Name: lightmail (Extract)
Rating: 5

Shabbir Banoobhai

‘the much madness that makes divinest sense’

by Helen Moffett

This talk by Helen Moffett at the Cape Town launch of book of songs provides an intimate perspective of the poet as a friend to the speaker, and gives us a glimpse of his daily persona and the workings of his mind and heart as a poet. It describes the deeply mystical bent of his writing as well as his clear-minded outspokenness against injustice. Helen Moffet is a well-known poet, editor, author and gender activist. Her poetry collection is titled Strange Fruit.

I want to tell you the story of an apparently ordinary man. Unremarkable, perhaps, because of his more sterling qualities – a devoted husband and father, pillar of the community, devout adherent of his faith, respectable member of the number-crunching profession. All these clichés are true of him. And for these alone, this man demands our respect – it is on these bedrock qualities that we build our societies. Someone has to pay the bills promptly, kiss the wife goodbye every morning, show up for appointments on time, guide the children, dress neatly, obey the speed limit – these things hold anarchy at bay.

he turns the fast of Ramadan
into a feast of creative fervour

But there is more to this story. What happens, what ripples in the universe are set up, when this same man – sober, reliable, respectable – is a visionary who walks the desert sands of Persia conversing with a Sufi mystic who’s been dead for 700 years? Who writes love letters to the world in the early hours of the morning? Who turns the fast of Ramadan into a feast of creative fervour? Who sings songs that find their home in the images captured by a stranger half a world away? Who slashes at the world’s ills with ink, then writes a prayer that bathes all who read it in tenderness? Who speaks with impenetrable clarity?

This man loves his family more than life itself. Yet, he travelled to Sarajevo and tried to enter it at the height of its bombardment. This man is shy (especially at my noisier parties), yet, he lays bare the heart of his domestic intimacy in print. This man is gentle, yet, few can write a more vitriolic indictment of social and political ills. This man is serious, yet, humour keeps surfacing at moments of otherwise breathless intensity.

this mystic has a voice
that speaks many tongues

I’ll tell you what all this means. It means that we are in the presence of a mystic. Mysticism, in the words of yet another poet who lived two centuries ago is, “the much madness that makes divinest sense”. All faiths and religions, every philosophy in the world, many post-modernist ones too, have wrestled with the paradoxes of paradoxes – how is it we can weep and laugh in the same moment? Why are love and hate faces of the same coin? But the task, the gift of the mystic is to show us a way to inhabit two different and apparently opposite worlds at the same time, to show us how to live out the contradictions of our age, how to enter and explore the fluid, magical space between two opposing aspects.

This particular mystic has a voice that speaks many tongues. This mystic howls from the rooftops with eloquent rage. He croons lullabies, winks, tells sly jokes, is bitingly sardonic. This mystic’s voice has spoken a poetry of resistance, love poetry, poems of asceticism and spiritual meditations. This mystic has roared about humanitarian subjects and purred in songs of singular gentleness for his wife and daughters.

the poems in this collection
sing and dance

Each of his celebrated collections has left a different footprint. Here, in this collection, we have a sustained cycle of songs that are both fresh, newly minted tributes to possibly the greatest mystic poet of all – Rumi. The poems in this collection sing and dance all the steps I have described above, but I shall let them speak for themselves.

Consider the complexity held within the simplicity of this phrase about war:

“the fires we will light to darken the earth”.

Or: “time is the skin of space”.

Or: “the space between the words in a poem without which there is no poem.”

Reflect on a stanza like the following:

the smallest of my creations is not a moth but infinity
look around you and you will see that the universe
is nothing but my amazement and you are its centre

Or: these lines written by the poet for his wife:

i promise that i will write you a love poem
every time i write any poem about love

Today, I sing a song about Shabbir. But I would be remiss if I did not pick up my lute in praise of John Cleare as well. One of the unusual pleasures of this collection is the marriage of concrete images to intangible concepts. What awaits you, the reader, is a double helping of delight – not just the poems, or the photographs, or even both, but seeing how it is possible to illustrate such abstract concepts as remembrance and grace. Look, for example, at the image illustrating “Song for Ruxanna”; it is a perfect example of this harmony.

I will close by returning to the poet’s verse, as he himself returns to the parent of this collection, Rumi himself, recording the conversation between themselves thus:

song of love
for mevlana jelaluddin rumi
recalling a visit to his shrine in konya

you might have wondered as you heard me cry
when we met, how a seven-hundred-year-old grief
could live in a fifty-year-old heart, and thought no doubt
in that gentle day, fast-forwarding into night, that here
is an errant bird that has finally made it to its home

is a river at its source separate from the sea, i ask
the question, you say, reflects the answer you seek
when love answers love, joy replaces questions

i danced just there where you are standing now
and gathered in one shams-lit moment, such beauty
as only the one who loves knows is possible, that lives

as we live and shines with the truth that lies within us:
so dance if you can, as one day you must; this madness
is all we have to show for the burdens we choose to lose
but first you need to stop those tears; they are affecting
the person behind you trying to take a photograph of love

Reviews:

In these reflections, meditations, prayers and poems written over a month of fasting and shared daily with his friends via email, Shabbir Banoobhai describes the journey of love as a ‘journey of the heart, in the heart, from the heart, to the heart’ and his experience as:

one of spirit engaging with spirit – sometimes trying to remove the veil of selfhood that covers our hearts, or that of ignorance covering our faces.

- From lightmail

September 10, 2014

wisdom in a jug contains reflections of love and wisdom – wise loving and loving wisdom drawn from an eternal well, restoring to all who love, the preciousness of the gift of love.

knowledge
is the garment of the heart
its stitches – god’s beautiful names

- From wisdom in a jug – reflections of love

September 10, 2014

"The volume contains pieces on a variety of themes – religious poems, love poems, philosophical poems, poems of social and political concern. Through all of them, one senses the poet’s personality – sensitive, meditative, scrupulous, passionate, humane. Banoobhai’s apprehension of society and its pains and injustices is grounded, then, in an impassioned sense of the possibilities of human expansion and human relationships".

Professor Colin Gardner – University of Kwa-Zulu Natal

September 10, 2014

In the body of South African writing, his is a rare voice with the courage and the artistic skill to articulate a contemporary spirituality convincingly. The utmost simplicity of expression is used to conceal and reveal, at one and the same time, ideas of intense profundity. The poems are often meditative songs of love, longing and loss in a mystical world but as often remain rooted in the social and political struggles of this world, as depicted in the stanza above taken from the poem ‘sarajevo’ for which he received the 2001 Thomas Pringle Award for poetry.

- Kobus Moolman, poet and academic, University of Kwa-Zulu Natal.

September 10, 2014

In Leadership as Healing, Shabbir Banoobhai has crafted a journey into the deepest heart of leadership that is both pragmatic and poetic...Leadership as Healing is a resource that I would find essential to use in my academic work and experiential training.

- Professor Kriben Pillay, Graduate School of Business and Leadership, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa

March 29, 2017

"Shabbir Banoobhai again gives us poems of an intense yet simple lyricism. The simplicity of Banoobhai’s poetry is deceptive. His language is simple, his words chosen with an almost austere delicacy. The meaning of his poems is immediately accessible and the emotional appeal direct. His images are the universal ones of land, sea and sky, used with a Biblical economy of detail. Yet the meaning of these poems often has a profundity that yields ever-widening rings of understanding, like a stone thrown into still water. Banoobhai’s strength lies in this combination of simplicity and universality. The most outstanding feature of the poetry is that it is infused with such clear intelligence … so that feelings become intelligence and intelligence, feeling…"

Eve Horwitz – University of the Witwatersrand

September 10, 2014

Help us to see your presence everywhere;
in the mule carrying a load of concrete blocks,
its drooping tongue covered in flies;
in the darkness forever fighting for its share of light

- From dark light – the spirit’s secret

September 10, 2014

A luminous work of the heart containing profound reflections on the nature of the Divine, Prophetic and human consciousness, love, justice, peace and war. A genuine and original Sufi primer for the 21st-century seeker, reflecting an important development in contemporary South African spiritual thought, it is both a treasury of wisdom and a hands on learning manual for our times.

- Associate professor Sa’diyya Shaikh, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town

September 10, 2014

In Shabbir’s poetry collection, the drums beat all night, the title which takes itself from a poem about imminent death we see the call for spiritedness even in the face of death. In many of the poems, even those dealing with serious social subjects or about personal hurt, lightness is seen in the poet at play in the world of the imagination, the poet playing with the clay of words and celebrating joyfully wit, humour and the embrace of life.

- Roshila Nair, editor of the collection.

September 18, 2014

Shabbir Banoobhai again gives us poems of an intense yet simple lyricism. The simplicity of Banoobhai’s poetry is deceptive. His language is simple, his words chosen with an almost austere delicacy. The meaning of his poems is immediately accessible and the emotional appeal direct. His images are the universal ones of land, sea and sky, used with a Biblical economy of detail. Yet the meaning of these poems often has a profundity that yields ever-widening rings of understanding, like a stone thrown into still water.

- Eve Horwitz, University of the Witwatersrand.

September 23, 2014

There are very few book-length sequences of poems and it excites me to encounter this form in the work of a well-known South African poet. To sustain a cycle of poems is to begin to dismantle the barriers between a novel or short story and poetry.

- Joan Metelerkamp, well-known South African poet.

September 10, 2014

Shabbir’s works present us with a language of lightness to help us navigate our way through heavy issues while at the same time it is woven through with the key metaphor of light, the opposite of or complement to darkness, a metaphor with strong spiritual association. This darkness is also the darkness within our selves, in those aspects of mind and being closed off to the human spirit or divine soul, and which for the spiritual seeker is strived against in religious terms and for the secular individual in moral terms.

- Roshila Nair, editor of the collection

September 10, 2014

when love burns, we call it sun
when love cools, we call it moon

when love falls, we call it rain
when love forms, we call it cloud

- From lyrics in paradise

A wise, distinctive voice – powerful, pure poetry.

- Michael Chapman, renowned anthologist of South African poetry.

September 18, 2014

I was able to read this novel in one day, in an almost uninterrupted swathe. I could not put it down; it was too compelling, also too demanding. Hypnotic ... I like it very much it indeed. The tension in the three love triangles rises to a nearly unbearable pitch, and the overlapping and interweaving of the triangles is extraordinary. So much is not said or explained, almost too much so; but the craft of it lies in the unanswered questions … I felt sorrow when the pages came to an end. I had become so invested in the characters. I wanted more!

– Dr. Helen Moffet, South African academic, poet and editor.

September 25, 2014

Shabbir Banoobhai seems to have arrived at the point where he sees in all human beings and creatures – in all of creation – reflections of the light of God. Even in the darker and darkest face of humanity he sees a flicker of primordial and transcendental light.

Mphutlane wa Bofelo, well-known South African poet, essayist and social activist.

September 10, 2014

Shabbir Banoobhai’s brilliant exposition on leadership is an invaluable approach to reperceiving the nature of leadership in the coming century. All aspiring and established leaders should read this book and share its lessons widely to transform themselves and the communities they serve.

- Dr Koffi M. Kouakou, MD, Stratnum Futures, Formerly Senior Lecturer at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand

March 29, 2017

The collection in your hands is an inspired and an inspiring one.

The poems, essays and reflections challenge us to see the Divine without creating a God limited by our preconceptions. They remind us of the presence of beauty everywhere, of our essential oneness, the need for a life of compassion, and the uniqueness of love.

- Omid Safi, Professor of Islamic Studies, University of North Carolina.

September 23, 2014

I am fascinated … In tone, and in the sections set in an indeterminate time and place, it reminded me of JM Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians, although its worldview is less harsh, more forgiving, and suffused with a sense of what one can only call love. It also carries whiffs of David Malouf’s An Imaginary Life. The story seems to operate on a meta-level, although it is free from the overly clever games of postmodernist meta-fiction.

- Rustum Kozain, award-winning South African poet.

September 25, 2014

This novel is a bold experiment and includes some wonderfully supple writing. It is full of ideas – more than one can say for many novels. I like the ease with which it shifts from narrative action to lyrical description to philosophical speculation – unusual, intriguing.

- Ivan Vladislavic, well-known South African novelist.

September 18, 2014

I first came to know Shabbir through his poems when I was struck by the clean simplistic line he generally favoured. But the simplicity was deceptive: he made each word (a sign of the true poet) carry great emotional and intellectual weight. An obsessive and talented poet, a precocious master of the Word and a fine lyricist to boot, almost every line of the work was subliminally ignited by the ancient great Islamic poets. He shares their prime qualities: sensuality, passion, brilliance of imagery, a holistic approach to nature, and love of God.

Knowing Shabbir Banoobhai, the man through his work, can illuminate something of the unknown. Here, then, is a further asset to and aspect of, South Africa’s uncommon humanity.

- Douglas Livingstone – renowned South African poet

September 10, 2014

A river that flows downhill needs to hold itself together to reach the sea. In its flowing to the sea are important lessons in oneness and togetherness. Water needs to combine with water to build the momentum it needs for its journey. But how does a river flow upwards, to refresh the source from which it began?

- From the mirror’s memory

September 10, 2014

at least take off your shoes
when you go dancing
on the heart of god

- From water would suffice – reflections of love

September 10, 2014

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