Oh wistful and heartrending earth, oh land
Of colors singing symphonies of life!
Myself is like a stone upon my spirit,
Reluctant, passing from your sunny shore.
Oh native colors,
Pure colors aglow
With magic light.
Mysterious atmosphere whose elements,
Like hands inspired by a magnetic force,
Touched so caressingly my inmost chords,
How strangely I was brought beneath your spell!
But willingly
A captive I
Remained to be.
Oh friends, my friends! When Ramadan returns
And daily fast and feasting through the night,
With chants and music honey-dripping sweets,
And fatmahs shading their flamenco feet,
My thoughts will wing
The waves of air
To be with you.
Oh when the cannon sounds to breaks the fast,
The children chorus madly their relief,
And you together group to feast at last,
You'll feel my hungry spirit there in your midst,
Released from me
A prisoner,
To fly to you.
And when you go beneath the orange trees,
To mark and serenade the crescent growth,
With droning lute and shivering mandolin
And drop the scented blossoms in your cups!
Oh make one tune,
One melody
Of love for me.
Keeping your happy vigil through the night,
With tales and music whiling by the hours,
You may recall my joy to be with you,
Until the watchers passed from house to house
And bugle call
And muffled drum
Proclaimed the day!
When liquid-eyed Habeeb draws from the lute
A murmur golden like a thousand bees,
Embowelled in a sheltering tropic tree,
With honey brimming in the honeycomb,
The tuneful air
Will waft the sound
Across to me.
Notes soared with the dear odor of your soil
And like its water cooling to my tongue,
Haunting me always like a splendid dream,
Of vistas opening to an infinite way
Of perfect love
That angels make
In Paradise.
Habeeb, Habeeba, I may never return
Another sacred fast to keep with you,
But when your Prince of months inaugurates
Our year, my thoughts will turn to Ramadan,
Forgetting never
Its tokens
Unforgettable.
—Mektoub.
On Belonging to a Minority Group
It was in Africa that I was introduced to Nancy Cunard—an introduction by mail. Years before, when I saw her at a studio in Paris, she had been mentioned as a personage, but I had not been introduced. In Africa I received a pamphlet from Miss Cunard entitled Black Man and White Ladyship. The interesting pamphlet gave details about the Cunard daughter establishing a friendship with a Negro musician, of which the Cunard mother had disapproved.
Miss Cunard wrote that she was making a Negro anthology to dedicate to her Negro friend, and asked me to be a contributor. I promised that I would as soon as I found it possible to take time from the novel I was writing. That started an interesting correspondence between us.
Although I considered the contents of the Nancy Cunard pamphlet of absorbing interest and worthy of publication, I did not admire the style and tone of presentation.
After some months, Miss Cunard informed me that she was traveling to New York, and from there to the West Indies, including Jamaica. She asked me if I could introduce her to anybody in Jamaica who could put her in touch with the natives. I addressed her to my eldest brother, who is well-placed somewhere between the working masses and the controlling classes of Jamaica and has an excellent knowledge of both. From Jamaica Miss Cunard wrote again that she had landed in paradise after the purgatory of New York, where she was put in the spotlight by the newspapers, when it was discovered that she was residing in Harlem among the Negroes. My brother invited her to his home in the heart of the banana, chocolate, and ginger region of Jamaica, and she stayed there two weeks with her Negro secretary. Both she and her secretary wrote extolling my brother's hospitality and the warmth and kindliness of the peasants. Miss Cunard said she particularly liked my brother's face, and she sent me a snapshot of him.