Yahia Lababidi: Forging Words from Silence

I first began experimenting with silence in university.  I would go on fasts for up to a week at a time, rationing words, and speaking only when I must – perhaps a mouthful in class, or even less if someone were in my face and absolutely needed to hear from me. Otherwise, friends understood that I’d ‘gone under’ and only the very committed continued leaving me voice messages or, braver still, tagging along, noiselessly.

The idea at the time–more inner imperative, really, than any sort of formulated thought- was to sound my depths and think things through. This was my first taste of freedom as an adult, and that is how I chose to exercise it. It was as though, suddenly and without explanation, I was taken in for questioning, and I had to play both parts:  officer and suspect. Who was I, What did I know, Why am I here, and Do I have an alibi?

Typically, I’d walk around all day in a semi-trance talking back to the books I’d read, lost in the echo chamber of my head.  I read a great deal more those days, again out of an inner imperative, but hardly the assigned work.  My self-imposed reading list was a volatile cocktail, unequal parts literature / philosophy, and the discovery of those great contrarians, Wilde and Nietzsche, made my world spin faster.  Unaware of it then, this obsessive reading was in fact teaching me how to write.  The rhythms and cadences of my Masters insinuated themselves into my style, just as their stances and daring were persuading me to distrust ready-made ideas and try to formulate better questions.

It was out of these silences and (attendant) solitude that I began writing what would become a book of aphorisms – by transcribing the heady conversations that I was having with myself at the time.   My ‘method’ in writing these aphorisms was simply to jot down on a scrap of paper (the back of a napkin, receipt, or whatever else was handy) what I thought was worth quoting from my soul’s dialogue with itself.

If ever I tried keeping a notebook, the thoughts would hesitate leaving their cave – sensing ambush.  So, by night I kept bits of paper and a pencil by my side, just in case.  And, when something did occur to me, I feverishly scribbled it down in the dark, without my glasses, out of the same superstitious cautiousness of scaring ideas off.

These aphorisms were to reveal me to myself and served as the biography of my mental, spiritual and emotional life.   I read as I wrote, helplessly, in a state of emergency; and, in my youthful fanaticism, I was convinced I was squeezing existence for answers, no less.  I felt that one should only read on a need-to-know basis, and write discriminatingly, with the sole purpose of intensifying consciousness.

Strangely, during these years of white-hot inspiration, I discovered that when I returned home to Egypt (for the summer, Christmas, and eventually following graduation) I was unable to write aphorisms.  No longer the master of my environment, and forced to accommodate the interruptions that make a life, I gradually realized that because I had lost my silences, I had lost my Voice… (Which is to say, I composed the bulk of the aphorisms in my book, Signposts to Elsewhere, before I turned 22.)

It would take me several years to begin writing again and, out of this unsettling and involuntary silence, would be born two new forms:  poetry and eventually essays. Not that I am incapable of aphorisms, nowadays. They still trickle, but my relation to them has changed and is somewhat more opportunistic.   I no longer wait around for these fickle visitations and, if I happen to be struck over the head by a good line,  I’m more likely to see if I can’t massage that into a poem, or even try to unpack it into an essay.  (Perhaps not much has changed, and I’m still rationing words after all these years…)

Yahia Lababidi’s essay “Speaking in Sayings” appears in LAR 11.