Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

ARABIC POETRY Since the late 1940s, Arabic poetry has spoken for an Arab conscience, as much as it has debated positions and ideologies, nationally and worldwide. This book tackles issues of modernity and tradition in Arabic poetry as manifested in poetic texts and criticism by poets as participants in transformation and change. Arabic Poetry studies the poetic in its complexity as pertaining to issues of: ● Selfhood ● Individuality ● Community ● Religion ● Ideology ● Nation ● Class and ● Gender This book also studies in context, issues that have been cursorily noticed or neglected, like Shi’i poetics, Sufism, women’s poetry, and expressions of exilic consciousness. It employs current literary theory and provides comprehensive coverage of modern and postmodern poetry from the 1950s onwards. Arabic Poetry is essential reading for those with interests in Arabic culture and literature and Middle East studies. Muhsin J. al-Musawi is Professor of Middle East and Asian Studies at Columbia University and University Professor at the American University of Sharjah. He has published 24 books in English and Arabic, including Scheherazade in England and The Postcolonial Arabic Novel. He is the editor of Journal of Arabic Literature. In 2002 he received the Owais Award in literary criticism, the most prestigious nongovernmental award in the Arab world. ROUTLEDGE STUDIES IN MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURE Editors James E. Montgomery University of Cambridge Roger Allen University of Pennsylvania Philip F. Kennedy New York University Routledge Studies in Arabic and Middle Eastern Literature is a monograph series devoted to aspects of the literatures of the Near and Middle East and North Africa, both modern and pre-modern. It is hoped that the provision of such a forum will lead to a greater emphasis on the comparative study of the literatures of this area, although studies devoted to one literary or linguistic region are warmly encouraged. It is the editors’ objective to foster the comparative and multi-disciplinary investigation of the written and oral literary products of this area. 1. SHEHERAZADE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS Eva Sallis 2. THE PALESTINIAN NOVEL Ibrahim Taha 3. OF DISHES AND DISCOURSE Geert Jan van Gelder 4. MEDIEVAL ARABIC PRAISE POETRY Beatrice Gruendler 5. MAKING THE GREAT BOOK OF SONGS Hilary Kilpatrick 6. THE NOVEL AND THE RURAL IMAGINARY IN EGYPT, 1880–1985 Samah Selim 7. IBN ABI TAHIR TAYFUR AND ARABIC WRITERLY CULTURE A ninth-century bookman in Baghdad Shawkat M. Toorawa 8. RELIGIOUS PERSPECTIVES IN MODERN MUSLIM AND JEWISH LITERATURES Edited by Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick 9. ARABIC POETRY Trajectories of modernity and tradition Muhsin J. al-Musawi 10. MEDIEVAL ANDALUSIAN COURTLY CULTURE IN THE MEDITERRANEAN Three ladies and a lover Cynthia Robinson ARABIC POETRY Trajectories of modernity and tradition Muhsin J. al-Musawi First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2006 Muhsin J. al-Musawi This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. • To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge• s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.Ž All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0–415–76992–2 (Print Edition) TO THE DEVOTEE AND SCHOLAR OF CLASSICAL ARABIC POETRY SUZANNE P. STETKEVYCH CONTENTS Preface xiii Acknowledgments xix A note on translation and transliteration xxi 1 Poetic trajectories: critical introduction 1 Arabic poetry in context 1 Modernism and secular ideology 9 The modernist impulse and its aftermath 22 2 The tradition–modernity nexus in Arabic poetics 30 A dynamic tradition 30 Masks 31 The surviving past 34 Recollections 38 Why precursors? 39 Translation as a modernist engagement 44 Configurational sites: classical and modern 46 Undermining poetics 48 Which tradition in the Rome conference (1961)? 54 The dialectics of tradition and modernity 56 Adnnls: the challenge of tradition 58 Modernity as a constant 60 Al-Baymtl’s tradition 64 Poetic career: Xalm. cAbd al-Xabnr66 ix CONTENTS 3 Poetic strategies: thresholds for conformity and dissent 68 The neoclassical qaxldah: Al-Jawmhirl 68 Addressing the strong precursor 69 Approaching the glorious legacy: three directions 71 cAbd al-Xabnr and the emulation of independence 73 Al-Baymtl’s alien and rebellious precursors 74 Recreating the forebear 76 Adnnls’ objectifications of forebears 78 Trajectories of modernity and tradition 82 Conclusion 85 4 Poetic dialogization: ancestors in the text—figures and figurations 88 Targeting the unitary discourse 89 5 Dedications as poetic intersections 130 Arab gift compendiums 131 Poetic simulacrum of narrative 133 The prefatory and dedicatory in poetry 135 Al->aklm’s Bird of the East 136 Dedicatory matter: identity for acculturation 138 Al-Baymtl and Khalll >mwl—the existentialist and the forlorn 141 Al-Sayymb’s lyrical–elegiac mood 142 Dedications as paratexts: al-Khml 143 Addressing Lorca 144 Elegy, dedication, and repression 146 Al-Mutanabbl: between al-Baymtl and Adnnls 156 Appendix I 160 Appendix II 160 6 Envisioning exile: past anchors and problematic encounters 162 Exilic evocations 163 Exilic trajectories 188 Textual homelands in context 191 x CONTENTS 7 The edge of recognition and rejection: why T. S. Eliot? 218 Marxism Christianized 218 Deconstructing myth 221 Tradition and the polyphonic poem 224 The paradoxical appeal of The Waste Land 226 Disinheritance through excessive patching 227 Eliot appropriated in traditional satire 230 8 Conclusion: deviational and reversal poetics—dissent, not allegiance 237 Poetics of legitimacy in context 241 The elegiac prelude 243 Classical transgressions 245 Engagements and invalidations 252 Iraqi pain recaptured 256 Sufism and transgression 260 Elegizing a present 263 Notes 268 Works cited 304 Index 319 xi PREFACE This book concentrates on the moment of anxiety and tension in Arabic poetry that occurs whenever poetic identity is in crisis, and whenever poets feel the urgency and need to engage their strong precursors. In this moment, both the spatial and the temporal coalesce, especially in a literary tradition as rich as Arabic. This intersectional space manifests the personal in its cultural richness. As the personal blends with other voices, it loses its individuality and gets objectified, especially when poetic voices dramatize modern consciousness. In other words, my argument follows up poets’ personal intima- tions while tracing the reasons behind their emergence in relation to other issues of regional, national, and global nature. The poetic and the spatial often converge, and the selected text may well testify to the old saying of the Prophet’s companion Ibn ‘Abbms (d. 687), made popular by Ibn Rashlq (d. 456 h/1065), that “poetry is the register of the Arabs.”1 Whereas modern Arabic poetry may fall short of such claims, its range of exchange with other texts, ancient and modern, Arabic, Asian, and European paradoxically impli- cates it in both hybridism and specificity. Simply, it belongs to the present as much as it is indebted to the past. This is the source of its strength and strangeness, too, as it becomes a locus of a cultural dynamic. In Yuri Lotman’s words, “the goal of poetry coincides with the goal of culture as a whole. But poetry realizes this goal specifically, and an understanding of its specific character is impossible if one ignores its mechanism, its internal structure.”2 To enable readers to trace and discern poetic manifestations and revisionist poetics, I have quoted poems and extracts as examples to elucidate the argument. The overall design of the book is thematic in the sense that its first few chapters engage with issues and concepts of tradition in modern poetics, and the responses of poets as participants in identity and cultural formation. Their address to ancient rituals and classical forebears evolves into poetic strategies, ranging between identifications and engagements, to dedications and dialogic negotiations, not only with strong precursors, but also with the reader as another participant in the making of meaning. The argument gathers momen- tum as the nexus between modernity and tradition invites a resolution, which has so much ambivalence that it resists clear-cut categorizations. The outcome xiii PREFACE materializes, however, into textual homelands and exilic evocations that constitute a large portion of modern poetry, and deserve, therefore, to be stud- ied closely in this reading of tradition and modernity trajectories. Stepping outside immediacy in time and place, the poet as exile re-inscribes into the present, a store of remembrance from the ancient past and the classical period, but not necessarily with the ideological and mythical superimpositions of the 1950s in the Arab world, as a period of great awareness of the mythical principle as made popular by T. S. Eliot. Each chapter argues its case in relation to the whole. Chapter 1 is a critical introduction to familiarize readers with issues and controversies that receive further study and attention in the rest of the book. It introduces concepts and movements as they pertain to Arabic poetry and poetics. Theory and poetry work together toward a deconstructive stance. The hegemonic cir- culation of dry language, stagnant referentiality, and application of the dor- mant and the backward to enforce and sustain power relations becomes the target of a revisionist poetics.

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