RAINMAKER OF GRACE
(Foreword to Rain
of Grace by SIAM)
Sometimes, somewhere, one is graced to come to great abundance.
It
can be flowers. I rode from Valencia to Cordova by an old
mountainous road skirting Sierra Morena across barren La Mancha,
and found myself in a narrow dale drained by a meager creek. A
vast field of poppies spanned the blood-red banks, painting the
earth by dense colours of flame and royalty, and on the opposite
slope, a blinding-white chapel of Our Lady withstood relentless
assaults of their crimson waves. I waded this living bonfire and
felt its intense heat on my flushed face through shut eyelids.
Such a great explosion of flower power is grace.
It can be fire. In the fiery land of Kamchatka, a narrow
mountainous peninsula wading the cold waters of the North
Pacific, I saw a volcano in full blast of its furnaces. Deep and
rich crimson liquid engulfed the mountain and ran down the steep
slopes of Avacha, its colours constantly changing from purple to
golden brown, from glowing embers of forgotten forest bonfire to
ferocious blaze of sun-like lava, the stuff stars are made of.
It was The Mount of Fire as dreamt by mystics in their midnight
visions.
It can be femininity, another great element of life unmentioned
by Heraclites. In the very last day of May, I came to an age-old
tiny and tranquil Ukrainian town with the ancient church of Our
Lady of Intercession looking into a slow river from their high
bank, and was swept off my feet by the flash flood of young
maidens, fresh and sixteen, graduates at school-leaving ball in
the park under open warm blue sky, with white bands and garlands
of flowers in their golden hair, in white ceremonial aprons on
top of dark and mercilessly short skirts leaving open their
graceful knees above high white socks and dark sleeveless tops
flashing tender arms and elbows, with their blue eyes a-gleaming
in the shade of black poplars.
It can be rain. It falls on the parched land of the Negev and
fills its open ravines, overflows every hole or depression, and
by hundreds of small streams it runs over the stretching roots
of huge old jujube trees and brings to life sleeping grass; it
sustains laughing jackals and desert foxes and leopards, it
brings life back to life after long summer sleep. It buzzes like
a hive of angry bees, and turns the ever arid south of Palestine
into vast celebration of greenery. This miracle of turning
desert into living land is sheer grace.
The poetry of SIAM
belongs to the same category of primeval elements. It is akin to
fire, water, flowers, and blossoming femininity in their great
abundance. It is the Mount of Fire and the Desert Rain. SIAM
is a miraculous rainmaker in the tradition of West Africa, and
the rain he calls for is indeed the rain of grace. His
appearance in our Philistine age in the mundane Indianapolis,
Indiana is a miracle undeserved by us; but then grace usually is
undeserved.
SIAM
belongs to the tradition of spiritual poetry, one that begins
with the Psalms and leads through deep Sufi mysticism of Rumi
and all-American cosmic spirit of Walt Whitman. His poetry is a
natural phenomenon as much as a work of art, and reminds us of
the sacred roots of the divine vocation.
In his
psalm of the world
he writes:
There is not enough Mercy in the world,
not enough gentle reciprocity,
the reciprocal miracle of being
a simple good human being,
not enough smiles in the world
to outweigh the frowns of the world,
not much Holy dance or intimate romance
left in the soul of the soul of the world –
not enough grace to save face in the world
And he endeavors to save the world with grace and love:
you have been water in a dry & barren desert,
an oasis for wearied traveler in search of
the golden city –
my ruddered ship upon a turbulent fatherless sea
who has taught me how to catch the great fish
which surround me,
you have become the salt in my tears,
His name SIAM
reminds us of the Sinaitic ‘I AM who I AM’, in his own words: “SIAM
is like unto IAM – the continuous eternal verb to be;
it is the ever new me of being and becoming”.
This IAM
constantly changes, it is riverrun of Finnegans Wake:
I don’t think
there are enough hours in the day for me to
write about me
because most assuredly, I am a work in
progress.
SIAM
stands also for his assumed name,
Shaikh Ibrahim
Al-Jahizz
M'Backe,
but this great mystic and poet was born a plain Michael Smith in
Indianapolis, Indiana. His father was a Greenville, Mississippi
native who in his later years also became an Indiana man, Milton
"Cowboy" Smith, a US Army veteran, in whose veins English, Arab,
African and Native American blood was blended into a unique and
explosive Afro-American cocktail. Like Diogenes or Tolstoy,
Milton Smith left his middle class home and lived under the
bridge “on 16th Street and North-western Avenue” in his adopted
Indianapolis “because he didn't, at 71, like anyone telling him
how to live his life”, wrote SIAM
and added: “Had he been white, they would have venerated him as
they did Henry David Thoreau when he withdrew to live in the
Walden Pond Woods alone”. He wrote about his father:
Strike the mind
and the body will eventually fall,
Your tears became
the Mississippi River,
And your soul
flowed there,
Your soul flowed
there.
You never met Mark Twain or Henry David Thoreau,
Richard Wright, Chester Himes, or James Baldwin,
Frederick Douglass, or Ralph Waldo Emerson either,
Yet they all foretold of your coming,
A stone that was cut from a mountain without hands,
A Cowboy shaped from broken glass,
A living breathing documentary of Frantz Fanon’s
“Black Skin White
Masks”,
You were the original
“Invisible Man”,
Ralph Ellison’s adopted Native Son
Of basement lights so bright,
And a Cowboy who danced gracefully
Yet painfully with broken bones.
Rustled into a life of hustle and bustle and
Got two women pregnant at the same time,
Damn Man, you was good!
You had enough to go around!
His son inherited from him his independence of spirit and
unquenchable thirst for divine grace. Life of the poet, now in
his fifties, reads like a manual for a soul-searching quest of
an American Guenon. He won an Academy of American Poets’ Award;
graduated from Aenon Bible College, attended Ohio State
University, and completed his Master’s of Theological Studies
Degree from the Harvard Divinity School in 1976. He lived on
honey and sunflower seeds.
He fasted forty days for the hungry people of the Planet Earth
and another forty days for its homeless, and explained:
Why am I fasting? I am fasting because Jesus said, "some things
goeth not out, except by fasting and prayer." And homelessness
is certainly something that needeth to go out.
He read his poems in the Kings Chamber of The Great Pyramid of
Giza in Egypt:
What shall i do
beneath the pyramid of my mind,
What shall i do
beneath the pyramid of my heart,
What shall i do
beneath the pyramid of my soul;
Why, i shall ride
the wings of a silver sphinx.
He lived for two years with the Benedictine Monks of Saint Maur.
There SIAM
came under spell of St. John of the Cross, the great
Judeo-Hispanic mystic and a friend of St. Teresa of Avila, and
blessed...
O guiding night!
O night more
lovely than the dawn!
O night that has
united
The Lover with
His beloved,
Transforming the
beloved in her Lover.
He searched for the African roots of his spirituality in West
Africa, walked across Nigeria to Senegal and wrote:
I heard the river call your name Illu Gan Gan, as you
danced, walked & leaped into the heart of the world,
the soul of the core of the world - you / the breaker,
the maker, the Nigerian shaker, the ebony rain dancer
of Yoruba Land – you / Oladumare’s son of life & light,
You / the keeper, the healer, the protector of all his
sons & daughters of sons –
You / breathing! heaving! sweating! chanting!
& the earth stood still in ominous silence at your
awesome Holy anointing:
Eventually SIAM
had found his spiritual home in teachings of the Senegalese
Saint Touba, the founder of the Mourid Mystical Order of
Al-Islam, from the Holy City of Touba. The son and heir to Saint
Touba, Serigne Saliou, initiated SIAM
into the lofty secrets of this esoteric teaching. Esoteric Islam
is first and foremost Sufi, and SIAM’s
poetry has the straight forward elusiveness, the robust delicacy
that is the sure quality of the great medieval Sufi poet Rumi.
what color is this tasting upon your tongue do you see?
what smell of divine fragrance do you now hear spoken in your
ear?
Now and then, SIAM
spends time in Touba and comes back to Indianapolis to his
family including his two children, Ali and Rabia, and his
beloved student disciples. His first and most devoted one is
named MomJara, after Saint Touba’s mother who is venerated in
Senegal for her spiritual power. SIAM
wrote: “MomJara is the name synonymous with intense prayer and
sacred devotional practices; she is the symbolic crucible out of
which Divine Transformation can and has surely occurred. MomJara
is the Queen, produced of Divine Grace, the Holy Consort of the
Spiritual Science [Tasawwuf] behind the poet's vision and the
poet's life force”. But MomJara is also great for barbecuing
chicken wings her 5’ 9’’ Shaikh is fond of.
One of his latest and most forceful poems is called “In
Jerusalem”. It is the explicit connection of the Jerusalem of
Prophets and of Edward Said, of the age-old appeal of people of
Israel and of Palestinian struggle for dignity:
Here in the Jerusalem, the City of Peace, i die;
i die when the Sun is once again in Sagittarius,
and the Moon is eclipsed in the sign of Pisces,
while finding release, and relief, of affectatious
reflections in the eyes of my brothers’ souls,
as theirs meet mine for comfort and consolation,
thousands of them now waiting for relief
across the seas, to give me their Salams,
and other greetings of Peace.
In this poem, SIAM
is calling on every one to have more mercy, to promote peace, to
coexist on this planet that God created for all the children of
Adam.
Even this poem is calling for humanity to ascend to higher
spiritual degrees within us all. In short, SIAM’s
poetry is a sign of life sent by the soul of America to the
world, saying: America is still alive.
SIAM
is the author of one book of contemporary verse,
A Word For Black
Emotion.
Israel Adam
Shamir
Jaffa
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