Manifesto
of the Arab Surrealist Movement, 1975
Printed in Arsenal: Surrealist Subversion #3, 1976
With disgust we shove aside the dregs of survival
and the impoverished rational ideas which stuff the ash-can-heads
of intellectuals.
1) We incite individuals and the masses to unleash their instincts
against all forms of repression - including the repressive "reason"
of the bourgeois order.
2) The great values of the ruling class (the fatherland, family, religion,
school, barracks, churches, mosques and other rottenness) make us
laugh. Joyously we piss on their tombs.
3) We spit on the fatherland to drown in it the fumes of death. We
combat and ridicule the very idea of the fatherland. To affirm one's
fatherland is to insult the totality of man.
4) We practice subversion 24 hours a day. We excite sadistic urges
against all that is established, not only because we are the enemies
of this new stone age that is imposed on us, but above all because
it is through our subversive activity that we discover new dimensions.
5) We poison the intellectual atmosphere with the elixir of the imagination,
so that the poet will realize himself in realizing the historical
transformation of poetry:
a) from form into matter;
b) from simple words hanging on coat racks of paper into the desirable
flesh of the imagination that we shall absorb until everything separating
dream from reality is dissolved.
Surrealism is nothing but the actualization
of this surreality.
6) We explode the mosques and the streets with the scandal of sex
returning to its body, bursting into flames at each encounter - secret
until then.
7) We liberate language from the prisons and
stock markets of capitalist confusion.
It is plain that today's language, instead of being an agitational
force in the process of social transformation and a vocabulary of
revolutionary attack, is only a docile vocabulary of defense cluttered
in the store of the human brain with one aim: to help the individual
prove his complete subordination to the laws of existing society -
to help him as a lawyer in the courts of everyday reality (that is,
of repression). Surrealism intrudes violently on this abject spectacle,
annihilating all obstacles to "the real functioning of thought"
(Andre Breton).
When we write, our memory belches this language
from the old world. It is a game in which our tongues become capable
of recreating language in the very depths of the revolution.
* * *
Our surrealism signifies
the destruction of what they call "the Arab fatherland."
In this world of masochistic survival, surrealism is an aggressive
and poetic way of life. It is the forbidden flame of the proletariat
embracing the insurrectional dawn - enabling us to rediscover at last
the revolutionary moment: the radiance of the workers' councils as
a life profoundly adored by those we love.
Our surrealism, in art as in life: permanent
revolution against the world of esthetics and other atrophied categories;
the destruction and supersession of all retrograde forces and inhibitions.
Subversion resides in surrealism the same way
history resides in events.
Maroin DIB (Syria),
Abdul Kadar EL JANABY (Iraq), Faroq EL JURIDY (Lebanon), Fadil Abas
HADI (Iraq), Farid LARIBY (Algeria), Ghazi YOUNIS (Lebanon)
