How Ought We to Live? The Ethical and the Poetic in Ustadh Mahmoud Mau’s Poetry

Abstract

Ustadh Mau’s poems are often concerned with teaching and guiding his community. Much of his poetry centres around basic ethical questions: What is good or bad? How ought one to live? Drawing on Michael Lambek’s notion of “ordinary ethics” and his emphasis on “doing ethics,” Clarissa Vierke takes this perspective as a way of entering into and listening to Ustadh Mahmoud Mau’s poetic voice. She studies Ustadh Mau’s poetic practice not as promoting a list of well-defined and unchangeable rules, but rather as a continuous struggle toward the right path and a major site of “doing ethics”—finding a language for it, weighing arguments, and judging and criticizing in relation to life situations and occurrences. Taking the example of three very different poems, Clarissa Vierke shows how his poems make use of different references, means of depiction but also vary in the way they involve ethics: sometimes as part of proclamations, other times in less explicit modalities of doubt and uncertainty. Considering ethics as part of poetic practice accounts for a dynamic perspective that goes beyond a functional analysis of a literary text and demands a close reading. She shows how not only the ethical permeates the poems, but the poetic, its means of expression, its imagery, its dialogues and sentiment and its way of relating to the world, also shape the ethical.