Through an intuitive use of bilingual verse, Emirati poet Shamma Al Bastaki embarks on a heartfelt exploration of Dubai’s historical districts in her debut collection, House to House – Beit le Beit. She merges different voices, narratives and poetic styles, drawing from conversations about the day-to-day lives of residents from the old neighbourhoods. The title itself is a key to the work’s layering; as Al Bastaki explains, Beit in Arabic signifies both “house” and a “line of poetry” (beit min al shi‘r). This duality further reflects her creative process, which involved going house to house to gather information, lending the poems a sense of movement – from verse to verse, language to language, and place to place.
Al Bastaki’s collection reconstructs the atmosphere and texture of everyday life spanning the 1940s through the 1980s. It conveys the enduring sense of community among those who lived through this transformative period, referred to by an interviewee as the ‘lucky generation.’ “In the poem, I ask: ‘You don’t feel like they are strangers now?’ And the response comes: abadan, abadan, which means not at all,” Al Bastaki tells MOJEH. This fervent denial signifies that those who grew up together in the sikkas and communities of Dubai Creek are not strangers, but are instead bound by a shared collective history.
“The stories of the people of the Emirates are beautiful, rich and deeply fascinating. They speak of a time and way of life that our generation may not have ready access to. I believe it is vital for all of us to contribute to safeguarding these oral histories,” she explains. The poem with the same name as the collection is the closest to the poet, as it was inspired by her grandfather. “The first poem in the collection, House to House, is the most meaningful, as it was inspired by my grandfather’s childhood and his early adulthood, when he would take the abra from Bur Dubai to Deira to open his family’s dukkan (shop).” It was the starting point of her poetic venture, which was then followed by almost a year and a half of ethnographic research.
Since beginning to write the collection in 2017, Al Bastaki has worked to share her culture, identity and community through verse, approaching it as a joyful process. The ethno-poetry collection, ahead of its release, also won her the ADMAF Creativity Award in 2019 by the Abu Dhabi Music & Arts Foundation. “Let the language guide you, and work with your impulses and intuitions more than with logic,” she advises young poets. “Literature is, above all, about connection and about creating and sustaining a community of readers and writers more than anything else.” House To House is available for purchase in UAE in-store at Magrudy’s and Kinokuniya, and worldwide on Amazon and ELF Publishing.
