Love and Poetry in the Middle East

Love and Literature from Antiquity to the Present

Atef Alshaer, Atef Alshaer

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780755640966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur des Nahen Ostens

Love has been an important trope in the literature of the region we now call the Middle East, from ancient times to modern. This book analyses love poetry in various ancient and contemporary languages of the Middle East, including Akkadian, ancient Egyptian, Classical and Modern Standard Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, Turkish and Kurdish, including literary materials that have been discovered and highlighted for the first time. Together, the chapters reflect and explore the discursive evolution of the theme of love, and the sensibilities, styles and techniques used to convey it. They chart the way in which poems in ancient poetry give way to complex and varied reflections of human sentiments in the medieval languages and on to the modern period which in turn reflects the complexities and nuances of present times. Offering a snapshot of the diverse literary languages and their relationship to the theme of love, the book will be of interest to scholars of Near and Middle Eastern Literature and Culture.

Chapter 1

Power-plays

Types of lover and types of love in Akkadian from the third and second millennia BC^*

Mark Weeden

Love and love poetry: Gender and convention, genre and reality

There seems to be something self-contradictory about the very notion of love poetry. The poet Adrienne Rich comments on the inherent dissonance between the lived and the verbalized that is involved in writing love poetry at all in her 1978 collection of poems, The Dream of a Common Language:

What kind of beast would turn its life into words?

What atonement is all this about?

– and yet, writing words like these, I’m also living.

Is all this close to the wolverine’s howled signals

that modulated cantata of the wild?

or when away from you I try to create you in words,

am I simply using you, like a river or a war?¹

This dichotomy of the direct experience of intimacy between humans as against the practice of expressing it in words is expanded during the rest of the poem to encompass other examples of the relationship between verbal art and wordless action, which form a direct chain to the most pressing questions of political existence. The love relationship presents the focus where this thought is most immediately and clearly expressed. Rich’s poem triumphantly and bitterly meshes the personal and the universal leaving us feeling emotionally decompressed. The worry is that to write about someone, a beloved, in the first place is to turn that person into an object, to deny ourselves the possibility of autonomy. When talking about love and what it means to write poetry about it, contrary to the intuitive and socially dominant view that it is a purely personal and private affair, we find ourselves very quickly in the realm of the social and political. This is not surprising: we are talking about relationships between human beings.

The cultural critic Roland Barthes in his work A Lover’s Discourse felt that he was unable to offer an analysis of love as a form of cultural activity; he was only able to give his own personal examples of the discourse or discourses associated with it.² The resulting late-night paranoias and internal monologues frequently revolve around the insecurities that are concomitant with making oneself vulnerable to another person. They are, I would imagine, recognizable to most adult humans at least in the Western world during the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries of the modern era at the same time as being disturbingly personal. Disturbing because the almost solipsistic nature of the discourse seems to be unassimilable, by definition inimitable, even catatonic. Yet it concurrently insists on claiming to possess universal comprehensibility.

Indeed, Barthes manages to situate even the most personal and self-affirming aspects of the discourse of love within the context of a series of patterns of behaviour, models for being in love, which condition and define our experience of the phenomenon, in his own case mainly constituted by the books he has read and the conversations he has had with his friends.³ Similar to his view of text as a tissue of previously spoken and written fragments defying a single authorial point of origin, so the experience of love itself becomes a re-living and repeat with variation of what others do or have done in the same situation, only identifiable as such due to its public cultural anatomy, which Barthes makes explicit and lays bare in agonizing detail.⁴

The introduction of the notion of ‘performativity’ into the field of gender studies by Judith Butler, the idea backed by ethnographic research that our sexual identities consist of learned and repeatedly rehearsed roles rather than essential categories, appears to relate in an interesting way to Barthes’s presentation of the discourse of the lover, whatever his or her sexuality.⁵ Love may be inscribed and expressed in gender terms as much as by means of many other patterns or clusters of characteristics that can be used to describe human beings, but gender and its entanglement with power remain a crucial feature of love poetry. Lauren Berlant makes a certain type of heterosexual love into the affective correlate of the repeated rehearsal of gender roles, returning again and again to the same ritualized power-complexes, and suggests its function as an important aspect of social cohesion, the reproduction of a particular way of life entailing the exclusion of other sexual possibilities.⁶ The pivotal role played by emotional life in society and politics that Berlant outlines has paved the way for a burgeoning field of studies in the relationship between love poetry and political culture.⁷

Between the claimed but patently self-negated immediacy of written love discourse and the ritualized cultural form that love practice takes in society, love poetry forms a fascinating lens through which to reflect on the values and hierarchies that cultural identity is constructed around, despite itself being the ve rbal art form perhaps most enmeshed in apparently artificial, traditional convention. Modern scholarship on republican and early imperial Roman love poetry, for example, has addressed the degree of ‘reality’ that can be accorded to the world of experience depicted in the poems, without a definitive decision on the issue being likely to be achieved or even being desirable.⁸ The discussion has been concerned with the extent to which particular poetic tropes and figures, for example, the lover dominated and enslaved by his beloved, can be ascribed to modes of living of the period or to participation in the type of discourse that is love poetry. The particular relationship of subservience to the beloved which was cultivated by the Roman authors Propertius and Tibullus in their poems, for example, not only had resonance within and was defined by the world of poetry, but it marked a clear area of social space in their material lives, which were themselves informed by their literary experience. The question of power and its negotiation, whether interpersonal or social, in a literary fantasy or a political reality, was and is of significance in discussing the literary form that is love poetry.

The above-mentioned considerations are of importance in my view when considering some of the love poetry of the third and second millennia BC from ancient Iraq. Love poems, thus the thesis behind my approach, present the lover as participating in and helping to form a literary role that is framed as part of a hierarchical social, religious and political system. The lover is cast in an archetypal role, which he or she shares with divine figures who have typified it, whose worship is constituted by rituals celebrating it, and figures of authority, who similarly play or inhabit that role. Royal figures are mentioned relatively frequently in the transmitted love literature we have, acting as an index, thus this interpretation, for the social performative context of the poetry. Lovers play roles throughout Akkadian love poetry, and those roles involve positioning the lover in various relations of power, whether aggressive, submissive or mutual, to the beloved, to the social order and to the divine world.

Defining genre then and now

Akkadian love poetry is so rare a literary form that specimens of it have occasionally been heralded as new genres in and of themselves.⁹ For this reason we should pause to think a little about what we mean when we talk of genre. Literary genre is a concept defining the range of expectations that the consumer of literature might form of a piece of work due to its subject matter, linguistic register or formal criteria such as metre or verse structure. Literary theory has reserved some criticism for this concept.¹⁰ Certainly, literary genres are not hermetically sealed boxes of characteristics, but it is difficult to imagine approaching literature without making some generic classifications on the basis of what one has already experienced of text.¹¹ Nowadays, there are mainly formal categories such as tragedy, comedy, epic, lyric, novel; mainly content-related ones such as fiction, fantasy, romance, horror, science-fiction; mainly situational ones such as place or purpose of performance, the places and times where one would expect to encounter certain types of art, related to the function for which verbal art is used in a society. Furthermore, genre is intimately bound up with the notion of character and stereotype, again to be understood as little more than a set of expectations that are associated with a particular type of literary figure in a specific genre: the hero in an epic, the fool in a farce, the lover in a lyric poem, for some obvious examples.

Often it might appear that genres, their sub-genres and indeed super-ordinate categories or ‘super-genres’ only exist as imaginary models to be broken and subverted, a standard which is most clearly defined in the negative.¹² Any account of genre has to be able to encompass its flexibility, to take account of aspects such as genre-subversion, genre-bending and genre-enrichment, to use some recent and not so recent terminology.¹³ There is also a distinction between the genre rules that are adopted or broken by the author of a work and those that are projected onto it during its reception and consumption, which may in different periods be entirely varied.¹⁴ The main prerequisite for identifying the expectations which the use of a particular genre element might be expected to awake in a recipient, sometimes referred to as the text’s ‘genre ideology’, is that we have access to enough samples of literary works that belong to the same category as well as to information about the cultural context in which they were produced or consumed. In the case of modern poetry this is not such a problem because we assume, often wrongly and arrogantly, that we inhabit what is basically the same world of experience as the author. When discussing pre-modern poetry, we are confronted at first sight by a mo...