ern Middl d e o Ea M s t r S fo t r u d e t i e n s e , C Resources for Modern Middle East Studies N Resources for Modern Middle East Studies y a g t i o o l n o n a l h t M E u f s o e m No. 5 u No. 5 Akiko Sumi and Tetsuo Nishio Sumi and Tetsuo Akiko by Edited The Personal and the Public in Literary Works of the Arab Regions of the Arab Works and the Public in Literary The Personal ISBN 978-4-87974-763-1 C0097 The Personal and the Public in Literary Works of the Arab Regions Edited by Akiko Sumi and Tetsuo Nishio Published in Japan in March 2021 by the Center for Modern Middle East Studies at the National Museum of Ethnology. 10-1 Senri Expo Park, Suita, Osaka 567-8511 http://www.minpaku.ac.jp/nihu/cmmes/index.html This study series was supported by NIHU Transdisciplinary Project “Area Studies of the Modern Middle East.” © Center for Modern Middle East Studies Contents Preface, iii I. The Private/Personal and the Public/Political 1. The Interface of the Private and the Political in Classical and Modern Arabic Poetry, 3 Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych 2. War and Death in the Poems of Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm and Akiko Yosano: The Interplay of the Personal and the Public, 39 Akiko Sumi II. From the Individual to Society 3. The Discourse of Coffee and Coffeehouse in Contemporary Arabic Poetry: An Analysis of “An Ancient Song” by the Iraqi Poet Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb, 75 Hassan El-Banna Ezz El-Din 4. How “Alf Lēla w-Lēla” Was Incorporated into a Song in the Repertoire of Umm Kulthūm, 101 Nobuo Mizuno 5. Joseph-Charles Mardrus and Orientalism: Re-evaluating His Translation of the Arabian Nights in Light of New Findings from Mardrus’ Personal Archives, 115 Tetsuo Nishio, Naoko Okamoto, and Margaret Sironval III. The Formation of the Collective and the Public 6. Cadavers and Homeland: Kateb Yacine’s Poetics of Collectivity, 143 Satoshi Udo 7. The Personal and Public Spheres in the Works of the Egyptian Intellectual, Yūsuf Zaydān: Novels and Essays, 155 Jaroslav Stetkevych Notes on contributors, 175 i Preface This volume concerns the relationships between the personal and the public in poetry, narratives, novels, and journalistic essays composed in the Arab regions. This topic corresponds with the framing theme of the Center for Modern Middle East Studies at the National Museum of Ethnology, Japan. As part of its research endeavors, the Center has been engaged in executing a project titled, “The Transformation of Cultural Resources and the Reconfiguration of the Personal Sphere in the Modern Middle East,” since 2016. For an individual, encounters with unknown people, places, and information become a constituent for structuring and shaping the world. The project aims to clarify how communities are formulated from the succession and accumulation of spheres that circulating individuals formulate, and the characteristics of the world that the individuals design from the perspective of preserving cultural resources. In keeping with the theme of that project, The Personal and the Public in Literary Works of the Arab Regions explores and clarifies the relationships between the personal and public spheres as reflected in literary works from Arab regions. Literary works are posited as essential and communal assets that play a role in the formation and reconfigurations of Arab societies and communities. Arabic poetry, narratives, and novels have played a central role in the cultivation and transformation of Arab social norms and structures. Personal encounters with previously unfamiliar people, places, and information via literature help shape people’s views of the world in Arab regions. The influence of the formulation of people’s views in these regions is also exerted on other regions like Europe and Asia. The volume is designed to cultivate new methods and perspectives for conceptualizing the personal and the public as themes, by depicting social spaces in such a way as to include or exclude pluralistic values. Two research questions that guided the studies of Arabic literary works to be presented here are: 1) Where is the boundary between the personal and the public and how is it drawn? and 2) How does the personal sphere function to help form communities or worldviews? In what ways do these cultural and literary sources reveal a reshaping of the personal sphere in relation to associated communal spheres? Covering a wide range in geography (the Arab regions, Europe, and Japan) and time (the Abbasid period to the present), this volume offers various perspectives for the formation of ideas on the personal and the public. As shown mainly in the first section of the book, “The Private/Personal and the Public/Political,” boundaries between the iii personal and the public are found with the flow of literary genres (subgenres) according to the period. With respect to Arabic poetry, for example, in the panegyric ode (qaṣīdat al-madḥ), which predominated the genre with its variants starting from the pre-Islamic era to the first half of the twentieth centuries, the introductory part, the nasīb (the amatory prelude) tends to express personal emotions and affections, though it can be understood to signify the public sphere both metaphorically and allegorically. In contrast, the concluding part, the madīḥ (praise), in which a poet recites a eulogy for the ruler or his patron, demonstrates public and political spheres. In the 1970s, a shift from committed public poetry (iltizām) into more intimate personal poetry was seen with a change in the form from Arabic free verse to Arabic prose poems.1 Traversing the personal and public spheres, a complex interplay was recognized in the Arabic poems of Abbasid, neo- classical, and modern poets. The volume illustrates various examples of how the personal sphere operates in the formation of communities and worldviews, through poetry, a popular song using a poem for its lyrics, a story collection, journalistic writings, and novels. These examples demonstrate that the accumulation and continuation of personal feelings and declarations presented in the literary works had an impact on people who encountered them through reading and listening. The studies reveal that the process of this influence of the personal on the public is often related to ideology, hegemony, colonialism, and nationalism, as well as the relationships between Arab and European countries or the East and the West. The literary works, as cultural assets, play an integral part by generating power to unite/disunite people and dynamism to reform/reshape their communities, through the interaction between the personal/private and the public/political spheres. In “The Interface of the Private and the Political in Classical and Modern Arabic Poetry,” Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych traces a passage of the intersections of the private and the public in the classical and modern poetics of the Arab world. Her analysis extends from tenth century classical poetry to twentieth century modern poetry, in that it covers two classical Arab poets, al-Mutanabbī and Abū Firās al-Ḥāmdānī, and three twentieth century Modern Arab Free Verse poets, Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī Ḥijāzī, Buland al-Ḥaydarī, and ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī. She offers an insightful overall perspective on how the private and public spheres were involved in Arabic poetics through the transformation of the genre, including forms, motifs, and diction. The Abbasid poems demonstrate the subtle polyvalence or ambiguity of the private and the public, the personal and the political. Under the influence of Western imperialism and colonialism, the Free Verse poems indicate various complicated interplays on the blurred boundaries between the iv private and the political. Akiko Sumi’s study on the motif of death in the Russo-Japanese War links the Egyptian neo-classical poet, Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm (1872?–1932), with the Japanese poetess, Akiko Yosano (1878–1942). She explores the Arabic poems “Ghādat al-Yābān” (“A Young Woman of Japan”) and “Al-Ḥarb al-Yābāniyyah wa-al-Rūsiyyah” (“The Japanese- Russian War”) by Ibrāhīm, and the Japanese new-style poem “Kimi shinitamō kotonakare” (“Beloved, You Must Not Die”) and essay, “Hirakibumi” (“An Open Letter”) by Yosano. Ibrāhīm’s poems display a complex interplay between personal and public voices, whereas Akiko Yosano’s poem mainly exemplifies personal expression. By praising Japan, the Egyptian poet indirectly calls on his people to raise their voices against their ruler who was virtually under the control of the British then. With respect to the theme of death in war, Ibrāhīm’s personal voice rings out louder in “The Japanese-Russian War” than in “A Young Woman of Japan.” In “The Discourse of Coffee and Coffeehouse in Contemporary Arabic Poetry,” Hassan El-Banna Ezz El-Din examines the phenomenal presence of coffee and coffeehouses in contemporary Arabic poetry (1945–present), that is, “the free verse,” on the concentration of the poem “An Ancient Poem” by the Iraqi poet Badr Shākir al- Sayyāb (1926–1964). His investigation extends to poems with a coffee theme composed by poets from 14 Arab countries. These poems can be categorized into six main discourses: “Coffee of Writing,” “Coffeehouse of Creativity,” “Coffeehouse of Pretenders,” “Coffee/Coffeehouses and Homeland,” “Coffeehouse of Lovers,” and “Coffee/Coffeehouses and Alienation.” He argues that his examination offers insight into the dialectics of the personal and public in contemporary Arabic poetry. Regarding the song “Alf Lēla w-Lēla” (“A Thousand and One Nights”) by the legendary Egyptian singer Umm Kulthūm (1904–1975), Nobuo Mizuno explores the song’s melody and lyrics that were composed in the Egyptian colloquial by Mursī Jamīl ʿAzīz. He used her live concert CD which contained the first performance of the song that was recorded in Cairo in 1969.