the differences between people and to legitimize the fact that the mighty could dominate the weak. There was no longer any respect for Creation. In a poem about Darwin, I also isolate the words: ‘The conversations with top breeders – revelations.’ Here, the world is inverted: it is no longer the angels who reveal things but the top breeders!”

In ‘Shakespeare, misselijkmakend’ (Shakespeare, nauseating), Stitou takes eight pages to narrate the life of Darwin point by point, larded with quotes from his autobiography. Darwin is called sarcastically ‘Our Father’. Can he be a regarded as a new substitute for God? “Yes, but that is generally accepted, isn’t it? Darwin is the Homer of science, a colossal figure. I was fascinated by that man. His autobiography contains all kinds of harrowing details that admirably illustrate the road he travelled – such as his love for poetry, which lasted until he was around thirty, for example. He had Milton with him during his voyages on the Beagle. But at the end of his life he tried to read Shakespeare and it made him sick. I think it was because he was busy rooting around in the fabric of Creation, day after day, for decades. It seems as if he had approached a secret beyond poetry. I am being dramatic, but I am excited by this thought and it resonates with other things in this collection.”

Although he is continually searching for words, hesitates about his answers, doesn’t raise his voice and makes a mild impression in everything, it is consistently apparent that Stitou is pleased to provoke and is enthusiastic about goading people. See the title Varkensroze ansichten (Pig-pink Picture Postcards) and the cover depicting a pigskin. “Ah, the fact that it is nonsense to regard a pig as an unclean animal is self-evident, of course. What I was wondering about was whether pigs are as pink as is claimed. Only when they are drawn do they acquire that childlike colour. The photograph on the cover had to be substantially processed, the pink was not pink enough by far. The cover gives the collection an unreal, artificial appearance and that harmonizes well with my poetry.”

The artificiality of his poetry is shown by his absurdist poems in which he allows himself to be led by coincidental discoveries, ready mades, which he processes, such as notes from his upstairs neighbour (her name is mentioned in the Notes, at the back of the collection, and is also on the bell panel) and the senior citizens survey of the Health Care Services in the Province of Flevoland. And for those who are sensitive to conceptual-anecdotal items, above the computer in Stitou’s room hangs a sheet of paper with female handwriting warning that the graduation thesis really must be submitted in the very near future. Originally published in NRC Handelsblad, April 2, 2004
Translation by George Hall with some editorial adjustments by Thomas Möhlmann