The corner of the café… here. For some time now, I cannot say exactly how long, I have been in the habit of reclining in a position that resembles relaxation, since sitting runs against the pattern of life. I look up to the highest point, accompanied by my hobby of contemplating the windows overlooking the street through the eyes of their residents. I imagine what goes on behind the lit windows, as I prefer unflashy lighting, like all things that carry the quality of exception, of difference.
I stop sipping my coffee for a moment and think of stopping forever and making do with the pleasure of the first sip. I wonder why one must part with the cup at the last sip. Perhaps it is the habit of responding to the mind’s signal by surrendering to the act without sensing it, and indulging to the point of satiation, so that repeating the process cancels its effect. I try to escape the lower circle of space-time through imagination, and to immerse myself in another time not governed by the succession of night and day. And I let my attention drift, heeding Ibn Arabi’s advice that if we never drifted, we would lose the ecstasy of awareness.
A vicious circle of existential questions exhausts my mind daily, scatters my thoughts and robs me of the pleasure of the five senses. So I go on like this, in despair, when the answers do not satisfy my perplexed mind. Amid this wandering, a WhatsApp notification alerts me. It comes from a member of a book club that one of my friends had invited me to join, to share reading with its members in sessions held from time to time. I followed the notification to a book sent as a PDF, to be read in preparation for the next session, titled “Man’s Search for Meaning” by an Austrian psychologist named Viktor Frankl, in whose pages he deals with his personal experiences as a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War, and through them presents the theory of logotherapy.
I withdraw for a few seconds from the crowd of thoughts by digging through music apps, hoping to find an innocent piece that would dispel the debate raging inside me. I stop at a rare recording of Baligh Hamdi humming with his oud a line about feeling as if he had been created anew, while I was looking through the book’s introduction, in which Frankl lays out the core of logotherapy:
that when a person finds a meaning or a purpose in his life, his existence gains importance and significance, and his life becomes worth living, a life its owner seeks to continue and to enjoy.
The idea drew me in… so I went back to reading greedily, while Baligh kept repeating the line, which provoked me. So I summoned him, sat him in an empty, companionless seat beside me, and debated him silently, protesting: “Is a person created twice, Baligh?!” I returned to Frankl, who was recounting his experiences while trying to cling to any thread of survival, citing Nietzsche’s saying that whoever has a reason to live for can usually bear almost anything, in any way. Meanwhile, the app moved automatically to Baligh’s next song. He seemed to have been searching with Viktor for the same thread, in another time, but when he found it, he began humming in rapture that he had been created for his beloved alone.
The questions piled up, and my curiosity about Baligh grew. The app had arranged his melodies about the secret of his existence in the universe into a playlist, at the end of which came “Ana El-Hob Elli Kan” (I Am the Love That Was). Although in its words he was describing the belated awakening of old age, he was not ashamed to step away from lament a little, with a line that departs from the song’s meaning, declaring that he came into this world only to love his beloved.
For a moment, I felt that Frankl’s analysis was reflected in Baligh’s state, when he pointed out that logotherapy is neither teaching nor preaching, as it is far removed from logical reasoning and moral advice.
Frankl likens the role of logotherapy to that of an eye doctor rather than a painter: the painter shows us the world as he himself sees it, while the eye doctor helps us see the world as it really is. Here, I stumbled while trying to assign one of the two roles to our Baligh, so I crawled towards the interviews of the woman who inspired his melodies, hoping her words would untangle the causes.
“Something strange… every day, over 7 years of marriage, he would go to the office and send me a rose, and I still have the albums.” These were the first words I found, spoken by Warda (whose name means “rose”) in one of her television interviews, referring to Baligh’s daily habit, a thanks to God for the blessing of her presence in his life. “The bohemian, who does not respect appointments, but he is a genius”, as the daughter of Algeria described him, was not content with tirelessly giving her a rose every day; she added: “Although I was living with him, his songs were a message to me; he was talking to me through them.”
From the first moment he heard her singing Umm Kulthum’s masterpiece “Ya Zalemni” in the 1960s, without seeing her, on a record labelled with the girl’s name, “Warda Ftouki”, who was known for humming songs while cooking in her father’s restaurant, Baligh realised that this voice, which he described as “husky and delicate”, was the means by which his heart would cross between the two covers of life, from sadness to the ecstasy of joy. And overnight, fate knocked on Baligh’s heart: she came from Lebanon, where she was living at the time, and he from his home, to meet at the house of violinist Anwar Mansi to work together on a song. But their hearts took another path, which they later expressed in the song “Khallik Hena” (Stay Here).
Like any person who finds the end of life’s thread amid the wandering, Baligh hurried to propose to Warda, but her family rejected his request, and then took her away to Algeria in 1963 to marry another man.
But she never left his heart, and he kept sending her love letters through songs, according to the novel “Letters on a Musical Score” by writer Mona El-Bakry, the most famous being one sung by Umm Kulthum about longing for the beloved even when only two steps apart. Nine years passed this way, during which Baligh did not give up calling out to hope through melodies, producing countless works. He had a short marriage to someone from outside the art world, on the advice of the Star of the East, Umm Kulthum, to help him organise his life, and after a few months he separated from her.
Fate returned once more to revive his heart, when composer Riyad El-Sunbati assigned him to compose a song for Algeria’s independence day to be sung by Warda, who resembled the heroines of Greek legends, as Baligh saw her at their first meeting, according to broadcaster Wagdy El-Hakim, or as he himself described her in a melody, in images of the breeze and of an angel. From here, they met again artistically, but this time they decided to rebel against the refusal, and they married in 1973. Perhaps one of the scenes that brought them together captures this reunion, when they sat humming together a song about a love that defies time and place.
Over 7 years of marriage, Baligh drew about a hundred melodies for Ftouki from her eyes, about which she said: “He tailored the melodies to me… he made most of his melodies while I was asleep, and if there was a phrase he felt was mine, he would wake me up.” I spent hours immersed in dozens of stories, listening and reading, told by the two of them or by those around them, to reach the answer to my curious question, until I stopped shortly before the end, in 1979, when the couple officially announced their separation.
It was a moment whose reality Baligh’s heart refused to accept, and he went on living with his Greek legend, searching, from the date of the separation until his death in 1993, for a voice to use as a hidden mailbox to send her his diaries, as he had done with Umm Kulthum. That voice was Mayada El-Hennawy, through whom he presented the composers’ eternal lament, “Kan Ya Ma Kan”, or as he hummed in a rare recording of no more than 9 minutes, in which he deliberately sang verses that El-Hennawy never sang, among them one that pairs the song’s title phrase with a claim to utter sincerity.
Perhaps Baligh’s ailment in the deleted verse, I mean “sincerity”, is the reason “the love that was” became the icon of an unforgettable memory, not only for Baligh but for you, me and others. Such as director Gamil El-Maghazi, who witnessed the moment Baligh’s heart broke apart while he was composing the song, and recounted its backstory about 9 years ago, pointing out that it sprang from his pain after he divorced Warda by phone that same night. He added in his account: “We were in Abu Dhabi… we used to follow him around because he was crazy enough to do anything. Abdel Rahim Mansour, Mohamed Roshdy, Suzanne Attia and I sat next to him, and he sat consoling himself with the oud and saying words. I had a sheet of paper with me and wrote down every word he said, and I told Roshdy and Suzanne to memorise the melodic modes.”
Baligh consoled the burning “ah” on his oud, declined to continue the session, and escaped into sleep, believing that “complaint is to God, not to people”. On the morning after the separation, El-Maghazi came to have breakfast with him and told him: “You made an unprecedented melody”, which surprised Baligh, who asked: “What melody?”, as if the event had made him lose his balance, which El-Maghazi restored with the paper, and Roshdy and Suzanne with the modes. Our Baligh went to his room, and after about 4 hours of seclusion he came out having arranged the words and the melody, and began humming a verse remembering a home they once had and kind friends who would weep if he ever wept. El-Maghazi explained that verse by saying Baligh’s feelings made them cry, especially when he sang that he had been created so that she would never shed a single tear.
I traced the fate of the rose in our Baligh’s heart, and found it alive while he withered. This was evident in his deeply sombre messages through Mayada, in verses lamenting a year gone by without even a letter from her, and others carrying words of reproach, contentment and blame. Not only that, but he defeated the pride inside him and asked Warda to sing his last wish, “Bawadaak” (I Bid You Farewell). She hesitated to sing it because of the gloom of its words, but with the courtesy of lovers she complied with his wish and agreed. At the first rehearsal, according to artist Ahmed Fouad Hassan, she burst into tears inside the studio, and Baligh got up and embraced her, in a moment about which she said after his death: “I was afraid… I told him that in singing it I would be bidding him farewell, and bidding the world farewell with him.”
Warda did not grasp the hidden meaning of “Bawadaak”: that she was never a myth born of the power of Greek legends, but the only truth on the path of his journey and the secret of his existence.
Or, as Frankl understood it:
that even a person stripped of everything in this world can still know happiness, however briefly, by thinking of the one he loves.
When a person can no longer express himself through positive action, and his only achievement is to bear his suffering in the right and dignified way, he can still find fulfilment by tenderly contemplating the image he carries of his beloved. Now I close the music app and the pages of the man in search of meaning, Baligh. I no longer care about finding answers to my existential questions; it is enough for me to realise that love alone can give life and can take it away.
