Much of poetry is defined by its ambiguity, but the ghazal form is especially so. The ghazal originated in 7th century Arabic poetry, and is encountered across Western, Southern, and Central Asian poetic traditions. The Uzbek writer Hamid Ismailov has labeled his latest book, We Computers, a ghazal novel. It is no surprise, then, that We Computers is a novel that fully embraces ambiguity.
We Computers is narrated by an artificial intelligence computer program designed by the story’s protagonist, Jon-Perse. The algorithms are trained on poetry and are asked to generate further poetry. Though Jon-Perse is French, he has become enamored with the ghazal form after being educated on Eastern poetry by his Uzbek translation partner, Abdulhamid Ismail –– presumably a fictional alter-ego of Hamid Ismailov himself –– whom the computers jocularly refer to as “AI”.
According to Ismailov’s English translator, Shelley Fairweather-Vega, “A ghazal is made of long self-contained couplets… but these two-line sets do not need to follow logically one from the other… both lines in the first couplet end with the same word… or at least rhyming words, and the last line in every subsequent couplet also ends with that word or rhyme.” The ghazal is also, importantly, a love song. When reading We Computers, the reader often wonders who or what is in fact beloved on the part of Ismailov. The author is occluded.
As for Jon-Perse, it is quite clear what attracts him. Jon-Perse has programmed his algorithms because he believes that poetry written by a computer is superior in value to poetry written by a human. He believes the existence of an author removes agency from the reader, and that the introduction of computer-generated poetry lends a useful erasure of authorship: “…he believed that a poem is merely a compilation of particular words, and it is the reader who endows that compilation with the pertinent meaning.” This kind of algorithmic writing fulfills Barthes’ prophesy of the Death of the Author to a degree the philosopher may not have been able to believe, “a pure gesture of inscription (and not of expression),” though now we may instead choose to say the algorithmic writing is generative, rather than inscriptive.
The chapters in this ghazal novel are referred to as “bayts”, and in the third bayt we witness Jon-Perse feeding a series of aphorisms from other famous French thinkers into the algorithm. For example, Voltaire’s “Those who can make you believe absurdities can also make you commit atrocities.” As the bayt continues, the computers are asked to generate their own aphorisms mimicking the style of these original ones. As the algorithmic aphorisms progress, the reader, (or this reader) realizes that though the aphorisms generated something stylistically, they seem devoid of meaning. Try as I might, I could not perceive anything profound from the statement, “There is patience in waiting and waiting in patience.” The computers next create aphorisms in the style of famous thinkers from the past. Not surprisingly, I could not make meaningful sense of “Let us leave the evil to evil, or else nothing will get better.”
(the computer-generated Kafka’s response to “what is evil?”)
If I, as a poem’s reader, hold greater agency than a poem’s original author (whether that author is Ismailov, Jon-Perse, Hafez, Fairweather-Vega, or an algorithm), what does it signal when the result does not appeal to me? Or what would it signal if what I am doing appeals but renders the underlying thinking altogether meaningless? If this becomes the case, will it be impossible ever to dislike a poem, since every poem would be, in a certain sense, of my own making, and thus tailored by and to my taste? If I dislike a poem, does it prove I didn’t labor enough making the poem’s meaning my own? If this is the case, one wonders why humans are seeking this sort of agency?
Early in the book, the computers share an aside laying out the perspective of AI (as in, Abdulhamid Ismail) on the subject of intellectual property: “AI believed that authorship and copyright law, as well as ‘intellectual property,’ were Western concepts… There is no place in this tradition for ownership or authorship.” According to the computers’ telling of AI’s reasoning, only Allah can own property under Islamic law. If Sharia describes divine law under Islam, Fiqh is instead the attempted human understanding of the law. According to the legal scholar Tabrez Ebrahim, published in Georgia State University Law Review, “Fiqh lawmaking accepts the impossibility of knowing God’s law with certainty but not the futility of trying to understand God’s law.” It seems Islamic law— like Islamic poetry— has a high degree of comfort with ambiguity. If the computers are correct, they present an interesting question: Does the state of Eastern poetry being authorless signify computer-generated poetry is more Eastern than Western?
While traditional Islamic law does not specifically recognize the Western idea of patents, recent scholarship argues that a conceptual basis for intellectual property rights exists within legal and theological frameworks of Islam. Ebrahim and others argue Islamic law explicitly protects property rights. According to Ebrahim, while it is true that “Sharia requires that all property belongs to Allah… humankind is given the power and authority to exploit and use provided resources.” The question of intellectual property then comes down to whether “intangibles” (i.e. non-material things, like poems) can be construed as property in the Islamic sense. Many Islamic scholars working today believe intangible property is protected, and fatwas have been issued across multiple Muslim countries specifying intellectual property as a valid form of property law. For Ebrahim, property is defined by its value and benefit, rather than its physicality.
The second requirement Ebrahim names as necessary to establish the idea of intellectual property under Islamic law is that it doesn’t conflict with any other explicit prohibition. For example, there must be assurance that private property rights don’t go against public interests. In Islamic financial law, this prohibition refers primarily to the creation of excessive wealth, though not wealth in and of itself. Wealth derived cannot exceed the effort required for its derivation. (Regrettably, when it comes to poetry, the idea of building any kind of wealth is implausible.)
Theology aside, in her introduction to the English language edition of the book, Fairweather-Vega notes that another key aspect of the ghazal form is the practice of authors “signing” their poems by including their own name in the final couplet. It is this aspect of the ghazal form which is perhaps most intriguing when considering Ismailov’s authorial intent in this novel. In fact, it makes a case for the consideration of authorial intent in the first place, and questions the idea that Eastern poetry is authorless in nature. Is the existence of the character of Abdulhamid Ismail meant to serve as this kind of name-signing? Or is Ismailov merely playing with us? Can we trust the computers to have given us, the readers, accurate information here? As with a ghazal, or with legal theory, a concrete answer is not so easy to reach.
Jon-Perse’s vision for computer generated poetry can be summed up as a kind of obliteration of the author. When we think of it this way, it is reminiscent of the idea of obliteration of the self, which is a key concept across many Eastern religions, including the Islamic tradition of Sufism. Some of the key poets in We Computers, Hafez and Rumi, were themselves Sufi. Jon-Perse is not a Sufi –– though he may be called an orientalist. As I made my way through the novel, I found myself wondering why he was so attached to the obliteration of the author. Is this just the fantasy of a certain type of author? One who wishes to become truly objective within their work? One who believes his biography has no bearing on the way he makes words? If that is Jon-Perse’s motivation, it remains a fantasy.
In the end, even Jon-Perse’s computers admit that he is their author. Their words are generated from their programmer’s psychology, as much as they are generated from the language of Hafez or Rumi.
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