At first, I was going to respond to PowerPoint I or perhaps Tocqueville by Khaled Mattawa, however I decided upon reading further into the poems. Tocqueville was a long narrative poem and the story that it told me was incredibly, however I feel that I lack the background contextual information in order to understand a lot of the metaphors. PowerPoint 1 is also quite an interesting poem, and I incredibly relate to one stanza that states "for to love one person / you must contemplate loving the whole world" but past that, I couldn't really synchronize with the rest of the poem, as it's structure is just too confusing for me. However, I feel as if I have read Mattawa's magnum opus being the final poem in the collection of poems. I know that this is most likely not actually his magnum opus, but considering how much I like it (and considering this is, after all, my blog lol) I just feel compelled to use the term. The poem that I am going to be reflecting upon for this blog post is Khaled Mattawa's Before.
In this poem, the narrator, who I believe to be Mattawa, reflects upon the time where he fed a cat who belonged to a friend. It is obvious that Mattawa truly enjoyed this exchange, as that is what it became, for he "talked with her" for a while and eventually fed her a bowl of milk to drink. Strangely, the cat takes a single sip of the milk and then proceeds to reject it. For quite some time, I sat attempting to wonder what this was a metaphor for, if anything. However, continuing on with the poem I'm not so sure if it is a metaphor for anything, however it is still incredibly important.
Mattawa continues with other fragmented stories, such as a child running "for the simple flame that must burn" or when he visited grave sites and tombstones and "ran through the cemetery and laughed [his] Cairo laugh". Both of these short moments are related through the theme of running, and it could be possible that the boy initially running at the beginning of the poem is him, however Mattawa declines by stating that "the child is not a memory, / only a gesture on [his] part" meaning that the story of the child is but written and not lived, however I still believe this can be used to argue that Mattawa was this child, being that the story of the graveyard is not lived but written to us. It is his gesture that allows us to know of the story, and while his living of that moment is directly related to him using a gesture to inform us, it is still words that share the child, not the memory.
What is the importance of establishing this link? To be brutally honest, there is only one valid view in my eyes. This poem focuses on time and moments, and how each moment happens affected by another one, but independent. The feeding of the cat, the rejection of the milk, the child running for the flame, the Cairo laughing in the cemetery, all of these moments comprise up someone's life, and they each happened in some specific order. On paper, Mattawa can choose to state them in any order that he wishes, as he is the poet, however in actuality the moments occurred in an order. This all comes together with the final section of the poem, "Billions of snowflakes in between, / and the befores that follow the first before." This means that all of these moments, these snowflakes, they fill the air that is life, the space between the start and the end of life. They swirl about in the air, seemingly infinite, however there is always a snowflake before that one right in front you, and so on so forth. This is how the passage of time is, there is always a moment before a moment, and there's even things before the first moment, the first snowflake.
This poem really is something special, in my opinion. It's like a quick snapshot into Mattawa's life and his perception of time. Time truly is such a magnificent and epic thing, and to truly be self aware of our place in time is incredibly daunting. Even personally, it's easy to state that "oh yeah like 7 years ago I was in middle school and I was tutoring a fellow student" but that's just a perception from one side of the edge of time to the next; from the here to the then. To fully comprehend every moment, every snowflake in between... it's stupefying, stunning, in awe. It puts me in a state of complete consternation, as I am anxious because time will continue on like a cliché ravaging endless river. The river that, despite the mass of snowflakes that flow through it, will never freeze.
really excellent response here!
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