The Love Mad in Arabic Literature: Laylā and Majnūn Legends (Wen-chin Ouyang) —— Reflections on the Event

  “Born in Taiwan, raised in Libya, then going on to study and teach in New York and London, it seems that Professor Wen-chin Ouyang has indeed been faithful to her childhood dream to explore the world like Sinbad, the legendary sailor in The Thousand and One Nights…” says Professor May-Shine Lin, Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, in her brief introduction of Professor Ouyang before the speech begins. At the mention of her childhood dream, Professor Ouyang’s face lights up, nodding in delight.

  The first thing Professor Ouyang does, upon stepping onto the podium, is to make sure that the audience is fine with her speaking bilingually, switching between Chinese and English. However, bilingualism is not where the story ends for Professor Ouyang. Early in the speech, the first line of a poem by Imru’ al-Qais comes bursting from her tongue in incomprehensible but beautiful Arabic. After all, says Professor Ouyang, even though she no longer dreams in Arabic, Arabic will always be in her blood as the language of both thinking and feeling. Indeed, multilingualism is a concept that frames the whole speech. Language, she reminds us, is not a fixed network of concepts. Language is porous and fluid, a rich, dirty, glorious mixing pot of image, sound, and cross-cultural meaning. “For me,” says Professor Ouyang, “It [multilingualism] is language itself.”

  We listen to a reading of an Arabic poem by Mahmoud Darwish, Palestine’s national poet. Professor Ouyang tells us that the love poems of Darwish are, at heart, odes to his homeland—the muse whose eyes are a thorn inflicting pain in the poet’s heart. In Darwish’s poem about Majnun’s metaphysical yearning for Layla, the ache for Palestine is embedded within the sense of profound alienation experienced when love is both everything and nothing.

  Showing us a beautiful tableau of the story of Qays (Majnun) and Layla, in the middle of which is a depiction of Qays on a pilgrimage, Professor Ouyang remarks wryly that Qay’s mind is fixated on Layla, not God, inviting a collective chuckle from the audience. Love poetry that pisses parents off, lovelorn madmen wandering through deserts and becoming one with nature— it is no wonder that the story of Qays and Layla gave birth to a whole singsong tradition in the Arabian world. Professor Ouyang plays us several musical clips, from Sting to Lebanon musician Marcel Khalife, giving the entire speech a colorful, exotic vibe. Evidently, the ancient singsong tradition is still going strong.

  Thus, we see how, over the centuries, the “globetrotting iconic Majnun” has made his way into contemporary thought, continually metamorphosing in the prism of time, space and language. In our modern world, it transcends even the bounds of being a love story, reflecting the pursuit of the ideology of monogamy. Monogamy, the concentrated flow of passion onto the one at all costs, is not merely a romantic ideal, but a political one. This is demonstrated by Harun-al Rashid, the fascinating character in Arabian Nights. The famous Caliph of the Abbasid Dynasty appears in literature as a dark yet glamorous tyrant, roaming through the dark streets of the Arabian Nights, landing judgements upon various adventuring lovers according to their adherence or deviation from the virtue of exclusive devotion. The love stories in the Arabian Nights, morbidly dramatic and taut with forbidden passion, demonstrate that one must fight to stay true to love. In a society bound securely within the framework of friendship, brotherly love, and loyalty between king and subject, the loyal passion epitomized by monogamy serves as an emotional model. Lovers thwarted from meeting in person, having to resort to exchanging letters instead? Quite relatable, Professor Ouyang informs us humorously, if you grew up in Libya.

  In the hands of Mahmoud Darwish, the story of Qays and Layla speaks to the anguish of Palestine’s fragmented identity—the insatiable yearning to become a nation-state and the profound experience of alienation, disillusionment and powerlessness when the desire cannot be fulfilled. Mad is their existential crisis, mad is their senseless persecution, mad is the impossibility of their quest. Yet madness is a weapon to rebel against the status quo, and to disintegrate the dogma of common sense with the force of untainted prophetic vision. Madness is the window through which the Palestinian soul can hope to find freedom, just like Qays, who, at the height of his madness, his selfhood annihilated, becomes reunited ecstatically with the land.

  Thus, the quest of poetry is not only to stand against terror and oppression, but to give birth to a new language beyond imagination, a new mode of being beyond dualling opposites, a new identity that transcends the impossibilities of a divided existence. Professor Ouyang ends the speech with the story and the music of famous guitarist Eric Clapton, who descended into the desert of opioid madness because of his impossible love for George Harrison’s wife. He would later find salvation in his art, emerging from the dark night of the soul to create some of the most influential albums of his time. One cannot miss the archetype of Qays and Layla looming in the background, and the poetic hope that Palestine will also rise like a phoenix from the ashes.

  After the speech, Professor Ouyang sits down for the QA session. From students to teachers to Professor’s Ouyang’s long-time fans, the QA session is lively and intelligent, ranging on topics from the famous Chinese play The Peony Pavilion, to the myth of the cowherd and the weaver, to Foucault’s take on desire and power, to Yo-Yo Ma’s Silk Road ensemble. Above all, the audience is given another juicy look into the question of madness. Madness, Professor Ouyang says, is a way to rebel against any kind of structure, from a stuffy bureaucratic status quo to the fixed rules of grammar itself. Madness is having the audacity to break away from accepted constraints, to put several toes out of line and express the inexpressible. After all, “What’s the fun,” she asks, in “An ideal community where everyone’s wearing a straightjacket?” To a stifling goody-two-shoes-society, poetry, wine, and madness fuels the fire of life itself. One leaves the speech with the feeling that a crucial seed of Arabian Literature has been planted in Taiwanese soil, and shall no doubt blossom gloriously into fruition.

Record by Mabel Chou