Arthur Rimbaud
Rimbaud: The Poet's Resting Place in Abyssinia
by: Talal Nayer
In the winter of 1880, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud left the port of Aden, burdened with his alienation and sorrows, and laden with sacks of Yemeni coffee and boxes of rifles to sell in the market of Harar, the capital of Abyssinia for almost a thousand years. In the European mind, this city represented the end of the known world at the time. The weary and sick poet walked slowly on the edge of the world, perhaps tired of poetry itself, for he wrote no poems during his eleven years in Ethiopia. Instead, he recorded his thoughts in letters—his last writings—which smoothly merged autobiography with travel literature.
Everything changed in Ethiopia. In his early Parisian poems, Rimbaud mocked religious and political figures, as seen in Les Premières Communions and Les Assis, but he eventually ended up boasting about his friendship with the rulers and clerics who filled the halls of the Ethiopian imperial court. There, Rimbaud fulfilled Emperor Menelik II’s request for a shipment of weapons that helped the emperor's army repel the invading Italian forces. Rimbaud did not live to witness the historic Battle of Adwa, but he lived long enough to meet and befriend Ras Makonnen, the governor of Harar and the father of future emperor Haile Selassie. Rimbaud wandered not just through lands but also through moods, transforming from a romantic poet into a weapons trader, how the fates and temperaments change!
The imperial palace in Addis Ababa stands just a few hundred meters from the national museum, where only two statues are found in its courtyard: one of Emperor Haile Selassie, and on his left, a bust of the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, whose head is turned toward Harar, the birthplace of his maternal grandfather, Abraham Hannibal. Pushkin died before completing his autobiography, which he intended to title Peter the Great’s Negro, a work that aimed to celebrate his Abyssinian heritage, just as Ethiopia celebrates Pushkin by placing his statue next to one who is considered by some to be a god. Such is the fortune of poets. In the market of Harar, Rimbaud sold weapons—perhaps even a pistol similar to the one that killed Pushkin in his final, ill-fated duel. Pushkin’s death always reminds me of another poet’s tragic end. Pushkin, the poet and knight, or perhaps the knight and poet, reminds me of his Arab counterpart, Antarah ibn Shaddad. Sometimes referred to as Antarah ibn Zubayda, or Antarah the son of the Abyssinian woman, he too died leaning on his spear, as a poet leans on his verse. As Stephen Spender said of poetry, “The greatest poetry is written by someone striving to go further than he can,” and Rimbaud, Pushkin, and Antarah all went far in time and place, finding their resting place in the land of Abyssinia.
