Between Pen and Paper: The Poetry of Habiba Muhammadi

by Shannon K. Winston

I write
To shout
To live
You write
To shout
To live
But who will silence
The shouting between us?

-Habiba Muhammadi, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi

Habiba Muhammadi was born in Algeria and attended the University of Algiers where she studied philosophy. She then moved to Egypt where she earned a degree in Arabic literature. Now a permanent resident in Cairo, she works as a journalist and contributes regularly to a variety of literary and cultural magazines (Handal, The Poetry of the Arab Word, 339).

As the poem that opens this article suggests, Muhammadi’s poetry reflects on her personal relationship to writing. She turns to writing as a space where she can be heard or, in her own words, where she can “live,” “write,” and “shout.” Simultaneously, she also broaches the larger question of collectivity: in the final lines of this poem, there is a pronoun shift from a singular “I” to an “us.” While the reader is not given any definitive answers as to who the “us” includes, what is clear is that there is strife that divides the “us” that should be united rather than divided. When taking the larger historical and political situation of Algeria into consideration, the “we” could refer to Algerians and the Algerian War of Independence and, at the same time, it could also include women who have struggled for so long to be recognized.

The page is the central image that pervades many of Habiba Muhammadi’s poems. Her speaker continually reminds the readers of the writing process as the poem unfolds on the page, which assumes several significances. For example, Muhammadi writes: “This paper is our friend/ It holds ever steadfast/Against the repeated stabbings/Of our pens.” Here, not only is paper a place of familiarity but also one that withstands violence—the violence against meaning, language, and the literal violence that a writer recounts over her lifetime, as well. In another poem, paper links the speaker to her past when she states: “In my room far away/ I write the memory of dead paper/In a barren space/Loneliness speaks words of love/to me..” (231). Far from encouraging the creative process, here, paper represents a dearth of words and possibilities for communication.

Overall, Muhammadi’s poetic style is pithy and clear. Many of her poems are treat very complicated themes within a few short lines of verse. In her preface to The Poetry of the Arab World, Nathalie Handal explains: “North African women throughout their history have been heroes and legends, martyrs and resistance fighters, nationalists, and writers, participating in all aspects of their civilization historically, politically, socially, and artistically” (Handal, The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology, 30). Muhammadi grapples with the past (and all that it entails for her as an Algerian woman living in Egypt) within the confines of the page.