Arabic Poetry

Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

Muhsin J. al-Musawi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781135989255
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire

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. It studies the poetic in its complexity, relating to issues of selfhood, individuality, community, religion, ideology, nation, class and gender.

Al-Musawi also explores in context issues that have been cursorily noticed or neglected, like Shi'i poetics, Sufism, women's poetry, and expressions of exilic consciousness.

Arabic Poetry employs current literary theory and provides comprehensive coverage of modern and post-modern poetry from the 1950s onwards, making it essential reading for those with interests in Arabic culture and literature and Middle East studies.

1

POETIC TRAJECTORIES

Critical introduction

Land, like language, is inherited.

(Maḥmūd Darwīsh, “The Tragedy of Narcissus
The Comedy of Silver,” 2004, p. 174)

Arabic poetry in context

Although poetry is no longer the “Arab dīwīn,” the record and archive of Arab life stories, aspirations, feats, and wars, as it was of ancient times,¹ it remains formatively present in Arab life and thought. It is still acclaimed by some as central to a so-called Arab frame of mind. Some Arab critics go so far as to claim that the pre-Islamic and early Islamic celebration of fuḥūlah poetry is behind egocentric poetics in modern Arabic writing,² and is responsible for the emergence of patriarchs and dictators.³ Although attesting to the cultural power of poetry and its rhetorical impact, this claim lacks cultural nuance, for hierarchic tradition at large uses masculine terms and measures to enforce its presence. The claim resonates, however, with recognition of poetry and poets as effectively present in Arab life and culture. It also draws attention to the limitation of such a frame of reference, for it has obviously the pre-Islamic Ode or qaṣīdah in mind in the first place. Whereas remaining central to cultural and pure literary discussions even after the disintegration of the Arab/Islamic center (i.e. 1258, the fall of Baghdad), the sole focus on the qaṣldah can be very limiting to any rigorous reading of Arab culture, its many trajectories, issues, and complex composition. Yet, in terms of literary discussions, it is so pivotal for literary coteries and controversies that it warrants a brief note on its formal structure.

The poetic form, the Ode or the qaṣādah, accommodates a variety of themes that also decide meters and formulas, however. As the great Arab prosodist al-Khalīl Ibn Aḥmad (d. 786) demonstrates in his pioneering reading of ancient Arabic poetry, his codification of meters on the basis of feet and root, there are sixteen meters of Arabic verse acceptably practiced. Meters vary in line length; but the line, as a number of musically patterned syllables or feet, is divided into two balanced hemistichs that hold the poem together. The rhyme scheme enforces the unity of the poem to some extent, while its resonance plays at times on the verbal expectations of the learned audiences. Meters usually suit the purpose and the intended musical pace of each theme. Hence the names given to those meters indicate movement, length, time, and, also, intention. Like any long-time practice, the qaṣīdah has grown into a binding form, not only in its meters, but also in its dominant structural patterns of the erotic prelude, the journey, and the panegyric in its varieties.⁴ The structure gave way to many innovations between the eighth and eleventh centuries that betrayed dissatisfaction not only with the erotic prelude and its obsolete recollections of desert life, but mainly with ongoing tendencies to imitate the ancients and to apply worn out imagery to a different life and culture. Bashshār Ibn Burd (d. 783), Abū Nuwās (d. 815), Muslim Ibn al-Walīd (d. 823), Abū Tammām (d. 845), al-Mutanabbī (d. 965), and Abū al-^cAlā’ al-Ma^carrī (d. 1057) were, respectively, among the pioneers in this innovative enterprise, whereas pre-Islamic poets like Imru’ al-Qays have become the strong precursors and forebears in terms of eloquence, spontaneity of experience, and daring involvement in life. Their names recur among the modernists as household words, and their poetry and life are drawn upon in assemblies and speeches. With such names in the back of their minds, modernists can hardly forfeit a sense of cultural or even genealogical succession.

Duly posited as such even in the latest debates on the role of poetry in Arabic culture, the qaṣīdah remains central to discussions for reasons that relate to its historicity and place in Arabic culture. The growing critical corpus that focuses on its history and cultural role assumes great significance in view of the changing consciousness, for ancient poetics still operates on this consciousness and formation of temperaments. No matter how hard the modernist and postmodernist critique attempts to sunder its bonds from early criticism and poetry, its inner search for a unified vision against banality, disintegration, and fragmentation implicates it in the interwoven workings of historicity whereby memory operates in a very intricate manner. In Walter Benjamin’s articulate deviations from Marxism, “Memory forges the chain of tradition that passes events on from generation to generation.”⁵ The workings of poetic consciousness reclaim images and details from the past to endow life with mystery, argues Hugo Friedrich. This amounts to no less than the “… attempt of the modern soul, trapped in a technologized, imperialistic, commercial era, to preserve its own freedom.”⁶ This contention applies with equal force to Arabic poetics. To operate on the past entails redefining the present as well, for the modernist poet has to create a new poetic selfhood beyond traditional categorizations of periods and people.

We may cite, as an example, the Moroccan poet Muḥammad Bennīs’ (b. 1948) self-styled “lineage to the pre-Islamic poet Imru’ al-Qays.”

He is the ‘Arabiyyah, Arabic language, in a canticle state, face to face with absence-death, as he halts to weep over a deserted campsite, alone in the desert which I cherish inside my study room. From this canticle, I derive my filiations as an Arab, and to it I listen whenever I detect a qaṣīdah or its opposite.”⁷

The specific mention of Imru’ al-Qays’ nasīb (erotic prelude) toponymy is of significance, too, as it, in Jaroslav Stetkevych’s words, “does not confer geographical location but serves rather to situate the privileged space, the poet’s siqṭ al-liwā, in the memory and in the imagination.”⁸ The privileged place as a reminder of loss intensifies the speaker’s sense of alienation, and its specific presence in Muḥammad Bennīs’ poetic sketch identifies the speaker, as the successor, with the precursor in an ancestry of creativity and dislocation. While echoing the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adūnīs’ (^cAlī Ahmad Sa^cīd, b. 1930), pronouncements on the meeting ground between the ancients and the moderns that constituted his poetic taste,⁹ Muḥammad Bennīs writes down a personal poetic lineage, a genetic succession that includes the poetry of Gabriel Garcia Lorca, Eliot, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Pablo Niruda, Malarmè, and Baudelaire, among others, who

cut across … [his] Arab lineage, from Imru’ al-Qays to al-Mutanabbī, or from Ṭarafah Ibn al-’Abd to Ibn Khafājah, and from Jamīl Buthaynah (Ibn Mu’mar al-’Udhrī) to al-Ḥallāj and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī. Arabic dīwāns and writings debate and address a poetic and writing experience, of a universal stamp, through which I have become acquainted with the poetic time, which is what concerns me in writing.¹⁰

While deliberately leading the argument to fit into his tendency to universalize experience, the Moroccan poet locates his career among a number of strong precursors who also substantiate a claim for a poetic role.

Oracular poetics

As late as the 1960s poets looked upon their utterances as oracular, though falling on deaf ears whenever warnings related to pressing national issues. The stand was not random, as it related to urgency and need, for the whole situation after the emergence of the nation-state and the overwhelming Israeli and global challenge propelled soul searching and drove intellectuals to review the cultural terrain and its endemic problems. The Egyptian poet Amal Dunqul’s (d. 1983) famous poem “Crying before Zarqā’ al-Yamāmah,” situates poetry in an oracular position where national heedlessness or negligence of governments will lead to havoc. The popularity of the poem embarrassed many Arab governments that survived through rhetorical victories although lapsing into stagnation and corruption. Using the pre-Islamic Zarqā’ al-Yamāmah’s discernment and vision when she noticed the enemy from a distance, camouflaging its movement behind tree branches, the poet still thinks in terms of vocational commitment and role enhanced by exceptional prophetic powers. While calling on her to speak up and break silence, the poet understands his position as a brigand who is marginalized for a purpose. “I, who never ate mutton, / Never had power, / was of no consequence,” he says, “Banished from the councils of the elders, / Now invited to die/ though not to parley with the men!”¹¹ Years later, some major poets still speak of an active role to be played, an engagement even larger than poetry writing and recitation, to critique a whole life and culture. The Palestinian poet Maḥmūd Darwīsh (b. 1942), for one, argues after the siege of Beirut, August 1982, “… if it becomes necessary for intellectuals to turn into snipers, then let them snipe at their old concepts, their old questions, and their old ethics.”¹² The call to involve intellectual life in active discussion and change addresses poetry, too, and criticizes positions and ways of writing. Maḥmud Darwīsh’s underlying critique targets an essentialist and absolutist rhetoric that is usually invoked or debated in the discussions of modernity and tradition.

Continuities and discontinuities

It is pertinent to explain my use of tradition and modernity in terms coherent to readers at large. Also, it is worthwhile to look at this issue in terms of modernist theories worldwide, as Arab poets at the present time are no less open to other cultures than their predecessors between the ninth and twelfth centuries. In Arabic, the past still holds significance, not only because it survives as language, and in accounts, symbols and values, but also because it acts through these on the present. Its registers may be recalled, invested, manipulated, and validated according to the rising occasion or need. “Tradition,” argues Anthony Giddens, “is not wholly static, because it has to be reinvested by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it.”¹³ In matters of survival, he adds, “Tradition does not so much resist change as pertain to a context in which there are a few separated temporal and spatial markers of which change can have any meaningful form.”¹⁴

The configurational nature of the new, and its confluence of trends, tends to supplant petrified forms. Yet, this modernist tendency to manipulate stylistic potentialities in hybrid genres including letters, memoirs, songs, reportage, and their like, can elude both progressive and regressive demarcations. Art forms meet needs and demands, but they are not strictly in keeping with material or social growth. R. Jakobson argues, “Nothing is more erroneous than the widely held opinion that the relation between modern poetry and medieval poetry is the same as between the machine-gun and the bow.”¹⁵ By debating such assumptions, Jakobson does not negate the aging of genres and practices. Victor Úklovskij argues on the other hand for change as an inevitable process.

Each art form travels down the inevitable road from birth to death; from seeing and sensory perception, when the detail in the object is savored and relished, to mere recognition, when the object or form becomes a dull epigone which our senses register mechanically, a piece of merchandise not visible even to the buyer.

(Ibid. 252)

This emphasis on relevance and contemporaneity does not necessarily preclude the perceptibility of specific forms or devices that are able to attract attention, or participate in the formation of a cultural consciousness. Both art forms and socio-cultural change interact in creating a consciousness. While the individual genius is not “simply the geometrical point of intersection operative outside him,” as Victor Úklovskij stipulates in his definition of the artist as an “agent of impersonal forces” (Ibid. 253), there is enough evidence to support Ejxenbaum’s paraphrase of Engels’ emphasis on the voice of history. He argues: “…creation is an act of historical self-awareness, of locating oneself in the stream of history” (Ibid. 254). Genres get established and approved within a horizon of expectations, for as Mary Louise Pratt argues in view of reader-response and discourse theories, poetry, and literature at large are “context dependent,” and literary production “depends enormously on unspoken, culturally-shared knowledge of the rules, conventions, and expectations that are in play when language is used in that context.”¹⁶ Genres and their subdivisions are “systems of appropriateness conditions,” or sets of generic rules, conditions, and expectations that may involve conformity and deviance, and coding and decoding, she adds in view of Elizabeth Traugott’s discussion of generative semantics (Ibid.). This accountability sums up socio-cultural aesthetics as genres operating on expectations while they are the byproduct of cultural necessity. In broad terms, Anne Cranny-Francis defines genre as a “sociohistorical as well as a formal entity. Transformations in genre must be considered in relation to social changes.”¹⁷ In Arabic cultural dialogue, genres undergo change, deviation, and challenge like any other communicative activity. Issues of tradition and modernity, and their further growths or setbacks, assume complexity due to appropriateness of conditions, which also inform the intellectual consciousness as they get informed by intellectual debate and production processes and imperatives. Their trajectories are neither uniform nor smooth, and postmodern poets in the line of Adūnīs (^cAlī Ahmad Sa^cīd), like the Moroccan Muḥammad Bennīs, may come up with a vision that downplays the early Nahḍah mediations between the binding strictures of the ancients and the adaptability to the spirit of the age. With both Derrida and Foucault in mind,¹⁸ Muḥammad Bennīs titles an early commentary on his grounding in tradition and modernity Kitābat al-Maḥw (Erasure writing). While establishing his identity and lineage (Kitābat al-Maḥw, 12) and asserting a list of readings that connect him to poets, classical, postclassical, and modern, the author also denies succession on the grounds that “writing erases the myth of origin,” for his writing is an “orphan writing” (Ibid. 13). This writing even glosses over the heated debate about the Free Verse Movement of the late 1940s,¹⁹ for he looks upon poetry in terms of a living tradition in constant debate with the Zeitgeist, as primarily experienced by the poetic self, beyond any servile subordination to exteriority. The self operates on the real as much as it responds to and challenges its rules and conditions. As such, recognizable deviations and divergences from conventions and norms are not neat formalities or pronouncements against norms, and Foucault’s total set of relations may gather more potency within his concept of the episteme before being displaced as well in a “constantly moving set of articulations, shifts, and coincidences that are established only to give rise to others.”²⁰ Both the conventional and the dynamic vie for ascendancy, and the constant of today may be the fugitive of tomorrow. Yet, even this mounting consciousness does not preclude due recognition of the classical, because ancient poetics of the qaṣīdah strongly operates as a frame of reference, regardless of positions and terms of understanding.

The revivalists

Chronologically, thematic concerns take shape in a historical context of encounters with Arabs’ Others. This is not to say that the Arab site was empty of innovation or progression, but it was not concerned with the West before its encroachments, its invasions, occupations, and challenge to ways of life and belief. First came the revivalist movement that included many names from all over the Arab world such as Maḥmūd Sāmī al-Bārūdī (d. 1904), Ḥāfiẓ Ibrāhīm (d. 1932), and Aḥmad Shawqī (d. 1932) in Egypt; Ma‘rūf al-Ruḥāfī (d. 1945), Jamīl Ṣidqī al-Zahāwī (d. 1936), ‘Abd al-Muḥsin al-Kāẓimī (d. 1935) and Muḥammad Riḍā al-Shabībī (d. 1966) in Iraq; and in Lebanon Badawī al-Jabal (the pen name of Muḥammad Sulaymān al-Aḥmad, 1907—?), and Shakīb Arsalān (1870—1946). This movement of the late nineteenth century challenged the colonialist onslaught on Islamic and Arab identity, by laying emphasis on Arabic classical language and political independence. The whole group fits into a neoclassical movement that found perfection in ancient poetry and aesthetics....