Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry 9780804782609

Citation preview

SILENCING THE SEA

SILENCING THE SEA SECULAR RHYTHMS I N PA L E S T I N I A N P O E T RY KHALED FURANI

STA N FOR D U N I V E R SI T Y PR E S S S TA N FOR D, CA L I FOR N I A

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Ju nior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Furani, Khaled, 1973– author. Silencing the sea : secular rhythms in Palestinian poetry / Khaled Furani. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-7646-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Arabic poetry—Palestine—History and criticism. 2. Arabic poetry—20th century—History and criticism. 3. Poetics. 4. Secularism in literature. I. Title. PJ8190.2.F87 2012 892.7'100995694—dc23 2012007600 Designed by Bruce Lundquist Typeset by Westchester Book Group in 10/14 Minion Section opener design by Naif Shaqqur. Calligraphy by Ahmad Zoabi. Arabic text is an excerpt from an untitled poem by Abd al-Jabbār ibn Hamdīs (d. circa AD 1132–33), a Sicilian and Andalusian Arab poet. “A horrifying [sea] whose rider would be nothing but a transgressor / If it were not, in the Quran, a sign to wonder / Because of what they witnessed, my eye or my ear / Continue to warn my heart about a relentless fear.” Translation by Khaled Furani.

To the souls of my mother and grandmother, Jamila al-Badawi Furani and Khadija Yaaqub Abbas

And from water we created all that lives Quran 21:30

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

ix

A Note on Transliteration

xi

Introduction

1

I N I T IAT I O N S 1

Secular Bewilderment

13

2

Rhythms and Rulers

21

3

The Land of the Poem

39

THE SONG 4

Memory for Beginnings

53

5

Metrical Discipline and Mastery

67

6

Poets for “the People”

91

THE PICTURE 7

Enough “Screaming”

111

8

Rhythmical Freedom

120

9

Modern Poets and “Conservative” People

154

viii

CONTENTS

THE DREAM 10

Redeeming Prose

175

11

When Meter Melts

199

12

The Laity Outside Poetry’s Temple

216

Conclusions: Secular Prayers

237

Notes

251

Bibliography

277

Index

285

AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S

T H E T R A I L O F R E S E A RC H F O R T H I S B O O K began over ten years ago. During this time, many more people have contributed to its making than my effort to acknowledge them can possibly include. My heartfelt thanks go to them all, primarily to the poets and their families for their hospitality toward this inquiry and the inquirer. As for several poets who have passed away in the interim, I am grateful if this book can pass along some of their stories, rhythms, and questions. From the quick of my heart I also convey gratitude to Talal Asad, who conveyed to me the value of investigating one’s own ignorance, and whose unassuming, probing questions kindled mine for this book and more. This inquiry was also nourished by the care of scholars at numerous institutions: Barbara Aswad and Geurin Montilus at Wayne State University; Ammiel Alcalay, Michael Blim, Marc Edelman, Louise Lennihan, Leith Mullings, and Jane Schneider at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; and Steve Caton at Harvard University. In the precariousness of ethnographic fieldwork riddled with closures and checkpoints of military occupation in the year 2001–2, Inam Dagher, Abd al-Karim Abu-Kashan, and Mahmoud alAtshan at Birzeit University ensured that many literal and figurative paths remained open. Brinkley Messick at Columbia University extended material space and moral sustenance when those were acutely needed during the book’s infancy. Trevor Dawes, whether at Princeton or Columbia libraries, extended indefatigable support in fi nding many otherwise intractable bibliographic sources. In navigating the deep of Arabic language and literature, I remain indebted to the inspiring as well as instrumental guidance of the following individuals: Sayyid al-Bahrawi, Taufiq Ben-Amour, Mahmud Ghanayim, Ferial Ghazoul, Fathi Furani, Elias Khoury, Jeries Naim Khoury, Muhsin Jasim alMusawi, and the late Magda al-Nowaihi. For profitable comments on this

x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

book at one or another stage of its unfolding, my gratitude goes to the anonymous reviewer at Stanford University Press and the following readers: Lori Allen, Steve Blum, Moustafa Bayoumi, Koray Çalişkan, Elliot Colla, T. K. Hunter, Janet Kaplan, Jonathan Shannon, Genese Sodikof, Ramzi Rouighi, and Andrea Queeley. I also extend my appreciation to my editor, Kate Wahl, and her fine crew for elegantly steering my book through production. To Benjamin Hollander, the sound-smith who listened with great care to the sounds and sentience in this book’s evolution, go my Haifian bundle of thanks. For offering financial support during the research and writing of this book, I thank the Social Science Research Council, the Palestinian-American Research Center, the Jonathan Shapira Fund, and the Committee for Educational Guidance for Arab Students in Haifa. To the descendents of Hajja Khadija and al-Badawi in the Abbas “tribe” go my thanks for nourishing this book, even by distraction, as we continue to live out the wider book of our common daily lives. Though we are separated by oceans, I thank my in-laws, Joan and Hugh Alpert, for their robust support, for availing space to write during visits to the United States, and for vital and discerning edits by Joan. Par ticu lar lines and thoughts in this book ineluctably grew out of conversations I have had with my siblings, Khulud, Fawzi, and Salah, who co-shouldered its brunt. Until my final breath I will remain indebted to my parents, Jamal and Jamila, for cultivating in me a palate for the secret sweetness of suffering. This book owes its beginnings and its compass to my mother, whose absence continued to nourish it, just as her presence had steadily done. To the awesome beginners, my children, Mysoon, Sukayna, and Jamal, I owe both the light that traversed through them when darkness shrouded my path and the serenity they brought when life’s hubbub prevailed. My soul mate, Helene, knows this book is but one emanation from the well of our bond. For all the lessons learned and yet to be learned from this inquiry, my gratitude ultimately returns to God—Maker of All-Forms, the Merciful, the Compassionate, the Light, and the Just, who extends the path of submission.

A NOT E ON T R A NSL I T E R AT ION

A VA S T M A J O R I T Y O F T H E WO R D S I transliterate in this study were spoken in classical literary Arabic (Modern Standard Arabic) during interviews with poets and the public of various regional dialects. Generally, I adhere to the transliteration system followed by the International Journal of Middle East Studies, except for words commonly recognized by English readers. However, I double Latin letters to indicate the gemination of Arabic consonants in lieu of the diacritic shadda. When transliterating words from demotic Arabic, I comply with the pronunciation of the given speaker(s). This occasionally includes assimilation of the definite article (al-) with the initial consonant of the nouns it modifies, as is the case with “solar letters” (al-huruf ash-shamsiyyah). In transliterating names and texts, I use diacritics for premodern sources, except for the Prophet Muhammad. For modern authors and texts, I use commonly recognized spellings and approximate others according to current conventions.

SILENCING THE SEA

INTRODUCTION

“I G I V E M Y S T E P S their form and tell the sea to follow me,” wrote the Syrianborn poet known as Adonis. Through these words, he sought four decades ago, as he still does today, to stir the still waters of poetic and political life throughout the Arab world. His words belong to a wave of remarkable endeavors by Arab poets to secure moorings for their tradition in the modern world. In culling the word “sea” (bahr), Adonis indicates his own powerful location at the crest of that wave, whose tidemarks have reached many shores of Arabic poetry, including Palestinian, the focus of this book. Beyond naming a natural formation, in Arabic “the sea” also refers to poetic meter. Unlike his predecessors who composed Arabic poetry in traditional meters passed down over generations and centuries, Adonis creates his own poetic form and tells meter to follow him. In the quest to modernize poetic forms, whereby Palestinian poets, and Arab poets generally, have radically transformed the sound structures of their poems, poets have adopted free verse and prose poems, forms in which poets, not “the sea,” stand sovereign over rhythms. This substitution of sovereignties has emerged from a protean process in which modernizing poets have essentially rejected poetic meter and refused to measure sound in their compositions. Over the past seven decades, their rhythms have become ever more irregular and their poems ever more silent, more likely to be read quietly and privately than recited publicly, beckoning the eyes more than the ears. As an ethnography of “literary” transformation, this book investigates forms of

2

INTRODUCTION

ethics, politics, epistemologies, and imaginaries, which have led to this prevailing silence in the contemporary poetry of Arab societies. It tunes in to the secular reverberations of these acoustic mutations, particularly within the Palestinian scene, which still struggles for sovereignty in the secular complex of nation-states as it does for a place in “world literature.” A primary goal of this book is to demonstrate ways in which poets’ emerging “silence” bespeaks contradictions and ambiguities of secular formations in modernity as movements in the sounds of rhythms, but also beyond them. I advance three main arguments. First, I argue that poetic forms and forms of life are inseparable. Thus different sonic edifices are enactments or embodiments of forms of life and self, freedom and truth, knowledge and tradition that poets aspire to cultivate, expunge, or simply explore. Poets’ sound techniques (e.g., rhyme, rhythm, and meter) invariably intermingle with sounds of living and knowing in their societies. For example, one poet’s defense of meter may elicit a critique of globalization, just as another poet’s attack on meter’s authority may inspire a critique of authority writ large in Arab or Muslim societies. Perhaps to Arab poets themselves and their public, this indivisibility between “the aesthetic” and “the political” is assumed because the oneness of the human word (and effort) has not experienced the steadily splintering sovereignties of human practice into recognizable, and respected, specializations and expertise as extensively as in the modern, secular West. This dissociability between techniques of poetry and craftings of the self foreshadows my second argument: that the secular has been vital for poets in composing modern rhythms of life. In the seemingly inert and innocuous details of poetic form that carry the fullness and finitude of human practices and the unfolding of collective and personal histories, the secular lives various and distinct facets of its embattled presence. Being far greater than statements poets make about the place of Islam (or religion generally) as consigned to a private place within society and outside politics, the secular affects ways poets conceive their tradition; sustain, relinquish, or renovate its practices; and infuse their articulations of a relation with a public, revealing attendant notions about language, creativity, truth, tradition, freedom, submission, living, and dying in the era of modern specializations. This second argument takes me to the third and final one: in its claims to self-sufficiency, the secular, in complex and contradictory ways, both denies and depends on an “other” it anoints as “the religious.” Poets of secular moder-

INTRODUCTION

3

nity vindicate in poetry what they repudiate in religion. With secular sensibilities they simultaneously rupture and erect ramparts with which they endeavor to found an autonomous field of poetry. They march toward life, freed from the miracles of a religiously persuaded world, only to reembrace them as aesthetic epiphanies, as in Adonis’s thaumaturgic command of the sea. To fashion an argument about secular poetic forms, I must first make a number of assumptions about poetry, poets, and poetic form. I draw upon two premodern conceptions of poetry as a body of knowledge (ilm) and as a historical repository (diwan). With these conceptions as a basis for viewing modern poetry, I have been able to see the poetic tradition as caught in the formation and contestation of truth and subject formations in a par ticu lar society, rather than as an insular unraveling of beauty and imagination. By extension, I approach poets as intellectuals whose work expresses, inquires, embodies, abdicates, and contests certain traditions of truth-subject formations in their society. Therefore poets are not merely expressive artists belonging to the “secular cult of Beauty,” as Walter Benjamin (1968, p. 224) would say, and as some poets in this study might say about themselves. When I began my ethnographic fieldwork, I did not plan to study poetic form. However, when speaking to poets I quickly learned that the topic that most concerned them was the state of verse; it interested and stirred them passionately in all sorts of directions. The question that initially brought me to the field related to a pervasive notion in Palestinian parlance after the collapse of Palestinian society in 1948: summoud, meaning “persistence.” I wanted to understand why poets employed it so commonly, using it to evoke fortitude in the occupied and frailty in the occupier. I was attracted by what appeared both tragic and tragically distant about this sensibility that claims an ethical form of power (and freedom) through powerlessness, once at home in a Sophoclean life, yet largely foreign to a modern life that equates the sovereignty of the self with its power (arche). Yet talking about summoud met only with poets’ disinterest. They informed me repeatedly that the best they had to say about it they had already said in their poems. And so poets took me to my new topic, insistently their topic: poetic form. The current Palestinian poetic scene is dominated by three forms: a traditional ode in use for over fifteen centuries, and two modern arrivals, both less than a century old: free verse and prose poetry. The scene is characterized by a plethora of exceedingly intricate power struggles among these forms, their adherents, and the different worlds they advocate. Henceforth I also refer to

4

INTRODUCTION

them by their common names in this scene: al-amudi for the traditional, classical pre-Islamic ode; taf ila for the modern form of free verse; and qasidat al-nathr for the widely debated form of the prose poem. I must stress that I have not attempted a history of these literary forms, nor do I imply a linear historical narration positing their sequential existence. All three forms coexist today, sometimes even among the works of a single poet, yet they do so in unequal conditions of power and prominence with par ticular consequences to their visibility. One essential difference among these forms involves distinct ways in how poets employ them to handle that raw material from time immemorial: human sound. Rhyme, meter, and rhythm are essential components of poetic forms. At least in the Arab poetic tradition, shir (poetry) has been defined canonically as “measured and rhyming utterance pointing to a meaning” (qaulun mawzunun muqaff a yadullu ala mana). I found a relationship between a growing desire in and among poets for the modern and an abating desire for adhering to the tradition. Sonic measuring has become irrelevant (even an impediment) to poets aspiring to modernity. Since I make an argument about poetic form, it is essential to identify the form of a given poem or that employed by a given poet at a given time. There are many ways to discern a poem’s form. In this study two take precedence. First and primarily, I identify poetic form through poets’ narratives, arguably “embedded philosophies” revealed in fieldwork interviews. Second, I identify form as it is visually manifest in two distinct but related registers: the typographic and the prosodic. The typographic register attends to the visual distribution of a poem’s words on the printed page, that is, its format, whereas the prosodic register captures the measurement of sound in a poem. Prosodic measuring can be expressed in a scansion, a visual analytic rendition of the aural characteristics of composition. Thus the complex of the form’s materiality (its immanence) is drawn from poets’ descriptions and from a poem’s visual and sonic layers as manifest on the page. I conducted my fieldwork from July 2001 to June 2002, focusing on the Palestinian poetic scene in Palestine/Israel primarily in Nazareth, Haifa, alTaybeh, and Ramallah. But I also ventured to neighboring capitals, namely, Amman and Cairo. I spent nearly a month in Cairo during the thirty-fourth International Book Fair held there. I went to other parts of the Arab world partly because the Arabic language does not and cannot abide by colonially inscribed borders of modern nation-states of the Middle East, and partly be-

INTRODUCTION

5

cause Palestinian poets encouraged me not to segregate my study from the wider poetic scene of the Arab world, as their own lives have been under Israeli sovereignty. In Cairo I was able to observe and interview poets from Libya, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, Syria, Lebanon, and even sealedaway Gaza. This range of interviews and observations made clear to me the extent to which the local pursuit of modernity through “the literary” comprises local expression of an otherwise broadly Arab and even global condition. In pursuit of poets working in the three forms of literary Arabic poetry today, I conducted fift y-eight interviews with forty-seven poets, six of whom were women. Their ages ranged from eighteen to eighty-four. I also interviewed seven nonpoets: literary critics and poetry recipients. I attended twenty-four poetry events in the local Palestinian scene, mainly in Nazareth and in Tamra in the Galilee and in al-Taybeh in the center of the country. In the first two locales, I attended the second Palestinian Poetry Festival (Mihrajan al-Shir al-Filastini); in the latter, I attended regular meetings of the Cultural Association (al-Muntada al-Thaqafi). I also attended poetry events held during the thirty-fourth Cairo International Book Fair and a poetry evening in Amman. My investigation additionally included examinations of daily press and archival accounts of activities in the poetic field. Whereas in the daily press I reviewed reports on poetic activities in the local Palestinian and wider Arab scene, my archival work attended to poetic content and context: published verse and political-literary criticism and coverage. The contemporary and historic press offered a map of the local literary terrain and its actors, present and past. One of my chief resources was al-Jadid (The New, 1951–91), a literarypolitical Arabic journal published by the Israeli Communist Party in Haifa. In the Public Library of Ramallah, I reviewed its holdings of al-Karmel (named after the Carmel mountain range). Published by Khalil Al-Sakakini Institute, this periodical was edited by the late Mahmoud Darwish from 1981 until his death in 2008, when it ceased publication. At the Palestinian House of Poetry in al-Bireh, West Bank, I reviewed two periodicals it has published, al-Shuara (The Poets, 1998–present) and Aqwas (Bows, 2001). I also reviewed newspapers of various political affi liations: al-Ittihad (The Union), the only Arabic daily within Israel, published by the Israeli Communist Party; al-Ayyam (The Days), a daily newspaper affi liated with the Palestinian National Authority on the West Bank; Fasl al-Maqal (The Discerning Speech) of the Nationalist Assembly Party; and Sawt al-Haq wal-Hurriya (Voice of Justice and Freedom) of the Islamic Movement. The latter two are Arabic weekly newspapers published in

6

INTRODUCTION

Israel. I also followed the online literary section of the London-based al-Quds al-Arabi. Finally, I made it a habit to read works by the poets whom I met, whether appearing in collections or in the press. Only at the risk of inviting misunderstanding could an introduction omit caveats, and I present quite a few. First, I explain why I focus primarily on poets and only marginally on their poetic works and clarify that this approach implies no statement on my part about the ontological primacy of the author. My study neither ascribes sovereignty to the author nor annuls poets’ authorial agency promoted by notions about the “death of the author.”  I believe this view can be profitably captured with the ambiguity deposited in the very term “subject.” Approached as subjects of the secular, poets in this study constitute the secular as it constitutes them. Second, on the selection of poets in this study a word is necessary. I was interested in poets as agents capable of articulating the practice of speaking and writing in society, irrespective of their standing in the literary establishment. Although all poets in the community in which I worked were invariably published in one or another literary outlet (and the younger ones increasingly posted on the Web), a majority of my informants were unadorned by the literary establishment and unheard of beyond it, living in obscurity and marginality. This point may be trivial to an anthropologist whose discipline does not require studying primarily (if at all) the fortified and famous in their field. Yet the established poets and literary critics I encountered expected literary judgment in my work and assessed its merits accordingly. As with some I encountered in the field, certain readers of this book may be dismayed by my including nonacclaimed poets. Rather than sustaining some literary criterion, this work should be understood as an attempt by ethnographic means to dissociate from assumptions about the literary as a self-evident concept or self-sufficient realm. I set out in part to explore the different sensibilities, practices, conceptions, and traditions involved in legitimizing literary merit, not to demand them. An objective of this work is to demonstrate the extraliterary salience permeating this putative literary merit while refusing to sequester analysis to specialized prosodic, linguistic, and literary forms of expertise. My third caveat relates to my giving preeminence to the materiality of form and therefore sound in poetry to the apparent exclusion of other poetic constituents, which may appear arbitrary at first. Only the conclusion of this book actually analyzes the semantic and figurative content of poetic writing.

INTRODUCTION

7

Why should my investigation exclude other significant aspects of poetry, such as grammar, syntax, and style? The contingencies of disciplinary training are again part of the answer. My goal as an anthropologist has been to learn from poets themselves aspects of their work that are unavailable in their written compositions alone. Another part of the answer has to do with the historically eminent position of sound (and sound measurement, to be precise) in making poetry and denoting its form, whether in Arabic or in any other poetic tradition. In other words, poems are classified as traditional, free verse, or prose based on their sonic architecture rather than tropes, although, of course, these two are always related in complex ways, a relation discussed directly in the book’s conclusion. My final caveat addresses my focus on three literary forms, which do not completely exhaust the field of contemporary Arabic poetry. I focus on them to the exclusion of other emergent and even still unidentifiable forms of poetic work. This work also excludes the immensely rich tradition of oral poetry while acknowledging that a total severance between oral and literary Arabic is unattainable. Also unattainable is a binary and irreversible distinction between audial and visual forms. The modern shifts at the center of this study and the debates among poets over the modernity of their tradition are quintessentially situated within the literary immanence of Arab poetic production. This means that the modern forms of free verse and prose poetry on which I focus are relevant to poets who compose in fusha (literary Arabic) and practically irrelevant to poets working in amiyya (demotic Arabic). It is this and only this kind of irrelevance of particular modern shifts to the world of colloquial Arabic poetry that accounts for my excluding it in this study. No normative reasoning about the legitimacy of one kind of poetry over the other should be ascribed to my attention to literary as opposed to colloquial poetry. And now some notes on the parts and chapters of this book. My story opens with three “Initiations.” They aim to acquaint the reader with terms of reference necessary for comprehending the argument and the story through which it unfolds. The first, “Secular Bewilderment,” develops the argument about secularizing poetic forms. It presents my sense of the relevance of secularism and secularization to this study, the notion of “the secular” I employ, and how I concretely register the secular in the world of modernizing poets. The second and third initiations place the story I want to tell in axes of time and place, respectively. “Rhythms and Rulers” acquaints the nonspecialist

8

INTRODUCTION

reader with knowledge of pivotal terms, techniques, and personae in the history of the Arabic poetic tradition, who are also evoked by poets in their narratives. To help graft this technical knowledge onto the fabric of life forms to which Arabic poetry belongs, I follow one prominent line of drama in the history of Arabic poetry: the encounter between the poet and political authority. I trace this drama through the work of three paradigmatic figures: the pre-Islamic al-Shanfara, the twelft h-century al-Mutannabi, and the modernera Syrian-born Adonis. “The Land of the Poem” presents a particular poetic field and its political prominence: the scene of Palestinian poetry festivals under the first Israeli military regime (1948–66). This history provides an important setting for positioning the ethnographic narratives that follow. In this section, I observe the last days of a historically dominant, but now largely defunct, form of al-amudi (the pillared) in the modernity of Arabic poetry. I also show the earliest cracks out of which free verse erupted onto and arose from this par ticular scene. After “Initiations,” the core ethnographic narration is organized into three parts, according to the three poetic forms inhabiting the literary scene. The first part is “The Song,” dedicated to the traditional form of al-qasida, more commonly known as al-amudi, with its regularity of a single rhyme, rhythm, and meter throughout a given poem. “The Picture” is dedicated to free verse, commonly called taf ila. In free verse, the practice of measuring sound loses its preeminence as poets slacken meter’s grip, but without entirely discarding it. “The Dream” is dedicated to the prose poem, qasidat al-nathr, in which poets completely repudiate the traditional practice of sound measuring, thus “silencing the sea.” In naming these parts, I point to the paradigmatic practice, “the grammar,” as it were, in the sonic edifice of each form. While “The Song,” “The Picture,” and “The Dream” aim to delineate the retreat of sound and the ascendancy of visualization (and obscure visualization at that), in no way should the practices they represent be taken as mutually exclusive. Within this tripartite discussion lives another one. Each ethnographic part consists of three chapters whose narratives each focus on one of three relations, which figured prominently in my conversations with poets: their relation to poetic tradition, to rhythm, and to a reading or listening public. These chapters are sequenced to express an escalating intensity in secularizing forms whereby poets view the measuring of sounds as increasingly obsolete and simultaneously express a greater mistrust of the audience.

INTRODUCTION

9

This secularizing intensity culminates in the book’s conclusion, “Secular Prayers.” While the ethnographic narratives explore form, largely through what poets say about it and principally about its sound properties, the conclusion shifts to an analysis of content. It also deviates from ethnographic interviews and observations to pursue a close and critical reading of poetic selections. This analysis of actual poetic writing aims to show the reader what poets always insist upon: a change in sound structures ineluctably involves a change in the poem’s structures of meanings. To effectively demonstrate this inseparability between form and content, I have chosen to focus on certain highly influential writings by Adonis (in free verse primarily and to a lesser extent in prose forms), who championed the cause of Arab modern secularity. Although Adonis is not Palestinian, his work has had a significant influence on the Palestinian and wider Arabic poetic scene. But more relevant to my argument, analyzing Adonis’s work enables me to probe a quandary that riddles the secular, demonstrating the ambiguities and contradictions in its modern workings through the ways it arranges its relation with the religious, in this case within a literary field.

1

SECULAR BEWILDERMENT

E T H N O G R A P H I C F I E L DWO R K among poets shaped my interest in secularism. Poets themselves, to be sure, did not repeatedly invoke it, yet secularism was profoundly assumed in the ways they sought to modernize their tradition and make it relevant to their world. The modernizing poets’ narratives—their “embedded philosophies”—collected through ethnographic field interviews most immediately resonate with secularism as a political doctrine of separation when the poets express its typical demand for expunging religion from politics. However, the secular as a dominant presence, as a hegemonic mode of knowing and living “the real” of the modern world, also reverberates in what poets say they wanted to do in their poems. It lives among modernizing poets in what Taylor (2007, p. 4) calls “the whole background understanding and feel of the world.” Poets assume the secular, a power for distancing themselves from a world they call “religious,” when they speak of what is “natural,” “obvious,” “necessary,” and even “inevitable” for modernizing their techniques and conceptions of poetic work. I, in turn, approach the secular as a force that goes far beyond the nonreligious and constitutes par ticu lar formations of being and knowing in the modern world. Through poets’ narratives, I show how the secular has been vital as well as complex in its working within a modern poetic transformation. It is exactly in poets assuming the secular that I realized its power during my fieldwork. I have come to consider its “silence” as a paradoxical sign of its dominant presence in the modern world. Its power does not simply lie in its

14

I N I T IAT I O N S

ability to be evoked by poets, to appear as vestments they wear or in pronouncements they make about a literary agency opposing religious authority or tradition in the public realm, although it is there as well. Most profoundly, the secular’s ability to operate viscerally and silently as axiomatic and natural, even with regard to sounds poets may or may not versify, attests to the magnitude of its power. It was natural and self-evident for certain poets in this study to posit poetry as distinct from religion, writing as more powerful than reciting, and historical time as sovereign over all others (e.g., a time of eternity). Their narratives make manifest the secularity of such separations and their implications for the secular’s claims of self-sufficiency. The moments when the secular commits itself to silence are no less significant than the moments during which it surfaces in speech. Such moments of silence occur frequently when secular poets write mythically. In fact, poets resort to religious scriptures and ancient myths of the Middle East in distinct ways that are not even possible for traditional poets. In his famous collection of poems, Songs of Mehyar the Damascene, discussed in the conclusion to this book, Adonis (1971, p. 98) confesses, “O Phoenix I prayed . . . so madness would lead us.” I found it bewildering that poets want to claim for history as opposed to, say, myth, or rationality as opposed to irrationality, an authoritative role in public life. But they prolifically use mythical signs, religious references, and seemingly illogical and nonrealistic constructions in their poetic compositions. The turn from versified to prose rhythms of poetry; the attendant changes in conceptions of poetic tradition, public, and agency; and a distinct resort to religious signs in poetry constitute a complex of secular shifts, effects, and consequences. They are not secular because poets declare them as such nor only because poets embed them in declarations for a separation between poetry and religion, or politics and religion, or for keeping Islam (and religious authority generally) within a private sphere of personal belief about the supernatural. The secularity of these shifts resides in what poets do with words (and in what they want their words to do), which profoundly resonates with the modern and contingent career of the secular as an ontology and epistemology of distancing from what or whom it anoints as “the religious.” One of the curious things secular poets do with words is evoke the mythical. In transforming poetic concepts and practices, the secular in modern Arabic poetry has not simply banished the religious; it has also come to depend on it. Poets evoke and mostly presume the secular as they conceive

SECULAR BEWILDERMENT

15

boundaries of their tradition and yet resort to its other, the religious, in their rhythmical and figurative practices. Furthermore, while poets advocate a nonsacred language—and accordingly aspire to have ordinary, prosaic roles in society—they charge their acts of writing with extraordinarily redemptive capabilities. The act of writing redeems (“liberates”) them from the prose and perishability of life. In and of itself, writing becomes an act of salvation to which secular poets aspire in the face of oblivion. Such aspects of this apparent secular quandary may not be peculiar only to modern poets. Reasons exist to believe it is a quandary of the secular itself. It remains the task of elaboration beyond the scope of this book to show exactly when and where this secular quandary manifests itself in other scientific, intellectual, economic, or political pursuits that owe their legitimacy to the secular. My account modestly aims to point to the possibility that something like this quandary could exist elsewhere and to advocate for the pursuit of other studies on this question. If modernizing poets’ quandary is in essence secular, it follows that one would expect other versions of it to appear in other places where the secular, morphed into a modern power, inscribes itself. Here my argument in the form of a narrative points only to the need for a sequel on its quandaries. My understanding of the secular that enables this argument is different from the all too common view that secularism is that which is outside religion, or even inimical to it. It is also common to think of secularization as a sacredness-stripping force. I part from these understandings and instead largely work with Talal Asad’s (2003) concept of the secular as a modern form of power. According to this concept, the secular is not to be reduced either to a political doctrine that requires the separation of religion and politics (secularism) or to a sociological thesis and a par ticu lar historical process (secularization), which has been crucial for creating the self-image of the modern era (rational, intellectual, worldly, disenchanted, and scientific; Casanova, 1994). Rather, the secular lives in the grammar of our modern being and forms, not only beliefs (theistic or otherwise), but also in conditions in which—and this is a crucial point for my argument—experiences of the oneness of human action splinters into autonomous realms. This useful distinction marks “the secular” as constituting “the real” and is therefore irreducible to a thesis, theory, doctrine, or perspective. It departs from a partisan preoccupation, however variegated, of secularization and secularism with religion in modern society and permits an investigation of poets’

16

I N I T IAT I O N S

modern secularity as something beyond accommodating religiosity to modern forms of life. As an epistemic-ontological category, the secular opens inquiry into how secular poets articulate as natural their particular need for founding the realm of poetry as an autonomous archipelago. Drawing upon Asad’s notion, one can examine the secular as a formative power that generates distinct ways of living and thinking in the modern world, without normatively investing this power with the enduring salvational purposes of Christianity (as in Taylor, 2007). Insofar as it inhabits the senses, concepts, and practices that make up the real in the modern condition, the secular constitutes a presence that requires creation of an absence it names “the religious.” In other words, I take as a distinct power of the secular its ability to operate as external to what it defines and even redefines as “the religious.” Inasmuch as the modern power of the secular demands through this redefinition the absence of the religious, it acquires its self-recognition through denial and dependency. And so the seemingly sovereign language of the secular and the forms of life it enables must thereby appropriate, substitute, and compensate for the religious. Typically this differentiating aspect of the secular is studied in theaters of nation-states and their management of religious life. The literariness of the secular remains generally a marginal preoccupation in the field of secularism studies. The question that dominates literary debates is the adequacy of identifying literature, romanticism, or criticism as secular. In this study I move away from a concern with the adequacy (or lack thereof) of the secular/ religious as an identity. Instead, I regard the secular to have evolved in modernity as a truth-subject forming power. Rather than asking whether or not Arabic poetry is genuinely secular, I examine a modern and particular career of the secular in its ability to generate as well as undermine subjectivities and truths within conditions of its modern power. My ethnographic investigation specifically focuses on the complex and contradictory consequences of secular poets seeking to redefine the boundaries of their practice and their purposes and forge new tools and relations to the public. The secular is made manifest in poets’ articulations of the aims of their poetic practice, in their attitudes toward the public, in their selections of tropes, and indeed in their composition of rhythms. I thus pursue Asad’s initial and generic formulation of the secular by examining the particular practices and concepts surrounding the techniques with

SECULAR BEWILDERMENT

17

which poets handle sounds in their compositions. Linked to the insight that “a hugely influential variety of secularism is institutionalized under the guise of the literary” (Jager, 2010, p. 184), and without any assumptions about the inherent secularity of literature, this study inquires into the ways the literary (specifically poetry) has evolved as a playing field of the secular. There is more to the secular than its being a powerful modern formation. Such a view imbues it with a lack of substance throughout its history and permits it no fi xed historic identity (Asad, 2003, p. 25; Blumenberg, 1985, pp. 9–10). To limit the secular to the status of an authoritative presence in the world that is external to religious authority is largely to work with its Christian and particularly post-Reformation career, especially after it “crossed over” (Blumenberg, 1985, pp. 5–6) from theology and culminated in claims of self-sufficiency in the modern era. That’s when the secular began to be equated with the immanence of the world and to be understood as all there is, denying as illusory the realness of that other world it demeaned as religious and transcendent (Taylor, 2009, pp. 1144–46). The particularly modern apparition of the secular as a form of power and as external to religion can stand for all its historic apparitions in the world only if its semantic malleability is forgotten and only when its referential ability is sealed. Reviewing a number of rings encircling the semantics of the secular spanning over two millennia can help to forestall consigning the referential abilities of the concept’s semantics to its Latin Christian history, and particularly to its history of domination following the Protestant Reformations, or rather following 1492, after which European “man,” in the words of Arendt ([1958] 1998, p. 250) or the murmurs of Heidegger, moved toward taking “full possession of his mortal dwellings.” In its Roman beginnings, long before it arose in the ser vice of domination (including domineering forms of “tolerance”) in the modern era of nationstates, the secular once marked finitude. In pre-Christian Latin, it announced the transience of time, persons, peoples, and places, as in its first appearance in the Latin saeculum, meaning a period of time, generation, era, or century. For example, cities and civilizations were allotted different saecula, that is, durations. The secular continued to signal finitude in early Christianity through its new locution, seculere, meaning “the world.” Yet seculere and the related saeculum negated “time of eternity” or Christ’s return, as, for example, when Augustine used seculere in contrast to eschaton (end of days) but not in contrast

18

I N I T IAT I O N S

to religion. The German descendants of Latin have the word irdischen to remind them of this inheritance from an antiquity and especially from the early Christianization of Latin wherein the secular means the worldly and earthly. Later, in monastic Christianity and its Canon Law, saecularatio became the name of a legal process through which persons and property leave, not irreversibly, the cloister and reside among the laity. In the next semantic ring the secular entered its modern course, following Europe’s expansion into the world, the Protestant Reformations, and the Peace of Westphalia. It began to name (through its derivative “secularization”) a historic process entailing a massive seizure of church authority and property. This prominent meaning is evoked in Marx’s (1843–44) “Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ ”: “But just as emancipation is not limited to the princes, so the secularization of property will not be limited to the confiscation of church property, which was practiced by hypocritical Prussia” (quoted in Blumenberg, 1985, p. 21). An additional semantic ring encircled the secular when George J. Holyoake, as part of the Freethought Movement, fashionable in Europe, founded the Secular Society and in 1851 coined the term secularism. In so doing, Holyoake wanted to preempt charges of atheism while advocating to replace Christianity with systems of science and reason that absented reference to supernatural and transcendent authority (Asad, 2003, p. 18). This Freethought Movement cannot be properly understood outside the Enlightenment critique of religion, which attracted both the mundane and the maverick among Europe’s intellectuals in search of an “exit from selfincurred immaturity.” Among these searchers was Max Weber, who imbued the secular’s semantic trunk with another meaning when he developed his theory about the differentiation of societal spheres. In that theory, Weber articulated his thesis of secularization by predicting the decline of religion. In describing and prescribing secularization, this thesis takes intellectualization and rationalization to function almost as synonyms of secularization, so that a par ticu lar mode of worldliness came to stand for all modes of worldliness. This par ticular immanence of the secular—its appearance in the world as a theory of secularization—maintained a paradigmatic presence in the rationality of the academic intellect in the West until its certitudes began to falter, especially in needing to account for religion’s refusal to vanish, as religious politics has been revived since the late 1960s on a global scale. This faltering of foundational secular certitudes, chief among them the secular’s claims for self-sufficiency, in a basic way animates my account of the

SECULAR BEWILDERMENT

19

secularizing of poetic forms, compelling me to think through rather than simply denounce or embrace the secular. The secular inhabits the way poets write, what they write, and for whom they write (including both their disposition toward and perceptions of the public). Their being secular does not simply mean that they have chosen not to grow beards and wear headscarves in the Middle Eastern lexicon of religious and secular signs. Rather, the secular in this story is largely and contingently a dominant fragmentary formation in ways of knowing and being in the modern era. It is a kind of presence in the world that quintessentially compartmentalizes, a worldliness that operates in the modern era in contrast to the otherworldly and presumes to stand for all modes of worldliness and exhaust all ways of residing in the world. As a dominant force of compartmentalizing, the secular thereby involves separating more than religion from politics. It also involves separating the poetic from the nonpoetic as a rubric in which poets also rearrange and redefine their sense of the world’s realities and nonrealities. I must stress that I do not attribute to the secular a primal causality for transforming Arabic poetry, but I do locate its compartmentalizing effects in the conditions and consequences of how poets have come to handle sonic distribution in their compositions. Assuming no inherently oppositional relation between a poet’s disposition and his or her practice, I approach the secular as a formation that works on the senses (e.g., seeing and especially hearing) and the various hierarchies attained among them, and how in turn the rearrangement of sensory hierarchies and experiences affects senses of truth, self, time, and place. Rather than confining the secular to declarations on the place of religion in society or its relation to politics, I approach it as forming a “particular sensorium” (Ong, 2002, p. 11) or a “cultural regiment of perception” (Schmidt, 2000), that is, as a way of rearranging the various senses and their reception of reality as well as generating kinds of subjectivity and knowledge. The secular therefore lies in a multiplicity of formations through which poets constitute themselves as poets and make distinctions between deep and smattering knowledge, clarity and obscurity of words, creativity and its absence, freedom of the self and its enslavement, versified and prosaic text, and certainly between the poetic and what is not poetic. In the narratives of this study, secularizing poets do call for privatizing religion away from politics and the arts, in keeping with the doctrine of secularism. But as they sustain the secular in their poetic practice, they exhibit additional attributes of the secular and its power. For example, they rely on notions

20

I N I T IAT I O N S

of freedom and creativity that are resoundingly secular (via liberalism) in erecting the sonic structures of their verse. The structures of their secular rhythms presume the sovereignty of a secular self, which learns to fear for its autonomy—from corrosive effects of the public or the authority of traditional meters—to depreciate sound measuring, and to separate art from other realms of human action (e.g., politics) as a precondition of creativity and subsequent redemption. Thus secularizing poets charge the finitude of their work and world with unprecedented infinity (and thus redemption). That poets have come to identify the act of writing with redemption—reaching permanence and freedom from finitude, however elusive they may be—is one among a number of secular effects. This identification is one consummate point in a complex and contradictory process that structures this book and its argument. In looking at the secular in this site and in these ways, I aim to contribute to questioning the place the secular occupies as the real in the modern world that came into being, as well as examine its dependency on the religious, whether acknowledged or not, in those human endeavors realizable through perception and action. Probing the secular’s claims of self-sufficiency and perhaps ultimately remembering a distant frailty that it signaled long before it evolved as a modern form of authoritative presence, one could ask a number of questions: How does a modern secular self draw its boundaries with its other, or with its other unadmitted, nonsecular rings of identity? What powers does the secular inscribe and erase as it affirms its truth in the formation of sounds, spaces, times, desires, certitudes, and doubts of modern subjects? How do a variety of modern autonomously practiced pursuits (therapy, finance, law, literature, science, worship, art, and politics) carry their certainties on the backs of ambiguities that are resoundingly secular? What conditions foster experiences of living and comprehending either the autonomy of these various pursuits or their indivisibility? To suggest the dependency of the secular on the religious, to question its claims for epistemic or ontological self-sufficiency is not to embrace one for the other. The enormous mutability of the secular and the religious in the West demands that thinking about them be constantly receptive to both, even if that receptivity obliges a return all the way back to the universe of Zeus Herkeios (protector of Greek borders, including both private and public varieties) before making any political decisions about any form of redemption that each promises to deliver.

2

RHY THMS AND RULERS

I N T H E B E G I N N I N G was the sound, as one might say when considering the foundations of the Arab poetic tradition, or for that matter any such tradition. From the vast stillness of the sands, under starry nights, out of sweltering heat, through ceaseless sojourns of humans and animals, and between the interlaced shades of life and death, the earliest rhythms of Arabic probably emerged. The historical record witnessed the evolution of these rhythms into a form that came to stand for Arabic poetry and has been known as qasida (ode) in Arabia for at least sixteen centuries. This astounding regularity of sounds defined Arabic poetry from the ancient highlands of Yemen to the forgotten cages of Guantánamo Naval Base, from the Arabic language to thirteen other languages across Africa and Asia, from the pre-Islamic era until the rise of nation-states in the modern Middle East. Until only recently qasida defined Arabic poetry. What follows is an initiation into some basic and influential concepts, techniques, words, figures, forces, and legends that animated and continue to animate the Arab poetic tradition. This initiation focuses on a set of encounters running through the history of Arabic poetry between political authority and the authority of poetry. Besides highlighting foundational references, I also visit the relation between Islam (and specifically the Quran) and poetry. Familiarity with these details will help in understanding the references, some more explicitly evoked than others, by the poets presented in the subsequent chapters. This initiation aims to present the significance of the poetic

22

I N I T IAT I O N S

tradition and that of sound within it, as well as the foreground for my argument about the entry of this tradition into a secular world. In a way it was the sense of loss of significance that started this account. It was a doubt about the fate of poetry in the modern era that compelled it, one that I experienced while still doing fieldwork research. When obituaries of martyrs (shuhada) were proliferating and frequently changing on public and private walls, storefronts, and electricity poles of Ramallah in the midst of the 2002 Israeli military onslaught, I had to restrain my inquiry into poets who wonder about martyrdom and its attainment by the women and men who face occupation. Such poets would insist that martyrs write with blood a kind of poetry that they are forever incapable of surpassing with their words. Only rarely did one of them venture into uniting the two stations (poet and martyr), as happened in the famous case of Abdul-Rahim Mahmoud. Although I did not pursue poets’ fascination with martyrdom, I did succumb to the pressure of a few poets who insisted that poetry is dead and began seriously to entertain their thoughts. Perhaps these poets are right. Perhaps there is no poetry anymore, at least in the sense of a tradition having collapsed into incoherence and nonviability. Exploring the possibilities that shut down and open up in the aftermath of a tradition’s collapse in part drives my account about secularizing forms in the Arab poetic tradition. Such existential doubt about poetry’s presence in the world enabled me at times to register the “poetic effect,” the stepping to the beyond, as it were, outside publicly recognizable, authoritatively defined poetry, not only through martyrdom, as poets themselves sometimes do, but also in what we moderns have learned to recognize as the realm of religious experience. As I avoided sealing boundaries between the poetic and the religious, or between the aesthetic and the pious, I found myself during my fieldwork confronting the borders of the terrain between poetry and the Quran. Ignoring the place of the Quran in Arab-Muslim life thins any understanding of poetry’s place in it. Yet it was not only existential doubt that compelled me to consider the relationship between the Quran and poetry as a way of introducing the Arab poetic tradition. It was also a disagreement. I could not agree with the many poets I met who thought that an absent “culture of reading” (thaqafat al-qiraa) in Arab societies explains public disinterest in poetry in general, or their poetry specifically. I could not agree because everywhere I saw people reading the Quran or listening to someone else reading, or rather reciting it. I could not say the same about poetry, certainly

RHY THMS AND RULERS

23

not about modern poetry. So given the poets’ skepticism about the mere existence of poetry and the disagreements I had with some of their opinions about a putatively absent literacy, I thought it illuminating to evoke the Quran’s presence by way of introducing the great tradition of Arabic poetry. After all, all poets, as I learned during my fieldwork, want to accomplish precisely what the Quran is believed to accomplish: to inspire thoughtful movement in the human heart. Traversing the distance between the Quran and poetry follows a certain logic: any understanding of the place of local Palestinian poetry in the modern world has to begin with an acknowledgment of its place in the larger Arab poetic tradition. Any understanding of the Arab poetic tradition rests on appreciating the place of the word in Arab history. Furthermore, we cannot appreciate the place of the word (and sound) in Arab Muslim societies if we do not acknowledge in one way or another the standing of the Quran, whose revelatory language has condemned poets yet has continued to inspire them for nearly a millennium and a half. In accounts of the Arabs’ great awe of poets and poetry, it is common to hear stories of tribal feasts and festivities in honor of a rising poet or stories about dramatic encounters between poets and patrons (Ibn Rashiq, 1963; Ibn Qutayba, 1969; Nicholson, 1923). Yet the immense presence of the Arab poetic tradition can be observed also from that which is outside poetry. By this I mean the Quran. More specifically, the prominence of the poetic word can be heard through the Quranic refutation of the accusation leveled against the Prophet Muhammad by some of those who first heard him. The Prophet was accused of being a poet, for who else could come up with such unusually stirring, even piercing sounds? Repeatedly, however, the Quran objects to this accusation, insisting that the words of the Prophet are not from a shaytan (satanic force), as some disbelievers have thought (and in keeping with the ancient Arab belief about the suprahuman source of poetry). The words of Muhammad, the Quran tells us, came from God. The Prophet is only a messenger of divine writ. The fact that disbelievers should deny the prophetic ministry of Muhammad, or see him dismissively as only a poet (at times majnun, “insane”), points to the awe Arabs had and perhaps still have for poets. I say perhaps because the historical eminence accorded to poets became unsettling to modern poets and their kindred literary critics who want to shed whatever sacredness they now perceive as attached to their language and their craft. They instead seek

24

I N I T IAT I O N S

to counter this legacy by writing prosaic poetry of daily lives focused on prosaic enchantments that come with a petit bonheur far from the greatness of the public realm. Surely the link between the Quran and poetry could have been established in other ways, such as by discussing the fact that one of the Quran’s suras (chapters) carries the title “Poets” (“al-Shuara”) and in fact goes on to condemn poets (but not poetry). Yet introducing the Arab poetic tradition via the Quran serves to show the civilizational prominence of poetry. And it points to another relation that exists between the Quran and poetry: verses of the Quran and verses of Arabic poetry share a profound valuation of and reliance on human sound. In addressing the human heart, the Quran presumes a listening ear just as much as if not more than a seeing eye. For the meaning of the Quran’s verses to be conveyed as perfectly as possible, it is essential for the verses to be heard, read aloud, or rather recited, as the book itself instructs its readers. Therefore, when reciting the Quran, even if alone, one is encouraged to read aloud in order to enable a fuller comprehension of meanings, in order for words to stay closer to what made them, to their beginning: sounds. Besides the Quran, the Arabic language itself testifies to the primacy of sound, especially in poetry. First, phonetically, shir, the Arabic word for “poetry,” points to related words in other Semitic languages (e.g., Akkadian, Aramaic, and Hebrew) that can mean “song” as well as “poem.” Second, Arabs in the poetic tradition maintained a primal affi nity between poetry and song, between word and sound, as evident in numerous classical poems and in classical literary criticism. Due to this affinity, it is common to hear poets and literary critics throughout the history of Arabic poetry refer to poems as songs (sing. nashid; pl. anashid) and to the act of composing or reciting a poem as singing (inshad). Besides song (nashid), poetry was home to other human endeavors, to activities of truth, intellect, and thought, and not merely a superfluous “aesthetic” sphere in the modern, preeminently Kantian sense of the word. Beauty dwelled in the home of poetry, as did knowledge (gnosis), power (arche), and goodness (in Arabic hasan connotes the good and the beautiful). Poetry as a human action offered a unified dwelling for multiple dominions that over a long history of secularization in the West have emerged as such autonomous realms as history, aesthetics, memory, mathematics, morality, politics, religion, and philosophy. In his classic dictionary Lisan al-Arab, Ibn Manzur alIfriqi (1955, pp. 2273–78) compiled an impressively extensive entry for the lexi-

RHY THMS AND RULERS

25

cal explication of shir (poetry). The elasticity of the word is such that it yields numerous forms of verbs and adjectives. The first sense this entry registers is that of poetry as knowledge, as in the common expression layta shiri, meaning “I wish to know” or “I wish I knew.” Therefore a poet is called shair in the sense that she or he knows (yashur) what ordinary others do not. It is only in the modern world that the word for “poetry” in Arabic acquires a distinctly different feel to it, as having to do primarily with emotions (shuur), whereas the word traditionally connoted knowledge (ilm). While still able to be a dwelling place for knowledge, poetry has been a legitimate vehicle for containing truths and countertruths about the world and its affairs. Two paradigmatic figures in the history of Arabic letters stand out for affirming the affinity between poetry and knowledge: al-Jahiz and alJurjani. Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr (circa 775–868), known as the “commander of Arabic prose” or otherwise by his sobriquet, al-Jahiz, is perhaps among the most famous users of shir for investigating human and nonhuman forms of life. His Book of Misers and Book of Animals are replete with “poetic testimonies”; they function in these books as evidentiary bases for prosemade claims (Abbas, 1971, p. 94). Moreover, treating poetry as a legitimate body of knowledge also enabled Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani (died a.d. 1078), a master of Arab criticism, to complete his classic works, Mysteries of Eloquence and Signs of Inimitability. In these two works he sought to demonstrate the stylistic supremacy of the revelatory language of the Quran over all forms of human composition. Al-Jurjani (1989, p. 26) said of his approach to poetry, “I pursued it not for its own sake; I pursued it li arifa bihi [in order to know through it] the place of eloquence, to render it an ideal of creativity, or to use it as evidence in exegesis of the Quran and the Prophet’s tradition, to compare its composition with that of the Quran and thus show the place of ijaz [inimitability].” Taken to be a kind of knowledge and a mode of knowing, Arabic poetry has been utilized for understanding the Quran, and other knowledges, thus opening paths to the language’s potentiality and evolution. To know through poetry traditionally meant in part to know (that is, remember) the past. Poetry in the nomadic and sedentary, but largely oral, forms of Arab life operated as an archive, portable across times and spaces. In this sense, Arabs considered poetry their diwan, their historical repository. The poet became the bearer of his (and occasionally her) people’s memory. A poet’s speech was a song sung to affirm the dignity of one’s individual and collective

26

I N I T IAT I O N S

being, the transience and the tumult of each. Poetry also appeared as a poisontipped spear aimed at an enemy, the sadness over lost times and places, and the sway of love and desire. Two sayings (sing., hadith) attributed to the Prophet Muhammad attest to the traditional power of poetic utterance in Arab society. The Prophet’s profoundly dissenting message was ridiculed by some poets and championed by others, and as a result the Prophet is reported to have said, “One fares better by filling one’s guts with vomit than with poetry,” but also, “In eloquence there is charm and in poetry there is wisdom” (Dayf, 1963, p. 44). There were poets who swore by the Prophet’s life and others who desired its end (Ibn Rashiq, 1963, p. 31). Whatever his views of par ticular poets, they did not deter him or his successors from valuing poetry. For example, the second caliph, Omar Ibn al-Khattab, reportedly recommended teaching children al-Shanfara’s Lamiyya since it teaches what he called makarim al-khlaq (noble ethics) (al-Malouhi, 1966, p. 10). Unlike the Prophet, whose disquiet over and dismay with fellow humans sent him into periodic seclusion in the Cave of Hira in one of Mecca’s valleys, the pre-Islamic poet al-Shanfara, as he admits in one of his odes, opted to live among the wild animals of the desert. Al-Shanfara (meaning “thick-lipped”) is the sobriquet of Thabit bin Aws, to whom Lamiyyat al-Arab is attributed. It is so titled because the rhyming letter (rawiyy) at the end of each verse line happens to be the letter l, or rather the sound lu. Hence an English title for this ode could be “The Arabs’ Lamique,” following the French rendering. Al-Shanfara belonged to a group of brigand poets (salik) who lived on the fringes of human existence. They pursued a precarious life of abject poverty and endurance outside their tribe or any tribe, either for transgressions they committed, inferior genealogy they inherited, or extratribal freedom they desired. Al-Shanfara chose to abandon his natal tribe, Banu Salaman, which mistreated him, and according to legend he vowed to kill a hundred tribesmen. By the time he died, he was said to have killed ninety-nine enemies. According to legend, the brigand poet asked that his body not be buried but become nourishment for those he trusted the most, the wild animals of the desert. His alleged hundredth victim was a man who kicked al-Shanfara’s skull thereby injuring his foot, which led to his death (al-Malouhi, 1966, p. 4; Stetkevych, 1986, p. 369). Embellished or not, the life attributed to al-Shanfara stands in a certain important sense in opposition to his Lamiyya, one of the earliest specimens in

RHY THMS AND RULERS

27

the canon of Arabic poetry. In this ode of sixty-eight verse lines, al-Shanfara declares and explains his abandonment of his tribe, affirms his physical might, valorizes his patience in the face of hunger, and records his resolve to live in dignity outside the tribe rather than in humiliation within it. As such the Lamiyya embodies one of the earliest instances of a tradition of contesting authority through poetry. In this instance, the poem resorts to the authority of poets, classically captured in al-Khalil’s notion of poets as the “commanders of speech,” in order to contest the authority of the tribe. Through complete adherence to the traditional rules of poetic composition al-Shanfara’s poem describes the trials of life of one completely severed from tribal legitimacy. He scrupulously measures sounds in his verse, as any poet (sedentary and nomadic alike) would have done in the tradition of Arabic poetry, to announce his severance from any measure of affinity to the tribe into which he was born. To measure his sounds and to speak of his freedom from tribal authority, he had to submit to the authority of meter, which in turn became the vehicle for his freedom’s articulation rather than negation, as is viewed by secularizing poets. To the poets of a secular modernity, securing the sovereignty of the self increasingly demands that they reject measurement, not submit to it, in contrast to al-Shanfara’s means for searching for life outside the tribe: Raise, my brothers, the chests of your mounts, set them straight; as for me, I incline towards another folk. I have a closer kin than you: a wolf, swift and sleek, a smooth and spotted leopard (smooth speckled snake), and a long-made one—a hyena. They are kin among whom a secret, once confided, is not revealed; nor is the transgressor for his transgressions, forsaken. When the ground, hard and flint-strewn, reaches my feet sparks and splinters fly. I prolong the length of hunger till I bring it death; I turn my mind from it and forget it. I eat the earth’s dust dry, lest any benefactor think me indebted for his favor. I writhe around the hollow of my gut, like a rope maker

28

I N I T IAT I O N S

twisting his strands, firm and tight. Know that I am the master of endurance; I don its cloth like a shirt on a heart like a young wolf’s; I shod determination. The dust-hued does of mountains goats roamed around me, as if they were maidens trailing long-trained gowns. Toward sunset motionless they stood about me, as if among the white-footed goats I were a long-horned buck, heading for the mountain peak, unassailable.

If the imagery in the poem endures the transference to English, what certainly does not is the Arabic rhythm. Although al-Shanfara composed his ode about life outside his inherited kinship, he relied fully on the Arabic tradition of versification, the only tradition his tribe probably ever knew. The enduring self that outlived hunger therefore also endured the laborious process of disciplining the rhythms of self’s sounds. As it deferred hunger, this self deferred dispersed rhythms, that is, prose, in order to count them as poetic. In deferring hunger and prose, the self had to discipline and transmute urges into empowering action (poetry) and nonaction (patience). The form of his poetry, like that which endured in the following centuries, gave Arabic poetry its name and its embodiment. Today practicing poets commonly refer to this form as al-qasida al-amudiyya (the pillared ode) because the word “ode” (al-qasida) by itself no longer evokes what it used to. Its semantic field not as clearly marked as in the past; al-qasida now includes poems that do not sustain the pillars (sing. amud) of Arabic poetry. The “pillar” that al-Shanfara sustained requires measuring and disciplining his sounds from within the authority of rhythmical tradition, which is the authority of poetry. Measurement of sounds was not only the entry to poetry; it was poetry itself. Poetry in the sense of stringing together the rhythms of sounds (nazm) proved more amenable to the memory of a largely nomadic and nonliterate society than prose, a form of unraveling or dispersing (nathr) those rhythms. In his detailed and comprehensive manual, al-Umda (The Pillar), Ibn Rashiq (1963, vol. 1, p. 20; died a.d. 1064) wrote, “Arabic speech was all prose at first but Arabs needed to sing praises for noble morality, their genealogies, remembrance of ethical deeds, distant lands, chivalry, and magnanimity so the soul

RHY THMS AND RULERS

29

may lean toward nobility, and so children may be steered to a good path. Therefore, they [Arabs] constructed rhymes, which they placed as a measure of speech and when their measurement was completed, they called it shir [poetry] because they sharu [knew], that is, perceived through it.” Th is statement again places poetry in the nexus of knowledge, history, memory, and wisdom. It further articulates a need for measured poetry. This articulation is a defining one for a tradition that does not define poetry outside the regulation of rhythm, which before and beyond conceiving poetry as an idea or emotion has been tantamount to the paramount practice of measuring sounds. Poets therefore had knowledge to bear, a memory or history to transmit, and a craft to practice. Here we arrive at a third conception of the Arab poetic tradition, sana, very much like the classical Greek word techne, meaning a “craft” and “art” that is inseparable from the activity of knowing. As with religion or virtue before the modern era, so it is with poetry: one did not become a poet simply by believing in someone or feeling something. One became a poet by doing something. And what poets did before all else was regulate rhythms that were understood as measuring or disciplining sounds. Addressing the poet as the “maker” of poetry, Ibn Tabataba (1982, p. 21; died a.d. 934) says in his classic Iyar al-Shir (Standard of Poetry), “Measured poetry has a rhythm whose correctness enchants understanding.” What is striking about this statement as it infuses music and thought is that it belongs to a world in which understanding, knowledge, and truth were not a dominion monopolized by letters and literacy. Literary poetry is therefore not to be conflated with a canon produced by literate agents. In fact, a great many poets making up the literary canon of Arab poetry were nonliterate. Before being regarded as letters, sounds too, even their rhythms, conveyed truths. In the world of that statement by Ibn Tabataba, the ear was still a primary (or in any event, legitimate) organ of communicating truths—not the eye alone or predominantly, as required by modernist poets who desire a literate, not oral reception of their work, because it is reading (far more than listening) that according to new sensibilities secures access to profound thought and comprehension. Yet in the premodern, indeed nonsecularist sensory complex of al-Shanfara’s oral world, seeing things was not the unrivaled measure of their truthfulness. Things did not acquire their reality only by being visible. That world’s immanence still accommodated invisible realities. Through the arduous mastery of the practice of measuring, poets became poets, and that is how a literary tradition conceived of itself until the advent of

30

I N I T IAT I O N S

modern secularity. This paradigmatic notion is embedded in the once famous but now increasingly notorious saying by Qudama Ibn Ja‘far (1981, p. 64), itself a canonical definition of Arabic poetry as “measured and rhyming speech leading to a meaning.” At the core of this minimalist definition is a poetic tradition that understood itself as a practice-based, practical human activity. Poets are constituted through what they do, not what they feel (or believe, intuit, and think), as became the case among poets of the modern “emotive” age. And what came to define what they do is measurement (wazn): regulation and discipline of the rhythms of sounds. So constitutive was the place of sound in this tradition, and more precisely sound regulation, that an intricately elaborate, and now largely obsolete, science of prosody (ilm al-arud) and corresponding terminology was established by al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi of Kufa, Iraq (died circa a.d. 778). He called the single meter bahr, meaning “sea,” which is reportedly linked to his conviction that a single meter is like the sea, and verse lines are its waves. Meter brings ashore endless but never completely identical wave-like verse lines. Al-Khalil identified fifteen distinct “seas” in which Arabic poetry is traditionally composed; al-Akhfash (died circa a.d. 830), a student of his student, added a sixteenth. Al-Akhfash (al-Bahrawi, 1997, p. 46) defines prosody as “the science, which reveals the breakages and the alignments in verse.” In other words, prosody involves uncovering the ways that verse aligns with or deviates from established sound patterns. Poets need not be prosodists, but prosody always gives tools for delineating the architecture of sounds, simple or complex, flawed or fine that poets design. The sounds of Arabic rhythms in al-Khalil’s premodern science are generally divided into three tiers based on their temporal duration, that is, quantity of sounds, as opposed to the stress or accent of sounds. The shortest, most basic sound units are found in the tier of awtad (pegs) and asbab (cords); they stand for six established combinations of mutaharrik (mobile) and sakin (immobile or still) sounds. The immobile sounds stand roughly for consonants and the mobile sounds for consonants followed by vowels; respectively, these terms could be partially equated with notions of “long” and “short” syllables. When sound units of the first tier reoccur, they produce a second tier of ten medium sound units, called tafail (feet). A recurrence of the medium sound units of tafail creates the longest and final tier of the sixteen identified meters. Those meters can and often do subdivide according to codified quantitative variations contained in them, called zihaf (relaxations) or ilal (de-

RHY THMS AND RULERS

31

fects), in which the poet can manipulate the collocation of long and short syllables. Arabic meters (buhur/awzan) are essentially quantitative. Therefore, ultimately, when a poet composes metrically, he or she measures and regulates, whether consciously or not, the quantity of mobile or still sounds in each verse line. Those quantitative sound patterns are the foundations of traditional Arabic rhythms, which sorely lack congruency with modern life according to secularizing Arab poets. The architecture of the single bayt (verse line) in the classical form derives from an elaborate metrical system. I present the technical details of this system for their bearings on the poets’ narratives. These narratives will demonstrate that this sonic architecture is the embodiment of an architecture of self pursued through the poetic form. In other words, the formations of sound are the immanence of self-formations. The predominant construction of classical verse occurs when a poet collocates a bipartite bayt of two equal shatrayn (hemistiches; sing. shatr). Equality of hemistiches here refers to a regularity in number and kind of feet, if there is more than one kind of foot. This regularity of verse lines is then sustained throughout an al-amudi poem. Regulating sound in al-amudi verse involves composing in a regular meter, a regular rhyme, a regular number of feet, a regular configuration of “syllables,” and a regular occurrence of final phonemes or letters. In fact so foundational has this practice been that it has demarcated the limits of poetry: what is within and what is without. Precisely on these ostensibly technical terms, classical scholars have classified the Quran as a category of its own, for being neither prose nor poetry. The Quran adheres neither to established standards nor to practices of poetic composition, as it follows no single rhyme or meter, but unlike prose it involves verses with repeated rhymes. And this is the distinction between modes of composition whose hegemony died with the advent of the modern era, which dissolved this sonic discipline. My explication of Arabic prosody here is of course a severely simplified presentation of an otherwise extremely elaborate metrical system. It aims neither to engage in a linguistic inquiry into the accuracy or universality of the al-Khalili metrical system nor to reveal the ideology that this prosody bears. Prior to the modern undisciplining of sounds, “singing” is how Abu alTayyib Ahmad bin al-Hussein (915–968), otherwise remembered as alMutanabbi (“the one who prophesies”) and considered the “seal of poets” (khatam al-shuara), conceived of his poetry when he boastfully called him-

32

I N I T IAT I O N S

self in one of his poems the “lord of rhymes” (rabbu al-qawafi). Al-Mutanabbi was born in Kufa, Iraq, and is said to have lived among Bedouins in the desert for three childhood years. In relation to al-Shanfara, located at the beginning of the canonical tradition, al-Mutanabbi stands at its other chronological end. Al-Shanfara lived prior to Islam, and al-Mutanabbi lived when Islam’s central political authority was beginning to disintegrate into local potentates. Like his predecessor’s, al-Mutanabbi’s work was made to confront authority, not of the tribe, but of a sovereign ruler. Coming to power after the demise of the Umayyid caliphate in Damascus (661–750), the Abbasid dynasty in Baghdad (749–1258) was but the nominal seat of central Muslim authority by al-Mutanabbi’s time. Other political centers rivaled its power to attract the ambitions and abilities of poets. AlMutanabbi traveled across several deserts and visited several courts. Notable among them was Aleppo’s court of the Sayf al-Dawla (916–967) of the Hamdanid dynasty in northern Syria (905–1004). So immense were the poet’s standing and self-confidence that he conditioned his acceptance of an invitation to join the ruler’s court on his absolution from various signs of ceremonial deference. Al-Mutanabbi did not want to stand, but to sit while singing his panegyric; he did not want to kiss the soil between the suzerain’s feet or dismount his horse while addressing him. Sayf al-Dawla consented to the poet’s terms, and al-Mutanabbi lived in that court for nine years. He composed for his patron what have become some of the most celebrated Arabic poems. Mostly panegyrics, they frequently include lines of wisdom, some of which have become so ingrained in Arabic as to remain part of its proverbial layer to this day. Al-Mutanabbi’s ambition and talent made it impossible for him to stay in the court of that ruler. Sayf al-Dawla disappointed al-Mutanabbi when he failed to duly distinguish his poetic genius from the lesser abilities of other poets in the court. The poet’s love, and love there was, for his patron was thus laced with bitterness toward the regent’s refusal or inability to exude an esteem that befits “the lord of the rhymes.” When another court poet, Abu Firas al-Hamadani (932–968), who was also the ruler’s cousin, according to literary anecdote, assaulted al-Mutannabi and Sayf al-Dawla failed to defend him, alMutannabi decided to leave Aleppo, which he did with a rebuke to his patron. As with al-Shanfara’s, al-Mutanabbi’s contestatory verse was in the classical form of Arabic poetry. His poetic contestation of the ruler’s unrefined and undiscerning judgment did not preclude adherence to an extremely refined

RHY THMS AND RULERS

33

rhythmical discipline. The misjudgment, or rather the unmeasured judgment of the potentate stands in opposition to the poet’s rigorously measured rhythms. Submission to the sovereignty of meter in poetic composition enabled alMutannabi to boldly challenge the sovereign’s judgment, as when he said: O most just of men to all save me alone, The quarrel is over you, but you are both enemy and judge I exonerate you from regarding them buxom Those who are merely bloated . . . The assembly in this hall shall learn That I am the best man to tread on earth I am he whose verse the blind has seen I am he whose words made the deaf hear them I sleep through the night not waiting for rhymes to come While others stay awake and struggle to catch a rhyme Look the ignorant! My good humor allowed him to stay fool Until he was annihilated by hand and mouth If you ever see the lion’s teeth showing Suppose not that the lion is merely smiling . . . The steed, the night, and the wilderness know me well, The sword knows me and the spear, the pen and the parchment know me too I befriended the beasts of wilderness Until the mountain peaks saw my magnificence . . . The most evil of all lands is one that leaves you friendless A tainted gain is the worst a human makes With what words do the pygmies utter poetry Neither Arabs nor foreigners, all of them you accept.

It would be incorrect to assume that al-Mutanabbi’s Arabic of the tenth century was the same as that of his pre-Islamic predecessor, al-Shanfara. The vocabulary, the imagery, and the syntax set the two poets worlds apart. Yet both constructed the same sonic edifice whose constituent material was rhyth-

34

I N I T IAT I O N S

mical discipline through sound measurement. Both of them measured their rhythms. Both of them produced poems with a regular rhyme, rhyming letters, and specified amounts of sound units in each verse line. Although the rhythmical rigor is naturally lost in English translation, the power of the poetic utterance as well as the oral-audial foundations are not. Even passing attention to his figurative language demonstrates that al-Mutanabbi parallels the kingship of the lion to the kingship of that bodily organ out of which poetry is annunciated: the mouth. In al-Mutanabbi’s world, when confronting the enemy, the sword can never complete its mission if it does not come with the word. The patron’s rule over the land is thus audaciously contested by the poet’s rule over the land of language. But besides the potency of the word, and poetic utterance specifically, al-Mutanabbi’s work also illustrates poetry as work on rhymes and measurement. The poem, for al-Mutanabbi, in keeping with the canonical definition of Arabic poetry, is something heard and recited. He signals this idea in the third line, when he speaks of his words as seen by the blind and heard by the deaf. Even if he committed his poetry to writing, alone in the starry nights of the desert, accompanied only by his sword, pen, parchment, and horse, his poems were to be uttered before and beyond being read. After al-Mutanabbi’s era, the Muslim world continued to splinter into fissures of power. Not until the conquest of Constantinople in the fifteenth century did a recognizably central Muslim authority emerge again. Yet the end of al-Mutanabbi’s era was also the end of the classical period of Arabic poetry. Other forms came to inhabit the scene of literary expression. For instance, the maqamat rhyming prose of the tenth through the twelft h centuries relied abundantly on the resources of classical poetry but was never confused with or considered poetry so as not to challenge the standing of the classical qasida. In Muslim Spain emerged the strophic form of muwashahat, but this form, like the maqamat, was in a way a variation on this same theme. It sustained a regular and distinct rhyme in different stanzas, but never rivaled the hegemony of rhyme regulation of the qasida. Throughout its history, Arab literary criticism accumulated a slew of debates on numerous questions: nature and culture, content and form, religion and poetry, realism and imagery, and plagiarism, or what might be loosely translated into the fashionable phrase “textuality” (Abbas, 1971, pp. 30–41). Throughout the history of these debates, arguments, and counterarguments

RHY THMS AND RULERS

35

in the tradition of poetic composition and literary criticism, sound and measuring proved paramount. Only toward the middle of the twentieth century did the “pillars,” a hegemonic inheritance from the pre-Islamic era fi fteen centuries earlier, begin to collapse. But that was not a sudden event in history. By then a century and a half had passed since the modern colonial encounter between the Orient and the West began, that is, since 1798, when Napoleon presented himself to Egyptians in Alexandria as the defender of Islam: “Nous sommes les vrais musulmans” (Said, 1979, p. 82). By then the modern horrors of the global European wars had seen the light of day. By then Palestine as an intact homeland had been exiled to the land of memory, and in time its outstanding intellectual in the West, Edward Said (2002a, p. 185) echoed the twelft h-century monk Hugo of St. Victor: “He is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land.” And a foreigner did sonic measurement become. For sound, this most intimate and precarious of poetic materials, fi nally succumbed to the seduction of poets’ search for “progress.” The military, markets, medicine, manners, and morality in the Middle East had all succumbed before sound did and became accordingly “ordered.” Meters, “the seas” of Arabic poetry, were perhaps among the last spaces of life to be seduced by modernity in the Middle East. Modern secularity of course began to arrive in the house of Arabic poetry when its neoclassical and romantic poets alike invited it to the lexical, syntactical, and tropical gardens at the turn of the twentieth century. It was only a matter of decades until modern secularity fi ltered further into the inner chambers of that tradition: sounds. Sonic disorder made its way into poets’ texts. The tradition of measuring, regulating, and disciplining rhythms of sounds no longer assumed the regnant standing it had inherited from the pre-Islamic past. Starting in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, Edith Sitwell, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Mallarmé, and, of course, Baudelaire were but a few among many poets of the secular West whom Arab poets found to be paradigmatic when they sought to modernize their rhythmical inheritance. Arab poets continued to deploy verse when contesting authority in the modern era. However, the fall of Palestine in 1948 also signaled the fall of other “sacred spaces.” Emboldened, rueful, angry, bitter, but also hopeful, poets called for contesting the authority of religion and other traditions of Arab life generally. For those were seen through the rationalities of secularism and nationalism as the culprits in the calamity of Palestine and the impediments

36

I N I T IAT I O N S

against the liberation of lands and peoples, inside Palestine and surrounding it. Among the leading voices in the quest for an Arab modernity has been that of Adonis (né Ali Ahmad Said), born in Syria in 1930. The poem that had a decisive effect on his entire adult life was not composed to contest political authority but to plea for cooperation between authority and its citizenry. As a child, Adonis had the opportunity to recite from memory a poem before the Syrian president Shukri al- Quwwatly on his tour of the recently independent country. When the president offered to reward the talented boy, the future Adonis requested education as his prize. At the age of fourteen, he commenced his formal schooling, which he completed in five years, not the typical twelve. On his road to literary maturity, rejection had become so ingrained in his poetic project that the poet forsook his natal name for that of an ancient mythical figure of beauty and fecundity. Recognized as someone with poetic genius, Adonis published poetry and criticism alike as part of his modernizing venture. Dissatisfied with the free verse rebellion against the classical form, he embraced the more radical form of the prose poem—more radical because it completely discards measurement, while free verse continues to uphold measurement, only less rigorously than the classical form. The target of Adonis’s contestation is no longer the tribe, as it was for al-Shanfara, or the ruler, as it was for al-Mutanabbi, but religion. Moreover, if regulated rhythms were the material through which these canonical figures expressed their contestatory verse, Adonis identifies in such regulation the abortion of any kind of contestation. A genuine rebellion for Adonis has to entail a rebellion against the sovereignty of poetic meter in order for the poet to attain freedom. Living after Nietzsche, Adonis, avowedly secular, contests the authority of tradition— such as religion, specifically in its monotheistic variety—an encroaching transcendental, external command. In the sixth and fi nal “hymn” of his book Songs of Mehyar the Damascene, a series of prose pieces dispersed among versified sections, he writes: I create a face for rejection and compare it with mine. I make ink and notebooks out of clouds. And I wash the Light. I release the Earth, and imprison Heavens and then fall. I fall so I can remain loyal to the Light, so I can render the world opaque, magical, changing, perilous, and proclaim Transgression.

RHY THMS AND RULERS

37

The blood of gods is still warm on my clothes. The cry of a seagull ascends from the midst of my papers. Let me carry my words and go. (1971, pp. 169–70)

As though they were the prose of a novel or an essay, the poetic words of Adonis on the printed page have a visual effect. In them lie the culmination and the quandary of a secular modernity facing Arab poets. Technically speaking, Adonis and other prose poets continue where free verse poetry stopped. They are not content with deregulating the rhythms of verse, as happens in prose poetry that abandons regularity of a single rhyme and consistent number of feet in each verse line. They seek to discard measurement of rhythms altogether. Sonically speaking, the compositions they generate are largely unmeasured, deregulated, indeed disorderly. They seek to redefine the poetic tradition itself as that which includes unmeasured sounds and undisciplined rhythms. The poem is highly self-referential: it frequently refers to its constituent materials, such as ink, notebook, papers, and words. Writing, not reciting, hearing, memorizing, or singing, constitutes the poem’s conception. Even when Adonis calls his poems “songs” they do not talk to the ears as much as mark that talk before the eyes. For his poems belong to a world whose immanence yields to the visual in ways that exclude to an ever greater degree the sonic as a claimant of truth. The midwife of Adonis’s poems is literacy, not orality; the delivery relies on seeing more and hearing less. As the narratives by poets in later chapters will demonstrate, these are substitutions in the forms of self (its ways of being and knowing in the world) and not merely a substitution in the birthing techniques of an art form. And it is a secular self fervently searching for emancipation from the snares of religious authority. The prosaic condition finds its way to the sound of Adonis’s words as much as to their semantics. This is why we read Adonis articulate, with the aid of metonymy, a secular desire to release “the earth” and imprison “heavens.” The freedom of this desiring self lies in the eternity it locates in the present, here, on Earth, not above, deferred, in Heaven. Its secular freedom paradoxically lies in a sovereignty, which is attainable after engaging with gods that so occupy poets of secular modernity. It quashes theistic transcendence of its Middle Eastern inflection in monotheism, only to refashion one of its own. Here lives a quandary of the secular proclivity in modern poetry as in modern forms of life. Poets who want to dissociate their labor from religious tradition and diminish the place of that tradition in society find themselves increasingly resorting to its language in their own work. A transcendence they think

38

I N I T IAT I O N S

they dissipated ineluctably returns in their work. When Adonis (1971, p. 15) refers to the poet as “Not a Star,” he writes, “Here he is, arriving like a pagan spear . . . here he is, wearing the nudity of the stone and praying to the caves.” Adonis represents a highly influential example of secular Arab poets whose work is replete with references to gods, goddesses, temples, and prayers and other rituals. The quandary facing their literary secular project involves the pursuit of a kind of freedom through sequestering human action into various sovereign domains with ramparts it erects among them and simultaneously ruptures. To begin to understand the series of struggles through which such a quandary arises in contemporary Arabic poetry, I now make a spatial entry to the world of Arab poets through the par ticular site of Palestinian poetry festivals under Israeli military rule (1948–66). During those festivals, the al-amudi form flourished before its tectonic demise among Palestinian poets, who could not find a place for it in their modern quest. As they found themselves in a kind of homelessness in modern secularity, they also found that a similar fate awaited their traditional sounds.

3

THE LAND OF THE POEM

O N T H E RU I N S of their homeland, a Palestinian remnant found itself in a fight for existence after the land’s conquest in 1948. What remained could not be secure, because the remaining Palestinians were under Israel’s first military rule (1948–66), which in turn was threatened by this minority’s presence. For the next eighteen years the Israeli military routinely confiscated Palestinian lands, livelihood, and life itself. Almost nothing but human speech was left to affirm the existence of a dispossessed but steadfast and largely oral peasant population. A pause of silence had to pass before native Palestinians could start their search for a language that would host the magnitude of their loss and their persistence. Drawing primarily on archival material from alJadid (The New), the Arabic literary periodical of the Israeli Communist Party, this chapter seeks to reconstruct a short-lived phenomenon of Palestinian poetry festivals under the first military rule and discuss how they fell after the 1967 war. This history provides important context for understanding the poetic transformations at the crux of this book; it is not infrequently referenced by the poets themselves in the coming chapters. For the Palestinian peasants living under Israeli rule, poetry assumed the role that Arabs had traditionally assigned it: as their diwan, their historical repository. Poetry was the paramount language of their exile. But the primacy of poetry over other genres, including novels, articles, speeches, and plays, had to do with more than belonging to an ancient form of Arab life that had found immediate expression in poetry. Under British Emergency Regulations

40

I N I T IAT I O N S

and more so under Israel’s drawing on them, poetry could be recited, memorized, and disseminated with agility unavailable to other forms, which are more precariously exposed to official censorship. Each and every prose line about Palestinian dispossession may have its versified equivalent, but poetry captured the quotidian pulses of Palestinian dispossession from its very beginning. As early as 1910, that is, six years before the French and British foreign ministers fatally drew the modern map of the Middle East to fit colonial designs in the Sykes-Picot agreement, and seven years before Sir Arthur Balfour promised on behalf of his king the establishment of a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine, a Jerusalemite poet and educator named Isaaf al-Nashashibi presciently wrote about the homeland’s loss. The fulfi llment of the Balfour promise, the poet knew, would exact the vanishing of Palestine if it were to become the home of one nationality (the Jewish people). There would be one admissible sovereignty, while ensuring, under the Balfour Declaration that operated under the paradigm of a nation-state, the protection of only “civil and religious rights of existing nonJewish communities.” In a traditionally orotund rhythmical structure and epic content al-Nashashibi beseeched, “O Palestine weep not, offer blood not tears / the land is gone and blood-offering alone remains / there shall come a day of grieving and sobbing when sobbing neither helps nor rewards” (alYaghi, 1981, p. 167). Erased from the powerful maps of the world, Palestine was sheltered by the memory of its griots, the poets. Outside the map and without one, Palestinians took poetry with them wherever they went. Palestinian poets remembered the lost homeland in the lost homeland itself, in refugee camps, in prisons, and later in the lands Israel occupied in 1967, in cities throughout the Arab world, and in many other places beyond it. For example, in 1966, the same year these festivals’ appeal was evidently waning, Rashid Hussein, that poet of legendary standing in the canon of Palestinian poetry, happened to leave the country for New York City. In 1974, three years before he died from smoke inhalation inside his Forty-Sixth Street apartment and fift y-seven years after the Balfour Declaration, Hussein recited on a Manhattan street while Arafat gave a speech to the UN’s General Assembly. In A Traveling Revolution the poet (1977, p. 11) asked in searching for a new language and new beginnings, “What has remained . . . except for a revolution we start with the letter ‘A’?”

THE LAND OF THE POEM

41

To speak of Palestinian poetry is to speak of a dispersion and dismemberment that befell the land and its peoples, including the poets. Poets of a par ticular literary site sought to stay on the land and live with the remainder of their people under an assortment of shock, shame, confusion, fear, acquiescence, hope, humiliation, persistence, and defiance. Near the ruins of adDamun village on the Carmel Mountain, from behind the bars of a prison that bears the village’s name, Tawfiq Zayyad (1958, p. 38), who worked in construction before becoming the mayor of Nazareth and a Knesset member from the Communist Party, sent these words of defiance: Mount fetters atop fetters for weaker than my wrists is your fetter Loving my people, the struggle and my persistence they all send flames of firmness for the fire blazing in my blight-fighting blood.

Their poetry, sprouting under the strictures of Israel’s first military rule, protested the confiscation of land, restrictions on mobility and speech, and the perpetuation of the refugees’ plight. These attributes would give Palestinian poetry its famous appellation as “resistance poetry” when the literary critic and novelist Ghassan Kanafani introduced it later as part of adab almuqawama (resistance literature) to the traumatized Arab world in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat. For until then the Arab literary scene, very much like the Arab world as a whole from which the Palestinian remnant was largely disconnected, knew or wished to know very little about the “inside” (aldakhil), the portion of Palestine that became Israel in 1948. The peculiarity of the poetic practice contributed to securing the supremacy of poetry over other genres. But so did institutions. One dominant institution that interceded for Palestinian poetry under Israeli military rule was the Israeli Communist Party (ICP). Despite its secularist politics, the ICP seemed like a natural fit and arguably the only sheltering form of politics to a population of uprooted peasants on their way to wage labor in Jewish fields and factories. It afforded them an emancipatory zone outside Zionist politics, with Arab nationalism and other Third World anticolonial struggles folded in. Through the seemingly natural congruency between the constituency and the party, the ICP became a colonizing state’s sanctioned party for a native constituency where each has things to win and to lose. The Zionist state found an alien body in its Palestinian population that the ICP could, under

42

I N I T IAT I O N S

certain conditions, contain in the sense of averting a drift toward even more radical opposition, such as questioning the state’s legitimacy, as in the case of the political movement known as The Land (al-Ard). However, the political actions afforded Palestinians within the contours of the ICP were not necessarily always tolerable to the state. Quite often they were not. They were not tolerated to the extent that the ICP served as an outlet for local Palestinians espousing an amalgam of socialist, communist, nationalist, and internationalist aspirations that came to undermine the state’s multifarious project of “Judaizing” the land. From the rubble of Palestinian existence, poets made their words soar in contesting these policies aimed at generating and ensuring the presence of a Jewish majority in the land and Jewish possession of it. Whenever the state aimed to sever Palestinian citizens’ bonds to the land, to their civilization, and to the Arabic language, poets affi liated with the ICP combated these attempts with the secular vocabulary of communism as they found it hospitable to their fears, compromises, and aspirations: The series of articles published by Comrade Stalin on language, which he wrote last year, confirms to us that our democratic cause to preserve the Arabic language in Israel, to nurture it and save it from what is attacking her is a battle with tidings of success. . . . The literati of the Arabic language and all its lovers are invited to participate in the democratic battle for preserving the Arabic language in Israel. We understand that in some of the schools in Israel there is an attempt to substitute fusha [literary Arabic] with the demotic dialect and for a long time the school curriculum for Arab pupils has contained songs taught in colloquial Arabic. . . . Although we appreciate the charm of many of those songs, our schools are called upon not to teach the demotic dialect for this is a dialect that pupils know without the school, but to teach the classical language and the songs in that language. And who is more entitled than our poets, both established and rising, to fight against this direction by composing nazm [lyrical poetry] with facile diction in literary Arabic so they could be sung with popular melodies and become widespread among pupils.

As guardians of land and language, poets composed and sang poems in a traditional manner to preserve the bond of their audience with their language. They recruited the form bequeathed to them from the pre-Islamic era, the only one the vast majority of them knew to be poetic, which is known today as al-amudi. While losing its paradigmatic standing elsewhere in the

THE LAND OF THE POEM

43

Arab world after 1948, inside the newly conquered land this ancient poetic form preserved its vitality for a short while. Through their traditional architecture, these Arabic poems preserved the rhythms of an ancient language, whose presence threatened the nascent Jewish state. The Israeli military rule sought to deny and destroy the viability of a Palestinian (rooted) existence, admitting an ephemeral Arab (nomadic sounding) one only, so it could attain for itself a placid dominion over the land. The poets came to the fore tending to the roots of persistence on a land whose landscape was vanishing both in name and substance. This disappearance confined Rashid Hussein, for example, who participated in the poetry festivals even though he was not affiliated with the communists (not all poets who participated in these festivals were). Hussein thundered at the first poetry festival, hosted by the village of Kufr Yasif, northeast of Acre, with the following recitation: “Today I come when we all are prisoners / When will I come when we are free? / O Kufr Yasif I longed to meet you, and then poets came flocking to you” (Ibrahim, 1984, p. 108). Although using ancient sound structures, a regular number and kind of feet, as well as regular end rhymes, poets used the language of modern secularism to express nationalist, socialist, and communist sentiments. Steeped in traditional forms of Arabic versification, Palestinian poets at those festivals recited poems about destroyed villages, appropriated lands, refugees, poverty, and various conditions of military repression. And with the kind of secular optimism that their socialist realism afforded them, poets sang for revolution and resistance toward an eternally triumphant world awaiting them and all the disinherited of the Earth. To eulogize their homeland, poets sang praises for a revolution taking place on theirs and others’ lands, including that of Patrice Lumumba in Congo, Jamila Buhayrid in Algeria, and Che Guevara in Cuba. Their despair and dreams conjoined with that of poets dispersed throughout the globe: Pablo Neruda in Chile, Langston Hughes in the United States, Nazim Hikmet in Turkey, Louis Aragon in France, Vladimir Mayakovsky in Russia, and Federico Garcia Lorca in Spain. By taking many of these poetic figures as paradigmatic, Palestinian poets were capable of threatening political authorities. Their words threatened the newly founded sovereignty and led to its enforcing emergency law, which it had inherited from British colonial rule between 1917 and 1948. Poets were routinely subjected to detentions, at home or in prison, prevented from moving outside their villages or cities, obliged to report daily at police precincts,

44

I N I T IAT I O N S

and threatened with loss of employment. Since a considerable number of them worked as teachers in state-run schools, another vital institution of the poetic scene, many resorted to publishing under pseudonyms. However, poems and the masses did not meet through literary publication. Rather, poems were recited to local audiences living in a still profoundly oral world. They were heard during poetry festivals that were like weddings (aras) held communally in villages. As in peasant weddings, everyone was invited to attend; no personal invitations were necessary, and when electricity was available, loudspeakers broadcast the collective invitation to the entire village. Poets occasionally came to the host village the day or the night before to evade military patrols but would often be summoned for interrogation on the morning after their recitations at the festivals. People came in the hundreds to village squares lit with kerosene lanterns and sometimes to town halls (e.g., Haifa’s Brotherhood Club and the Nazareth Christian Youth Association) to hear their poets (often each had two poems to recite). For two to three hours they listened, either standing or sitting on rush stools they brought with them, on rooftops or in tree branches, in withering rain or heat in a world where ears still seriously contended with eyes as claimants of truth. These popular festivals were populist literary-political events that erupted perhaps seven or eight years after the silence, fear, shock, and humiliation of 1948. They offer historical testimony to the place of poetry in Palestinian society, the conditions in which poets worked, and the basis for ways secular modernity was to radically affect Palestinian and in fact all Arabic poetry. Although these festivals’ popularity lasted no more than a decade, they encapsulated on a local scale the final flourishing hours of a poetic tradition seeking to find a legitimate residence in the house of modern secularity. These festivals witnessed a coalescence between the politics of poetic form and the politics of struggle for sovereignty. A senior poet, Hanna Abu-Hanna, now a retired school principal yet still quite active in the literary scene, was often invited to recite his poems, some of which he wrote while in prison. A regular contributor of poetry and essays to al-Jadid, Abu-Hanna (1957, pp. 26–27) here praises the festivals’ rejuvenation of his people’s spirit: The calamity that struck this Arab Palestinian people scattered its sons. A remnant stayed within the borders, but the majority of men of letters and the educated were sent to exile. The conditions that surrounded this remnant of people converged to deprive it of cultural continuity with the Arab world so

THE LAND OF THE POEM

45

an Arabic book became a scarcity that we rushed to seize. Also, the [Israeli] Ministry of Education directed Arab students in such a way that their Arab culture would be erased and their linguistic abilities damaged. But the spirit of this people battled all these obstacles, and for this reason, we see the budding fruits of Arabic literature in this country, defusing its delicate, refreshing scent all over. . . . Everywhere around us there is a call for poetry. . . . Everything around us is fi lled with emotion and song. . . . We find these poetic fruits in our poetry festivals that became one of our blessed literary traditions in this country. . . . There is no doubt that a true change occurred in our poetry at this stage. While the first fruits were distant from waqiiyya [realism] in a distant self, detached from our pains and miseries . . . the rising of national and human spirit took poetry forward in its realism.

Abu-Hanna’s poetry moved “forward” when he evinced the romantic stance that had inspired Arab poets between the European world wars. In that period, his generation was particularly influenced by poets who predated socialist realism and did not write for the “the masses,” in the secularist language of social commitment, such as Khalil Gibran and Mikhail Nuaima or their Palestinian followers, most notably Michel Haddad. Yet after 1948 poets risked losing touch with the elusive notion of reality if they did not in one way or another speak about the homeland and about politics (siyasa). Engaging with politics was an entry permit to the Palestinian poetry scene, and the only politics that seemed to make up reality during the 1950s and 1960s (and arguably the present) was that of liberation from colonialism. Toward this kind of liberation the poet had to change to be able to move forward, so poetry could still matter and not be irrelevant. In a struggle for survival, Palestinian poets had to sing everywhere to a public thirsty for the well of their words. In singing everywhere, poets were doing what their ancestors had done since the pre-Islamic era. They composed poetry to be recited before and above committing it to paper. It was still sufficient to compose in ancient rhythms while infusing poetic vocabulary with eff usive secularist hopes of nationalism and humanism. The modern change of which Abu-Hanna speaks occurred in poets’ semantic sensibilities before it affected their sense of sound. And so poems spread with remarkable agility to the local public, whose encounter with them was predominantly acoustic. In addition to optimism of a promising present and a revolutionary future from national, colonial, imperial, or capitalist oppression, poets worked with a discernable trust in their

46

I N I T IAT I O N S

local public. They trusted that the public who came to hear them, although they were often not literate, had a profound appreciation for the meanings they heard in poets’ sounds. Poets, in their turn, had yet to fear that this local, audial appreciation would constitute a compromise of the artistic value of their work. The value of their work still lay in the kind of reception it enjoyed among listening crowds who clapped their hands to convey confidence and pleasure. Poets had to fear the arresting arms of a military ruler, not, as they would later, when further into their modern quest, the clapping hands of an audience enchanted by their revitalized ancient rhythms. On the path to a secular modernity, these two kinds of fear met contrasting fates. As the secularity of modern conditions reached beyond what poets said, it began to affect how they wrote (in aspects of rhyme, meter, and rhythm). The fear of local ears degrading their art grew more acute in its effect on their production of art, while the fear of political authority became quite superfluous. Ten years into Israeli military rule over the part of Palestine occupied in 1948, poetry festivals had spread like wildfire in cities and villages throughout the Galilee. It was a fire whose flames the authorities feared and needed to extinguish. The testimony that follows conceals the real name of its author, who had to resort to the pseudonym Nuwwar (“Blossoming” or “Lightening”) when publishing in al-Jadid. It also conceals the name of Palestine and the name this homeland gave its inhabitants, Palestinians. Written under fear of retribution by one of the state’s arms, Nuwwar’s testimony describes one of the poetry festivals that took place in the village of Kufr Yasif during their peak. The mnemonic security of Zionist sovereignty had demanded since its inception the erasure of a local Palestinian memory and the inscription of a transcendent and secular Jewish one in its stead. This situation was so precarious that it was acutely challenged when Israel celebrated its first decade of existence and authorities insisted on the participation of their Palestinian subjects in the state’s birthday celebrations. They were to have singing in their schools and marches in their towns to “show off the progress the state believed it had brought to its Arab citizens” (Hoff man, 2009, p. 80). On May Day of that same year clashes erupted between state security forces and demonstrators in Nazareth and Umm al-Fahim. It is not surprising therefore that poetry festivals that year prompted strong repressive measures from Israeli authorities. In concealing the true name of their author in order not to trigger a reaction by the military ruler, Nuwwar’s printed words took measures that

THE LAND OF THE POEM

47

daring poets did not follow in the verse they recited to the ears of their public at the festivals. However, the military ruler’s measures to prevent the festivals had little effect on the poets’ willingness to take risks such as imprisonment or loss of employment to recite their verse: The festivals of poetry have become national demonstrations that terrified the authorities of oppression and terrorism. The word found in our poetry a sharp weapon in the battle of our people. Al-nashid [the song] turned into fire by our struggle and by insistence and faith in the people. We still remember the fear that struck the soul of the authorities and its agents on the eve of last year’s festival in Kufr Yasif. A few months ago, when a poetry festival took place in Acre, the oppressive system went hysterical and, since it failed to terrorize the poets, it resorted to the cheapest of tactics when they shut down the electricity. The administration of the cultural club of Kufr Yasif called for its [second] annual poetry festival on 10/10/1958, Friday evening, but the two poets, Isam alAbbassi and Habib Qahwaji, were not given permits to enter the village. . . . Terror and pressure was exercised against invited poets and, before the festival commenced, police cars began to patrol the village to scare people away. . . . But the loudspeakers of the festival welcomed the poets and announced the opening of the festival and the more than 800 people present clapped very loudly and fi lled the village square surrounding the club. . . . The poets succeeded one another yunshiduna shirahum [in singing their poetry] with a magnificent climate of jawwun hamasi [fervid aura]. It is difficult to see a people love poetry more than our people. . . . Masses of crowds—most of them standing listening to poetry for over two and a half hours . . . beautiful melodies all gather in one symphony in the horizon of national struggle and liberation that crowns our honor and gushes in the souls of our people. (Nuwwar, 1958, p. 56)

This testimony brings to the fore the complexity of two clashing nationalisms: one a sovereign state, Israel, whose theology tolerates the other, Palestinian citizens, as sovereignless prisoners of the state’s memory and forgetfulness. Poetry at those festivals released Palestinians from this imprisonment. These poem-songs—and a few among them became lyrics for very popular songs that later spread throughout the Arab world —were conceived, composed, and disseminated as belonging to an unsecularized world whose truths were to be encountered and contemplated acoustically. Nuwwar attests to a time when poetry as a song and the appreciation of a hearing public were living their final hours. For poetry had to move forward; it had to become secularly

48

I N I T IAT I O N S

modern and make a monumental retreat from sound to image in literary Arabic poetry. In a few a years the “beautiful melodies” which Nuwwar lauded degenerated into “screaming” and “noise,” impeding the progress of poets in search of modern forms for their work and their life. The year 1958 marked ten years into the loss of the homeland and nearly eleven since Nazik al-Malaika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab of Iraq pioneered the dismantling of the sonorous classical form by writing free verse, whereby the poet can deregulate the number of feet and the end rhyme in each verse line. If the holiness of the homeland did not prevent its dismantling, then what could possibly be inviolable about the revered, hoary form Arabic poetry inherited from its ancestors, poets seemed to ask then. As Abu-Hanna (1994, p. 107) puts it, “That time was a time of kufr [denying the truth] of everything . . . leaders and leadership, speeches and words; masks were torn asunder and fell, all that was land on which we stood collapsed into the abyss of the earth, all that was established and relied upon broke like a hollow reed.” Even in the besieged literary and cultural life of Palestinians under military rule, where books had to be smuggled in,  the seductive call of free verse made its entrance, as did the occasional broadcasting of free verse poems on the staterun radios of neighboring Arab states whose literary custodians were not particularly welcoming, and were even hostile to this foreign literary arrival. But free verse not only came to Palestinian poets; Palestinian poets also went to it. As members of the ICP, numerous poets traveled to Eastern Europe to study or attend conferences under the auspices of the socialist bloc. On those travels, poets met with, heard, and read the works of Arab and non-Arab poets who were producing poetry that seemed so radically different. Throughout the 1960s the revolution in rhythm (evincing the classical form) and in content (postromantic realism and surrealism) enchanted Arab poets. For those poets working under the strictures of military rule, it became clear that they did not need to confine their work to local audiences that came to hear them but could expand to a wider readership around the globe and into many languages other than Arabic. As poets marched farther down the path to modernity, and particularly after the first military rule ended in 1966 and the second occupation of Palestine and neighboring countries commenced following the 1967 war, which further deepened the abyss of the Arab political condition, faith in “the people” or “the masses” started to erode, and the private reader or a select group of readers rose as the ideal. Poets’ fear of state-of-emergency rules silencing their

THE LAND OF THE POEM

49

poetry was supplanted by fears of a public that might kill their aesthetic goals. In keeping with the secular sensibility of denigrating sound as a legitimate vehicle of truth, the poet became more a painter than a singer, taking the recipient into a beyond with the aid of imagery that was more important than sounds. In fact, a thorough secularity demands that the poet become quieter. Sound and its regulatory techniques—rhythm, meter, and rhyme—could not go on as the unrivaled rulers of the poem. In keeping with the secular sensibility of the modern self, poetic ability entails reconfiguring the poetic sense of freedom, which, when liberally conceived, consists of evincing external rhythmical discipline to whose authority the sovereign will of the autonomous poet cannot afford to submit. With this shift in poetic freedom, visual receptivity began to gain more significance than its audial counterpart. The oral and the invisible lost their ability to appear as adequate habitats for truthfulness. Only three years after Nuwwar celebrated “the beautiful melodies,” the rising local poet Mahmoud Darwish (1961, p. 40) came to regret them: “Should we be content with the audience’s judgment . . . ? Should we trust its aesthetic valuation of our poetry? It is regrettable that we took the easiest of paths. . . . We descended with enthusiasm that surpasses that of the audience in order to please it and purchase its clapping at the cost of art that is lost in much of our poetry. . . . This danger found a fertile soil in many of the poetry festivals.” The discipline of measuring sounds ceased to distinguish between poetry and nonpoetry, a standard of the Arabic poetic tradition since the pre-Islamic era. The withdrawal of poetic meter occurs within the withdrawal of sound itself as poetic material. In 1965 the modernizing poet Salim Jubran wrote about the poetry festivals (four years after Darwish regretted the kind of oratory poetry they hosted, and seven after Nuwwar celebrated it). Reflecting on the legacy of poetry festivals, Jubran (1965, p. 17) notes, “If we review the journey of Arabic poetry, it is not difficult to find out that the oratory poetry of festivals that once shook our villages and towns when it came out is now dead and what has remained are the poems that dealt with our issues authentically, profoundly and without noise.” Making authentic and profound poetry tantamount to noiseless poetry was a necessary step for moving forward, poets would say, in keeping with the secular temporality of “progress” in historical time. By 1965 local Palestinians were able to announce the victory of a modern Arab poetic rebellion against what appeared as restrictive, stifled, and stifling versification. After

50

I N I T IAT I O N S

the deafening defeat of three Arab countries by the Israeli army two years later, the “noiseless” poems Jubran wrote about only became more appealing. As the primacy of sound retreated, so did the concepts and practices that made that primacy possible. In the following decades, poets not satisfied with abating the rhythmical rigor of their tradition started to question and even discard the very concepts of meter, rhyme, and rhythms and the traditional forms of self that enabled them in the first place. After that “earthquake of 1967,” as Arab intellectuals commonly refer to it, after the withering of Arab nationalism, socialism, communism, secularist convictions, and the renewal of Islamic politics in the public sphere, poets turned en masse to poetry that frees them from what they had produced until then. In the 1970s this trend culminated in the abandonment of realism and, among prose poets, in the total abandonment of poetic metrical forms. When today’s poets explain, justify, or defend their shift away from traditional forms and rhythmical practices, they speak about the “natural” demands of life, progress, and history. This shift has seemed almost self-evident to poets because they seek poetry that emanates from their own time, a time of secular modernity, which they had to take into that inner chamber of their labor, namely, to its rhythms. This chapter focused on a literary tradition during its final hours in a particu lar local site of contested national sovereignty. Seemingly natural, linguistic, technical, literary shifts were protagonists with bearings on the political struggles for national sovereignty and secular modernity in Israel/Palestine. The next section focuses on poets who linger with the traditional forms, long lulled into regions of irrelevance by decades of searching for a secular modernity. Their poetry is examined to give space to necessary remembrance in order to critically evaluate the contingencies and ambiguities permeating the certitudes of secular forms sought by poets of free verse and prose.

4

MEMORY FOR BEGINNINGS

“M O U N T F E T T E R S atop fetters for weaker than my wrists is your fetter” were the words Tawfiq Zayyad (1958, p. 38) “sang” at a poetry festival in the village of Kufr Yasif in the Western Galilee one night in October 1958. Zayyad was at the festival conveying a ubiquitous message of persistence among Palestinian poets living under Israeli military rule at the time. While my English translation may manage to convey the contestatory ethics of persistence in Zayyad’s words, it surely fails to convey the Arabic rhythmic discipline with which he composed them. Unlike the visible fetters of the military rulers he defiantly invited, Zayyad submitted his compositional will to seemingly invisible fetters of the traditional authority of metrical composition in Arabic poetry. They were invisible only in the sense that as a matter within the world of appearances, they lent themselves primarily to hearing, not seeing. As fetters enabling his ethical freedom, their truth and power were greater than what the eyes could see. Zayyad adhered to regularity of single rhyme and meter to compose this verse by sustaining the foundational practices of Arab poetic tradition. His internal freedom was so abundant that it emaciated the fetters imposed on him by the military ruler and supplanted them with the sonic fetters to which he subjected himself. Seeing the weakness of power and the power of the weak is something Palestinian poets, six decades into the occupation, continue to do even to this day. Yet what they and fellow modernizing Arab poets needed to abandon

54

THE SONG

(some gradually and others swift ly, but almost always with a sense of inexorable destiny) was the measuring of sounds, the rhythmical discipline. In so doing they began to tread in a distinctly modern clearing, different from the one that was constantly, continuously, and even hegemonically trodden by poets from the pre-Islamic era until the middle of the twentieth century. What remains from that millennium-and-a-half heap of poetry is the memory of a monumental path on which a few poets still thrive and the confusion of disconnected and sequestered roads where a great many poets keep walking or otherwise stagnate. Modernists find Arab poetic tradition impeding poetic “progress” that allows the poet to be free to deregulate, to follow an “internal” rhythm, to measure or not measure sounds in verse. Today, after decades of modernizing, Zayyad’s form of traditional poetry is widely forgotten and abandoned insofar as modern literary Arabic poetry is concerned—as is an array of sensibilities, concepts, practices, and forms of knowledge that were necessary for its making and departed with it. It is vital to include in this ethnographic narration of secularizing Arabic literary forms the cohort of poets who continue to work with or at least defend the kind of versification that Zayyad once practiced. It is they who continue to make the case for the primacy of tonal measurement and for the poetic form that relies on sound like no other: the classical form commonly called alamudi. It would be wrong to infer that in including the traditional poets, I posit the nonsecular, after which the secular follows in a linear historical progression. Such a purist shift from a nonsecular to a secular world would be a gross misconstruction of my narrative. A good number of poets from this cohort can be and are secular in very noticeable and basic respects: they advocate nationalist, socialist, or communist ideologies; they ascribe to secular views designating a private place for religion and take religious belief to be a personal matter. Yet part of my argument is that the presence of modern secular power exceeds views such as those about separating religion from politics, which have come to distinguish its career in the modern West. If the traditional poets of this chapter speak from within the house of the secular when they express views on religion, they definitely remain outsiders to that house when they account for their rhythmical practices, figurative sensibilities, and relations to their public. The secular that I discuss has to do with how poets think of and actually allocate their rhythms, how they imagine and represent the real, and how they reach out to a public.

MEMORY FOR BEGINNINGS

55

The story of this form and its poets dwells on a foundational practice of rhythmical discipline before its modern dismantlement by projects of secular freedom. I focus on the poets persisting with traditional measurement because I think they arrive at the contemporary scene as Walter Benjamin’s “citations from the past.” This is to say they certainly are not the background of a dead past preceding the present. They, or at least some of them, like Bedouin raiders, are capable through their narratives of disrupting the sedentary authority and sedated thinking—about freedom, knowledge, words, power, tradition, and creativity—which have been formative in the secular language of modernizing the literary terrain of Arabic poetry. In these narratives are fugitive traces of a nonsecular rationality that the rationality of a secular modernity has not fully hemmed in. This verse form historically and authoritatively had defined Arabic poetry throughout its nearly sixteen centuries of recorded history. As I have already noted, in common and contemporary literary parlance, it is called al-amudi (the pillared) for its adherence to the “pillars” of classical Arab poetic composition. The traditional architecture of this form is governed by a rigorous sonic discipline based on monorhymed and monometered versification. Surrounding the dismantling of Palestine in 1948, nearly a century and a half after the Napoleonic assault on Egypt and the onslaught of modern projects to order various spaces (textual and otherwise) of the Middle East, the hegemony of poetic pillars and the form whose construction they enabled has crumbled. To come to the world of poets who once worked, and some still do, in the al-amudi form is to arrive at the world of the forgotten and the abandoned in the fierce quest to modernize and secularize Arabic poetry. The al-amudi poets remain left out of modernity. They are reactionaries who impede literary progress. They are ridiculed and stifled, and most detrimentally, they are rendered irrelevant because they have been ignored by literary figures and institutions capable of acting as custodians of modernity. Two instances illustrate my point. First, in the year I spent among poets and during my visit to Cairo’s thirty-fourth International Book Fair, the General Egyptian Book Organization, an agency of the Ministry of Culture, invited Arab poets from outside Egypt to read at the fair, none of whom were affi liated with the classical form. Perhaps classical poets were either not worth the expenditure or nonexistent from the standpoint of the officials in charge of the state-sponsored book fair. Second, I am reminded of the Palestinian

56

THE SONG

al-Karmel, a prestigious literary-political periodical, a conspicuous partisan for the modern, where publication of a specimen of al-amudi would seem a transgression or even unthinkable, like a Benedictine monk’s espousal of polygamy. For many, the traditional poetic form is no longer suitable under current conditions of modern Arab life. The silencing of these poets occurred not only at the behest of the literary establishment, but also on occasion at the behest of another grand modern establishment: the nation-state. Palestinian poets who composed under the first Israeli military rule (three of them are presented in this chapter) were sent to prison, as was the case with Zayyad, whose verse opens this chapter. They believed their words could change the order of things (and the world), and presumably so did the guardians of the state, who clearly feared them and their words. However, whatever assurance that belief gave, its implicit optimism did not endure for more than three decades after 1948. After a variety of secular hopes (communism, socialism, nationalism, postcolonialism) lodged in the horizons of Palestinian and Arabic poetry, that belief was torn asunder, certainly after the 1967 defeat of three Arab states in a war in which Israel extended its occupation in all of them. Subsequent generations of poets, especially Palestinians, who continued to face the hardships of occupation in spite of the 1993 Oslo Accords, say they can hardly mend themselves, let alone the world. No one wants to scream and shout any longer, poets say, while reminiscing about the poetry of that time, even though it seems they now have the previously denied liberty to do so. The military ruler that succeeded in domesticating its first captive population of native Palestinians and since then went on to rule, directly and indirectly, over the lives of Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, some of them refugees from the 1948 war, is long gone, or otherwise lost its fear of poets’ words. What appears to scare occupiers are not poems any more but exploding bodies. Yet it is precisely that moment of military fear of the poetic word within the vast history of the Arabic qasida (ode) that this ethnographic story takes as a crucial reminder just before sonority became screaming, before singing (in this case the measuring of sounds) was severed from profound thinking, and before the discipline of poetic meter was sent into its modern exile. The stories that follow tell how, in fact, it was not meter alone that was exiled. The fate of a technique interlaced with the fate of terms through which people learned about who they are and who they could become in secular modernity.

MEMORY FOR BEGINNINGS

57

The fact that these Palestinian poets composed in the aftermath of the first modern destruction of Palestine left indelible marks, such as the need to write for the masses ( jamahir) in keeping with modern socialist realism, then prevailing in other Arab countries. However, the Palestinian poets who read the works of secular revolutionaries such as Lenin, Sartre, Marx, and Trotsky were the very poets who followed in the footsteps of an ancient tradition of Arabic poetry stretching from the pre-Islamic slave-hero poet Antara bin Shaddad to the courtly poet of modern Egypt Ahmad Shawqi. The singularity of this Palestinian poetry derives in part from its double belonging. It disseminates secularist hopes in the form of socialism, communism, or nationalism, yet it does so by retaining a premodern sonic architecture to house these hopes. The writers who build this sonic architecture do so from a zone of dissonance with modern secular reason and power. Recording the details of that dissonance is the primary task of this section. The poets of this section make clear that both poet and public thrived on an unrelenting faith in the struggle of the people from the 1940s into the 1960s. Sustained under this veneer of socialist realism (writing for the masses) there is, as I discuss below, a profoundly nonmodern understanding of poetry as a public act, which has become hard for poets of secular modernity to sustain. With poets writing for the people, the revolution still held currency. For the Palestinian contingent this hope was even sustained until the stone intifada (uprising) in 1987. All had faith that the world would change. Yet when it did, acutely after the 1967 defeat and the resultant retreat of Arab nationalism, poets called many things into question, including faith in the people, and political parties and ideologies that claimed to speak in its name. They even questioned the very poems they composed and how they composed them. Their poetic diction needed transmutation. Their sonic architecture that had lagged behind had to catch up to the shifts in poetic diction, which had occurred earlier, at the turn of the twentieth century. The crisis surpassed what poets said and reached how they sounded while saying it. Hanna Ibrahim is not a modernist in the sense of forsaking measurement in verse, but he does believe that poetry cannot operate in the twenty-first century as it did in the middle of the twentieth. So disillusioned with the revolution, he thinks that poems now need to be quieter and softer than they were until the 1960s. Aging explains some but not all that happened to Ibrahim. He was another poet who attended and recited at poetry festivals and paid the price for years to come. Yet more than illustrating the risks or costs of being a

58

THE SONG

Palestinian poet under Israeli military rule, his story allows for an examination of the defining eminent practice of traditional poetry: metrical composition, which entails measuring sounds. I met Ibrahim in Haifa, which his generation used to call “mother of the poor.” This vestigial phrase refers to a time when the British integrated Haifa into their imperial economy and engineered a considerable rural migration to the city in search of wage labor, away from unmercifully taxed and taxing toil on the land. Along with the peasants came the literate (not mutually exclusive populations), and so the city enjoyed literary importance in the two decades subsequent to the 1948 collapse. Now, in an age of high-tech corporations, with Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Google, and Microsoft situated on the southern edge, Haifa is no more than a forgotten relic of its former self. I did not chance upon Ibrahim at a poetry event, which the city once welcomed in abundance, but at a poor, shabby publishing house that I happened to visit in an attempt to fi nd a poetry anthology I needed. He came from his village of al-Buayna to the city to work on publishing a book of short stories. Apparently he had retired from verse, with relief too. Now in his mid-seventies, Ibrahim no longer believes in poetry’s power. This shift marks a dramatic difference in the life of a man who once had contact with the clandestine National Liberation League (NLL), a pre-1948 group of communist Palestinians that stored its book collection in his house. Through this contact Ibrahim had been able to read Marx and fellow revolutionaries and learned to advocate for socialism and communism. He also became an asset to the Israeli Communist Party, which secured a place in Israeli politics as a leftover from what remained of the NLL in the aftermath of 1948. Ibrahim worked in a stone quarry in the 1950s, raised a family, and often found himself in trouble with the Israeli government. Until the mid-1980s, during his years as a manager in the publishing house of the communist Arabic daily al-Ittihad, he was not permitted to leave his village. In 1989 he, a communist from a Christian family, was elected head of the local council in his Christian and Muslim village, winning the support of a Muslim majority. Today he is retired from all these posts and from the Communist Party that has bitterly dismayed him. On his completing his business with his publisher, we decided to head to my parents’ house midway up the mountain. After eating the local mallow known as milukhiyya, which my mother served for lunch, the main meal of the day, we retired to the living room for a conversation, overlooking from

MEMORY FOR BEGINNINGS

59

Mt. Carmel the glass and steel buildings bursting amid much lower and older stone and cement constructions in downtown Haifa. Ibrahim declared, “Today’s place for poetry is in the backseat,” and explained why he turned to writing short stories and newspaper articles. Ibrahim offers a view of the stakes of generating the traditional poem. His story reveals how context thoroughly inhabits the intimate details of the text. For Ibrahim, the materiality of the poem—its regulated sounds—resonates with global and local order. Above all, by measuring sound (regulating rhythm through poetic meter, distributing rhymes, collocating a fi xed number of consonants and vowels), he had sent political-moral messages (for keeping people unified and politically active): Our goal was to keep the people, most of them, in one stand, united. The public meeting, however, was dangerous. One runs the risk of being accused a communist. If you are accused of this you can lose your job or permit. People were afraid to come; it was a risk. To entice people, there was a role for poetry to play. I remember that when there was a public meeting with the Secretary General Mekunis, people feared coming. The chairs remained empty. . . . “Come O crowds come,” and people stayed out, peeking from a distance. So they asked me to recite a poem. When I finished, the chairs were full. I chose strong appropriate meters and brave, expressive words. Today I don’t like revolutionary talks. I am the bitterest enemy of revolutionary words. But then that was necessary. If you needed to encourage people, you needed a strong voice. The meter needed to be appropriate and helpful and the words strong. The poets tried to address poetically the problem of the people. Because people liked poetry, they came in masses to meetings even though they could have paid a price. To get a loan you needed the military ruler to be pleased with you. They could have lost their jobs or endangered their children’s education or careers.

In Ibrahim’s world of the 1950s, the poetic word (and the word itself), spoken as well as written, could still pose a threat to political authority in a way that has become impossible today. Freedom of speech was restricted because speech mattered—at least to a military occupation that was less than two decades old, like Israel’s at the time. The stronger the colonization of Palestine became, the more politically impotent speech became. The word seems to have turned impotent under a nation-state that has become increasingly strong, militarily at least, and in which aesthetics, truth, and politics are pursued through an unprecedented specialization and with distinct dissonance among

60

THE SONG

them. Ibrahim may have been secular in following communist or socialist ideologies, and correspondingly in taking the people as his target. Yet he deviated from the secular when he took poetry as a public event, not a personal private exercise; as a political event, not an aesthetically sealed engagement; and the primacy of sound, not writing, in keeping with the traditions of his world, as the vehicle of truth. Ibrahim learned many things in his poetic career, one of which, the mastery of poetic meters, enabled him to produce poetry on various occasions. His performance at a political gathering raises many questions about metrical composition: How does a poet learn and master the meters? What is involved in measuring sound quantities? How do techniques of a form relate to a form of self that a poet wants to achieve or abandon? When and why is such a measured composition sustained? What connections might there be between a poem’s metrical structure and events in and structures of society? I took these questions with me to meetings with poets who were working generally but not exclusively with the al-amudi form. I say “generally” because occasionally some of them dabbled in free verse. This cohort of poets continues to defend measurement, measuring sound, working with meters, even if on occasion some of them compose a less rigorously measured verse as well as prose. These poets helped answer some of my questions in showing me how they entered, learned, and mastered the poetic craft. One Saturday afternoon during the fourth and last reading session, Nijma (meaning “star” in Arabic) was allowed on the stage of the second Palestinian Poetry Festival; it was the weekend after September 11, 2001. The primary organizer of the festival, Moustafa Murad, could not refuse the fift h-grader, whom he playfully called “the promising star.” He consented to her request to read poetry if only to express gratitude to her native city of Tamra in the Western Galilee, especially since its mayor hosted the festival in the basketball court of its main community center. Murad is himself a poet and the owner of a publishing house that he improvised in a shelter built under his residence in a town adjacent to Nazareth. Through his publishing house, he befriended many poets throughout the country, including the young poet Mona Dahir from Nazareth, who introduced me to him. Murad recruited Dahir and other poets to help organize the festival. He also received funding, I was told, in the amount of 60,000 NIS (about $14,000) for the festival from the municipality of Tamra, which is headed by the Islamic movement in Israel. I estimated 130 to 150 attendants

MEMORY FOR BEGINNINGS

61

during its first and most attended session, which was its opening one Friday afternoon. This poetry festival coincided with the annual Al-Aqsa Festival, dedicated to protecting the second holiest place in Islam from Israeli archaeological excavations underneath it, which is sponsored by the Islamic movement and the Al-Aqsa Foundation within Israel. This latter festival, which reportedly filled a soccer stadium, was a major reason, according to a few poets, for the poor attendance that barely filled the basketball court. Yet the comparatively small audience for poetry was caused not only by the withered place of poetry in public life, in contrast to religion. The unpopularity of this poetic event also had to do with the type of poets who were scheduled to appear. With a tight, long black dress, its thin straps webbing her shoulders, Nijma went up on the stage, uttered the basmala and then commenced to glance at a paper as she declaimed her half-memorized poem before a crowd of little more than fift y people. With eyes darting to the paper, but always with bodily drama, she dedicated her rigorously, rigidly composed al-amudī poem to the ubiquitous subject of martyrs (shuhada) and to the Al-Aqsa Mosque of Jerusalem. Her poem was appropriate since the poetry festival was dedicated to martyrs. When Nijma completed her reading, she received the strongest and warmest applause of the festival. As the festival followed shortly after September 11, 2001, the attacks in the United States were the subject of the first poem read. In “Palestine Is Coming,” evoking the absence of a homeland and hope for its return, the poet mourned the dead in Washington, D.C., in New York City, and in Jenin, where an increasing number of Palestinians were being killed amid the darkness of global attention then focused on the tragic events in the United States. The festival was called by a name that had been widely unutterable under the first Israeli military rule (1948–66), the second Palestinian Poetry Festival. For the word Palestine, like the land itself, was not supposed to exist. To the Zionist colonizers, the land was supposed to be an empty desert awaiting their “return.” And so mention of an existing Palestine or Palestinian natives upset the denial that was so foundational to the making of Israel and its military rule. Until 1966 it was safer to avoid these demonic, transgressive words. Today, however, with colonization so secure, neither word would produce the kind of inadvertent consequences that they had historically under military rule, such as imprisonment or loss of employment. In the case of Murad’s festival in 2001, they mostly resulted in no funding from the Arab Section in the

62

THE SONG

Israeli Ministry of Education. Murad told me in one of our many conversations that had he orga nized the festival with a “softer language,” that is, with a title that excluded reference to Palestine and instead referred to things Arabic or even Israeli, he would have received financial support from the Arab Section of the Israeli Ministry of Education. Of course the organizers debated the merits of each name, but what they debated far more intensely was the criteria of eligibility to participate. If agreement on these criteria seemed unattainable, it is because the organizers and participants lacked a common vision of a more basic criterion: How does one become a poet? It was neither easy to agree nor clear how to establish the definition of a poet among the organizers, divided as they were between modernist and traditionalist partisanship. At the organizational meeting I observed in miniature the entire scene. What I saw alive and animated during the debate among the organizers was a tradition in disarray. I saw a tradition that had lost its claim to coherence and continuity. It had lost its base of agreement. To say this is not to assume that tradition is a space of mindless conformity and absence of argument, but it demonstrates how the argument itself lacked any established criteria for resolution. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart comes to mind when I reminiscence about this episode, and especially Mahmoud alDesouqi’s intervention. The poet Mahmoud al-Desouqi had demanded without success that a committee be set up to screen the poets who would read. A vociferous objection came from Samih al-Qasim, a poet who enjoyed a literary grandeur and supportive majority unavailable to al-Desouqi at the organizational meeting. Unlike al-Desouqi, al-Qasim had abandoned al-amudi long before and then achieved poetic prominence throughout the Arab world and beyond; his modern and postmodern poetry is translated into several Western languages. Al- Qasim demanded that the festival be run like the ancient and legendary Suq Ukaz, the Meccan bazaar in which poets of various tribes rivaled each other in recitation. Yet it was precisely this kind of forum to which al-Desouqi objected; not all who deigned to read poetry deserved to be called “poets,” he countered. Al-Desouqi feared that the sought-after model of Suq ‘Ukaz would turn to just that: a suq, strictly meaning “bazaar” or “market”; in Arabic this word also connotes baseness and coarseness. Hence the slur suqi, whose meaning is something like “vulgar” or “plebeian.” Al-Desouqi considered the poetic scene riddled with too many “poets,” ones who had not learned the fundamen-

MEMORY FOR BEGINNINGS

63

tals of Arabic poetry, the tradition of measuring sounds, as he had learned them, starting when he was Nijma’s age. Al-Desouqi’s childhood was spent under British and Israeli rule. His Egyptian-sounding name comes from an Egyptian ancestor, a scholar and mystic who settled centuries ago in Palestine when the ancient borders were more open, or nonexistent. To this day, people seek his help to restore the health of sick ones, thereby expressing a lingering belief in the healing, protective power he supposedly inherited through the Egyptian line of his genealogy. Now in his seventies, al-Desouqi is a retired accountant; he had studied economics and journalism at Tel Aviv University. His family came from Fardisa, a village that was destroyed in 1948, and he has been living since then in the centrally located town of al-Taybeh, increasingly left to descend like other Palestinian urban locales near major Jewish towns within Israel into places riddled with civilian criminality (drugs and guns). Al-Desouqi is active in the local Cultural Association (al-Muntada alThaqafi), where I often heard people refer to him with the honorable title of al-shair (the poet). The title conferred on him the same reverence accorded to a doctor, professor, or sheikh. Th is is precisely the reverence that modernists would not accord him. Instead they insulted him (in my presence) by calling him a nazim (composer). This appellation establishes a contrast between two abilities: composition and imagination. In classifying him merely as a composer, his modernist detractors admit his ability to measure sounds, to generate rhythms and rhyme, but this ability does not entitle him to be called a poet—an agent of profound thinking, knowledge, and imagination—which they see as evacuating verses of sound-measuring, which has become seen by and large as the home of the hopelessly shallow. In my meeting with al-Desouqi, I asked him how and why he had entered the craft that had earned him his titles. I wanted to understand what was entailed in learning his sana (techne), as one calls poetry in the traditional sense of its being a craft. As al-Desouqi and other poets of his generation told me, in their largely oral world, memorizing and religion were ingrained in their long, arduous path toward mastering their poetic capability. When I was little, I had an illiterate uncle, Ali, who memorized a lot of poetry . . . Antara and Abu Zeid al-Hilali, and in Ramadan we gathered to hear him sing [yunshid]. I loved what I heard and went to buy what he memorized

64

THE SONG

and learned it by heart. So when my uncle was absent or sick, I would substitute for him. Perhaps memorizing this poetry resulted in my poetic capability. Another reason is that my father was educated, and he almost went to al-Azhar, but he did not. However, he had a library of literary and religious books. Since I was little, I was exposed to books of poetry and religion and memorized a lot of poetry as a child. At school we memorized poetry: al-Mutanabbi and Shawqi. I read their diwans, learned them by heart, and was influenced by them.

The poets whom al-Desouqi mentions wrote no poetry without meters. They all belonged to a world in which illiteracy, memory, and religion had not fallen to depreciation in modern sensibilities. In their world, words, specifically their sounds, stood at the center of family leisure and social life in a way that would become increasingly difficult with the advent of modern literacy and visually oriented technologies of entertainment. Note how Uncle Ali’s illiteracy did not prohibit his knowledge of a vast body of poetry. Illiteracy was not yet a synonym for ignorance. The word “memory” did not arouse the image of docility of thinking and action. For al-Desouqi, to know a poem, to learn poetry, was to memorize. Memorizing was a generative, not inhibiting practice. And religion, more precisely religious texts, constituted his exposure and his entry to the world of language and poetry. Memory, in the nonmodern, nonsecular childhood of al-Desouqi, was the primary equipment used to obtain knowledge. Yet now al-Desouqi lives in an age when both free verse and, even more so, the prose poem not only thrive but dominate. As if to underscore this aura of anachronism and atrophy associated with al-amudi, an emcee of one poetry event I attended in Cairo described the young Ahmad Bekheit before his reading as a “unique poet who resurrects the al-amudi poem.” So dead and out of place the traditional al-amudi has become that it requires “resurrection” by a young Egyptian poet. Bekheit is originally from a village in the south of Egypt; I first met him at a poetry tent at the thirty-fourth International Book Fair in Cairo. I attended that book fair partly because poets such as al-Desouqi encouraged me to go and partly because Palestinian poetry cannot be adequately understood without attention to the larger, encompassing Arab and global poetic scene. Years and deserts separate Bekheit and alDesouqi, but both commenced their march toward the mastery of poetry through memorization and religion. Bekheit, like al-Desouqi and other poets

MEMORY FOR BEGINNINGS

65

whose entry into poetry was through the al-amudi form, continues to valorize the place of sound (tonal rhythms) and music in poetry in ways that other modern poets do not. Although Bekheit composes songs for shows on Egyptian television to earn a living, his narrative recalls poets whose entry into poetry was through an everyday world fi lled with memorization, orality, lyricism, and religion. Like al-Desouqi, Bekheit insists on the vitality of measuring sound. Despite his young age, he is unimpressed and unconvinced by modernist forces in the Arab poetic scene that consider acts of measurement to be obsolete. His narrative also allows another glimpse into a world where knowledge was understood and practiced in ways that are radically different from modern apparitions. In the world of Bekheit, like that of al-Desouqi, knowledge is embodied and sensuous. It lives in the heart and enters it through the ear. Its epistemic validity is not inherently tarnished because it percolates there. Knowledge, poetry, and religion coalesce in ways generally unrecognizable in forms of modern life. And I take that coalescence as a marker of the nonsecular existence that modernity transformed. [My] beginnings were in the inbihar [enchantment] with musiqa al-kalam [the music of speech], starting from learning the Quran in the kuttab and then textbooks in schools. They had special charm. I used to memorize all the poems in those Arabic textbooks as soon as I received them. . . . I used to feel that a word has a spell of magic in the poem. It is different from the word in the lexicon. It is capable of shaking a string in the heart through its rhythm if used well. These issues are hard to explain. They are spiritual. I had the understanding that poetry links to the music of speech. I had the feeling that there is a language other than prose to express oneself. The more language had this music, the more I liked it. There was this extremely precise and mutqan [perfected] rhythm that charmed me, as in the Quran and other human texts, especially in poetry. Poetry tuqattir [distills] human knowledge through music.

For Bekheit, knowledge associated with poetry through its music is obtained by listening, not always or necessarily by reading. The seat of that kind of knowledge lies in the heart and is not confined to the brain. Like al-Desouqi, Bekheit speaks of the centrality of memorizing as a practice that cultivates capabilities leading toward poetic mastery and productivity. To memorize old (that is, al-amudi) poetry is to learn how to mea sure sounds of words. To memorize is to learn how to generate disciplined, mea sured poetry. In

66

THE SONG

mastering the discipline of meter by way of memory, one cultivates a capability for versifying (that is, measuring) sounds. In memorizing traditional poetry, al-Desouqi and Bekheit learned how poets composed in the traditional meters. For poetic meter to become part of the poet’s fabric, it must be practiced, mastered, and eventually internalized. It is a matter of neither abstract nor annihilating restrictions. As a restriction, poetic meters constitute a poet’s capability with time and freedom. Meter is the cultivation of a discipline and internalization of its restrictions, which ultimately enables poetic production. The next chapter conveys how this discipline works on and in poets who continue to vindicate it.

5

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

T H E P R E V I O U S C H A P T E R presented narratives of poetic beginnings, which conveyed some authors’ early exposure and entry to the poetic craft. I included them because they disrupt prevailing claims in secular modernity about memory, religion, or orality as the invariable spaces of unthinking, noncreativity, or lack of freedom. The nonsecular world to which these narratives belong does not confine knowledge to the written. Sounds carry truths too. Rhythms educate. Now I want to get closer to the details of cultivating an essential capability needed to produce the traditionally lyrical al-amudi form and its nonsecular topography. Both al-Desouqi and Bekheit described having memorized a copious amount of canonical Arabic poetry, all in al-amudi form. Although they primarily compose al-amudi, occasionally they dabble in free verse. Their experiences testify to the reality of poetic forms: on different occasions and at different life stages poets fi nd certain forms more appropriate than others. Only on the rarest occasions did I encounter poets who worked with only one form. Yet these al-amudi poets would never practice the prose poem, the poem without meters, the poem they consider no poem at all. On this point, al-Desouqi and Bekheit are in concert with Samih alQasim, who also abstains from the prose poem, even after entirely abandoning al-amudi. Al-Qasim differs in many ways from al-Desouqi and Bekheit, but like them, he remains an advocate of measured poetry. Like them, he sees mastery of meters, that is, their internalization, as an enabling, not a debilitating

68

THE SONG

discipline. Al-Qasim was born in late 1939 to a Druze family from the Galilee. His sheikh father, a man of notable religious learning, used to gather Druze, Christian, and Muslim religious men for discussions in his house. As a child, al-Qasim served water to his father’s guests; this was how he became acquainted with the religious texts that he is famous for employing in his modernist poetry. Unlike many of the “big” poets I sought to interview, al-Qasim was accessible. Approaching the age of retirement, he has made frequent appearances on al-Jazeera in recent years. Those who do not read him are likely to see him on television, commenting on current political events. Toward the end of his sixth decade of life, the image seemed to afford him what the word could not. The image seems to trick, transmute, or deter death in a way that words, or their sounds anyway, are no longer capable of doing. I met with al-Qasim at his office in Nazareth, where he edits a weekly tabloid, Kul al-Arab (For All Arabs). In his carpeted office, I saw mounted photos of him with the late Yasir Arafat, photos of other poets, and a painting of a refugee child with a dove resting in his palms. Before the interview began, I was served the traditional welcoming coffee. I explained to al-Qasim my interest in learning about his work as part of my ethnographic research. Unlike all the other poets and for reasons unknown to me, he was uncomfortable with the digital recorder, so I wrote down his words. Although al-Qasim no longer writes in al-amudi, I present his views alongside those of the existing poets of this form because, as it did for them, it constituted his entry into poetry and, more importantly, because he expresses, even if implicitly, the freedom that secularist optics occlude in al-amudi form once the poet masters and internalizes the poetic meter: Every movement in the universe is constrained by another one. The sea wave has a range that ends when a new wave comes. There is no absolute freedom. Even volcanoes and winds are limited, and so is the freedom of the human. Free verse is a provocative name, as if measured verse is not free. When you write a poem of free verse, you need time, a hand, a pen, and a paper. All those are restrictions. You also need an idea and a language. And a language is grammar. Without it, it breaks down. The question is what you do with restrictions. If the poet masters them he becomes free. If the restriction is in you and you have mastered it, then you are freed. Poetry has its restrictions, but those become tools of liberating cultural consciousness. The poetic meters are restric-

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

69

tions for a starting poet. For an able poet, they cease to be restrictions. The poet who has not mastered meters faces a restriction.

The nonsecular rhythms of al-Qasim’s story can be heard in his account of freedom. It is an account that deviates from certain triumphant liberal visions (negative or positive) of freedom as an absence of restrictions and an insertion of autonomy even though “liberating cultural consciousness” is hardly a foreign phrase to liberalism. The kind of freedom he thinks with and lives by as a poet does not negate self-surrender or submission. The freedom he speaks of is attainable through mastery of, that is, submission to restrictions. Freedom in poetry is more precisely the mastery, the internalization, not the abandonment of restraints. To internalize restriction is to break down the rampart of a sovereign, self-sufficient self. To internalize the meters, to weave them into one’s fabric and become one with them, is in part to submit to them as confining. But the more internal these restrictions become, the more generative they are and the more enabling they become. The poet Hanna Ibrahim also conveyed to me that meters are initially difficult and restrictive, but once mastered, they come naturally, as they did to him when he saw, on TV, a Palestinian child killed in his father’s embrace. His is another narrative of poetic meters as a space of mastery. Mastering the craft (sana) of poetry is inconceivable without mastering the meters. For Ibrahim, the foundation of being a poet rests on a practical activity with publicly recognized criteria for virtuosity: measuring sound quantities, regulating them into patterns. Poetry for him does not reside in a state of mind, in an inert state of being, or in an approach to the universe of animate and inanimate things. If novice poets find entering or mastering the poetic craft to be difficult, it is not because they are lacking a poetic approach or a poetic state of mind. Rather, it is difficult, according to Ibrahim, because metrical mastery is still remote: The first rule in learning poetry is that you have to know Arabic grammar. Without it, there is no poetry. Second, you have to love reading. I used to read anything I could get. I also read Antara bin Shaddad. My father used to ask me to read Antara’s diwan when we had family gatherings at night. People loved to hear this. All Arabic folk songs derive from poetic meters. In our nature we like song and poetry. When someone feels poetry, he begins to croon [yudandinu]. Then the image comes. You collect images and paint them with words and with colors. I saw Muhammad al-Durrah’s picture when he was shot.

70

THE SONG

I hummed, it come out as Muahammad, the rhyme came naturally and fitting with the name. . . . He who does not write with meter is not capable. As alMutanabbi said: “If it were not for struggle, all people would become rulers.” If a doctor’s license is easy to obtain, like composing modern poetry, then all people will be doctors and in times of a test, these doctors will kill all their patients. Also poetry’s license should not be simple to achieve. Not everyone should ride the mule of poetry. Poetry is difficult and not everyone is fit for it.

Ibrahim’s claim that capable poets can naturally bring out rhymes recalls the common meaning of the word “meter” in Arabic, namely, the sea, a natural force that washes over shores just as meter washes through poets. As a name it carries a proposition for the working of time, its movement in animate and inanimate life, but it is iterative and cyclical, not a linear flow of time. The sea as a name for a measuring practice signals the flow of sounds in a single verse line, itself embodying the flow of an entire life as a constant process of change consummated in a repetition. In one of his later works, In the Presence of Absence, the poet Mahmoud Darwish applied the paradigm carried on the back of this naming. He wrote in this book, a meditative biography of sorts that he subtitled A Text (as distinct from poems): Words are the waves . . . words have the rhythm of the sea and the calling of the mysterious . . . the sea is the first source of rhythms . . . return to childhood teach me poetry teach me the rhythms of the sea and return words to their first innocence. (2006, pp. 30–31)

When the grammarian (and mathematician) al-Khalil ibn Ahmad alFarahidi of Basra, Iraq, (died circa 778) coined the term bahr, he reportedly linked it to his conviction that a single meter is like the sea. Like the sea whose waves never end and can never be identical, so it is with the single meter, which can generate innumerable and different repetitions of verse lines. Even under the alleged monotony of traditional poems that so repel modernists in their quest for “plurality,” it is possible to hear how the traditional verse lines can be a simulation of the work of sea waves. No two verse lines, as no two sea waves, are identical. And between the roarings of every two verse lines, as between two sea waves, there is the interrupting effect of a whooshing silence.

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

71

In earlier life forms, Arabic prosody as established by al-Khalil was curricular material; some of the senior poets presented here studied it at school. Today this science of Arabic rhythms has to keep out of sight in “progressive” (read “modern”) education. The Arabic word for prosody (arud) may be as forgotten and thus unfamiliar to schoolchildren as might be the fire that once blazed before becoming a basalt stone or the fire that once enabled al-Khansa (died a.d. 646) to compose out of anguish her enduring eulogy for her brother Sakhr. Al-Khansa composed this ode in the al-basit (outspread) meter, as shown in the poem on page 72. This meter is generated by the repetition of two kinds of feet, twice in each hemistich. Following the Arabic text of the poem as it appears on page 72 are a scansion (taqtia) and an English translation, which uses Western prosodic symbols to show the sonic structure of a poem. It should be read from left to right, even though the Arabic text reads from right to left. In this meter of al-basit, there is a general regularity in two kinds of feet in each hemistich. The very discipline that al-Khansa garnered to compose her eulogy impeded the arrival of modernity in the work of Arab poets. However, for Ahmad Bekheit, this discipline remains a kanz (treasure) he is unwilling to surrender; he finds in it a richness that only an ignorant poet would relinquish. Such a poet would be incapable of weaving prosody into nasijuhu (the fabric of his being). In breathing the music of the meters, one can tap into their immensely diverse possibilities. When Bekheit mentions “submeters,” he is referring to all the canonized deviations and derivatives from the established metrical patterns that were produced by regulated inflections called zihaf (relaxations) and ilal (defects). These regulated inflections of sound patterns enable a metrical diversity within measured regularity. Abler poets claim that diversity of metrical formulation and virtuosity of rhythmical practice lie beyond the reach of poets who have not mastered the meters. The poets who have excelled in them speak of metrical restriction as a form of freedom, which they attain by submitting to them. Bekheit again remarks on this point: Let me tell you something . . . people think that the meters of al-Khalil are about symmetry, that it is a dead body. But this stems from ignorance. The good poet can give you varied music in the same meter through syntax. [Bekheit gives examples from his poetry to explain his point about variation within the single meter.] . . . It is as if prosody is like musical distribution and the poet is like a composer of a melody out of sentences. But the bad poet does

(continued)

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

75

not have prosody in his fabric [nasijuhu]. A bad poet is not breathing music in his heart, is not regulated by the music which he uses. You find him afraid and he will give you the monotony that sends you to sleep. . . . There are a million tricks to change rhythm within one meter, and inside these meters, there are submeters. So it is not just sixteen meters. The total is over sixty-four musical formulations. I challenge you to find poetry around the world with this amount of diversity . . . I challenge you.

I was challenged, however, by a concern other than Bekheit’s and other than what linguists might identify as parallelism in his verse. I was challenged by how his generative poetic discipline has become the object of modern dismantling. Why should the primacy of sound in poetic production and the regulatory power of that sound begin a descent to oblivion upon the arrival of modernity? Are not regulations, calculations, precision, and discipline some of the constitutive features of modernity, which were, according to its dominant self-image, lacking in the chaotic, capricious, and incalculable time that it came to replace? How could a modernity that so desired to order the Middle East bring forth such a corpus of disorderly texts? In what ways do these rhythms belong to the secular formation of that modernity? In the eyes of poets who ascribe to measuring sound in verse, especially in al-amudi form, chaos (fawda) defines contemporary Arabic poetry. Indeed, due to their defense of meter and prosody in a poetic field whose literary modernity rejects them as antiquated practices, al-amudi poets usually end up speaking from the margins: they are not published as widely as they might otherwise be, and they scarcely grab the attention of any seriously practicing critic. To illustrate, al-Desouqi explained what had happened to what he loosely calls prosody, or more precisely, the discipline it entails, during his poetic career. His account attests to his own marginality as a traditional poet and to the marginality of what he practices. However, al-Desouqi articulates a defense of meter and measurement more broadly. Unsurprisingly, he disavows the prose poem, a pinnacle of secularizing in Arabic poetry. What emerges from his narrative is a defense of meter and sound measurement that is infused with a defense of the established Arab tradition writ large against an alienating modern condition. In attacking or defending a poetic device such as meter, he and other poets also attack or defend things outside poetry, as it were. The story of marginality al-Desouqi provides exceeds technical practices. It extends to basic terms of his nonsecular being.

76

THE SONG

I was able to observe al-Desouqi’s marginality during my fieldwork. He had been writing since he was sixteen, shortly after the British evacuation from Palestine. Upon achieving a certain level of publicity in the local scene, he was offered (but refused) a good position by the Israeli military ruler, he tells me, if only he would agree to drop his political poetry and instead write obscurantist poetry, which readers could interpret with “liberty,” poetry in which the story of a homeland conquered and lost could be replaced with stories in which life’s trivialities obscure the nobility of tragedies. During the 1950s and 1960s al-Desouqi composed poetry that “breathed fire” among people who heard his recitations. He was among the few senior poets held under civil arrest until the mid-1980s. Under these orders, he was not permitted to leave his town of al-Taybeh in the center of the newly founded Israel without the permission of the Israeli police. Upon Arafat’s return to the homeland after the Oslo Accords in 1993, he was invited to read poetry to mark the occasion. For despite his marginality among the established poets today, al-Desouqi boasts that he is the best “poet of occasions.” His pride in his ability to be the best poet who composes, perhaps even improvises, in response to specific occasions brings out the derision one would expect from modernist poets who have learned to distinguish between “superficial” poetry recited, often on the spot, at populist events and the “deep” poetry of knowledge and thinking, which elates the “inner feelings” of secular living. I met al-Desouqi in the town of al-Taybeh, about a twenty-minute ride from the Jewish town of Netanya; he and his wife picked me up at the central bus station there and drove me to their home. His wife drove, since she has better eyesight. One of the first things al-Desouqi talked about was his disappointment about what he saw happening among poets in the past two decades. He complained that people today call themselves poets immediately after they “put two words on top of one another.” He also complained that people today have no knowledge about the prosodic basis of Arabic poetry and thus made its music a scramble (khabisa). He compared prosodic chaos within the poem to chaos in the field of poetry and political parties: Al-arud [prosody] is a necessity of poetry just as water is a necessity of life. If one does not master [yutqin] prosody, one does not master poetry. Today prosody books have disappeared. The subject is excluded from the school curriculum. Prosody used to be a subject we learned in the schools back in the days of the British rule. Today, if someone writes poetry without knowing

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

77

prosody, the person cannot be a poet. There is fawda [chaos] in poetry. Here in Israel-Palestine, the political parties are behind this to a great extent. Anyone who belongs to a party, whatever he writes, is published in the party’s paper just because he is a party member. This is wrong. There is no dabit [discipline]. Even in the last poetry festival, I asked for screening. I was on the selection committee, but the majority objected. It is important, especially for poetry, to have a discipline. Even in the Arab world, there is a struggle between free verse and prose poetry and metered poetry, an overwhelming chaos. But eventually, what is right shall remain right. Metered poetry is the foundation of writing poetry. . . . The majority of poets today master neither the Arabic language nor prosody. There are seventy-two rhythms out of sixteen meters. If you master those, you don’t need prose poetry. . . . How can you write if you don’t master the meters?

Whether al-Desouqi extracts exactly seventy-two or seven hundred rhythms out of the sixteen meters identified (so far) in Arabic versification is irrelevant to the issue of lacking what he calls dabit without which he cannot work. Prosody, the science of identifying rhythms, becomes in al-Desouqi’s words a loose way of evoking rhythmical discipline. In other words, he conflates prosody with rhythms themselves. But this conflation of terms may not necessarily be understood as mere personal error—al-Desouqi failing to be precise in his vocabulary. This conflation makes it reasonable to expect that his imprecision is not simply idiosyncratic but rather belongs to and is embedded within a wider condition in which the vocabulary of an old world loses its force and clarity as words of a new world come to the fore. As long as prosody (or what it is made to stand for) remains buried under the heap of the debris of progress as conceived in liberal emancipatory projects of secular modernity, then it is quite inconsequential whether al-Desouqi resurrects this term to mean rhythms or railroads. Absence marks al-Desouqi’s story. As he notes, until the British rule (1921– 48), schoolchildren in Palestine still learned prosody as part of their established curriculum. Yet after the British evacuated and Israel ruled instead, learning the rhythms of his language (learning prosody) vanished along with the homeland. Vanquishing the world of al-Desouqi therefore was the work of both modernist Arab poets who saw tradition as an impediment to the progress of their craft and of a colonial-settler state that saw in native Arabic a threat to the security of Jewish supremacy in the land.

78

THE SONG

If the progress al-Desouqi calls “chaos” kept him outside modernity, what made his voice continue to resonate is his evocation of poetry as a practice in writing. It is wrong therefore to think that his story is one told only outside modernity. The way he thinks of poetry, as something written, as an act of writing (as distinct from reciting or speaking), does accommodate the vocabulary of secular forms of life, where the existence and therefore realness of things is made tantamount to their ostensibly less imperishable appearance in the written word. What I find especially startling about al-Desouqi’s narrative is not the animation or the inaccuracy with which he broadly speaks about meter and sound measurement. In his universe, meter is as basic, inherent, and necessary as water is for life. Meter is not only not dead; it is a space of living and thriving. For him, prosody, or rather what he makes it signify in his speech, metrical composition, is the equivalent of poetry. He charges meters and rhythmical discipline, which he signals by his evocation of prosody, with the role of dabit. I translate dabit simply as “discipline,” but it is semantically broader and includes that which controls, regulates, measures, governs, rules, and restrains. All these actions are at work when al-Desouqi generates verse lines that contain regular rhymes, a regular number of rhythmical feet, and a regular configuration of this number. This disciplined construction is what makes it very unlikely for him to publish in the prestigious al-Karmel literary periodical, which prints the works of “developed” poets, namely, Arab and Western poets of secular modernity. Thus al-Desouqi is left to publish scattered poems in daily parochial presses or to publish them at his own expense in the form of poetry anthologies. If al-Desouqi continues to work on poetry through and because of metrical discipline and its restrictions, it does not follow that it is always easy for him to do so, even after six decades of composing. However, to al-amudi poets, the importance of cultivating this discipline surpasses aesthetic and affective judgments. To work with the recognizable tradition is to sustain a par ticu lar sense of history in which the present does not triumph over or ameliorate the past. This distinct conception of time in the classical form does not view the present as a protagonist in a drama of linear time succession. Rather, it is as if the present is forever the degraded distance from a past it can never regain. It is as if the only redemption for the present poetic production is an impossible repetition of the original and inimitable moment. In the history of Arabic literary poetry, this time vision means the utopian repetition of a splendor residing in the pre-Islamic odes of al-muallaqat. This iterative sense

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

79

of time is infused in the architecture of the al-amudi form, manifest in the cyclically sonic structures, which do not preclude variety. The verse to which alDesouqi commits himself parallels the sense of time that he endorses. Here he responds to a question about a poem he composed, surprisingly, in free verse: I wrote this free verse poem because it was not easy to express things in a metered rhyming poem on this subject. You cannot describe everything in this form. Free verse is easier to picture [tusawwir] all that you want. . . . The poetic meter is a restriction. It is a big restriction because it limits the words you can use in the line that you want to describe. . . . In order to establish equivalence [tasawi] it becomes difficult to bring many descriptions.

Why is the meter limiting? The more distant we are from the old, the weaker we are in performing what the ancients accomplished. Who can write the muallaqat? Poetic production generally gets weaker the more it is removed from the source. Poets before did not have a dictionary of the language; they knew its words spontaneously, instinctively. People did not have grammar manuals; upon mixing with Persians, a need for grammar books arose.

Here al-Desouqi appears caught between two conflicting forces: renovating or preserving the traditional architecture of the Arabic qasida. Up to a point this is a debate between the “ancients” (qudama) and the “moderns” (muhaddithun), which is not foreign to Arabic poetry. A famous debate took place, for example, around the works of Abu Nuwwas and Abu Tammam in Baghdad during the Middle Ages. Strictly speaking, the debate was largely over diction and the themes of poetry. Urban and urbane poets of the global metropolis of Baghdad rebelled against the qasida they inherited from the pre-Islamic age. It embodied what they saw as the coarse desert life of Bedouin Arabs. They did not want to begin their poems in the way that Arab poets until then had traditionally begun: with descriptions of tribal encampments and bemoaning the desertion of loved ones. While renovating novel themes and modernizing obscure diction were the objects of medieval debate, the architecture of the qasida remained largely and dominantly the same until the middle of the twentieth century. Until seven decades ago, the preIslamic sound architecture remained intact and hegemonically so. It was not until the twentieth century that secular notions of “freedom” and “knowledge” took hold in Arabic poetry, that the meters were opposed as

80

THE SONG

restrictions that stifle art and creativity. Even when Arab poets of Muslim Spain composed the then unfamiliar and peculiar strophic poetry of al-muwashahat, meter still reigned supreme in verse construction in which rhyme differs from one group of lines to the next. In other words, the medieval poets of alAndalusian muwashahat regulated their rhymes according to strophe, but did not discard meter. To be a secular modern poet in the twentieth century, it is insufficient to change rhymes of different lines or stanzas; it is even insufficient to work with two or more meters in a single poem. To be a citizen of the secular state of the world it is necessary to question the concept of meter and the practice of sound measurement that it enables. To persist in working with meter is to be enslaved by the past, to refuse to develop, and to refuse to be a poet of secular modernity. One place to observe the marginality of al-amudi poets is in publishing practices, where the predominant literary poetic presence is rapidly squeezing human words (in print at least) out of existence. The veneer of impartial publication practices and policies covers a much thicker layer of personal connection and political partisanship, as I learned from stories of accomplishments and failures among poets. Poets generally have a personal relationship with the editor of the literary section in which they seek to publish and are publicly known to be supportive of the political faction affi liated with the newspaper that publishes their works. Beyond their canonical presence in schools and university curricula, most al-amudi poems that I found in the hands of practicing poets appeared as published works in the literary sections of local newspapers, as opposed to anthologies or the more esteemed literary journals. Yet I think the translatability of poems, especially into Western languages, better attests to the strength of their presence in the poetic scene. Al-amudi poetry is confined to an Arabic readership, unlike free verse and prose poems. Furthermore, when an alamudi poem does appear, it is not infrequently formatted in a smaller space and in smaller type, in contrast to free verse and prose poetry, which tend to  have a smaller number of words and more space between the words. Alamudi’s words always appear more condensed and crowded. The publishing conditions of the wider Arab literary world were echoed in the local Palestinian scene. An Omani poet, Dhyab bin Sakhr al-Aamiri, criticized the publishing practices of the London-based daily al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem) in a

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

81

letter published in its op-ed section. In the title to his letter, al-Aamiri contends that the newspaper’s rejection of al-amudi poetry contradicts its nationalist line. He faults the newspaper for not treating the “traditional form” with the same respect and equality it accords the “modern.” While al-Aamri locates a blinding fascination in the West with the “modern” form, he locates a confidence in Arab tradition with the traditional form. He also blames the newspaper for regularly and proudly announcing the near death of the traditional form. Positioning himself as the disinherited other in relation to the paper he proclaims: Your stand with the causes of justice and equality demands that you do not belittle the other and therefore you need to give a chance, encouragement and attention to the poets of measurement and rhyme, tantamount at least to the respect that you bestow on the modern poets of prose. Arabs from the Ocean to the Gulf wish—except for the modern among them—that al-Quds al-Arabi preserve the authentic and eternal pattern of Arabic poetry, in keeping with its nationalist line, and not be dazzled with the Western pattern of poetic writing.

This letter demonstrates that traditional forms of Arabic poetry have become foreigners in the modern scene. The writer of this appraisal resorts to the rhetoric of difference to make his point: he posits the traditional form of Arabic poetry as the disowned other of a modern Arab poetic scene. But it would be wrong to conclude that the appearance or absence of forms is merely the function of ideological lines of this or that media. Within an endemic condition of marginality, al-amudi’s appearance ebbs and flows. The “cooling” or “heating” of political events seems to be one way of following the fluctuating (and mostly marginal) visibility of al-amudi. Its visibility in the press seems to suggest that its rhythms are activated (and therefore more congruent) when the space of private and political existence dissipates in one way or another. For example, an al-amudi poem took up the space of an entire newspaper page in the spring of 2002, when Israel began reinvading the West Bank. On Friday, April 19, that year, the local al-Ittihad, the only daily in Arabic in Israel, printed an old poem from the archives of Palestinian poetry. Composed on the eve of the 1948 war by a doyen of Palestinian poets, Abu Salma (1907–80), and titled “To the Kings of the Arabs,” it beseeched Arab rulers to intervene and protect Palestine from the occupation the poet presciently saw coming.

82

THE SONG

When circumstances have been more mundane, “cooler,” more prosaic, free verse and prose poems have been published more conspicuously than al-amudi poems. The al-amudi form has remained largely in the hands of conservative or religious poets. One of the longest al-amudi poems I have encountered in the press is by a Christian clergyman, Father Michel Saba; his poem “The Philosophy of the Stone,” dedicated to those who “humanize the stone in stoning,” totals 107 lines. The al-amudi form has regularly appeared in the Islamic movement weekly, for its leader, Sheikh Raid Salah, publishes “songs” (anashid) for children in the literary section. I have also seen al-amudi poems occasionally in the Communist Party’s daily, al-Ittihad, by a poet who composes only in al-amudi form: Daoud Turki. Neither the Catholic priest, nor the Muslim sheikh, nor Daoud Turki are likely to be considered poets today, and I suspect that they would not mind. It would also be rash to think that their inadmissibility to the republic of poets has to do with their religiosity. Turki was in fact an avowed follower of the secularist doctrine demanding the separation of religion and politics, as I came to learn from him. Rather, they are deprived of admissibility to the poetic community because they are likely to be dismissively called “composers,” those who can regulate sound but do not have due imagination. In other words, although their ability to compose metrically is admitted, they are thought to lack inspiration. This separation between verse and poetry, between sonic and imaginative capacities seems to have embittered what Turki had to say about the contemporary poetic field. On a quiet afternoon in fall 2001, I visited Daoud Turki, who passed away in 2009. He had a home in Haifa, where he had lived with his wife and two daughters before being imprisoned for decades for organizing a militant group of Jews and Arabs opposed to the Jewish state. He had recently lost his wife; one of his daughters was in exile in Syria, but his younger, unmarried daughter assisted him. His legs had been amputated and he was wheelchair-bound. He never even alluded to his injury, and I considered my asking about its cause as out of bounds. With one hand always in a glove and another revealed, Turki sent poems to the locally published al-Ittihad with impressive regularity. Turki spoke from a position he shared with al-Desouqi; the marginal position of an obsolete poet, insisting on the old, traditional forms. Like al-Desouqi, he had a devolutionary sense of time, in which the present steadily descended from the past. In Turki’s defense of the classical qasida, he expressed a nonprogressive, nontriumphant rhythm of historical time. Historical time constantly

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

83

regresses unless a rupture through the present is attempted toward a redeeming repetition of a moment of origin of an unreachable beginning. Turki told a story of a poetic fall. Like al-Desouqi, he located this original and inimitable moment of beginning in the pre-Islamic era, which signified the climax of Arab poetic excellence that later poets could only try to reach. Turki found his heroes among the enslaved and wronged, but dignified poets, Antara bin Shaddad and Tarafah bin al-Abd. Antara, the son of an enslaved Abyssinian mother, attained his freedom from his father after his heroic fight in defense of his tribe, Bani Abs. A long poem by Antara describing his chivalry and his love for his cousin Abla is one of the muallaqat, the pre-Islamic poems that constitute the canonical origin of Arabic poetry. The other poet, Tarafah, deprived of his inheritance by his maternal uncles, and despite a warning, faithfully carried the letter he was entrusted to deliver, even though it treacherously included orders for his execution, leading to his death as a fecund, though illiterate, poet at a very young age. For Turki, the grandeur and honor of those pre-Islamic poets lay more in their ethical accomplishments than in their “artistic” ones. What surprised me during our interview was Turki’s rejection of being called a “poet”: I don’t need the title of a poet. I don’t accept such a title. I am first munaadil [a man of struggle] and then a poet. This is what I write. You don’t have to call it poetry. You can call it political articles composed with poetic meters. It does not honor me to be a poet. My action is my honor, my homeland. But poetry is not sharaf [honor] for me.

Turki spent thirteen years in Israeli prisons for his usurped homeland. He was born in 1929 to a Christian family that migrated from al-Meghar, a village near the Sea of Galilee, for wage labor in Haifa during British rule. He said that he was “the son of a peasant who knew neither reading nor writing. But he was a man of nakhwa [courage], and he bequeathed it to me.” It was because of such nakhwa that he was so proud of his daughter Ayda. She helped him in his mixed guerrilla band of Arabs and Jews. He was so proud of her that he asked to be called “Abu Ayda” (the father of Ayda), in contrast to the dominant patrilineal Arab tradition by which a father is called after his eldest son. He was also proud of another woman in his life, his fi rst cousin, who was also his wife, Umm Ayda (the mother of Ayda). It is to her that he dedicated the first poem he composed while imprisoned in 1974. If he followed a tradition in sharing his life with a cousin, he deviated from it by what he said when

84

THE SONG

he mourned her in death. On her death announcement posted in the streets of Haifa, Turki iconoclastically quoted a famous line from a speech by Qis bin Saidat al-Ayadi, the pre-Islamic Arab Christian orator and a supposed bishop of Najran. Turki substituted the quotation for the common image of a crucifi x printed at the top of death announcements among Christian Arabs. He asked during our meeting at his house, “Why should I use a Roman symbol? This is something that the Church established in Europe, that it took from the Romans. The crucifi x is a sign of crime and punishment. Why should I look to Rome when my history is in Wadi Najran?” Turki worked only with the al-amudi form. He said to me, “I cannot memorize what is written today. Everyone is free to write anything one wants. I will not discard it [new poetry], but I don’t like it. My ear is used to the classical music in Arabic poetry.” Turki’s poetic beginnings stemmed from an early childhood ability to memorize and recite traditional verse. In 1935 his teacher copied a poem by the Syrian poet Omar Abu Risha on the blackboard, and except for Turki, no one in his first grade class succeeded in memorizing the poem. This mnemonic potency later helped him find a job as a clerk in the tax administration when the British ruled Palestine. It was a potency I witnessed during our conversation, when his responses frequently came out in the form of memorized verses, including some that were first uttered more than fifteen centuries ago which for him remain unrivaled: Arabic poetry had reached its pinnacle in the pre-Islamic days, the days of

Antara when poets began to be influenced by foreigners whom they wanted to imitate. To the young poets, I say, yes, we do need to renovate, but not in this way. We don’t need to imitate the firanja [Westerner], in greed of global prizes, in greed of acceptance in the world. I see Antara the slave, as the most honorable. He fought for his freedom. Another one is Tarafah, who as a young illiterate man carried the letter of his execution order. He did not fear death. These are the people I respect. The nature of our country gives a different inspiration. Of course it is all relative. Our skies are not like the skies of Paris. It could be more beautiful there. It could be more beautiful here. Nature plays a role . . . but this is not to say that we become hostile to others. To each and his taqsuhu [climate]. In poetry, it is the same thing. I take what’s useful and leave out what’s not. As for poetry, what life produces here is not what is produced out there.

Regardless of the climate, Turki was mostly homebound because of his severed legs. His house was located in the neighborhood of Wadi al-Nisnas, a

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

85

major Arab neighborhood in Haifa, a mixed city of Arabs and Jews. Although mixed, most Jews lived in their own neighborhoods, apart from Arabs. More recently, the arrival of the high-tech industry in the city’s outskirts has coincided with a notable movement of Jewish families to adjacent towns, environmentally and ethnically cleaner than Haifa, which is now left, in its center at least, to Ethiopians, Russians, Asian temporary laborers, and Palestinians, including young couples who prefer city life to their ghettoized villages on whose mostly confiscated lands bucolic Jewish towns exist. Perched on the slopes of the Carmel Mountain, Turki’s neighborhood of old stone houses was witness to its age of seven to eight decades. Turki lived in such a home. Greeting visitors at its entrance was an assortment of herbs and plants that locals often grew: basil, lemon, grape leaves, and mint. They were arranged in pots on the wide balcony, another feature that is typical of oldstyle architecture. Doors and windows are arched below high ceilings. Turki’s house stood as a relic, like his verse, from a past that is largely exiled to forgetfulness, even though old stone houses are increasingly renovated into snazzy law offices near the courts in downtown Haifa. Turki’s story disrupted that forgetfulness of the past and a complacent certainty with the present. Hence its nonsecularity. Turki was nonsecular, first of all, for his cyclical (and nonhistorical) sense of time: where the present is a ceaseless degradation of a point of beginning it will always seek to recover, where the local past stands for a nonrealizable but nonetheless imitable accomplishment. His nonsecularity resided also in his refusal to read the unfolding of modern poetry as a sequestered story of aesthetic progress. Western power, in the form of its literary prizes, is integral to this unfolding. The kind of poets Arab men and women now want to be seems intimately tied to the kind of prizes they are after. Turki’s story reminds one of the decimating or disseminating power that literary prizes have over forms. While the story of modern Arabic poetry presents a triumph to some, Turki thought it showed the enduring frailty of human desire and incompleteness. Of course, one does not need to be Turki’s age to refuse to acknowledge the death of al-amudi poetry or to refuse to use traditional rhythms more broadly. Some young poets join senior ones in resisting the consignment of al-amudi and the tradition of rhythmical discipline to a space of atrophied experience. For example, the young Ahmad Bekheit advocates for the al-amudi form by insisting on its being a space that is life-enabling and even life-flourishing. In an attempt to break through the isolation that seemed to have surrounded both my own work and the poets I encountered in Palestine, I traveled

86

THE SONG

to Cairo, the great Arab literary-political metropolis and only one of two Arab capitals (the other being Amman) that I could visit with impunity on my Israeli passport, the only passport I had at the time before becoming a United States citizen after 9/11. I first met Bekheit at a poetry reading he conducted in one of the tents at the thirty-fourth Cairo International Book Fair. Like alDesouqi and unlike Turki, Bekheit dabbles in free verse. However, he would never work with the prose poem format. Bekheit’s criticism reveals his attachment to traditional lyrical poetry. Born in 1966, he is attached to a practice that arose during the past decade to signify an act of rebellion, of critical, not complacent, traditionality, especially in Egypt, where the prose poem dominates. For a poet like Bekheit, who has the “poetic meters in his fabric,” as he says, the rhythm of sounds remains central to his work, in ways that do not exist for free verse poets, and certainly not for prose poets. For Bekheit, to measure sounds in the traditional way is to subvert a dominant present where prose has become not only a poetic technique but also a condition of being: Each one of us has a role. I want to fi ll a zone, which if I abandoned would be a loss. . . . I want to fi ll a zone that convinces the reader that the al-amudi has still something to offer. In Egypt at least, I found that zone unoccupied. I was feeling that this zone would die if it were left neglected, deserted, if no one developed and enriched it. Gradually, I began to discover that the responsibility was increasing, that there is something larger than the al-amudi form. There is a strong current that wants to dump all that we have. What we have is music in poetry. This is why the effort needs to be established and preserved. I was gradually convinced that I was right in my decision. Experimentation is going to extremes. Soon we are going to need a new beginning in poetry. What will we be left with soon? Music is gone. Picture is gone. And the human is gone. We will be left with a white page. It used to be that writing free verse was to be new, to be rebellious. I want to claim that today al-amudi is the peak of rebellion. It is against us being one voice. . . . Why should we all become prose poets? It frightened me to think that every attack on Arabic poetry and its language was not simply a poetic attack. It was an attack in disguise on the Arab person, the Arab heritage and Arab thawabit [certainties]. This provoked me so much that it led me to defend one spot of order. True art bears ruh al-umma [the spirit of the nation]. You can destroy a people in one of two ways: its reli-

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

87

gion or its poetry. These are the two fundamental certainties in it. The attack on poetry was never a pure literary attack. It entailed behind it a great desire to attack other things.

Although in Egyptian and other schools around the Arab world, children are still likely to encounter the kind of poetry that Bekheit claims is dying, that is, al-amudi poetry, the Egyptian state, through the agency of the Cairo Book Festival, supports experimental and modern poetry by granting them a greater visibility, one that renders Bekheit’s persistence in using the old form a resistance to monotony. Poems children read at school do not make up the poetic scene, as do poetry events, periodicals, and anthologies, either published privately or with public funds from the state. Those mark the real scene more than any literary school curriculum could. Thus whatever absence the modern forms may suffer in curricular materials is supplanted by the literary scene—a presence so overwhelming and confused that it gives Bekheit the sense of searching for new beginnings amid chaos, amid things falling apart. Out of that dominance of prose over verse emerges Bekheit’s narrative of chaos, which is comparable to the view of other measuring poets. The traditional form in Bekheit’s narrative challenges its burial at the hands of chaotic deregulators in the name of “aesthetic modernity” and “poetic experimentation.” His narrative gives a voice to a critical reconstruction of tradition, not its wholesale abnegation. The traditional form, unlike what modernists say about it, in Bekheit’s hands remains a space of vitality in both the literary and extraliterary sense. The nonsecular echoes of Bekheit’s voice—never mind its humanist or romantic reverberation (“the spirit of the nation”)—emanate from his double refusal to deregulate rhythms and to dismiss religion as equally vital forces of life generation. This sense of being attacked as an Arab and as a poet by the teeming chaos of unmeasured rhythms or no rhythms at all was precisely what animated my conversation with another poet, who is ten years younger than Bekheit but who nonetheless works with the al-amudi form. He too gives a narrative of tradition, like Bekheit, as generative space. But unlike Bekheit, he is the resident of no country. He lives in the occupied West Bank, where the Israeli military occupier (not the civilian arms of the nation-state) provide as well as prohibit basic conditions of existence and terms for describing it. Abd al-Majid Hamid was born in 1976 in the village of Beit Dajan near Nablus on the West Bank. Like all al-amudi poets I interviewed, he began his

88

THE SONG

poetic career by memorizing verse. However, the poems he learned were mostly religious Islamic songs (anashid). Like other poets presented so far, he spent time in Israeli prisons. Indeed, like Turki, he composed his first poem in prison and later published it in a collection produced by a publishing house affi liated with an Islamic movement on the West Bank. By his own admission, he said that the poem imitates an Egyptian work composed by Hisham alRifai on the night of his execution for involvement in the Muslim Brotherhood. Like the Egyptian poet, Hamid dedicated his poem to his parents. The Israelis arrested him upon his return from Jordan, which had expelled him immediately after he read poetry that the authorities at the university where he was studying found too threatening. Hamid resumed and completed his undergraduate studies in the Arabic Department of Birzeit University. He won first place in the Palestinian universities’ poetry contest. Hamid now teaches Arabic at a private school near Ramallah. He also occasionally serves as imam of a mosque in his village and occasionally works out at a local gym. Our first interview was at the public library of Ramallah, where I was able to go through the Palestinian literary periodical al-Karmel, whose volumes are available there. In May 2001, when the city’s closure that had begun on March 28 was eased, I was able to return to Ramallah from Haifa after a two-month absence. If it were not for cell phones and al-Jazeera, the distance and the disconnect between Ramallah and Haifa (separated geographically by only 160 kilometers) would have devolved to planetary proportions. I felt that Hamid spoke with a particular honesty, rare in a scene where the struggle for attention and visibility can turn very costly. Aged twenty six, he spoke with uncommon candor about his confusion as a poet: I see poetry walking towards a dead-end. The dead-end means not having a public for this poetry. I believe in renovating. But this modernity goes to extremes. I cannot stand its prose poetry. I don’t see it as poetry. I like it as a literary work. Why should you force me to acknowledge Israeli occupation as part of the Arab League? You bring a body with a name that it does not deserve. What is wrong with calling it prose? Does not prose have its beauty! These people want to impose a foot in the literary field. I don’t understand this talk [when a poet says]: “My head is the hat of the world.” My Arab sensibility is against this exaggeration. My soul mingles and interacts with the poem that stays within accepted modernity. Prose poetry has to stay in the category of prose, poetic prose. Let’s keep a criterion for distinction between literary

METRICAL DISCIPLINE AND MASTERY

89

genres. Let me be able to distinguish between the male and female, between the old and the young. The heart does not hold two opposites at the same moment. You cannot be unfaithful and faithful at the same moment. You cannot be hateful and loving at the same moment. It cannot be prose and poetry at the same moment.

As with other narratives I present, the significance of this one emanates neither from analytical precision nor from factual accuracy. Rather, its significance emanates from the proposition it makes and from the myriad threads it has with worlds it wants to sustain and dissociate from. These threads are woven into a narrative of collapse. Things are collapsing, in the eyes of Hamid, as they are in the eyes of Bekheit, Turki, al-Desouqi, and Ibrahim. Rhythms, words, genres are collapsing in a way that erases distinctions, and even the very criteria for distinction. Hence Hamid’s metaphor of anomaly: admitting a foreign presence (Israeli occupation) to a local body (Arab League). Prose inside poetry is like Israel within Arab states, foisted in their midst, is what Hamid appears to be saying. Hamid clearly does not devalue prose itself but rather insists on standards, on clear distinctions between prose and verse. As distinctions between traditional forms of composition have collapsed, so has a sense of the real, a sense of what words should say and how they should say it. Logic, or rather a certain realism, has broken down too. Obscurantism reigns, which Hamid views as an “exaggeration of sensibility” and an inability to find an audience. The public, and hence Hamid’s nonsecular impulse, continues to matter, unlike the attitude of most modernist poets, who want to discard any limitation that shackles and retards authenticity of experience and expression. Hamid’s stand accentuates the public face of poetry, insisted upon by poets of the al-amudi form. This is not to say that secularizing poets do not care about their public, but rather that there is a difference between how they define their audience and who that audience actually is. What the public means to those who regulate meter and those who want to regulate less or not at all are radically different. The public has a positive valence that it loses progressively as poets press on with bringing their field to a secular modernity. Hamid’s insistence on the particularity of and accountability to an Arab public lead him to reject what he describes as “obscure” modernizing poets. In fact the complaint that modern poets, especially those who write in prose, are obscure is one that I heard quite frequently among poets and others who

90

THE SONG

reject the increasingly dominant prose poem. It is not that this poem includes rare vocabulary from the tombs or heavens of the language’s diction. If this were the case, one would only need to open a dictionary. The complaint is that while words themselves are easier and more prosaic in modern poetry, the connections between them are not. The severance of the apparent connection between words coincides with the secular severance between poets and their public.

6

POETS FOR “THE PEOPLE”

A F T E R M O R E T H A N A D O Z E N phone calls and months of anticipation, I finally resumed my talks with the poet Hanna Abu-Hanna. His house on Allenby Road in Haifa was only a twenty-minute walk down the mountain from the apartment I had rented with my wife and two daughters. This apartment was also conveniently located near a few family homes on Hatzionut Avenue. Allenby Road and Hatzionut Avenues belong in different ways to the erasure of history that has marked modern Palestinian existence. While Allenby Road is named after the British general Edmund Allenby (1861–1936), who fought against the Ottomans and led his country’s mission to occupy Palestine in World War I, Hatzionut (Zionism) Avenue signifies the ongoing triumph of a colonial history over native memory. This street still tends to be called by its Arabic name, Shari aj-Jabal, “Mountain Street,” as it presumably had been the only main road up the Carmel Mountain from Haifa’s shore. Historically, Haifa, once a small town, was confined to the mountain’s feet. When the United Nations recognized the State of Israel, the street was renamed “UN Avenue.” In 1975, when United Nations Resolution 3379 denounced Zionism as racism, the street was renamed Shderot Hatzionut in retaliation. Although the UN rescinded its position in 1991, Mountain Street remains buried under Zionism Avenue in memories as in resolutions. After taking my daughter to the nursery school in the largest Arab neighborhood of the city, Wadi al-Nisnas (Valley of the Mongoose), I headed to Abu-Hanna’s house. On the way, I came across two workmen posting frames

92

THE SONG

containing printed, vinyl-covered poems. They were constructing a path that slithered across several streets and alleys and would open under the bilingual (Arabic-Hebrew) name “The Path of Poetry.” This path was sponsored by the Haifa Municipality as well as the Arab-Jewish Beit Hagefen, a cultural center in the city’s Arab section that buttresses state denial of Palestinians, better known as “coexistence” between Arabs and Jews. None of the coexistence activities take place in Jewish neighborhoods. Welcoming occurs only on the Arab side of town. Not only are Jews not asked to welcome coexistence activities of any sort in their own neighborhoods, but they are also invited to “coexist” with “Arabs,” as distinct from “Palestinians.” Given the vast geographic region to which the term Arab applies, this distinction connotes an ethereality of belonging that seems to allay Jewish anxiety over rootedness in the land, nourished as it is today by the deracination of native Palestinian existence. On “The Path of Poetry” I encountered a bilingual poster (Arabic-Hebrew) of a poem written by Abu-Hanna in the form of free verse. Yet I was more interested in his prosaic words that would constitute much of our conversation, rather than the versified ones. When I reached Abu-Hanna’s apartment on the second floor of a stone building, I rang the doorbell where his surname appeared in three languages: Arabic, Hebrew, and English. The male name Hanna in Arabic derives from the ancient Aramaic layer of the language and is better known to the world as John. The door opened, and Abu-Hanna welcomed me into the living room. It was our third and final meeting. The main purpose was to resume a conversation we had started a few months earlier. In his captivating autobiography Zillu al-Ghayma (The Shade of the Cloud), Abu-Hanna describes life in his home village, al-Raineh, near Nazareth, its peasants’ processions for rain, his Quranic schooling in the town of Sdoud, and his attending boarding school in Jerusalem under British rule. His father was a landscaper whose job led him to travel throughout Palestine. In Sdoud there was only a kuttab, a Muslim Quranic school, available to the Greek Orthodox Abu-Hanna. In this biography, however, he does not broach the subject of his poetic beginnings. In our conversations, I learned things about his early attachment to romanticism in poetry through his enduring love for Gibran Khalil Gibran; he told me, “Gibran writes in a daily language, away from . . . traditions [taqalid]. And when he was criticized . . . [Gibran] said, ‘You have your language and I have mine.’ So his work was a rebellion against tradition. Socially

POETS FOR “THE PEOPLE”

93

he was rebellious. He rebelled against the priesthood and protested against poverty.” Gibran’s defiant proclamation on the cusp of the twentieth century, “You have your language and I have mine” (“lakum lughatukum wa liya lughati”), mimics through a romantic secular inversion the rhythm of the last verse in the Quranic sura under the name “al-Kafirun” (deniers of truth) (109:6): “You have your religion and I have mine” (“lakum dinukum wa liya din”), signaling that the faithful and “the deniers” (more commonly translated as “disbelievers” or “infidels”) each have their distinct religion. What Gibran as an anti-ecclesiastical Christian Arab is doing here is transmuting the Quranic verse to convey a secular message of poetic-social rebellion whose most celebrated product in the West is perhaps The Prophet. In fact, the Quran and other religious and mythical sources provide the bulk of the vocabulary through which secularizing poets paradoxically convey their poetic messages. In a typical triumphal vision of secular modernity, the word “tradition” appears as the inimical space of atrophy for Abu-Hanna and for Gibran. Linguistically “renovation” means speaking a language of “daily” life, which is classical Arabic ( fusha), but does not derive from the elated lexicon of the ancients. The compass guiding the time vision of secular poets like Abu-Hanna and Gibran also guides their verbal selection. If the desert cannot be that compass—an ancient dwelling for poetic and other traditions in Arab history—its lexicon will not be that either. Gibran’s rebellion inspired Abu-Hanna’s shift to socialist realism even though the former is marked as a pioneer of the romantic strand in the history of modern Arabic poetry. Abu-Hanna actually wrote a poem about his shift, which he titled “Divorcing Romanticism.” He divorced romanticism after reading the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovski (1893–1930). Abu-Hanna’s socialist realism infused much of the poetry he recited at poetry festivals sponsored by the Communist Party during the 1950s and 1960s. Changing the priorities of poetry affected his relationship to his public. The question of poets’ relationships to their audiences inevitably surfaced in my conversations with Abu-Hanna, as it did with all the poets I met. Poets working in the different forms spoke about “the people” (invariably referred to as an-nas or ash-shab), those to whom they write and those whom they avoid. I was curious to know who “the people” in different cases were and what “the people” meant for the poets across different forms. It became clear to me that

94

THE SONG

whether or not to measure sound in a poetic utterance is unthinkable without knowing the public a poet seeks to reach. In other words, whether to compose in the traditionally lyrical form, in free verse, or in a prose poem is inevitably related to the poet’s par ticu lar audial or reading public. The question of poetic form transmutes to such questions as, For whom do poets compose? What kind of relations do they want to cultivate sustain, or avoid with the public? Poets’ expositions of their relations with the public reveal how ideas about poetry, the public, and mere existence have changed with the arrival of the modern condition in the world of Arab poets. Their expositions offer accounts of transformation in their sense of themselves and their words and the place and power of both in the world that has come into being. Abu-Hanna has a foot in both worlds, traditional al-amudi and free verse. He had practiced the traditionally lyrical form for a good part of his poetic career, but when the time came to abandon it in favor of free verse and to be truly modern, he began to write not only in daily language but also with greater freedom of sounds. His narration of his poetic shift tells of the changing relation between poets and the public on the way to learning the subject of linear-historical and secularized time, known as “progress.” Today the poet has to be an intellectual in order not to give something usual and prosaic. But when I recall my writing in the 1950s, I had to write honestly. When I went to the mihrajan [festival], the role of the poet was revolutionary. I wrote “A Winter Night” [“Lylu Shitaa”] in the 1950s and published it in alJadid. It was a bit symbolic. And back then the level of intellect was not high. Comrades came and asked me, “What is this! How will people understand this?” So we started writing more clearly. People were not as educated as they are today. Today artistic valuation is higher. Then there were 150,000 villagers and a handful of educated ones. Today we are a million and 200,000 with thousands of university graduates. There is a critical eye today to poetry. Th is is the new approach to poetry. . . . The new stream takes the taf ila [foot] but does not restrict the poet to use a fi xed number but rather to distribute it on the basis of the drama. Today we live a new vision, a new world. To express oneself today, you need to give a picture and a stand through a drama, through a story, and symmetry does not allow that. . . . The old poetry is lyrical. . . . They used to say “anshada shiran” [he sang poetry]. In the twentieth century, with development and an opening

POETS FOR “THE PEOPLE”

95

to Western culture . . . the poem picked up new themes. The themes today picture the human condition.

Abu-Hanna’s revolutionary voice of decades ago is barely audible today. It ever faintly invokes that former revolutionary role. That role was played in various endeavors that became synonyms of the revolution: socialism, communism, Arab nationalism, and anticolonialism. By the time Abu-Hanna said these words to me, almost all of these revolutions appeared to have had a fervor that passed through the land without any discernable rooting. None of these political revolutions lasted as long as their aesthetically named sister, modernism, and the house from which they all descended, secular modernity, in which the remnant of Palestinian villagers, who turned first into wagelaborers then into university students, graduates, and city dwellers continues to stand. The arrival of this secular condition as told by Abu-Hanna is the story of a redeeming progress, of moving toward a “higher” intellect. Though his is a common story, so common that it has become one of the ways the secular is recognized (secularization as intellectualization), it is striking nonetheless. It is striking because in this story Abu-Hanna conveys the different premiums given to various sensorial faculties of attaining that higher intellect. It matters less whether or not the present contains a higher intellect. What is crucial here is what this perceived increase in intellect entails in terms of garnering different and unequally valued sensorial abilities for engaging with and making “the real.” Increased intellect, as perceived by Abu-Hanna, brings “higher” artistic valuation, and this in turn means greater appreciation of the “symbolic” or “the incomprehensible” layers of reality. Abu-Hanna’s story is couched in terms of writing either honestly, clearly, or symbolically, outside realism, as literary critics might say. With the spread of literacy and secular academic education, the more “symbolically” and hence “less clearly” reality has to be depicted. The sound configuration may have become simpler, but the pictorial-visual expressions of reality have become more central and complicated. Hence the triumph of a critical eye, as Abu-Hanna says. The eye becomes the sovereign organ of discernment. If Abu-Hanna used this phrase unwittingly, as I suspect he did, it is because the visual has seeped into the fabric of his secular vocabulary; the visual has acquired a presence in his world in a way that ceased to be possible for the aural. To be an intellectual in that new perceptual rearrangement, you must speak through the visible to

96

THE SONG

truths that are worth their name only if the eye, more than any other sensory organ, can behold them. Higher intellectualism, in the secularly headed world of Abu-Hanna, entails also a higher appreciation for what is visually depictable and visibly present. The presence of the visual is so grounded in Abu-Hanna’s secular vocabulary that it charts his way of describing the effect of traditional poetry. He culls a word from the geometric lexicon, symmetry, to describe the sonic discipline through which poets measure, that is, regulate, the rhythms of their verse. When it was first systemically examined by al-Khalil, this practice of sonic regulation, as already noted, was identified by reference to “the sea” (poetic meter), which, as in traditional poems, was the source of endlessly but dissimilarly disciplined verse lines or “waves.” That act of disciplining rhythms of verse previously enabling the very definition of poetry is now geometrically and visually perceived as an act in the yoke of symmetry. In this development, whereby a poet writes less honestly, as Abu-Hanna implies, what matters more than sound is the pictures, or images, put in a more literary language. Why has singing verse in the traditional sense acquired a modern semantics to mean also screaming or droning? The ear in this new world is the seat of musical enchanting (tarab), as modernizing poets would say; it is not the seat of deep knowledge. What has happened in a society that now valorizes the prosaic and devalues the lyrical? The story of Hanna Ibrahim again offers a place to visit this question. Ibrahim, a compatriot and contemporary of Abu-Hanna, left poetry altogether. It is not that he does not love it any longer. He has simply lost faith in its potency, in its ability to deliver. He conveys an inescapable feeling that something has gone amiss after all these years. Now he believes that power of delivery lies with the written, not the recited word, and primarily in newspaper articles and stories. He recently published a book of short stories telling tales of the homeland and its peoples. He considers only that which is rhymed and metered to be poetry, in keeping with the traditional definition of Arabic poetry. Yet he no longer finds a place in his world for “screaming” orotund verse. This verse was fitting for a revolution that his generation thought was coming but never did. Instead foreign occupation and internal corruption have continued to seep deeper. Ibrahim may not compose the free verse that Abu-Hanna does, but he agrees that something has happened to language and the world that makes it no longer necessary to sing and “scream.”

POETS FOR “THE PEOPLE”

97

There is no more fear today. Let’s admit that today in Israel there is a democracy. There is a freedom of expression. But this is not always an indication of the ruler’s generosity of heart and democracy. It could also be an indication of the weakness of our position. Th is is to say that our words are not frightening anymore. When under military rule we were so weak. When they used to renew our residency rights on [an] annual basis, you couldn’t move without military permission. I once asked someone, a policeman, “Why you are treating us like this? We have nothing, no weapons, we even recognized Israel before Israel existed.” He said, “Your talk and your poems are more difficult than weapons.” So if it were more perilous then why is it no longer? Because it lost its value. Talk as much as you want, you will not frighten us. The Caliph Muawiya said once, “I shall not interfere with people and their tongues as long as they don’t interfere with us and with what we own.” Today there are no socialist, Arab, or Islamic worlds. Everything is torn. Israel steps on them all. They say, “Let them talk. Let them vent their anger in words and poems, let them scream until they have a headache and go to sleep.” . . . When one wears a coat in the winter, this is natural. When one wears a coat in the summer, what will people say about him? Back then the revolutionary sentence was timely and valuable, but today it is like someone wearing a coat in the summer. The ones with revolutionary sentences are either wounded or weak. Pardon my words, but there is a colloquial saying that goes “The big fart comes from the tired donkey.” Maybe in a battle there is a point to screaming.

Ibrahim once lived in a world where poetic words frightened even political authority, because words, especially in the mouths of poets, were weapons. They had an edge. In the mouths of Palestinian poets of Ibrahim’s generation, they disturbed the sovereign’s plans for spreading acquiescence and forgetfulness among the native inhabitants of the land. They also had an edge because the newly founded military regime had such a thin skin and was so profoundly insecure that the smallest of words could occasion a disturbance in its fragile claim on the land. Ibrahim exudes the sense that, five decades into the occupation, either the battle is over or, more likely, it has shifted ground. He was part of that battle in which screaming words were the primary weapon. He had to recite, with or without a microphone, to a mass of peasants, factory workers, and educated

98

THE SONG

classes who wanted to learn about their world and affirm and affect their presence in it, through words. This was of course at a time when radios, rather than newspapers, were a more accessible media. However, given the modern exile of poetic meter, the sound of modern poems had to become quieter because new moral and political subjects are in the making; a new world is emerging as an old one has been collapsing. That sonority became the degrading synonym for screaming, altering ethics and politics, not merely the aesthetics of sound. In the aftermath of the 1948 fall of Palestine, poets throughout the Arab world initially found sustenance in great hopes that a redemptive Arab secular nationalism, especially in the 1950s and 1960s under Gamal Abdul Nasser, would triumph over foreign colonialism and over the oppressions of Arab traditional (religious and monarchic) order, which were blamed for the loss of Palestine. For the wider Arab world, deserting the traditional architecture of the Arabic qasida was part and parcel of deserting the traditional societal order it embodied, but not yet so in Palestine. When Abu-Hanna and Ibrahim recited at poetry festivals during the 1950s and 1960s, the orotund sounds of their verses were described as “beautiful melodies” and “symphonies” that affirmed the bonds between poetry and the people (ash-shab) or the masses (al-jamahir)—a linguistic accretion or mutation that points to the presence of the secular in the world of the poets who otherwise, traditionally, would have referred to the masses in now outdated terms (such as amma, “commoners”). Yet such sounds—historically peculiar as they were because of the secular socialist realism that infused them and because of the premodern verse architecture that sustained them—did not continue for long after the fall of Palestine. Unlike Ibrahim, younger poets today, especially the prose poem writers among them, are still unsurprisingly able to anticipate a revolution. They maintain that the state wants them to compose “screaming” poetry, or at least tolerates them when they do so. However, as the bearers of a revolution yet to come, they will not pursue an antiquated hope. For them, the revolution, if it occurs, will occur in the souls of a few private readers and not on the stages of poetic recitations accompanying massive political demonstrations. If they have shed the secularity of grand oppositional narratives such as nationalism and socialism, they have delved deeper into the secular to get ever closer to the complex contradictions living in its vortex. For a great many contemporary prose and free versifiers, it is no longer possible to subscribe to the grand stories of hope and redemption that sustained their predecessors until the

POETS FOR “THE PEOPLE”

99

1960s—until, that is, the malignancy of Arab nation-states and encompassing Western power became evident everywhere. For them, poetry’s ultimate cause is poetry as such, a self-sufficient realm. Echoing Marx, poetry now revolves around no other spheres of human action, but they revolve around it and it revolves around itself. By the 1990s all these grand stories had been discredited, the nation-state appeared unabashedly self-absolving of its commitment to “the nation,” and its most worthy battles had become those it waged against enemies it called “fundamentalists” and “terrorists.” Poetry itself thus becomes the only believable story. Poetry, like forms of revived Islamic religiosity, becomes the place of going beyond or below the project of the nation-state. In the contemporary idea of poetry, a salvation of the soul, privately refashioned and redeemed, is so potent, particularly among the staunch secularists, those who have a profound aversion to Islam’s “interference” in politics and arts, and generally to religious authority acquiring a public face. So potent has this private redemption of the soul through poetry become that even poets still advocating the al-amudi form resort to it when describing their poetic mission. Ahmad Bekheit is a case in point. Bekheit received loud applause when he came up to read his al-amudi poem at the Evening of Poetry tent at the thirty-fourth International Book Fair in Madinat Nasr, in Cairo. In the Evening of Poetry tent, I saw Bekheit on a podium with two other poets: Ahmad al-Shahawi, who dedicated a love poem that seemed directed at a woman sitting near me, and Iman Abu Bakri, who recited, in demotic Egyptian, a satirical poem against the authorities called “There Is Nothing” (“Ma Fish Haga”). All three poets read other works in the classical form, and all appeared to have memorized much of what they recited. Although the audience applauded loudly for Bekheit, especially when he was introduced as someone who was “resuscitating” the classical form, Abu Bakri received the strongest applause, both from those sitting inside the tent and those standing outside to hear her, because she drew in people to take part in her poetic, theatrical performance. Veiled herself, Abu Bakri sought to unmask and mock political and religious authorities of censorship in the country. Bekheit’s own views on his relationship with the audience came out over a series of conversations we had in downtown Cairo. Bekheit concurred that an audience could deceive the poet by providing him with a sense of accomplishment with their applause. In turn the poet gives the public what it wants to hear. However, he argues, only an indolent poet, or a poet who wants something

100

THE SONG

other than poetry from poetry, could be seduced by this public cheering. As a young poet in his mid-thirties, Bekheit speaks in fashionable parlance about the soul (al-ruh) being the object of poetic redemption. He also articulates a mutually nurturing relation with the public that only al-amudi poets express unwaveringly. Furthermore, for Bekheit, composing lyrical poetry for the people does not prohibit working on the soul, or in other words, composing “profound” poetry: Poetry is all that I own. First of all, I write for myself. I feel more wholesome, more beautiful. This is what I feel when I write alone: when you produce something, that makes you feel good. It makes you feel better to find that your work reached someone in the desert of ugliness around us. I write with the hope always that someone needs this in the moment of clash with the soul. I write for the people, not for poets or critics. I am not concerned with them. Most rewarding about poetry is that you meet people who never saw you before, but love you for no other reason but your poetry. This makes me feel alive. It is worth it, in spite of all difficulties, to meet this love, even if you don’t face them for twenty years. My only hope in poetry is not accolades. It is that poetry lives with people. I don’t want dead anthologies in university bookshelves. It makes me so happy to run into someone who has read a line from my work.

In Bekheit’s account, a sense of poetry for and among the people is evident once again. This sense exudes, I think, some secular and largely nonsecular moorings. When Bekheit spoke of “the soul,” he did no more than take it from the mouths of secular poets surrounding him. Deterred by secular sensibilities toward the religious, the poetic becomes the kind of space in which poets, largely with secularist sensibilities, work, cultivate, and care for themselves. Of course it is possible that in his evocation of the soul, Bekheit is countering the well-known claim by secularist-modernizing poets that versifying, especially traditionally as Bekheit does, confines the poet to the surface, barring her from delving deep into the authenticity of being and knowing. But Bekheit also joins secularist poets who mark and perhaps single out poetry (as distinct from religion) as a remaining space, remaining for reaching out to the soul, beyond the nation-state, which they know in the modern Middle East has crushed so many bodies and souls. But the nonsecularism of Bekheit resides in his very old sense of poetry as a quintessentially public practice. He speaks of a public affirmatively and approvingly, which becomes harder for poets of pronounced secular sensibilities

POETS FOR “THE PEOPLE”

101

to do. The public neither menaces his creativity nor sends his words to the abyss of superficiality. Quite the contrary. Notwithstanding the secularist aura of socialist realism conjured by words like “the people,” Bekheit uses the term in a nonsecular sense. The public or the people, as he would say, furnish the grounds of creativity, giving words for living and thriving. His nonsecularism comes out in his refusal to specialize in a modern sense and grant poetry a self-sufficient, private realm. Intellectualization of life and fragmentation, that is, specialization into autonomously sovereign spheres of human action (and realms of truth), brings death. That is where his words would die. The academic library bookshelf becomes the grave of his poetry. But reaching out to people does not mean, in fact never meant, composing for all of them. The relation a poet seeks with her or his public governs the sonic architecture of the poem. Yet that relation constitutes and, at times, determines the lexical stock that goes into the making of that edifice. Born in 1936, Mahmoud al-Desouqi remains committed to the metrical and rhymed composition of al-amudi. I accompanied him to various events in and outside his town of al-Taybeh, within the Triangle region in the center of what has become Israel. A ghetto of wealth and poverty, law and its apparent absence, al-Taybeh is occasionally threatened with transfer outside Israel’s sovereignty and is constantly severed from its rural and endangered beginnings. But there was another threat that hovered in the shadows of al-Desouqi’s speech: the threat of death, both in a literary and a literal sense. Absented from the literary scene, he filled our conversations with reminders of his past accomplishments. It seemed that he needed to tell his story, as if he were living in a world that had turned deaf to him. He needed to talk, as though he were Scheherazade of One Thousand and One Nights in her attempts to keep death at bay. The more I heard him, the more he conveyed a sense of his world withering away. It was as if he wished to uncover his world for me before he met his death. Al-Desouqi and his cohort of poets were particularly generous in sharing their spoken words and printed works, as if they were begging for an ear or an eye. Eager to remind the world that they existed, their parting gifts to me were often loads of anthologies and single poems that they published or wanted to publish, to ward off a billowing oblivion. I received many such gifts one evening at a meeting of what is informally called al-Muntada (The Association), a group to which al-Desouqi belongs, along with three women and four other men. Walking to the meeting through

102

THE SONG

the old alleys of al-Taybeh, al-Desouqi and I came across residents who greeted him as ash-shair (the poet). “The people” hear him, al-Desouqi said; it is the muhaddithun (renovators), his way of saying “modernizers” of poetry, who do not, belittling his verse for its lugha mubashira (direct language). This accusation implies that al-Desouqi’s language is all too facile, semantically and logically, too pedestrian and common. Its simplicity of emotion and realism, its lucid vision and visualization are no match for the complex world that has come into being. But al-Desouqi emphasized that all literature, prose and poetry, is min wa-ila al-nas (from and to the people). He wondered, poignantly, “For whom do we write? Why is poetry called the diwan of the Arabs?” Al-Desouqi’s bluntness did not preclude misinterpretations of his intentions. That evening at the al-Muntada meeting, he caused an uproar among the women poets, all veiled, when he condemned Arab rulers for their complacency and failure to defend Palestine; he “impiously” called them awlad al-qahba (sons of bitches). Although shocked, one woman defended him, quoting the timeless dictum about poetic license: “A poet is entitled to what others are not.” Another woman was not sure if his lampoon was directed only against Arab rulers; in the discussion that ensued after the poem’s reading, she suspected that the poem’s blunt condemnation could be misconstrued so as to target all Arab peoples. Although a senior poet like al-Desouqi should have had at his disposal an arsenal of subtle ways to condemn Arab rulers, he chose to condemn them bluntly, with raw anger, not disguised as signs or allusions, as modish semiotic vocabulary would suggest; this is because he objects to rampant obscurity in verse. While the “renovators” of poetry draw upon the ancient and almost completely forgotten myths of Babylon, Canaan, Egypt, Greece, and Phoenicia (rerouted to the East via the Arabic translation of Sir James Frazer’s Golden Bough in the early 1950s by the prominent Palestinian writer Jabra Ibrahim Jabra), al-Desouqi finds it sufficient to evoke a history that the people know. Unimpressed by the recent modernist and postmodernist fascination with myth and memory, he resorts to the biblical account for his historical source. A controversial poem titled “Enough . . . O’ Offspring of the Slave” refers to a biblical genealogy that identifies Hagar, an Egyptian slave, the second wife of Abraham and the mother of Ishmael, as the mother of all Arabs. In consideration of the people, the enslaved Hagar remains a much more familiar name than the goddess Anaat of Canaan, a commonly employed figure among mark-

POETS FOR “THE PEOPLE”

103

edly secular Palestinian and other Arab poets who have embarked on recovering ancient mythical and extra-Quranic knowledge in the history of their societies. Al-Desouqi explains why he must write clearly and directly: Those who write obscurities are the ones who acquire fame in the West, because the Orientalists want that. The clear and understood poetry is the poetry that arises, awakens the people. For example, in the days of military rule, the ruler asked me to write obscure poetry. He did not want me to write clear poetry in order not to entice people. I will not call al-Quds “Yabus,” for who among the lay people would recognize that we are taking about Jerusalem? Yes, the poet has to be in the middle, neither too far below audiences nor too far above them. Not obscure. You have to write things that people understand and benefit from.

Nonsecularism visits al-Desouqi in at least two places: first, through his approach to obscurity, and second, through the societal hierarchy in which he positions the poet. His refusal to write “obscurely” conveys a certain nonsecularism in the sense that his resultant work does not demand the mediation of exegesis, which paradoxically prose and free versifiers seem to increasingly require. Acts of interpretation aside, there is also the question of engaging with “the real.” In a strange way, al-Desouqi writes with a kind of realism from which secular poets want to flee through enchantment and myth. Against his suffocating realism, they pursue shadows, the seemingly “unreal” in the precincts of the mythical and illogical. Hence they evoke an esoteric Canaanite past via the name Yabus, not Al-Quds, the recognizably Arabic and Muslim name of Jerusalem. Whether Jerusalem is called Al-Quds or Yabus relates to whom one is talking. Words have their compass. Clearly, poets who speak of Yabus have in mind the modern quest, originating in the West, for unearthing ancient, even premonotheistic mythology. They also have in mind the Israeli conqueror who colonized the land partly on the assumption of its being barren. To speak of the pre-Israelite Yabus, then, is to undermine a modern colonial movement’s (Zionism’s) claim to an empty land, though paradoxically it affirms Zionism’s claim of being a movement of “returning Jews.” In the countermyth, the ancient Semitic people of Canaan are thought of as proto-Arabs, the forgotten ancestors whose lineage to the present Arabs has long been erased. There is another thing that marks the nonsecularism of al-Desouqi, besides his choice of words and the entailed presupposition toward the real. It is

104

THE SONG

the way he spatially positions poets. They are neither exactly among the commoners, nor are they beyond them. This hierarchic structure retaining a measure of reverential, public deference for the poet distinguishes him from poets more entrenched in secular modernity. These poets generally display a profound dislike for ancient social hierarchies, especially of the poet as a revered clannish figure, but on the other hand, they often complain that the people are backward in relation to their progressive aspirations. They display profound exasperation with a public that menaces them; they fear the public’s ability to go far and deep. The premodern, nonsecular sensibility that lives on in al-Desouqi has him place poets not back in time, but below in space. The people do not know what he knows about language. Yet he is not ahead of them in terms of the future. The relation al-Desouqi strives to have with the people brings forth the semantic and sonic features of his verse. The sonic and the semantic, form and content, assume no oppositional or separable positions, but this is not true only for al-Desouqi. It applies to all the poets I met, modernist or not. For alDesouqi specifically and for poets of al-amudi generally, “the people,” for all the particularly secular reverberation of this locution, retains a premodern enabling sense that poets have been progressively losing today. In the modern secular condition, poets increasingly fear for their ability to obtain understanding from the public. In choosing the al-amudi form, poets have elected to compose for the people, and in so choosing, they select words and references that the people know. For poets like al-Desouqi, myth as a modern aesthetic device is not even an option. His decision is to compose with a classical realism that modern ideas of history and the people complexly enable him to do. And the words of that history, even when contentious, must be measured and clear for the people to comprehend. But where are the people for whom al-Desouqi is composing? Raising this question marks a kind of absence I generally observed in my fieldwork. The people’s absence signaled a double marginality in the world of the alamudi poets. They were marginal in a poetic scene that was itself marginal, as though poets were talking to each other and no one else. While I witnessed the marginality of al-amudi poets in various print media, especially newspapers that allocated less and less space to this form, I once had the opportunity to observe the marginality of the poetic scene on the whole during another evening of poetry featuring al-Desouqi. That event was sponsored by al-Muntada at a new community center in the town of Qalansuwa, near al-Taybeh.

POETS FOR “THE PEOPLE”

105

The reading was to take place in the largest hall, the auditorium, and also the emptiest one, as other rooms were fi lled with children taking classes in crafts, karate, and music. It was held a day after members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) had killed an Israeli cabinet member in retaliation for Israel’s assassination of its leader. So it is possible that the military occupation, turning ever more insidiously prosaic, had (given the rank of the killed) regained the interest of an otherwise disinterested public. The occupation had people alter their routines, stay at home, and follow, however briefly, the episodic intensity of its escalation on television. The chairs, arranged in two columns and four rows, remained largely empty for some time following the scheduled start of the reading. The opening was therefore delayed, fortuitously enabling me to chat with some of the attendees. One of them had enough age behind him that he remembered the popu lar festivals in the 1950s and 1960s, before the Internet, television, and the mushrooming of satellite channels, perhaps even before radio, but certainly before the currently endemic disconnect between poets and the lay public. About those festivals he said, “We used to cry. . . . We would read poetry even under the rain, under the branches of an olive tree. . . . No one would go home, in spite of the rain. . . . In the 1950s, two to three hundred people came to a festival of poetry.” No more than twenty people showed up at the poetry event in Qalansuwa. One of the al-Muntada members from the town that hosted the event, Abd alRaziq Abu Ras, apologetically opened the delayed event, reminding attendants that even a poetry reading in Nazareth, which he called “the cultural capital of the Arabs in Israel,” may not muster a greater number—Nazareth, whose predominantly secular politics led the nationalist struggle of Palestinian citizens within Israel for almost four decades until the late 1980s, until the city of Umm Al-Fahem, now a center of reviving Islam within Israel, started to vie with Nazareth over that leadership. Speaking immediately after the moderator, the head of the community found the attendance encouraging: “The message is to those who are present. . . . Today, it is especially difficult to leave TV.” I took this as a reference to people closely following the news of the unfolding occupation. But I had my doubts. I was not sure that television alone explained the meager attendance. I did not think that it was primarily television that was keeping poets from talking to people other than their fellow poets, who composed most of the attendance at this event, as well as at other poetry readings that I had attended during my fieldwork. The occupation dominated much of

106

THE SONG

the news when I was working with poets, but it was not new news. Might something else be taking place? When the occupation was very young and insecure, poetry was a major act of defiance in its face. People in the hundreds attended such events as this one. If the fact of occupation had not changed, what else had happened in Palestinian life that led the people to stop listening to the poets and the poets to stop singing? Was it possible that what was happening to poets was intractably linked to what was happening to human words (and the place of human sound in them) as part of a drama wider than their country? If the fate of carpentry is linked to the fate of trees on earth, ought not analogously the fate of poetry be part of the condition of words and sounds in the world? Even five decades ago there were early signs that poets were no longer just singing in the Palestinian scene. A local story of severance between music and thought and between knowing and hearing had been set in motion. Even Hanna Ibrahim, who is still committed to traditional measurement and versification, does not believe in the high sonority of poetry anymore. He calls it “noise.” However, although Ibrahim has retired from poetry, he insists that were he to compose poetry today it would be for the people. This is in part typical of poets working in al-amudi, and also in keeping with a whole cohort of poets who once worked or continue to work toward grand futures: socialist, nationalist, communist, or religious. Clashing as those political undertakings may be, they seem to have coalesced on at least this point: a profoundly traditional stance that poetry is a public event and a public practice with publicly established criteria that seem increasingly untenable in the pursuit of modern secularity. Poets working with the hoary al-amudi form, regardless of their ideological affi liation, have an accountability to the public that thoroughly modernizing poets do not experience with either the same velocity or mode. It is not an issue of popularity but of making the public quintessentially integral to defining and validating their production of the al-amudi form, in a way that is not possible for poets of forms more suited to the secular condition. Rather, modernizing poets are more conflicted about the people, who can be a force that gnaws at their sense of autonomy and creativity. Ibrahim’s nonsecularism lives neither in a possible disavowal of Christian doctrine nor in pews he routinely stays away from. He has dedicated his life to socialist and communist politics. His nonsecularism resides, as it did with others of his generation, in the sense of the public, a nonspecialized public for

POETS FOR “THE PEOPLE”

107

which he insists poetry be composed, notwithstanding the stringent criteria he places for admission to and cultivation of the craft. I asked Hanna Ibrahim about the criteria of his craft for good poetry. In his response, he mentioned the importance of the people, a response typical of poets working in the al-amudi form. The poetry that Ibrahim has composed is not yet conceived as an autonomous realm in and of itself, because it was composed for a recipient; it is intended neither to save a poet’s soul nor to be understood only as a piece of art. To Ibrahim, those who set the criteria of poetry are the people, the people’s taste. I know for example how people react when [they] hear comprehensible and metered poetry or when they hear just any poem, any piling up of words. I see a difference in their response. . . . I wrote no poem for a paper or magazine. I wrote it only for the people, to be heard at festivals. Even the title of the poem was “Nashid li-l-Nas” (Song for the People). As a poet, I became known among people and was appreciated. On the other hand, this blackened my face with the government. For twenty-nine years, I could only move with a permit. I had to take off work for two days to go and obtain permits. For the Communist Party, I was useful for elections. My poems brought voters. . . . My poetry was a way to convince people about socialism and communism. I wanted to show people that capitalism is exploitative and that social justice rests with socialism. Can someone in a demonstration or meeting against land confiscation read what they call today prose poetry? The audience would slap him or get him off the stage. To entice people you need an enticing tone, enticing language. This [tone] may not be always good. Sometimes it is uncalled for. But back then the strong language, the strong meter, and the musical rhyme that transferred zeal to people was necessary and important in order to gather people and unite them around a cause.

Whether or not the trust Ibrahim places in the people is justifiable, whether it has a ruinous or invigorating impact on his poetry is besides the point here. What is striking about his position is its vitality for his craft. This is a vitality that is in a very crucial sense nonsecular in that it does not exhibit a feel of poetry as just another form of self-sufficient specialization. Politics runs through his craft as would hydrogen through water. The truths that poets like Ibrahim bespeak are not the denizens of a self-sufficient realm awaiting an exegesis to be released from a cloistered text.

108

THE SONG

There is yet another nonsecular dimension to what Ibrahim says. It has do with something other than the ramparts he refuses to erect between the poetic and the nonpoetic, something other than the fact that the public feeds his conception of the poetic. He goes on trusting in ways that have become progressively harder for poets more thoroughly immersed in and identified with secular forms of living. The nonsecular lives in Ibrahim’s valuation of sound. It lives in his placing a premium on hearing. Above all, poetry reaches the ear. Literacy, engaging with the written form of human words, is not presumed to be the reigning pathway to truth. Conversely, hearing is not an obsolete precinct in the search for and proclamation of “truth.” For Ibrahim, the highly metered form of al-amudi does not preclude employing poetry for causes (irreligious as they may be perceived) he finds enlightening. Being sonorous and loud has not inhibited him from addressing “profound” problems of ideology, consciousness, and justice—quite the opposite. In Ibrahim’s lyrically dominated world, knowledge is attainable through hearing, reciting, and singing poetry. He belongs to a world whose realness is not a captive of the visual and visible. The soundness of thinking and being demands not only seeing, but also hearing. Nor does al-Desouqi, who lived under the restrictions of a military rule that severely restricted his mobility, find the metered, sonically disciplined poetry a fettered space. His submission to “the shackles” of acoustic discipline constituted his ability to defy the military authority and educate the public in verse form, very much like Zayyad (as described in Chapter 4) defied and ridiculed those who imprisoned him. Their freedom was not only a function of resisting restrictions others imposed on them. It also had to do with restrictions, invisible as they may be, that they willingly placed on themselves. In the following three chapters focused on poets of free verse, I present a cohort that experiences and expresses freedom in new ways. They attain their freedom by loosening the grip of meter on their composition, even though they do not completely discard it. They want to reach their public more through images and less through sounds. And they increasingly find the people to be potential “blackmailers” of their art and sonic measurement, its inhibitor. For the sake of their art, for the sake of providing profound knowledge, modernizing poets increasingly need to escape the people. If the traditional imaginary of a societal hierarchy had poets come to their audience from above, the modernizing poets of free verse see the people as lagging behind them.

7

ENOUGH “SCREAMING”

“A N D W H Y D O W E F E A R WO R D S ? / They are the friends that come to us / From distant spaces in the soul,” wrote the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika ([1949] 1987, p. 335), who lit the flame of free verse from Baghdad. In her 1949 collection, Shrapnel and Ashes, all the words of Arabic poetry seem flammable. Her recollection of what happened at that time shows how she and others were changing the sounds of their verse to meet, as she puts it, the contemporary demands of their souls. Their rhythms were the immanent waves arriving from the undercurrents of their inner searching selves. She reflects on her generation’s rebellion against the classical Arabic ode: “Individuals who start new movements in the nation and create new patterns do so in order to fulfill a spiritual need that consumes their being and calls them to fill the void that they feel as a result of a dangerous rupture in the life of the nation” ([1962] 1989, p. 54). This recollection induces a set of questions: In what ways does this void—a rupture and a consuming spiritual need—belong to the story of a world turning secular? In what ways are al-Malaika’s words the shadows of a secular presence engulfing her “nation”? What kind of self and society make the freedom invested in free verse expedient and necessary in an epoch of secularizing nation-states? The three chapters in this section respond to these questions. They focus on poets like al-Malaika who are working with the form of free verse in their ongoing pursuit of a quieter and deeper poetry. While the previous section tells

112

THE PICTURE

the stories of poets who are said to be before or outside a secular modernity, the three “Picture” chapters focus on poets who are advocating the cause of that modernity in Arabic poetry. With them, the assumptions and consequences of a secular presence are more pronounced than they are with the traditional poets who maintain a greater distance from that force. The secular is more pronounced among poets of free verse because it reverberates in their articulation of poetry’s realm, tools, and public in ways that sustain secularism’s sequestering of spheres (e.g., religious from aesthetic) and do so in ways that are unappealing to traditional poets. We see how the free versifier presents, notably with regard to the question of poetry’s relation to the public, a middle position, an intermediate space between the traditional versifiers and the modern prose poets, who at the end bring us face-to-face with the quandaries of secular reason and power. While the “Song” chapters trace some of the conditions of poets working with the traditional rigor of metrical discipline, the “Picture” chapters focus on poets who, as befitting their secular world, find it necessary, in fact inexorable, to forgo that discipline, although not entirely. The three main relations of the “Song” chapters run through the “Picture” chapters as well: how poets’ pursuit of a secular modernity transforms their conception of poetry, their rhythm, and their relationship with the poetic public. The poets’ narratives reveal that their changing of rhythms, forms, and tools follows the remaking of a self along the lines of secular power and its liberal inflection. A secular poetic subjectivity erects a religious other that is also inextricably linked to its self-recognition. In the grip of this powerful notion, by which freedom becomes synonymous with a lack of restriction, the modern poet, like the normative self-sovereign subject of secular power, ought to be free from the restrictions of tradition or other binding externalities that encroach on autonomy. The practice of acoustic discipline and the submission to metrical authority does not dissipate entirely. Not yet, anyway. However, this sonic discipline shifts ground as it begins, with poets in the free verse movement, to migrate to a transcendental realm of irrelevance. What now disciplines poets’ rhythms are ideas, invisible currents of the soul, not regulatory sonic practices. In this emancipatory logic, submission becomes an inherent sign of enslavement. Inversely, submission to meters, that is, internalizing them, suffocates freedom. What should be made clear at the outset is that when al-Malaika was speaking of “the nation” she was referring not exclusively to the Iraqi nation, but also to the Arab nation. It is as though the “spiritual need” of which she

ENOUGH “SCREAMING”

113

speaks totally disregarded existing geopolitical borders and haunted the Arabic language, residing wherever that language has lived. The spreading fire of al-Malaika’s call was unstoppable. In the late 1950s, even when al-amudi was experiencing a heyday in the local Palestinian scene, some poets were eager to receive this call. Nine years into the Palestinian collapse of 1948, one poet, only twenty years old, published the first free verse in al-Jadid. Mahmoud Darwish is said to have also been the first Palestinian poet to publish a free verse collection, and he remained among the most prominent advocates of free verse until his death in 2008, even though he sought a kind of reconciliation between it and the prose poem. More than forty years later, during the fall of 2001, I sought to interview Darwish in Ramallah, where he was living part time. Many see Darwish as lighting the flame, not only of free verse but of Arab verse itself, in an especially dark age of prose—when prose had “invaded prayers and shattered the hymns,” as expressed in Darwish’s (2000, p. 21) own words after the angel of death, as locals might say, tried to pay him a visit in a Paris hospital during the late 1990s. Instead of death that angelic visit exacted from Darwish a new book of poems, Jidariyya (Mural). Darwish remains a master and a celebrity poet in the Arab world, a founder and former member of the Parliament of World Writers, whose works have been translated into more than twenty languages. He received several awards, including the Lenin Peace Prize, the Lotus Prize from the Union of Afro-Asian Writers, and the Prize for Cultural Freedom from the American Lannan Foundation, which funded translations of his books through the University of California. He was also an editor of the prestigious al-Karmel periodical, housed in the mansion-like Sakakini Cultural Center of Ramallah, with a driver to pick him up and drop him off, as I learned while waiting for an interview with him. Twice I waited and twice I failed to achieve that desired interview, although we met briefly on both occasions. Of course, occupation is part of the reason. Neither one of us could enter Ramallah when we wished. In this dismembered land, as Darwish would say, he was stuck in his other house in Amman and I in Haifa. But the other reason the interview never took place had to do with Darwish’s requirement that I interview “good” poets, which I took to mean those with literary recognition in the field. Indeed I sought to speak with “good” poets, but it was never my intention to meet only “good” poets. Apparently the names I listed at his behest of poets I had interviewed or was going to interview were unbecoming, inappropriate to

114

THE PICTURE

his standing, and a disser vice to literature because I did not distinguish between “real poets” and those who “purport to be poets.” That I was undertaking an ethnographic study of Arabic poetry rather than pursuing literary appraisal did not persuade him in the least. It even angered others. I must have criteria for judging what is “literature,” Darwish insisted, just as I must have criteria for judging what constitutes the “social sciences.” Lacking a narrative directly from him of his literary development, I have had to content myself with his published positions on the need to “renovate” poetry, as found in a plethora of publications starting more than five decades ago. In 1961, in one of his regular contributions to al-Jadid, titled “An Opinion on Our Poetry,” Darwish (p. 40) chided the poetry community for compromising “art” at the local and widespread poetry festivals sponsored by the Israeli Communist Party, although he appreciated the political potency of poetry at those festivals: As much as we acknowledge the [poetry festivals’] value in awakening political consciousness among our people, reminding it of its bitter reality and opening its eyes to its wounds and chains, as much as we worry about the artistic value of poetry, . . . we don’t deny our pride in the grand, brotherly affi nity between the poets and their people, but we regret that our poetry has become slogans, indistinguishable from political sermons except by meters.

The secular imprints its presence on the words of Darwish and on the reality he describes in a number of ways. Consider, for example, how the oneness of being begins to sequester into separate spheres each reality, invested with unprecedented sovereignty. The aesthetic for Darwish, that is, art, has to be protected from the menace of the political, as religion and politics are prescribed as separate for the good of both by the political doctrine of secularism. In addition to allocating a sovereignty for poetry that supersedes the political, the secular effect finds its ways to contours of life as well as its substance. The secular affects the act of defining traditions and the relations among those who go on living them. In Darwish we begin to see a process set in motion: alienation replacing the affinity between poets and public, the turning of poets to an academic, “professional” language that attracts mostly other poets and literary critics, and rarely ordinary citizens. Just as an entire realm of poetry and relations among poets and public change by a secular fiat, so do technical devices. Meter, Darwish tells us, is what made the poems fall short of being heard only as political sermons. Meter may spare its adherents banishment

ENOUGH “SCREAMING”

115

from the kingdom of poetry, but it does not guarantee admission to the realm of the Beautiful. This is because poetry understood as an art in the modern sense can no longer afford mobilizing sound as its privileged matter. The poets of the secular perceptual complex command the eyes more than the ears. Darwish was basically urging the local community of Palestinian poets to “catch up” with their fellow Arab poets, especially those in Baghdad, where the Arab version of free verse then appeared as the dazzling future of Arabic poetry. In May 2001, anticipating that I would make the last of my monthly visits to Ramallah before concluding my fieldwork, I decided to stay within the “cage,” as I came to see the city. Usually, at the end of the day on those visits, I headed back to my rented room in al-Dhahya, a neighborhood outside the A zone, which is what the besieged Ramallah became after the Oslo Accords, once called by Edward Said (2002b) the “great fraud.” After ten years, the accords left Palestinians negotiating “bits of land lacking coherence and continuity, security institutions designed to assure their subservience to Israel, and a life that impoverished them so that the Jewish state could thrive and prosper.” However, on my last visit, I figured that my time was too precious to waste on some checkpoint soldiers, probably from Ethiopia or Russia, who decided who stayed in and who did not. Thanks to the generosity of people I met in the field and some I hardly knew, every night I found a place to sleep. In the early part of each day I worked at the Palestinian House of Poetry on the very edge of the attached Muslim town of al-Bireh, which might as well be a continuation of Ramallah, although unlike the Muslim-Christian city of Ramallah, its stores do not sell alcohol. Inside the House, a complex of three floors, one could not escape the presence of the Pasgout Jewish colony on the hilltop. But perhaps no less escapable was then President Arafat’s Palestinian National Authority (PNA). The signature of this colony inside the House of Poetry was traces of bullets on broken windows and damaged furniture. The signature of Arafat himself was immediately present in his photographs, hung to greet visitors at the entrance staircase and in the offices of various staff members. To be sure, there were other kinds of pictures in the House, including pictures of the intifada, such as a man emerging from a cloud of smoke to hang the Palestinian national flag at the top of an electric pole, and a child stoning a tank. There were also pictures of notable poets from Palestine and the Arab world decorating the walls of the House of Poetry, an initiative found in several other Arab capitals. I was told

116

THE PICTURE

that in times less troubled than the existing one, the House hosted poetry events that gathered poets from various parts of the Arab world—those who were willing to pass through borders controlled by Israel. Boycotting Israel has had its governmental and civic faces. It is not at all clear to what extent boycotting Israel by Arab officials is the product of impotence or complacency, since it is publicly known that they hold secret meetings with Israeli officials. It also remains to be seen how the civic boycotting of Israel among Arab intellectuals has contributed to Israel’s denial of its beginnings in colonialism, which has thus allowed it to act as though it were merely a vicar of a secular West, with no relation to its Arab and Muslim orbit. One of the gifts the Arab boycott has extended to Israel is sustaining its denial of a Palestinian and Arab presence in its midst and its surroundings. I suspect that were Arab and Palestinian life permitted a full presence, Jewish supremacy would be immediately overwhelmed. However, the current form of Arab boycott helps Israel imagine that it cordons off the avalanche of adulterating non-Jewish life on a land believed to be racially contracted with the divine. In this system of segregation that serves the Israeli occupation, the Palestinian House of Poetry has had trouble bringing Arab, including local Palestinian, poets to its premises. If the former contingent has reasons of pride and principle that prevent it from coming to the West Bank, the latter contingent has the practical reasons of military checkpoints governing their mobility. The House of Poetry was sheltering staff members as a temporary residence because they found returning to their home villages throughout the West Bank far too perilous. Some poets in residence converted the salon into a bedroom, where couches became beds. The office of the House’s director conveyed the regality with which Taha al-Mutawakkil held the place: the intercom door, his bodyguard-chauffer, his busy cell phone, and his assistant, Sima, who conveyed the orders of coffee or tea to the House’s porter. Sima saw to it that I had an office in which to sit and review and sometimes photocopy some of the House’s periodicals. The office belonged to a staff member who could not make it to the House for weeks, as he was stuck in his village. Although short-staffed, the House never seemed short of a telephone; the lines worked at all times. I cannot say the same about other houses and establishments, not even the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Culture. In addition to the ringing phone in the director’s office, the TV was always on and the door was always open. For the most part, al-Mutawakkil’s booming voice seemed to drown out the sounds of the TV. An alumnus of Israeli pris-

ENOUGH “SCREAMING”

117

ons, he had mastered Hebrew as well as the language of Palestinian political institutions, of which the House is undoubtedly one; on more than one occasion I was told that Arafat offered the directorship of the House to al-Mutawakkil as an appeasement due to his exclusion from the Palestinian ministerial cabinet. In Black Milk, one of his recent anthologies, al-Mutawakkil takes the highest of these institutions, the presidency of the PNA, as the subject. In this work, he retells the historic collision of Haroun al-Rashid with his Persian aides, the Barmakids, as a paradigm of a defeated Arab sovereign in order to criticize Arafat and his retinue in their excitement for the Oslo peace process and its American sponsorship. He also made sure to let me know that, contrary to what is expected of poets with a need to rebel, he prayed five times a day and abstained from drinking alcohol, as piety in Islam requires. Creativity for him did not fade with adherence to strictures of religious piety. Al-Mutawakkil even boasted of his piety, which he claimed was scarce among poets, who he maintained could be creative thinkers and craftsmen without impiety. Under a photograph of him with Arafat and another of Arafat alone, al-Mutawakkil told me that he no longer gave prime significance to rhythm in poetry. While his timing of this poetic shift (among Palestinians in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords) bears a mark of singularity, there is nothing singular about the shift itself. His narrative is common among Arab poets who felt suffocated by traditional rhythms, if decades before he did. It is as though poetic certainties among Palestinians had first to be shaken by seismic political events in order for them to come into contact with doubts. Al-Mutawakkil’s testimony marks the approach of those modern Arab poets working with the notion that orality and rhythm are the property of traditional (read “superficial”) poetry. In the new world that opened up for al-Mutawakkil, depth in thinking and being is reached visually rather than acoustically: In our early poetry, before 1994, we went to rhythm. And rhythm is a kind of screaming. Now, I no longer pursue rhythm. Since rhythm alone causes no more than excitement and instantaneous stimulation. And this is of no use. It is more useful to leave a signature in the heart, being, and mind of the recipient. So I started to pursue the Idea, not the Sound. The Idea is more charming and more penetrating. . . . In our early texts we let rhythm dominate everything. After 1994 we started searching for harmony in our texts that balances rhythm with idea, picture and enlightenment. . . . What happened in 1994, a

118

THE PICTURE

year that is a turning point, were three zalazil [quakes] in the world and in Palestinian thought. The first was the collapse of what appeared to be the final bastion for the idea of Arab unity and the triumph of regionalism, as evident in the Second Gulf War, when Arab countries participated in the Atlantic attack on Iraq. Th is shook the Arab being. The second, no less dangerous, was in the deep transformation in the Palestinian’s view of his opposite. Before, we saw the Israeli as the total enemy that we must get rid of. In 1994, as if suddenly, there were Oslo and Madrid, and we began to hear about possibilities of coexistence. This was a deep quake. Th is led to the shock among many intellectuals and the silence of many of them. These events signaled the beginnings of a new kind of content in Palestinian texts. The third quake was the collapse of the Soviet Union, which left the globe in the hands of the Americans. For me, out of the three quakes the most dangerous one was Oslo, it was the deepest. . . . Oslo was something that I had to come to grips with; it led me to reconsider a lot of my givens. We were disillusioned, we were lied to. . . . We abandoned screaming and naiveté, but we did not abandon anger and contemplative writing. This is a more advanced stage of seeing things and handling them with more wisdom. Before Oslo, we were charmed by orations and rhythm. After the revelations in light of Oslo, we became more mature, more reasonable, and more deeply angry. The quiet voice could be more influential than screaming.

Besides poetic conventions and devices unfolding along with political events, in al-Mutawakkil’s narrative one also hears about the insertion of immense modern shifts in various personal histories. All too often among poets, their telling of the former made their telling of the latter unavoidable. National formations, atrophying or flourishing, are intimately linked to what al-Mutawakkil thinks and does about rhymes and rhythms. Illusions ended and hopes collapsed in 1994, after the Palestine Liberation Organization signed the Oslo Accords with Israel, an act of abandonment in the eyes of many Palestinian intellectuals. In its wake, Mahmoud Darwish resigned from the PLO, and Edward Said (1996) leveled a scathing critique in his Peace and Its Malcontents. For al-Mutawakkil, the Oslo Accords were not only a space of political disillusion but also a poetic mutation. His craft flourished in responding to the political decadence brought on by the Oslo Accords. Moreover, in his trajectory the Oslo Accords seem to be no more than a mere eruption of a

ENOUGH “SCREAMING”

119

volcano that evinced subterranean forces long at work under its politicking strata, namely, modern secularism and its kind of regnant visualism. According to al-Mutawakkil, to be modern demands further drilling into the forms of secular and visually oriented life. Consider how the word “texts” recurs in his narrative. It does not come from a void. Substituting for words like “work,” “composition,” “song,” and increasingly “poem,” it is very much part of the parlance of the contemporary scene of urbane Arabic poetry, which is increasingly veering toward an academic form of speaking. Apparently this academic language (typical of a secular intellect) brings the poet closer to the literary critic more than any other. Of course one way (not always the most useful) to understand the secular is as the fragmentation and separation of spheres, or specialization that received a paradigmatic articulation in Max Weber’s secularization thesis. But the secular affects something other than the wholeness of lived life; it also affects how its truths are perceived, expressed, experienced, and searched for—effects whose unfolding is identified by secularization’s well-known self-understanding as intellectualization of or disenchantment with the world. The equation itself of rhythm with screaming or droning, as occurs in al-Mutawakkil’s narrative, is hardly only Palestinian. Wanting to be modern in Palestine and elsewhere in the Arab world, poets embraced this shift, this escaping of screaming and droning. Recall how during the 1960s both Darwish and Jubran chided their fellow Palestinian poets for adhering to sonorous composition and thus possibly vitiating art in poetry. Whether or not they and al-Mutawakkil were searching for a “quieter” poetry, something changed about who they are, who they want to be, and the kind of world they wish to inhabit; Al-Mutawakkil carved out his necessary distance from the sound of words. It has been a necessary, even inevitable move for all poets who want to belong to secular modernity, where image conquers sound as the venue to knowing and living the world’s admissible realities.

8

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

T H E D I S TA N C E B E T W E E N H A I FA A N D R A M A L L A H , door to door, should normally take around two hours to travel. However, in exceptional conditions, traveling this distance can take up to seven hours and four different vehicles (since they are not permitted to cross checkpoints with their riders), as it did on my third fieldwork visit, in October 2001. Flying to London would have taken less time. The subject of military checkpoints and mobility is on everyone’s lips. The roads on which people travel are a special place to observe the state of the space. They are everywhere and nowhere at the same time, absent and present at once. Roads can end or begin in the most unexpected places. They can become anything at any moment: a place to walk, to drive, to demonstrate, to worship, to sell, to shoot, to hide, to get arrested, or to get killed. They are so beat up, so wretched to the point of standing as symbols, very concrete symbols, of life under occupation and corruption. On one taxi ride inside Ramallah, the driver complained to me about how forgotten Palestinians were. Arab leaders and politicians cared only for their positions and were detached from the lives of their citizenry, he reminded me as his cab dived through ponds, some made by nature, others by the weapons of occupation. But since life must go on, drivers went almost anywhere, as people had to keep living despite or because of occupation’s horror. And so, I thought, I must continue my ephemeral venture called fieldwork. On this October trip, I met Mahmoud Abu Hashhash for the first time. A childhood friend of mine, Lena, who had left Haifa for a fuller Palestinian life

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

121

putatively found in Ramallah, introduced me to him. The insignia of Palestinian nationalism was not denied, suppressed, or made illegal on the West Bank, as it had been under direct Israeli sovereignty. Both Abu Hashhash and Lena found Ramallah, the seat of a tattered sovereignty, a place from which they hoped to start collecting the pieces of Palestinian existence. At the time, she worked at the Institute for Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, and he as a coordinator in the Education and Culture Program of the al-Qattan Foundation, a Londonite Palestinian millionaire’s philanthropic institution for the promotion of art, science, and education in Palestine. Lena arranged for all of us to meet on a quiet Friday afternoon when entering Ramallah was relatively feasible. The meeting place was al-Matall, one of Ramallah’s cafés, an old stone structure notable for its elevated rooms, domed ceiling, and arched windows overlooking a bucolic valley on the city’s edge. Its architecture summons a rootedness that still lingers in the city, now a quilt of Palestinians fleeing, migrating, and returning. After this first meeting, which lasted five hours, Abu Hashhash and I met later on our own. He was in his mid-thirties and, like much of Ramallah’s population, especially after Oslo, not originally from the city. Those considered Ramalleans today come originally either from the villages destroyed in 1948 located on land that is now Greater Tel Aviv, from villages and towns on the West Bank, and most recently after the Oslo Accords from other Arab and nonArab countries. Abu Hashhash grew up in the al-Fawwar Refugee Camp near al-Khalil (Hebron). He graduated from the English Department of Birzeit University, and at the al-Qattan Foundation he coordinated literary programs for youth. In his poetry career and in the local Palestinian poetry scene, he belongs to the “generation of the 1990s,” who complain that they are ignored by the literary establishment inhabiting the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Culture, and who therefore turn to the Palestinian House of Poetry as an outlet for the production of their poetry. Like a surrogate mother, this House adopts young poets, as it did when it published Abu Hashhash’s The Pain of Glass. The value of getting to know a young poet like Abu Hashhash is that he is not one of the “big” poets who offered their time but delivered highly polished and evasive words that generally proved frustrating to my work. Grand poets often took special care that their words would not mingle with those of poets of lower standing. Grand poets also seemed to have acutely sensed how the revealed words of the Quran present a most formidable exemplar, if not rival,

122

THE PICTURE

to anyone fated to work in the Arabic language. The way some celebrated poets behave makes one think that only own their words can redeem them from their finite lives. Unlike those established poets, Abu Hashhash did not start by asking me which other poets I had met or planned to meet. To be sure, master poets were on his mind; in fact, he was an admirer of the older Mahmoud Darwish, whose poetry he had copiously memorized. He told me that it takes someone like Darwish to remind one that poetry is still useful in our times. Darwish, he said, regularly published five thousand copies of an anthology, sometimes in Paris, whereas he had published only one thousand local copies of his collection. The young Abu Hashhash was very gratified to learn one day that an excerpt of one of his poems was unexpectedly translated into German, for which he received a symbolic sum of money. Abu Hashhash mostly publishes free verse, but throws in prose poems to demonstrate that he is not exclusively committed to a single form. In this multiplicity, he expresses what he regards as a “position towards modernity.” As for the premodern al-amudi poetry, he finds that its “validity is low in this age”—a reminder that sonic structures of verse emanate from structures of time and space beyond them, so much so that an intimate detail of rhyme is bound to carry not only its composer’s personal auditory taste, but also an epochal structuring of that taste. To recover a sense of personal expression, one has to keep in mind that versifying or composing prose is an embedded way of being and thinking in the world. The depletion of al-amudi’s validity cannot be understood simply as a form of aesthetic fading. Accompanying this depletion are forces that usher in new ways of sensing time, place, and self. Abu Hashhash addressed such themes when I asked him what appealed to him about free verse: Free verse not only allows freedom of rhyme but also freedom of taf ila [foot]. This raises the question about the nature of poetry. I believe the classical form of poetry, with all its regularity, repetition, and rataba [monotony] cannot help you orga nize your chaos, the chaos of the contemporary poet. Look even visually at the classical poem. It is disciplined, measured like a mizan [scale] completely and almost absolutely. There is tremendous nizam [order] in it. At some point in history, this order broke down. Foreign and distant forces descended upon it. It is obvious now that the concerns and complexities of life are immeasurably greater than in the past, which was simpler even though the

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

123

fate of humans now, as in the past, is the same. I cannot write about al-Fawwar [refugee] Camp like Aristotle’s tragedy addressing the nobles. My poetry represents my world in an individual way, but it also intersects with the concerns of other people living in this world.

Abu Hashhash’s account brings us especially close to the proposition that the secular has its own rhythm, a rhythm that appreciates, in a distinctly modern way, the act of return. Time structured as a constant repetition dissolves in the secular rhythm of the modern condition. When Abu Hashhash banishes the cyclical rhythm found in the classical form, he invites a linear vision of time. Time, in which events and processes are inscribed linearly, only gets more complex. Repetition is conceptually reduced to sameness and identity, thus rataba (monotony). Speaking nearly four decades after free verse had dethroned the classical form and at a time when free verse could no longer promise deliverance from the abysmal state of Arab politics, Abu Hashhash had lost the sense typically prevalent among virtuoso poets of the al-amudi form that places meters as the site of incalculable and dissimilar possibilities. Repetition in that old form signals neither boredom nor banality. It is the sign of a return that is always generative, which it ceases to be for poets ardent for modern forms of life. Incidentally, in Latin, the notion of return is embedded in the word verse, implying an act that is distinguishable from prose, which lacks the sense of “turning around” that verse has. Somewhat similarly, in Arabic, the word for prose (nathr) implies dispersion, something that has been thought to be inimical to poetic composition (nazm). Of course, Abu Hashhash’s testimony, like others’, has the virtue of reminding us that these descriptors do not confine their meanings to what poets do with their poems. They also extend to how they live and specifically how they sense time and space. The secular rhythm is something that lives, one can understand from Abu Hashhash, in something beyond the sonic structures of his verse and in his life’s varied forms. Without a notion of return, as a state of constant becoming, neither completed nor predictable, it is unsurprising that the traditional, disciplined form bores Abu Hashhash. Although the most prominent form of life in the Quran is a constant journey of returning to God, a ceaseless recovering of the forgotten, in contemporary Palestinian life return as a dream deferred reaches no higher than the skies of national rights. Although arguably few Palestinians may have relinquished the dream of return to a homeland, the notion of return

124

THE PICTURE

has been secularly transposed from a constant state of becoming to a status quo of nationalist waiting. Lives lived and times sensed as progressively advancing deprive one of an adequate appreciation of repetition and cyclicality. All such rhythms are reduced to banality or, in sonic terms, monotony. Without an adequate appreciation for the notion of return, one is likely to fall into the optic trap, as does Abu Hashhash, of seeing the present as singular in its complexity. Whatever complexity the past may have had fades out as a barren face is projected onto it by the self-image of a superior poetic present. It is not accidental therefore that the poet who devalues repetition and who searches for freedom from rhyme also finds the present more complex than the past. The rejection of nonrepetitive acoustic rhythms in poems finds its extension in the linear tempo a poet lives by. The circularity poets like Abu Hashhash evince from the sound of their poems they also eschew from their sense of time. Time and rhythm do not exist outside traditions. And traditions are always situated in a locatable place. They always have geography to speak of; it houses and even constitutes them. And if a past—the land of tradition—is too simple for the complicated questions of the present, then this present is in no need of that past. One might as well start speaking to people once thought to be outside the tradition, as Abu Hashhash does, to “other people in the world.” His turning to “the global,” a signature left by a national disillusion called the Oslo Accords, is itself part of the collapse of the nationalist enterprise in current Arab politics, and even before it, the deracination of “the local” around the world. In the contemporary and globalized scene of Arabic poetry, Abu Hashhash’s ideal readers are less concentrated in Palestine and more likely to be dispersed, like capital, around the globe. To repudiate traditional verse one need not be born in Palestine or in a refugee camp. For example, Nazik al-Malaika, as mentioned in the previous chapter, pioneered free verse in Baghdad, beginning in 1947, when at the age of twenty-four she published her “Cholera,” eulogizing the victims of the epidemic then spreading in Egypt. In 1962 she published Issues of Contemporary Poetry (Qadaya al-Shir al-Muasir), in which she defends free verse against assaults from those who see it as anathema to the Arabs’ literary tradition and from those who see it as a compromised, half-hearted attempt to modernize this tradition. In the second chapter of her book, she discusses the “social roots of the free verse movement,” noting five of them: a thrust toward realism; yearning for independence; resentment of patterning (namudhaj); flight

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

125

from symmetry; and preference for content (as opposed to form). In a particularly revealing section, she relates her resentment of the disciplined and symmetrical classical versification to her childhood resentment of what she identifies as “Oriental” architecture in Baghdad: The modern poet found himself in need of a release from this rigorous geometric thinking . . . and this is not strange in an age that is searching for freedom and wants to break chains to live one’s intellectual and spiritual needs to the fullest. . . . Now, when I look back at the past, I sense that I actually rebelled against the Khalili two-hemistich method as a way of repelling the symmetrical abode whose two sides are completely identical; and the truth is that I would feel immense discomfort with the order of houses in Baghdad. Every time I saw a symmetrical residence I found myself tighten and darken. It did not occur to me then that I made this harra [passionate] call to build verse on unequal lines and an irregular number of feet because I was also calling for changing systems of construction because I was repelled by symmetry and longed to destroy it and rebel against it. ([1962] 1989, pp. 60–63)

Al-Malaika presents an emancipatory story of spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic liberation. Something must have atrophied or felt suffocating to make her speak of the need for a release. What used to define Arabic poetry, measured and rhyming speech, she experienced as a disabling inhibition. A lifeless tradition or one on the way to becoming so can sometimes have the weight, if not the smell, of a cadaver. To modern poets in an age of freedom there comes a new rhythm. And al-Malaika helps us remember that poems are not alone in having rhythms. So do homes and souls. Hers is a source for thinking about the secular as having a rhythm or even multiple rhythms in the modern era. The distinctive thing about this brave new rhythm is that it assaults traditional ways of building homes, composing verse, and searching for freedom, including the freedom of knowing oneself. It seems that wherever it encounters repetition, regularity, or circularity it dismantles them in combating what it sees as banality. But this is not a precise way of describing what is at work here. For this distinctly modern secular rhythm aims to dismantle only particu lar kinds of repetitions and their attendant disciplines. While the poet has been escaping traditional rhythmical discipline, other kinds of discipline have been closing in on her by the modern nation-state, whose entire apparatus operates through measuring capital. Al-Malaika as an agent of modern

126

THE PICTURE

times was summoned to deregulate (undiscipline) her sounds so ferociously, to the point where some sounds could be made obsolete altogether. At the same time so much of her life, as typical of modern citizens, became increasingly measured, monitored, regulated, and quantifiable, and hence visualized by the powers of the secular nation-state. An irony and a question linger in al-Malaika’s account. The irony is that she has demanded the destruction of precisely what Orientalists have typically taken to be absent in the Middle East when they set their secular eyes on it. They perceived an absence of rigor, order, and precision amid teeming chaos in law, language, architecture, education, markets, and morality. Indeed, as is well known, precisely the putative absence of these qualities was mobilized in justifying the colonial mission of the West in the Middle East, as elsewhere. What escaped the secular gaze of colonial justifications for re-forming (ordering and disciplining) the Middle East were the formidable disciplines both poems and prayers traditionally demanded in the region. But modernity, or rather the dominance of its secular rationality, in a certain sense, gave up on poetry and religion. For modernity took itself to be the incarnation of eternity—it is all there is—while two otherworldly preoccupations, religion and poetry, until very recently could promise no more than pathways to eternity. Al-Malaika’s need for release speaks to the nature of the poetic experience in the modern era. In accounts of the modern condition, such as Weber’s famous descriptions and Nietzsche’s diagnoses, freedom and collapse reverberate as paramount themes. In turning Weber to understand modernity, one finds a story of liberation, popularly known as “rationalization” or “instrumental rationality.” Of course, one should add here that Weber was a sensitive enough observer to express ambivalence with this rationalization with his well-known metaphor of “iron casting.” Nietzsche, on the other hand, forces one to recognize in the modern era collapse, death, void, conceits of power, and utter confusion, in short, none of the triumphalism that is evasively attached to the Weberian account of modernity. Whether the scales tilt toward Weber’s rationalization or Nietzsche’s collapse as paradigmatic visions of the modern, at least two possibilities exist in seeking to account for poets’ relation to it. Poets’ desertion of traditional rhythmical practice may constitute a dissenting response to a variety of disciplines already squeezing the overwhelmed life of modern citizenry under secular calculations of nation-states, or their rhythmical freedom may inhabit the acquiescent immanence of inner moral faltering. The underlying assump-

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

127

tion is that the visible is emblematic of the invisible (inner confusion, for example). The resulting task entails finding out in what ways the resort to rhythmical freedom is corrective or constitutive of the modern projects of secular liberty. Is the modern abandonment of tonal rhythm complacency or contestation in the face of a dominant, secularly calculating rationality? Does the desired freedom in free verse perpetuate or undermine authorized forms of freedom in secular modernity? These questions presume, of course, the secular to be a form of domination in its modern apparition. Obviously at stake here is the sovereign will of the individual. What might be less obvious is that an answer to these questions demands, to a certain extent, the attribution, risking even a slippage into projection, of intentionality to the poets. But diagnosing the intentions of individual poets could prove analytically futile, in contrast to a more practical task of asking about the conditions in which they work and about the shifting, even warring epistemologies in these conditions. Asking about conditions of intentions rather than about poets’ individual intentions allows a rephrasing of the previous question: Has the modern secular turn made the turn to prose obligatory? And with epistemic shifts in mind we can ask: Why do forms increasingly migrate from audial to visual existence? Why does a poetic form occupy a progressively visual face along with the spread of secular existence? Why do disciplinary spaces of the state advance while the sonic discipline of poets retreats? The ways one relates to visibilities and invisibilities of the world have to do with senses of time, actually with multiplicities of times (time of return, time of eternity), and how one lives the present in relation to its pasts and futures. That past forms are inadequate for present conditions is a view I heard time and again during my conversations with Palestinian as well as non-Palestinian poets whom I met during my visit to Cairo. They also expressed that the modern age cannot bear repetition, symmetry, order, or regulation, because the present is “more complex.” New poetry is charged with erecting a zone of difference and deviation from what now seem repressively and superfluously ordered traditions. As I mentioned earlier, my visit to Cairo’s International Book Fair stemmed from my concern to avoid parochially segregating Palestinian poets from the larger Arab poetic scene encompassing them. For the works of Palestinian poets are variations on the rhythmic conditions of the wider Arab and global scene. The Arabic language in the hands of its Palestinian wordsmiths, whether

128

THE PICTURE

ruled militarily or civilly by Israel, is a current that flows deeper and more effusively than the existing geopolitical borders of any national sovereignty. It was encouraging to know that Palestinian poets, invited or not, go to Cairo to read their works. Ferial Ghazoul, an Iraqi professor of comparative literature at the American University of Cairo, emailed me about possible contacts. She led me to my unplanned but embracing host in Cairo, Hilmi Salim, a journalist for the al-Ahali newspaper and a chief editor in the High Council of Culture, in whose hands lies the publication fate of many books. Salim has been a leading poet of prose in Egypt, if not the Arab world, since the 1970s. In Egypt I met many other poets who were working in various forms and with various registers of the Arabic language. Thanks to Salim, who invited me to join him at a poetry reading late one night, I was able to witness the memorable and living power of human words. In fact, it was in Cairo and during its book fair that I saw how the life of this language, Arabic, is so overwhelming in its diversity, as it stretches from the mountains of Eurasia to the deserts of Asia and the plateaus of Africa—a language that crosses an enormous, extremely variegated swath of soil. I experienced that linguistic multiplicity particularly at a poetry evening sponsored by the American-African Committee against Torture, which dedicated an evening to the memory of Moustafa Sayyid Ahmad, a human rights activist from Sudan. Remarkably, the first one to eulogize him was a boy, no more than five, who recited a poem in classical Arabic. So taken by words, songs, and poems was the audience that night that its enthrallment remained indelible throughout my entire fieldwork. Since 1968 the Cairo International Book Fair has been organized under the auspices of the General Egyptian Book Organization, an agency of the Ministry of Culture. That year the organization brought books from almost forty countries to the grounds of Madinat Nasr in Cairo. In addition to books, there were pavilions dedicated to selling related items (e.g., stationery, electronics, and accessories), research panels, and entertainment. The book fair also invited more than a dozen Arab poets living abroad to come and read their works. To my knowledge, all were known for their free verse and prose poems. Poets invited at the expense of the Egyptian Department of Culture stayed in posh hotels on the banks of the Nile. Al-Munsif al-Wahaybi of Tunisia was invited to read his work and to give a talk about his poetic experience. As a free versifier, he views the classical

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

129

poem as part of the past and not suitable for the present. He also believes that poetry does not need an audience, or more precisely, needs only a small audience; he feels that the word for “audience,” jumhur, has repelling auditory and oral connotations. What the poet actually needs are readers. I chanced to meet al-Wahaybi on the grounds of the book fair, in a café called al-Maqha al-Thaqafi (Cultural Café)—a testimony to the translation and distribution of a central word in Western secularity, “culture,” that when translated into Arabic is thaqafa. Th is naming presumes a hierarchic distinction between the term “cultural” and its lack, or even its opposite: the shabi (populist) café. For unlike the German-driven word “culture,” etymologically related to peasantry, cultivation, and tilling the land (Wolf, 1999, p. 29), the modern Arabic word thaqafa is related to a premodern verbal construction, thaqafa, meaning “comprehended,” “found,” or “knew.” Hence the adjectival form muthaqqaf in contemporary Arabic, which operates as the word “intellectual” does in Western languages. It was a curious name for a café whose prices seemed to presume a certain kind of public who was not only “cultured” but had enough money to pay double or triple the usual amount for a finjan (small cup) of coffee. One could also order tea, food, and, of course, the water-pipe (shisha, as Egyptians call it). People frequent this cultural café in order to see who is and who is not there. I found it a very hard place in which to sustain a conversation, since as people milled around there was always someone to stop, interrupt, and greet. It was a place to show visibility for nurturing and expanding one’s network and for marking one’s presence when so many in poetry were falling prey to absence. This café, in other words, operated as a literary agora. Although conditions were difficult for a single sustained conversation, it was not hard to witness many loud and whispered exchanges as well as blatant people-watching. The Cultural Café was attached to one of the tents dedicated to readings of modern poetry. The regalia particularly saved for this tent consisted of red carpets and a stage with a banner declaring “Cultural Association.” Poets reading—actually more often reciting—traditional verse were relegated to the stageless tent of The Gathering of Young Poets, which was covered with a ragged, gray carpet but contained more chairs than the modern sites. Many of the poets who came to recite or read in the tent of The Gathering of Young Poets were not young, as I came to learn from my many visits to it. It was the type of poetry, not their age, that grouped poets in that tent. It was the kind of poetry that al-Wahaybi associated with death, just as Abu Hashhash and

130

THE PICTURE

al-Malaika found no validity in the classical form for grappling with the complexities of modern times. Besides writing free verse, al-Wahaybi also works as a professor of Arabic literature in Tunisia’s Kairouan University. He gave me his recent Metaphysics of the Sand Flower, from which he presumably read at the festival. Although I missed my chance to hear his reading, we did discuss over tea his views about the current state of Arabic poetry. Intrigued by his bold views on the usefulness of borrowing from Western poetry, I arranged to meet him later at the entrance to his hotel. From there, along with Shahir, a friend of his from Syria who writes colloquial poetry, we walked to al-Gourioun, a restaurant-café serving alcoholic drinks that seemed to attract many Westerners in downtown Cairo. Al-Wahaybi conveyed confidence that when Arab poets borrow from Western poetry, they make it their own. The colonized’s borrowing from the colonizer’s language and imagination does not make the former subservient to the latter. This seems to be how al-Wahaybi reconciles or carves out a moment of truce, as it were, in the battle between traditional and modern ways of imagining the world, between an arriving influence and native presence. Moreover, he seemed convinced that today’s Arabic poetry is among the most advanced in the world. Needless to say, I was nonplussed as to how he gauged the advancement or retardation of imagination, given that imagination presumably occurs within vital, coherent traditions. When I asked him why free verse appealed to him, he replied: Free verse allows me to get closer to what I want from poetry. I am convinced that this form can serve my understanding and goals. I wrote al-amudi and it is the easiest thing that I can write. I became convinced in the past few years that al-amudi’s time is gone. This qasida has come to us from the jahili [preIslamic period]. You write, and without noticing, you see that this is the composition of al-Mutanabbi or Abu Nuwwas. I try to avoid this imitation by staying away from al-amudi. This qasida, willingly or unwillingly, takes the poet to the past. It does not live up to the new conception of poetry, as involving drama. It is almost impossible to fi nd modern amudi poetry. He who writes in al-amudi is producing death.

In al-Wahaybi’s vision, traditions die when they cease to challenge. Obviously, the classical ode lost its ability, by a complicated set of processes, to challenge him. These processes have acquired different names: Westerniza-

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

131

tion, modernization, rationalization, secularization, colonization, progress, and degradation. And the names belong to stories that have different starting points as well as different destinations. For al-Wahaybi, modernity means the terminus in the long history of the classical ode. To compose a classical ode today is to live among the dead or, alternatively, to see a dead person walking. There is no real life in it for al-Wahaybi, because it lacks any struggle that interests him. He is searching for a struggle not primarily with sounds of words, but more vitally with images and the drama they provide. The poem, we can already hear in his words, is an event in writing, not speech. Truths press on toward their new residence in writing, so much so that poetry acquires its essence and identity in new territories. Moreover, time does not simply surround (contextualize) the poem. Time inhabits the poem. It attaches to the poem as though it were its identification card, crucial for determining its legitimacy, its admissibility to certain times and spaces. The past as embodied in the classical ode lacks an entry permit to the eternalized and secular present in which al-Wahaybi lives. The power of death, al-Wahaybi helps us understand, is not self-sufficient. Its existence requires life and living. If the banishing and ultimate death of poetic form means that literary critics have abandoned it, then in a certain way the Egyptian state-sponsored fair is a place to observe that death. If criticism sets alight a direction, an agent, or a specimen and hence brings them to life, then al-amudi was left in the dark at the festival where poets of traditionally metered verse were left in the main to recite on their own, without critics to recognize their existence. Critics were in the company of free verse and prose poets at the fair. But poets do not live on criticism alone. Despite the death knell rung by al-Wahaybi and other free verse poets for al-amudi, the audiences attending recitations of traditional poets were larger than those for modern poets at the book fair. It was as if the more the chairs fi lled up, the more metered was the verse, and the more colloquial the language. The people in the tents of traditional poetry did not sit cross-legged, high-heeled, neck-tied, or Lycra-clad, as did the audience of the more sedate, modern poetry events, where the applause was also often softer. In the more crowded, traditional poetry events, taking place mostly in the tent of The Gathering of Young Poets, I saw more headscarves, gowns, beards, flip-flops, and religious and pious attire. There I heard much from men and women about the Palestinian martyr (shahid), the intifada, and devotion to al-Quds (Jerusalem). In other, more

132

THE PICTURE

resolutely secular poetry tents, I heard more about Sufis, fear of death, nightmares, and erotic dreams. No tent, however, monopolized one poetic subject, and the subject did not seem to be the attraction for the crowds. Instead the more obscure or distant the language and the less rhymed the verse (for those seemed to coincide), the emptier the chairs were. What this meant in part was that the modern poetry tents, as in similar fields of modern action, included speakers who were talking largely among themselves. They also spoke in the presence of literary critics, while the traditional poets spoke more to the lay public. A multiplicity of tents and trends had thus become common and created vacuity—a void of talking across one another. The measure of the chairs’ occupancy as a spontaneous scale to rate the popularity of poetic words was impressed upon me on many occasions as visitors dropped in or left sites as they pleased. One January night, while attending the fair’s regular “Poet and Experience” session that was always supposed to start at 8:30, I met a leading free verse poet in Egypt and the Arab world, Ahmad Abd al-Muti Hijazi. He came to speak at the only poetry session that occurred each evening in what was perhaps the largest and most regal performance site at the fair, dedicated to poetry, but not only to poetry. It was a hall, not a tent, with a mural of then President Hosni Mubarak wearing dark sunglasses, the Giza pyramids behind him, composing the backdrop of the stage, adorned with two huge bouquets of artificial flowers. This cement and glass hall, named Saraya October the 6th, invoking the 1973 military victory over Israel, has attracted over the years such prominent figures as Pope Shenouda III, the Coptic patriarch of Egypt; Azmi Bishara, a former Palestinian parliamentarian in the Israeli Knesset, now living in exile; Amr Mousa, the general secretary of the Arab League; and Mubarak, always accompanied by nationally televised live broadcasts. From this stage Hijazi spoke to about a hundred people in a hall that seemed able to fit quadruple that amount. He recounted the beginnings and development of his poetic career. As he went on, the empty seats of the hall began to fi ll and the noise increased. The arrival of increasingly disinterested crowds puzzled me until I learned that the seats were fi lling up not because of Hijazi, but because of who was to follow him: the poet-singer Ahmad Fuad Nijm. He made his fame through political dissidence and gave that night a rousing performance in colloquial Egyptian. In fact, people became impatient when Hijazi seemed to prolong his speech, having started much later than scheduled. Time (especially to the detriment of others) tended to become a

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

133

plaything for poets of greater reputation. But time, whether dispensed leisurely, generously, thoughtfully, or parsimoniously, is more than an object of play. It also works as a mirror of a poet’s life and death. Hijazi needed to be heard, as if to remind himself that he still had life—at a time when death, whether of the poetic scene or his personal one, gnawed at him. The secular Hijazi seemed to forget that night that hearing also occurs in silence and stillness. It was impossible not to notice the sense of relief and rejuvenation among the stifled, disinterested crowd when his lengthy talk finally ended. I followed Hijazi to the entrance of the hall and waited until he had finished talking to the TV reporters about the need for Arab poets to learn about globalization, and not only about the ancients and their classical prosody. Introducing myself as a student from Palestine who was conducting an anthropological study of Arabic poetry at a university in New York, I asked to set up an interview with him. I also conveyed to him the regards of Samih al-Qasim, the notable Palestinian poet whom I had interviewed earlier in Nazareth. Hijazi kindly gave me his home phone number and said that I could see him there. It was noon on Saturday when I met him. In fact, I rarely interviewed poets before that time in the metropolis of Cairo. The buzz of the city itself seemed to start even later in the day in the Cairo I saw in the company of poets. Cairo was different from Ramallah or Nazareth, whose peasant past left its traces. Also, unlike Egypt’s established aristocracy, with their hired domestic servants, Palestinians’ economy of domestic help was far narrower and more alien; their ancient peasant past lived on like stubborn shrubbery on the sides of a paved urban sidewalk. I arrived at Hijazi’s house to find him busy writing at a desk in his booklined office. Sadiyya, the maid, was attending to his two grandchildren, visiting from France. After starting in Egyptian journalism, Hijazi had studied in France and taught Arabic literature at the University of Paris. After fourteen years of exile, he was residing again in Egypt and was serving on the editorial staff of the state’s newspaper, al-Ahram (Pyramids), where he had recently launched a series of critiques against the prose poem. Hijazi ordered Sadiyya to bring me my choice of mazbuta (disciplined, measured) coffee with a medium amount of sugar, while he went on writing for twenty minutes or so. Finally, after placing his pen on the desk, he announced that the interview could not last long since his wife was due to come home soon. Perhaps this was his way of telling me how much he thought of our conversation. In any event, a “grand” poet of Hijazi’s caliber had relatively little to

134

THE PICTURE

offer in terms of written work (books) or time for spoken words. He needed neither to show me books, because he was not desperate to establish his presence, nor to give me time, because my esoteric ethnographic needs had little or no consequence for his fame, or so was my assumption. The lavish offering of time (and books) that came from “lesser” and less visible poets was countered by highly guarded offerings of time and almost always no books from “big” poets. Theirs were sold in bookstores and found in university libraries worldwide and now on websites dedicated to them by admirers. I met with Hijazi to understand his need to work with free verse. While presenting his approach to his craft, he, like others, gave me the sense that free verse belongs to this age, while the al-amudi does not. His first work in free verse, published in late 1955, made him an avant-garde poet at the time. The anthology that brought him fame is A City without a Heart (Madinatun bi-la Qalb). As high school students in Haifa we learned his poem “The Death of a Boy” in which he writes: in the city square death resounded like shrouds, silence landed a green fly came from sullen cemeteries in yonder countryside it spiraled its wing over a boy who died in a city where not even a single eye cried. (1970, p. 143)

Hijazi’s espousal of free verse was possible, he told me, after he had rid himself of the restrictions of the romantic and classicist influences that had still dominated the scene of Arabic poetry at the time, in Egypt and elsewhere: I was telling you about our need for a new language, neither the language of the classicists that served bad purposes of panegyrics, nor the exhausted, romantic language that became cold and all too familiar. . . . The classical language of the ancients felt far from us. We know it, we study it but have found it to be far away, not because of diction, but because it has been associated with par ticu lar subjects of bad reputation, such as poetic panegyrics. At that time, the question was not simply of language and poetry, but also politics. . . . There was a general anti-royal atmosphere and all associated rituals, including panegyric poetry . . . Also, this [romantic language] was a language of the inner self; you didn’t have in it any sign of daily life, of reality. It is the language of emotions. Poets

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

135

need to talk about the bus, the street, the city, food, and hunger. . . . The shortcoming of romantic language is common to the ancient language: their distance from the life we live. . . . What appealed to me about this form was that it could become my form, my language; I no longer had to search for and find marjiiyya [authority]. In the old forms, classical and romantic alike, you needed a preceding authority and references; you had to be committed to a certain form. Yet the new qasida, the liberated form, is your own poem. You make with it what you want.

As if you were the beginning? Yes, exactly. It is as if you were the beginning. What does that mean? That means that you say what you want, what you believe is very necessary, and what is pressing you, without restrictions. Therefore you could use colloquial Arabic and you could form your own meters, in your own peculiar ways.

The classical ode during Hijazi’s entry into the world of poetry felt as stifling as did the monarchical regime. The monarchical crumbs of Egypt that were leftovers from the Ottoman Empire, which had dissolved in 1921, appealed more to British power than to Egyptian subjects. Egypt’s monarchy, which had long challenged the center of power in Istanbul, could not escape London’s imperial-liberal powers. The Free Officers Revolution erupted in Egypt in 1952, overthrowing the British-sponsored monarchy, and for most of the next two decades Gamal Abdul Nasser championed the causes of Arab unity, socialism, and cold-war nonalliance in Egypt and beyond. The romantic sway that reigned over modern Arabic poetry between the European world wars eroded with the spread of Arab nationalism, saturated with socialist aspirations in both political and literary establishments. Repelling traditional societal hierarchy and individual romantic inertia led Hijazi to the rhythmically looser free verse. The demolition of restrictive social hierarchies extended to free verse as a form of abandoning, however incompletely, rhythmical regularity. Yet the secularist politics of Arab nationalism attracted poets in more than one way. It surely touched their rhythm as well as their diction, their words. Poets’ need to promulgate quotidian diction in verse, bringing to the fore the daily life of urban Egypt as distinct from the elevated register of Arabic, reveals how the making of the present, the sense of what is the present, and the relation of words to the present have changed. We have no reason to believe that

136

THE PICTURE

premodern poetry was detached from its daily life any more than we have reason to believe that Hijazi’s poetry has been. What we need to contend with is not a question of the relevance or irrelevance of words to the present, but expressing ways of living in the present time through sounds and words. The secular finds its way to the registers of language used by poets through individual words they either select or omit. Dante took that course when he dared to bring Italian “vulgarities” to his Divine Comedy, which is one of the reasons Eric Auerbach conferred on him the status of “poet of the secular world.” Hijazi’s need to use demotic rather than classical Arabic, most notably exemplified in the Quran, is one way to understand the secularity of Arabic poetry. Traditionally, poetic virtuosity was constituted in part by the ability to recruit “poetic” and refrain from “nonpoetic” vocabulary. The beyond does not exist in remote words anymore. This is not because the beyond in the secular has vanished. It is because the present is increasingly thought and lived as being itself some kind of beyond, perhaps the only beyond there is. Not all words had been regarded as fit for and admissible to poetic composition. It was up to poets, once called “commanders of speech” by al-Khalil, to discern, recruit, and dismiss words in the search for poetic power. But words and language in a secular world of modernity can not lead the life they had in a nonsecular order. A quotidian and prosaic Arabic in the rising secular order has had to replace the elevated Arabic bequeathed by the premodern era. Thus the ostensible abolishing of societal hierarchy outside the poem translated into dismantling its equivalent in poetic diction. No word should be denied a right of entry into poetic composition, and no word deserves an inherent regal (poetic) status because monarchical sovereignty in the language of liberal aesthetics, as in the language of liberal rule, has lost validity. The established sovereignty in the political realm (Egyptian royalty) and lexical discipline (classical Arabic) was supplanted by the arrival of a sovereign self. Th is arrival inscribes itself in the relation the poet pursues with rhythm, specifically meter. The regal sovereign abolished “outside” the poem is resuscitated rhythmically “inside” the poem. Hijazi thus becomes in a typical fashion himself the principium (beginnings) of rhythm, and its principle. The authority of beginners before him has lost its legitimacy. He, as lord of rhythms, dispenses their start and end, when they regulate and when they deregulate. He thus allows us to begin understanding what has happened. He is bound to meters not by learning but by owning them: meters live or die in his verse. And since the act of learning meters inevitably involves the sur-

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

137

rendering of self, Hijazi attained his secular freedom by the aggrandizement of self. The search for personal meters, for what modern poets call “internal rhyme,” is a search by those wanting to belong to this age, be it in Nasser’s Cairo or Baathist Damascus, be it a Sudanese poet or a Syrian, be it in the homeland or in exile. Yet back in the 1950s and much of the 1960s nationalism in the Arab world had yet to lose its redemptive features and so appeared like an assured deliverer from colonial domination and acquiescent traditionalism, from poverty in soul and subsistence. The independent, personal soul and its constituent rhythms were not yet required. This is what I learned from Ahmad Dahbour, who lived in and outlives that era. He is originally from Haifa, from its largest extant Arab neighborhood of Wadi al-Nisnas, where Jewish visitors from all over the world today take safari-like tours to be entertained by the artistic productions of a few Arab and many Jewish artists displayed on the walls or sealed-up windows of emptied homes in the neighborhood. The visibility of the Israeli (essentially Jewish) presence lives in the invisibility of things Palestinian. Before Dahbour evacuated during the war, his family had owned a bakery and a house that he was able to return to for the first time in the early 1990s, after the Oslo Accords. When they lost their home in 1948, Dahbour, his siblings, his parents, and his blind grandmother found themselves in a hut in a refugee camp near Hems, Syria; he describes the camp as not fit for human existence. That is where his struggle to survive and to imagine began. And he keeps returning to that place of imagination with tantalizing pangs of pain; for example, he rebukes his father in his book Here, There: What has my father feared so that his sins committed the act of a swallow if he only were to say: slaughter my child . . . but did not leave who knows perhaps I would have become Ishmael or his green bird, or . . . nothing even nothing has a meaning and eminence in its soil. (1997, p. 83)

Deprived of electricity, family gatherings in the evenings focused on storytelling. Words, that is, sounds still came before images. Dahbour’s parents were good storytellers, he recalls. His father, who eked out a living from washing the dead and reciting the Quran at their burials, asked him to read from a fading yellow book when he was in fourth grade. That book contained the Arabian, pre-Islamic epic Al-Zir Salim, telling the exploits of the poet-king

138

THE PICTURE

Abu Leila al-Muhalhil (died a.d. 531), who abandoned his early life of chasing women to avenge the killing of his brother. When Dahbour read the poems collected in a written version of the oral epic, he immediately fell in love with the “split texts,” as he describes them. One of these split texts is the specimen by al-Khansa in Chapter 5, which he did not then know was an actual poem. But he knows enough today to evoke it as a text in consonance with the academically oriented literary scene. It is as though the word “text” bestows a kind of seriousness, depth, and legitimacy of belonging to the present intellectualism that earlier names cannot. It is also the name used by what may be the largest remaining public for poets: professional literary critics. Dahbour’s speech may not have been able to escape the presence of specialists, but its beginnings lay in the intimate universe of his mother. His mother, able and resourceful for her family and neighbors, saved him with her stories about a magical, parallel city called Haifa. “Why do you need to see the wonder box [likely derived from the German wunderkammer]?” she asked him when he could not join Syrian kids to see the wonder box on display at town fairs. She promised him that she would bring him instead the sea on a mule from the Mules’ Court in Haifa. She also told him that there was no need for swings for which he could not pay, not even with bread, which substituted for money among penniless kids on the Eid. She reminded him that the Carmel Mountain in Haifa moves when children mount it. When clothes were torn and shoes split open, she asked him not to care about clothes, for in Haifa clothes were impervious to rain. There, she told him, rain fell only on plants and soil, not on humans. Dahbour recovered his mother’s tales and many more as he sought to account for his childhood entry into the kingdom of poetry. Her stories became the soil that nursed his ability to create, his poiesis. At the start of his sixties when I met him in the winter of 2002, Dahbour was living and working in the ancient city of modern refugees, Gaza, the inferno of Palestinian existence, where military occupation meets military response, almost the only place where occupation is not normalized, as it overwhelmingly has become elsewhere in Palestine, and where the violence of Palestinian against Palestinian was then surpassing that of the occupation. There he resided with his wife and children, one of them a student in the United States. He had returned to Gaza after studying in Baghdad, after living in Tunisia for some time, and after the Oslo Accords, along with many PNA functionaries. He was working as a director in the Ministry of Education and Culture and writing a Friday column titled “Stone in the Air” for the commu-

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

139

nist daily al-Ittihad, published in Haifa for seven decades. In this way Haifa has stayed with him and he with her. But it was neither in Haifa nor in Gaza where we met. He was barred from entering Israeli territory and I from entering Gaza, because of my Israeli citizenship. An Israeli military ordinance then prohibited citizens of Israel from entering the enclosed West Bank and Gaza; however, prohibition was more whimsical than systematic or constant. Dahbour and I met in Cairo during the book fair, where the Egyptian Ministry of Culture officially invited him to read during one of the poetry evenings. The Israelis had allowed him to enter Egypt by land and me by air, but I was not fated to return the same way. After carefully inspecting my laptop, Israeli security personnel at the International Cairo Airport deemed it suspicious and dangerous due to a “technical problem” that they “could not reveal.” They would not allow me on the aircraft with the laptop, so I returned to Haifa by land the following evening with some of the best conversations I had during my ethnographic fieldwork safely stored on the computer. One of them was with Dahbour. Although I missed his reading event, I was able to interview him for nearly four hours in the cafeteria of the Semiramis Hotel, on the bank of the Nile. For someone with an upset stomach and worries about his wife and children back in Gaza, Dahbour nonetheless engaged me for hours over coffee and tea with stories about his childhood mentor, the poet Maurice Qabaq, and the poetic ability he nurtured in him. Dahbour said that Qabaq was his “guardian angel,” who taught him poetry as well as “the art of life through giving and tolerance.” Qabaq also taught Dahbour that it is “not necessary to be noisy and exhibit oratory because the modern poem is read with the eye.” Qabaq thus initiated him into the secular intellect of modernity that distances itself from the acoustic in searching for truths. The ear, which brings noise, becomes inferior to the eye, which takes you to depth. The deferral that comes with sound loses out to the immediacy of vision. The eye has proven to be of greater service than the ear to reveal a form of eternity (embedded in modernity), which is neither deferred to a future point nor recovered from a certain past, but is believed to be lived. Dahbour also learned that the modern poem is read as a whole text, not as discrete lines. When image dethrones sound, figurative representation rules. When sonic repetition retreats in the world of poetry, so does memory. Without repetition much is bound to be either misrecognized or altogether forgotten. Because of this modern conception of reading a poem, according to

140

THE PICTURE

Dahbour, Qabaq once found himself in scandalous trouble with the salafi (past-ist) culture in town when ecclesiastical authorities in the Syrian church misread his poem “Love and Theology.” His lines “The Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Father, three in One Phantom / if we do not praise the Lord” marked him as a heretic. The iconoclast Qabaq helped Dahbour do what Hijazi of Egypt did before him: leave romantic and classicist verse for an unhierarchical “modern” and “liberated” poetry: I am undeniably indebted to taf ila, that is, modern poetry, to Maurice Qabaq, who noticed that this child, who may be talented, is afraid of taf ila because he was pulled by the turath [tradition]. He noted that the prose poem is not worth a shilling. He taught me that with taf ila poetry you could write it and keep it metered. Taf ila was then the revolution in the 1960s, it was the future, taf ila was like an earthquake. Today you don’t see that in prose poetry, which is considered the third road. Khalil Khoury and Maurice Qabaq, who are among the best poets of Syria, were deliberately flunked in the university because they wrote taf ila. On the radio, it was forbidden to broadcast modern poetry of taf ila. Even many modern poets wrote poems about modern poetry. . . . Choosing the modern form is choosing the modernity of life. It was enough for me to know that this form has its rules and that it is difficult and challenging. Beware: taf ila is the difficult one, not al-amudi. With al-amudi once you figure the meters you walk the lane. With taf ila you have to know when to put two feet, four feet, or ten feet on the line, when to absent the rhyme and when to reveal it. This challenge, this search for new forms that are not pre-made leads to a heated debate. . . . I discovered that the word’s meaning is not literal. I felt that I live in open air.

Dahbour’s account demonstrates ways in which the politics of the establishment (the nation-state) and the politics of dissent (modern poets) collide in the battle over possessing the literary field. The nation-state as a modern creature feels threatened by the conception of free verse and conspires with tradition to abort its birth. The sovereign state recruits tradition in combating renovation and revolution, without either side ever fully recognizing how entangled with each other they are. They all seem to suffer from the misrecognition wrought by a sense of self-sovereignty, whether belonging to states, their dissenting subjects, or their sense of time. Note how Dahbour banishes tradition to a place outside the present and, by extension, places willful action in the present time only. To act within a tradi-

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

141

tion means to act without will and in the past. Tradition and the individual enter this moral landscape in a conceptually inimical relation. Also, Dahbour makes it clear that a discredited tradition, one that has lost its authority, ceases to challenge. It becomes facile to the point of boredom. Exploration, creativity, and adventure are moved to a place outside tradition and into a “revolutionary” present. The singular sovereignty of the present claims the revolution for itself, prohibiting breathing in the past to locate the future in its beginnings. Forms of life and forms of poetry, spatially understood, extend to each other, according to Dahbour, who points out that working with free verse equals working with modernity and revolution. To Dahbour, the Palestinian struggle could not stay the hostage of culpable traditional Arab regimes, complacent with modern colonial Western powers. That the Palestine Liberation Organization began to lead the secular struggle in 1964 was the revolution for Dahbour. The classical form, like traditional regimes, is illegitimate in the present. A sense of time and a sense of sound collide. It is not surprising that this kind of binding of the past to the present would demand that a poet deregulate rhymes. Repeating rhymes, rehashing the same sounds degenerates into an unthinking, autosonic exercise. Of course, free verse does not completely forfeit rhythmical repetition, as can happen in the more radical shift toward the prose poem (the focus of the “Dream” chapters). Tonal repetition remains in free verse, only not as stringently as in the classical form. Liberalism, as an inflection of secularism, finds its way to Dahbour’s rhythmical practices, to his freedom of deregulating rhymes. He therefore feels, in keeping with a liberal-secular sensibility, less encumbered by the weight of sonic discipline than poets of the classical form presumably did, and as some still do. Yet recall what Samih al-Qasim says: “The question is what you do with restrictions. If the poet masters the meters he becomes free. . . . The poetic meters are restrictions for a starting poet. For an able poet, they cease to be restrictions. The poet who has not mastered the meters faces a restriction.” The point is that rhythm is a discipline requiring the ability to measure sound. In realizing modernity in its search for secularity, this illiberal disciplinary capability has become increasingly obsolete. Neither its notion of freedom nor its tradition of truth formation are able to secure citizenship in the secular world that Arab poets have come to inhabit. Taf ila is a term that indicates a unit of sound measurement between meter and “syllables” in Arabic verse. It parallels the concept of the foot in English

142

THE PICTURE

poetry. This prosodic name also became the common Arabic name for free verse (shir hurr), which takes the single foot and not the entire meter as its basic unit of verse construction. As such the poet is free to collocate a different number of feet in each line and to hide or reveal the rhyme freely in different lines, even while committing the entire verse construction to a single poetic meter. By loosening the grip of metrical rigor, the taf ila poem contains irregular rhymes and uneven numbers of feet in each verse line as in the sample poem by Fadwa Tuqan, 1918–2003, shown on pages 144–145, including a view of its appearance in Arabic; a scansion to show its structure; and an English translation. If so many other things about modern life are ostensibly more regulated, more orderly, and more disciplined, why has the opposite happened to modern Arabic poetry and perhaps to modern poetry generally? I did not understand why modern poetry meant for Dahbour simply a less regulated form in terms of meters and rhymes, or how free verse is congruent with notions of freedom that moral economies of capitalism demand. How can one account for the discipline of measurement receding from the realm of poiesis while flourishing in realms servicing the markets of modern capital? It is as if modernity lost interest in “measuring” things of little or no utility for its secular present. Citizens of the modern Arab world live in an era when their markets, as well as markets the world over, appear far more orderly and ordering than their poems, vying only with disciplinary spaces of theistic worship. Why has rhyme become so loathsome for the poet who sought to be modern? And what are the implications of this loathing? Al-Mutanabbi (915–968) once said, “The miseries of one people are the gain of another” (“Masaibu qawmin inda qawmin fawaidu”). Without Dahbour’s stomachache, I doubt that we would have had a four-hour-long conversation on a beautiful January day in a city like Cairo. Not feeling well, Dahbour opted to take it easy and to stay in at his hotel. To be sure, we did not spend all four hours conversing about poetry. An Iraqi novelist friend of Dahbour, who was invited to the festival from London, joined us. Dahbour and his friend spent nearly an hour reminiscing about life in an Iraq that was. This is how I heard about Dahbour’s longing to visit Karbalaa and its shrines and to enjoy Iraqi folk songs and foods. This is how we drifted to talk about his admiration for the Prophet Muhammad, whom he regards in a secular fashion as a “genius.” Dahbour’s view of Muhammad’s genius is secular because he presumes Muhammad’s prophetic ministry to be the work of an autonomous sovereign

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

143

intelligence exhibiting high-level imaginative faculties; Dahbour is silent about the revelation in Muhammad’s language. Incredulous Arabs, Dahbour reminded me, dismissed Muhammad for being poetic in the Quran, as for example in this passage (sura 21, verse 5): “ ‘Nay,’ they say, ‘[his] are medleys of dreams, nay, he has but fabricated [them all], he is only a poet. . . . Let him, then, come unto us with a miracle as with those [prophets] sent before’ ” (trans. M. Asad, [1980] 2008). After hearing him recount the story of his road to free verse, I was interested in hearing his views on the significance of rhythm in taf ila, on a poetic device in a poetic form that is sustained by and for, it is said, the image. In accounting for his rhythm, Dahbour elaborated on the changing contours of sound and self: Each poet is a planet. I am with the spirit of multiplicity. I am not for pre-made patterns. I don’t stipulate a condition on poets that they must know of or must have metered poetry. But if they do write metered, they must follow prosodic rules. If they are writing in amiyya, [their] work is not judged for grammar. But if they write prose, why not? That too is poetry. Even prose poetry has its rules. It does not tolerate rhymes. Yet metered verse needs and demands rhyme. . . . I am interested in T. S. Eliot’s stand when he said, “I make in new poems music of thoughts.” Th is is not the music of chronological distances between letters and vowels. But the idea itself moves from collective to personal talk, from market [suq] to a high language of imagination and wings. Rhythm gushes in language according to movement in the psyche, it is a sensibility. I can’t tell you how to develop a rhythm. It is internal rhythm.

It is as if rhythm is the stuff of emotions alone; it is no longer taken as the basis of a practice, the practice of mastering the traditional meters of Arabic poetry. It melts into the thin air of feelings. Rhythm, like religious belief or morality, flocks into invisibility and inertia of a private self below the threshold of a public realm. It loses its public standards of practice. This relocation of rhythm entails the redrawing of the self along secular lines; it is from the ink of liberal-secular expressions about what counts as human identity and freedom. The poet acquires a sovereign self that constitutes its own beginning that is freed from any prior and external restrictions. Its rhythm relocates to a place of transcendence (“movement in the psyche”). Yet rather than being the transcendence of the powerful (e.g., the nation-state’s promise of redemption) it belongs to the vanquished and the absented.

146

THE PICTURE

Dahbour learned early on from Qabaq’s lesson that a modern rhythm has to be thoroughly attuned to the present. This means that in Dahbour’s present, poetry should acknowledge the existence not of the donkey cart, but of the airplane, electricity, and the microphone. Dahbour could not tell me how to develop a rhythm, but the young Mahmoud Abu Hashhash of Ramallah told me how his own rhythm developed and what it represented. Abu Hashhash, however, grew up with modern rhythm, which has marked speed but also loss, confusion, occupation, and co-optation after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which for him meant a tattered secular return to the hijacked motherland. I saw Abu Hashhash for the last time before leaving the field in May 2002. From late March to mid-May we stayed in contact over the phone since I could not visit Ramallah during that period and he could not leave it. Although soldiers came to his house and to his sister’s next door, they did not arrest him. His brother in-law, on the other hand, was detained for a short while. If anything arrested both Abu Hashhash and me, as we concurred over the phone, it was the news on television, especially on al-Jazeera. Watching news was the only thing one could do against the occupation: watch it televised. Perhaps it provided Abu Hashhash with a sense of power in this profound condition of powerlessness. Perhaps it allowed him a sense of hope that something would change as soon and as fast as the news. The horror of occupation cannot become a daily matter. It sounds horrific that one should get used to horror. Yet these were my illusions and nothing more than illusions. Life went on, on hold. Many things were put on hold during that period. After the March 2002 reinvasion of much of the West Bank, my visits to Ramallah were suspended, as was much of life in Ramallah and the rest of the occupied land. Once, trying to convince myself that I was doing fieldwork and not succumbing to the malaise around me, I decided to hang out with Abu Hashhash. To simply hang out with poets was, I figured, part of my ethnographic task, whose borders felt constantly ethereal and whose substance mercurial. I stopped by his office at the al- Qattan Foundation, one among several restored two-story mansions in the more affluent al-Masyun (a neighborhood where posh apartments were commonly vacated for safer ones abroad), where there was less intifada graffiti, where the stones of walls and fences remained generally intact and “cleaner,” at least in comparison with the walls of the refugee camps. In his office on the second floor, above the foundation’s library, Abu Hashhash made us some tea and complained that there was no sense in doing any work, no sense in planning for anything. What might take him months, such as de-

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

147

signing workshops or poetry contests, could so easily be ruined in a second when life is precariously lived under military occupation. In a subsequent May interview, he explained how his poetic rhythm relates to the rhythm of his circumstances in a modern and occupied Palestinian society: The rhythm that represents the modern poem is psychological; it is confused, complex, disorderly, and fast. Th is is not necessarily the rhythm of all poets. I cannot say that I have a clear vision and project. Honestly, I am still searching. I write with more freedom now than in the past. I publish prose poetry to make a statement that I am not committed entirely and eternally to free verse. I don’t care if I write prose or verse. This new freedom allows me just to write without concern over form. I write as if no one is going to read it. Of course there is no absolute freedom, but there is extreme freedom. The more freedom that a writer has during writing, the more honest is the result. There is more of a chance to create something new. It is important just to write, regardless of everything else. Writing is practicing freedom. The 1990s generation feels freer, more absolved from commitment to that which has been attempted, because all attempts have failed. Today a lot of dreams have been destroyed and vanished— from the Gulf War to the Oslo Accords. We are not even permitted to use the phrase “Zionist enemy” in al-Ayyam. Those who have spent their lives in the collective struggle feel that they have wasted their time. They discovered that with Oslo, all appears like a mirage. This is why I don’t want to repeat the experience of others. I take a personal, not a party position.

Dismay of the state of affairs in Palestine prevails throughout Abu Hashhash’s explanation. He was dismayed by a leadership seen as impotent, seeking to score high in the politics of peace while unable to safeguard even the scores and records of its student population in the basement of the Ministry of Education and Culture. Abu Hashhash’s rhythm is the rhythm of his generation, which entered the Arab poetic scene for the first time during the 1990s (after the Oslo Accords, which allowed the return of some to part of Palestine, and after the 1991 Gulf War, in which Arab countries facilitated an attack on Iraq). Abu Hashhash’s rhythm developed simultaneously as a rhythm of the occupied and the ignored, occupied by the Israeli army and ignored by the Palestinian official literary establishment. Abu Hashhash spoke from the graveyard of rhythm in its traditional Arabic sense. Because, as he says, rhythm is psychological, it is neither available

148

THE PICTURE

nor meaningful to him in its older sense, as a practice in tonal discipline. But more blatant in his narrative than the dissolving of a rhythmical tradition is the failure of several others. He had been left with the failed and faltering certainties of nationalism, socialism, and secularism. What has remained is acutely restricting: the co-opted and co-opting agents of occupation that prohibit Palestinian writers from sustaining in their texts a sense of foreignness toward Israel as an occupying power. When so much had fallen apart in Abu Hashhash’s world, it became a struggle to retain the shock and trauma that birthed the phrase “the Zionist enemy” in the aftermath of 1948. Almost sixty years later, writers like Abu Hashhash were being pushed to normalize their lives, not by the occupier, but by its Palestinian subcontractors, having power over what they write. A secular Israel accumulated sufficient strength to allow it to retreat into a certain space of transcendence, relegating to some of its occupied agents the task of managing the immanence of its power. Yet relocating to transcendence, to a beyond, should not be mistaken as an inherent sign of strength. Although the powerful may choose to operate in the invisible, the powerless, more often than not, are made to do so. To Abu Hashhash, writing becomes the essential, defining act of poetry. Moreover writing, a visual immanence of language, becomes a space of practicing freedom. In places where nature, history, society, nation, or God have become unfathomable or irrelevant, language alone is left as a deliverer. Language becomes transcendence, or at least a space toward transcendence. Writing is the practice of freedom, which, in keeping with a prevalent notion of freedom in secularist-liberal tradition, means the shedding of restrictions. One says what one needs or wants to say. It is not necessarily the freedom to know and “measure” oneself which may require silence, stillness, and above all listening. Both rhythm and writing are made to inhabit a space of transcendence; both relocate to a beyond. Yet while language is a transcendence that acts on others or allows others to act, rhythm is acted upon. Language is charged with redeeming its writer, and rhythm is nowhere to be heard; it is felt and even seen visually, more than it is heard. That is to say, rhythm that is dispossessed of its place of beginnings in sound and silence must live exclusively in “psychology.” Rhythm, then, is what one feels, not what one does. Just as belief is severed from practice in secular rationality, so is rhythm, thus letting the oneness of life dissipate into an archipelago of autonomous realms of action.

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

149

Reflecting on the typically factional poetic scene of Ramallah, Murad al-Sudani of the House of Poetry protested in the pages of the London daily al-Quds al-Arabi that his generation was being ignored in a recent book of selected Palestinian poems. The work, published in 1999, was commissioned from Amman, the designated capital of Arab culture for the year, and assembled by Ali al-Khalili of the Palestinian Ministry of Education and Culture. It did not include any of his cohort’s works, and al-Sudani mentions in his article many of the names that al-Khalili overlooked, referencing an anthology titled The Permanent Guests of Fire that includes the works of thirteen poets of the 1990s generation. Al-Sudani concludes that for the past ten years, no intellectual or institution has paid attention to his generation’s efforts, creating a scene in which “each sings for his own Lila.” This generation, according to al-Sudani, welcomes the criticism of those “older in creativity and culture,” but rejects being ignored. Al-Sudani’s protest is emblematic of the time and its poets. It points to one of poets’ greatest, if not the greatest, fears, that is, to be ignored. To be ignored is to be sentenced to death. This death largely occurs when critics and literary editors keep a poet’s name in the dark. A Palestinian poet often faces the angel of death twice each day: as a Palestinian and as a wordsmith. To stay alive, therefore, is to stay above, not under, the ground of Palestine—to have one’s name mentioned by someone somewhere—in newspapers, periodicals, books, or poetry events. Neither the multitude of poets nor the rivalry among them is a recent fact of history. But ancient as poets’ rivalries may be, there is a distinct quality to the modern poetic condition: the inflation that besots their raw material, the word. The resultant paradox is that there is an avalanche of poetic words, but words themselves are hardly as valuable as poets want them to be. By tracking the circulation of printed words, I learned even more about the place of rhythm in the works of those Arab poets I met. A printed daily brochure announcing the events of the Cairo International Book Fair told me who was reading what, when, and where. That’s how I was able to identify and contact Joseph Harb of Lebanon. As I learned in our meeting, he was apprehensive about his poetry being relegated to a place of submission. Although he feared neither military occupation nor the havoc it left in its co-opted Palestinian leadership, he feared Western colonization. I learned many other things from meeting Harb thanks to Madam Safinaz, who arranged the meeting. Before knowing her, I had been working on my

150

THE PICTURE

own. Madam Safinaz explained that she was in charge of all the visiting poets’ accommodations and transportation on behalf of the ministry that had invited them. She knew all the hotels where they were staying in downtown Cairo and was happy to help me meet the poets. Reaching the Giza Sheraton in a van that was serving Madam Safi naz and her poets, I was able to talk to Harb, who writes mainly in free verse and occasionally in colloquial Lebanese. Before our interview, I had heard him on a memorable night in the Poetry Evening tent in the company of the Egyptian Farouq Shusha and the head of Syrian television, Ali Abd al-Karim, who were also working primarily in free verse. Shusha was embarrassed that the fair’s organizers did not host the event for Harb and Abd al-Karim in the Saraya of October the 6th, a place he deemed a better fit for Egypt’s guests and for poets of such stature as Harb and Abd al-Karim. Although lacking the grandiose and the regalia of the Saraya, the Poetry Evening tent still had a red checkered carpet and an elevated stage with a table and a podium. This setup was certainly unlike the tent for The Gathering of Young Poets, unofficially reserved for more traditional recitations, where anyone could show up and sign up to read her poetry. No such spontaneous readings could occur at the Poetry Evening, whose performers were all scheduled in advance, even if they were from outside Egypt. Harb, wearing a suit and a necktie and standing behind the podium in the Poetry Evening tent, introduced his presentation by using the common literary parlance nas (text). “Text” as a word, more than “work,” let alone “song” or “composition,” registers the place of writing as defining what poets do: they write. “Text” has a greater semantic proximity to our eyes than to our ears. But it points to something other than the rise of the visual. It directs us to the rising ethics of professionals and specialists. As a word in the poetic scene, it resonates with an authority of literary specialists honed in the academic order of reasoning. If poets are intellectuals in their own way, then what matters here is not the intellectualization of poetry as much as the professionalization of the intellect. In literary theory, this professionalization cloisters and severs texts from their contexts; it thins their attunement to the conditions of their making. Edward Said (1983) charged secular criticism with the task of showing the adverse consequences of severing texts from their contexts. Harb dedicated his poem to the late Salah Abdul Sabour, a pioneering poet of free verse in Egypt. He also made allusions to what sounded like a painful childhood among the nuns at his school. In what I took to be a com-

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

151

mentary on the entire Arab poetic scene, he declared, “From under the ground are the true poets. Above the ground are only those who attempt to be poets.” When we met, it was in one of the lounges in his hotel, only a couple of hours before his flight back to Beirut. If I could have done so, I would have postponed our meeting to arrange a longer discussion in Beirut, no more than a three-hour ride from my native Haifa. In childhood I recall hearing tales of people from Haifa going to watch movies in Beirut before 1948. But so many decades after 1948, in the bubble-like citadel that constitutes the sovereignty of Israel, nearby Beirut exists at an imaginary remove, inordinately greater than its sheer physical distance. This is why, when considering the vastness of the Arab constituency, Harb and I could meet in the normalizing patch (with Israel) in Cairo, but would have found it perilous, really a fantasy to meet in Beirut (or in Haifa, for that matter). In Cairo, Harb expressed to me his anguish over the road that Arab poets had been taking. When he was younger, no one dared to publish what was now being published. In contrast to al-Sudani’s claim of exclusion, Harb lamented that kids (awlad) were running the literary sections and supplements of the press and the general media. He found it reprehensible that just about anything could be published nowadays. For him the poet was charged with discovering the “depth of the human soul,” and therefore “poetic conceptions reach further than political and military effects.” The striking thing to me was his use of the word “soul,” a recurring choice among poets, as though it alone remains a worthy focus of poetry these days, when so many other causes have produced nothing but failure. He also told me, “Mahmoud Darwish will be more lasting in his effect on the Palestinian self than Abu Amaar [Yasir Arafat] because the poet sees what is further and deeper, what is yet to be known, and so moves society’s wheel forward.” Like the young Abu Hashhash of Ramallah, Harb of Lebanon saw poetic rhythm as a property of the psychological (nafsani). The psychological has acquired a realness of existence that other realms have been losing. Depth or authenticity is considered to be the lot of the psychological. Public or collective stories are thin in their capacity for realness. However, while Israeli occupation surfaced in Abu Hashhash’s account of his rhythm, it is Western domination that surfaced in Harb’s: The internal rhythm is the rhythm of the nafs [soul]. A particular psychological state forces you to use words and phrases that are closer to that psychological

152

THE PICTURE

state. This is how a rhythm is produced. . . . What bothers me is when a poet brings a rhythm that is not his own but is the product of a different group. And that bothers me. You belong to a history that is not accustomed to this rhythm. Rhythm is a collective historical sense and you are a product of this given history, part of it. But all of a sudden comes something, a command, from another poetic production. This is our big calamity. Arab society had something stolen from it and became a new thing. We are slaves of the West and don’t think in a free way. I love Baudelaire, but I will not allow him to abolish my historical accomplishment and put in its stead the collective sensibility of another group. I would lose my own collective sensibility and turn into an imitating creature. Such a creature does not possess anything but the tools of those imitated. I am referring to the surrealist, nihilist, modernist, and postmodernist schools. As we took from them shoes, dress, dance, painting, and song, we also took from them poetry. We treat poetic writing as if it were something to be exported like all other stuff. Every theorizing for the West in a Western style is stolen theorizing. . . . Those who theorize for the West are thieves. They think it won’t be discovered that they stole their sources. There is a lot of falsification for the purpose of marketing, and that brings down the value of the poet.

Unique to Harb’s articulation is his view that in rhythm resides, among other things, the power relation that binds Western and Arab societies— which to him is Western dominance and Arab acquiescence. This is because rhythm for Harb has to do not only with an individual psychological state, but also with a collective condition. Rhythm becomes the space for continuing and discontinuing traditions, for dominating them or having them dominate. This explains, I think, the absence of modernist terms such as “development,” “progress,” and “advancement” in his vision of Arabic poetry. In contrast, those terms proliferate in triumphal accounts embraced by modernizing poets who champion the cause of modernity, a Western-condoned modernity, in Arabic poetry. The accusation often leveled against master poets from less established poets, which I heard throughout my fieldwork, was that master poets desire Western recognition (in the form of publications in Western languages) and the awarding of Western accolades, especially the Nobel Prize. According to such criticism, these poets say what the West needs or wants to hear: about the

RHYTHMICAL FREEDOM

153

“fanatic nature” of Islam, the “traditional character” of the Arabs, and the “intolerance” of Arabs and Muslims to multiplicities of being. But more pertinent is Harb’s stand on rhythm as part of the public world, as the ongoing work of a collectivity, with a particular history, which renders his internal rhythm not entirely internal. This rhythm continues, at least for poets such as Harb, to be the rhythm of tradition, society, and polity. Rhythm for Harb is not the act of a sovereign agent, but the practice enlivened or atrophied as part of a common history. Rhythm for all its singularity and individuality always carries the signature of tradition.

9

MODERN POETS AND “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

D OW N T H E H I L L from al-Hara al-Sharqiyya (Eastern Neighborhood), the predominantly Muslim section of Nazareth, I finished my breakfast of homemade manaqish and shai with my aunt, Umm Hisham, who died a few months later from kidney failure. I had stayed with her every time I visited Nazareth. Near the Virgin’s Spring, Nazareth hosted massive rallies for Palestinians after 1948 and well into the 1980s, when it started to lag behind the city of Umm al-Fahem in the center of the country. With a mixture of nationalist, communist, and socialist voices, Nazareth used to speak about redemption through Arab nationalism or communist internationalism. The ascendant Umm alFahem speaks instead with the voice of Islam. Neither one has been spared proposals in the Israeli legislature for possible removal to a place outside of Israel’s borders, where it will not challenge the sovereignty or adulterate the purity of Jewish Israel. To get to Nazareth, I would ride a bus or take a car ser vice from Haifa’s old Mules’ Court for nearly an hour northeast through the sloping hills of the Galilee. In certain ways, its Palestinian villages are no longer villages and its Jewish kibbutzim are no longer kibbutzim. Most of the villagers no longer live off the land, and those who still do can barely eke out a living. The majority work in jobs that support urban forms of existence. Despite controlling land once farmed by the villagers, the kibbutzim have moved from their agrarian socialist pursuits into private, discrete capitalist ventures. Most homes in villages, save occasional bubbles of affluence, crowd each other. From a distance

M O D E R N P O E T S A N D “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

155

they look like a compressed but bumpy mass of staircases as they slope down the mountainsides, while many homes in kibbutzim have retained their green surroundings because of the land available to them. Their flourishing bedand-breakfast industry strives to present an image of a verdant Tuscany or Aix-en-Provence, especially to those tired urbanites coming from the center of the country, from the space that chases the image of Manhattan, namely, Tel Aviv. In late August, my friend Mona Dahir, a descendant of a family whose ancestor Omar al-Dahir once governed Palestine under Turkish rule, invited me to attend a meeting of al-Sibat, an association of poets and nonpoets who are concerned with the cultural preservation of Palestinian folk art. She offered to introduce me to several poets in the city at a time when I was desperate to speak to poets who were barely known or completely unknown, much like Dahir herself, who wanted to be mentioned in my research. The al-Sibat, meeting was to have taken place in the old and strikingly deserted casbah of the city, where municipal donkeys, not trucks, picked up residential waste in its narrow alleys. But because the meeting was canceled I had more time to chat with Dahir. At her family’s house, across from a shopping mall, wide and tall on the hill of Natzeret Elite, which could be seen from the windows of the salon, I met her family for late afternoon coffee and cake. Determined to resume fieldwork that all too often felt ethereal, I decided to stay overnight at my aunt’s. The next morning, I walked to Edmoun Shehadeh’s shop on the main, almost always congested street of Nazareth, Pope Paul VI Street, so named after the papal visit in 1964. Here, Shehadeh has the bookstore he always wanted to have. He opened the shop after quitting his profession as a carpenter, on his doctor’s recommendation, a career that had occupied him for two decades. He also had to sell half a dunum of his family’s land to build the store in a city where cement was spreading in chilling proportions, creating houses crammed next to one another with only remnants of gardens remaining. Shehadeh was having breakfast on the glass counter in his bookstore and invited me to join him. I thanked him but declined, and went on to explain to him my research and the reasons I wanted to talk with him. I considered him, then in his late sixties or early seventies, as belonging to the oldest cohort of living Palestinian poets. He told me that he was putting the store behind him. His daughter was really the one running it, but he came every day to help out. He had energy neither for the store nor for poetry, which in fact he had started writing

156

THE PICTURE

late in life. Initially, he had been part of a theater group and wrote mostly plays, but by then he was writing very little poetry or plays. He could not stay up late, as he used to, but he was recently able to complete a short novel called The Road to Birzeit and had received a writer-in-residence award from the Arab Section of the Israeli Ministry of Education and Culture, a section that many think was contributing to the decay of a deeply damaged poetry scene, particularly through its “willy-nilly” (li-man habba wa dabb) publication of poetry anthologies. Yet Shehadeh was not writing for everyone. He said that he wanted his “verse to have mobile, alive pictures, where you feel life and drama and conflict.” He added, “I see poetry not as photographic pictures. I try to paint a picture with symbols, allusions.” His road to his free verse poetry was paved by Iraqi poets like Nazik al-Malaika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. He discovered through them that sound is not as indispensable as he had once thought. He had striven to write in the “Iraqi way.”  I wanted to understand what kind of relationship Shehadeh wanted to have with the audience. I therefore asked him for whom he wrote: First of all, I write the poem for myself, not in order to be recited as oration in front of masses. I write for people who like to think while they read a poem. There are people who read a poem quickly and want to understand it from the first glance. I try to go deeper in my verse. I want the reader to take part in the poem. The reader responds to the meaning of the poem. This is a good thing. I let the reader be a critic. This should be the correct poetry, not the poetry of clichés and photographic pictures. We need poetry with depth and symbols. I am not calling for poetry soaked in obscurity. . . . This audience doesn’t want to read riddles and quizzes. They should be able to understand much, if not all the poem. My poem requires effort, but it does not make you feel blind. . . . But the audience still likes music and rhyme, from what I see at poetry readings. Poetry with symbols, living pictures, drama, and significations does not get much applause—like my poetry. I don’t scream and tickle emotions like traditional poets. I address the mind, which is harder to reach.

Also harder to reach are audiences’ ears. It is as if the only worthy cause of poetry has become the “I,” as though other stories and their public have been folded away. Just as it is true that Shehadeh writes for himself, it is equally true that there are no masses to hear him anyway. All that has remained is Shehadeh’s “I.” All else, including the nation, the land, Palestine, socialism, and any

M O D E R N P O E T S A N D “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

157

dissenting politics to which Shehadeh has been willing to ascribe, have proven a failure or at least a fantasy. His “I” stands taller than all the clambering glass-and-steel high-rises of multinational corporations now standing in the place of ancient vanished fields. The individual self has become the space of depth that requires writing, while the rest clings to the superficial. The self thickens, but everything else is emaciated. This is what many contemporary Arab poets say is the reason for their writing when they see defeat and disillusionment proliferate. Stories come and go with their own epistemologies. Thinking for Shehadeh exists in reading. For him, truth presents itself to the thinking eye, the courier to the final destination: the mind. To the secularity of knowing, reading and writing are more yielding than acts of listening, remembering, believing, or dreaming. The secular thus restructures relations among Shehadeh’s senses, rearranging their hierarchy. As pathways that bind him to the world, his senses are rearranged to make a seeing-reading-writing subject come first. He finds that oral or audial paths are either too short or simply block his journey toward truth. What strikes me about the secularity in Shehadeh’s sensibility is what he has taken as the constituents of reason, not his privileging of reason as such. In this epistemic re-formation, the heart is missing as sounds are ridiculed. The oneness of action dissolves into shreds over which the ocular mind dominates. That the visually driven mind prevails in Shehadeh’s account of his reality does not mean that he is obtuse to its complexity. If it were not complex, he would not have spoken of a dissonance between the common public and his desired audience. If “the real” were transparent, he would not have needed symbols, drama, and other transposing equipment. What is commonly described as “realism” in theory, architecture, movies, and painting has become for the poet an occupational hazard, something that he or she can ill afford. Since words by virtue of being only words have long lost their wonder, they must delve into deeper sediments; they must mean what they typically do not on their exposed surfaces to retain their power to elate. As “the social” (including “common sense”) contracts, words’ common meanings shrink. The vulnerability of words—their porousness and dependency on each other to carry meaning— yields to a putative autonomy that poets seek to establish among them. As private and public buildings began to erect fences around themselves, so did words in poetry. Both have done so for the purpose of impenetrability. As buildings have increasingly aimed to thwart transgression against the

158

THE PICTURE

safety of those inside, words have immured themselves against triviality or banality. For in a rampantly prosaic world order, poetry fights ever more ruthlessly to transpose readers and meanings. Poetry may even forfeit all its inherited techniques to increase its resistance against menacing trivia, including techniques that enabled its earliest self-recognition, such as sound. Shehadeh’s relinquishing of a poetry that reaches the ear, which is meant for reciting not reading, could have been one of the reasons that I did not see him at the second Palestinian Poetry Festival that took place in the Western Galilee town of Tamra in September 2001. He himself furnished two other reasons: he was busy with the shop (it was back-to-school season), and he found out that Moustafa Murad, the organizer of the festival and the mayor of the town hosting the festival, was inviting what Shehadeh considered “fourthor fift h-rate” poets. It was during the last day and last hours of that festival that I had the opportunity to hear someone else’s criticism of it, someone who actually attended. Ahmad Kiwan came to the festival to listen, not to read. But he was rather dismayed by the poetry he heard and by the Palestinian and Arab poetry scene in general. Kiwan spoke to me about his views of poets, not about his occasional work as a poet, mostly in the traditional form. It became apparent that he considers the regrettable state of the poetic scene as part of the reprehensible Arab political reality. For the fourth and final day of this festival that stretched over two weekends, its organizers had planned a trip to Jerusalem to express solidarity with the Orient House, a sign of Palestinian statehood in Jerusalem, which had been seized and closed by Israeli authorities. On a sidewalk near the House (Israeli police prohibited people from standing at the entrance to the House or in front of the large cement blocks that blocked the street in front of it), poets read poems and speeches in honor of the Palestinian national struggle. The poets appeared in the order they acrimoniously negotiated during the bus ride to Jerusalem. There was something both trivial and emblematic about their disputing the order of their appearance; the struggle for fame is as trivial and as ancient as the Roman goddess from whose name the Latin word fama was derived. The emblematic nature of this debate was its incongruence, like penguins competing for places to stand on a rapidly melting glacier. They read their works in the presence of Abd al-Qadir al-Husseini, who, following his late father, Faisal al-Husseini, had assumed responsibility for the House.

M O D E R N P O E T S A N D “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

159

Besides words, al-Husseini also received some memorabilia of the festival: a tray and a handful of flags. Afterward officials at the House served us cold drinks on the sidewalk of a nearby street; then we took the bus to the old section of the city, where the group separated to eat, shop, or pray. We reunited in the early afternoon to head back to Nazareth. On the journey back, I resolved to take a nap. But Kiwan was sitting behind me and talking to me without any intention of stopping. I opened my eyes and resigned myself to listening to what proved to be a lamentation, not only on the festival, but also on the state of Arabic poetry. He charged the contemporary scene with disarray, conceits, and self-conceits. In his invective against the malignancy of the conditions under which Arab poets and their societies lived—a commonly heard complaint—he said that bad poets have the same fate as the one-eyed among the blind. The one-eyed among the blind is a king. Today poetry is akin to a suq [market], and the suq is fi lled with poets or semipoets or those who call themselves poets. In such a state al-habil bi-l-nabil [the bad mixes with the good]. What is lacking among our poets is knowledge, thaqafa [culture], reading, and familiarity with the turath [tradition]. . . . It does not matter which poetry you write, but it is important for it to have a jaras musiqi [musical bell] for the ear to cultivate, to formulate. If we consider all this in regard to the Tamra festival, then you will find that the number of poets is very, very few. For much of what was said there was prose, and sometimes bad prose at that. Chaos was all over the place in that festival. . . . In poetry one has to begin from the beginning, the rhymed and metered poetry, because this is the foundation on which the Arabs built their tradition of poetry, and one cannot with the brush of a pen cancel what has been acknowledged for more than a thousand years. Th is is injustice to poetry and to literature. . . . Only after the poet has a firm ground in the traditional poetry can he go in all sorts of other ways, but in all cases he must retain the music of poetry. This is what many modern poets lack as they write shir mursal [diffuse poetry].

At the poetry festival in Tamra, Kiwan saw ruins where others saw pluralism. Those ruins were a suq, which in Kiwan’s testimony has acquired a particularly pugnacious scent. According to one hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, markets are the places most despised by God. Unlike maskan (home) and the related verb sakana, connoting stillness and tranquility, suq

160

THE PICTURE

connotes that which is base, boorish, and out of bounds. When Kiwan places the contemporary poetic scene in the market he evokes not its value as a commodity but the dissolution of its coherence. The modern dispersal of sounds away from traditional disciplines that measured them stretches beyond the conditions in which poems are produced into the very act of composing them. Prose poem writers, even the unskilled among them, can claim that they possess a poetic ability, even though traditionally it is the ability to versify. This is the charge Kiwan levels against the poetry scene. He used suq to describe the disorder, where anything goes. Standards have dissipated, as has the primacy of sound, according to Kiwan. In a secular modernity where freedom often means the shedding of “external” restrictions or, inversely, aggrandizing self-autonomy, there is a severance from an ethics of beginnings. Yet beginnings in Kiwan’s sense of time unfold in the present, not before it. Beginnings are neither external to nor do they precede the present self. Beginnings ceaselessly live in and even generate the present. Music and modernity seem estranged from each other in Kiwan’s narrative only to the extent that sound and silence no longer interlace in the making of truth, as they used to in defining and making the real. For the real largely has come in a dominant way to mean what the eyes see. So dominant has the power of the ocular become that even Kiwan, who otherwise does not deprecate the place of sound, cannot escape from its grasp when he assumes poetry to be an act of writing or reading. I think it has not been remarked enough that traditions, whether secular or religious, cannot acquire a complete hold on those who ascribe to them; however, they may be less ruptured in lands where the modern project of colonialization has had less time to take root. The military siege of Ramallah still seemed less adept at interfering with Palestinian life’s contact with its beginnings on the land, in comparison to Israel’s success in Haifa and the surrounding Galilee, whose Palestinian populations were largely tamed under civil administration by 1966, less than two decades after the 1948 occupation. This of course was one source for my thinking, not wholly justifiable, that Palestinian culture, poetry included, enjoyed a greater immanence in the still militarily governed lands, not as thoroughly domesticated by Israel’s normalizing power. In early October 2001, a couple of weeks after meeting Kiwan, I went south to Ramallah as part of my habitual goal to visit the city at the start of every month for a week or so if its borders were open. In October 2001, they still were.

M O D E R N P O E T S A N D “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

161

At that time of the year the mountains of Ramallah and Jerusalem betray the desert climate characterizing much of the land. If snow falls, most likely it falls on those mountains and almost nowhere else. But the cold that drilled into my bones that night was not the only thing that concerned me and my friend, guide, and host, Abd al-Karim Abu Khashan, a professor of modern Arabic literature at Birzeit University. We were concerned about gunshots between settlers and Palestinians firing from right by his house, which was dangerously exposed to the Jewish colony of Pasgout. Abu Khashan was actually incensed by the Palestinian militants who endangered his family with their utter irresponsibility. He knew that by firing from under his house, the Palestinian gunmen provided the army force guarding the colony with an excuse to start shooting indiscriminately. His neighbor had been shot in such circumstances. Staying away from the windows that overlooked Pasgout, Abu Kashan and his family slept in the back of the house, while I slept on the floor of his office in the middle of the house. When the shooting became more frequent and intense, as it did in late March 2002, Abu Khashan and his family moved down the valley to his mother-in-law’s house, which was closer to the colony but less strategically located for the gun battles that ravaged the area. One late October afternoon, Abu Khashan, with the typical kindness he attributes to his Bedouin heritage, took me to the Ministry of Education and Culture in Ramallah, where landline telephones did not work, but faxes and cell phones did. He wanted me to meet Muhammad al-Batrawi. He introduced us to one another in a hurry because then, as on every Tuesday, al-Batrawi was leaving to go on the air to receive calls from poets on a radio program dedicated to poet novices and sponsored by the Palestinian National Authority. Although I never had a chance to listen to the radio show, I was able to hear al-Batrawi’s views in a series of interviews that took place in his third-floor office. From him I learned what “modern” readers might want of poetry, as he showed me how their experience was thoroughly visual. Al-Batrawi, then in his seventies, confessed that when he saw himself in the mirror, he saw the face of a stranger. He found that at least inside he had ceased to age after his twenties, when he left his village of Sdoud, whose destruction gave rise to the Israeli town Ashdod. Al-Batrawi continued to dream every night of his beginnings, his village. This is why he also continued to like what young men like: chocolate, women, and Tom and Jerry cartoons. But he learned about territorial sovereignty from British rule long before he learned

162

THE PICTURE

about it from a cat chasing a mouse on television. This is also how he fell into trouble with authorities well prior to Israeli rule. Before finishing his schooling in the seventh grade, equipped with Marxist convictions, al-Batrawi had already gone on campaigns seeking to convince people not to pay taxes to the English (al-Ingliz). In the mid-1940s, when he was in his teens, he participated in establishing al-Ittihad (Union) newspaper, which later became the only Arabic daily in Israel and, somewhat later, the mouthpiece of the Israeli Communist Party, but at that time barely subsisted. It became a subsidiary of a local advertising firm, The Arab, which littered the newspaper with advertising, including solicitations for advertising. The newspaper’s historic red motto, “Laborers of the world unite,” in calligraphy above its original 1946 masthead on the front page, ironically beckoned readers to unify as consuming rather than producing subjects. By its sixth decade of publication, consuming and existing had become spectacularly interchangeable in its semantics, but not its semantics alone. Across the ocean, U.S. President George W. Bush and then New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani called on American citizens to overcome the calamity of the 9/11 destruction by asserting their freedom to consume, rather than to think, insofar as thinking reaches the absent and may occur in a variety of ways (meditating, remembering, walking, swimming, reading, writing, praying). Al-Batrawi used to travel more frequently than he did when I met him, even as far away as the United States, where he attended international conferences for writers as a member of the World Union of Writers. Apparently he helped launch not only a newspaper, but also the careers of many poets and novelists when he worked as a literary editor for one of the local newspapers on the West Bank. To show the importance of paying attention to beginners, he provided me with half a dozen names of known writers whose careers he had nurtured. For him, the letters of young poets to the editor are the “most dangerous” because “the published word in our society has the power of magic.” Al-Batrawi’s view that writers’ reputations come through print has its source both in the new and the old worlds of Palestinian poets. In the old illiterate Palestinian world, committing something to writing meant bestowing a measure of immortality on it. Committing a name to writing bestows on it an eternity that its fleeting oral presence cannot offer. In writing, a name acquires timelessness. In the literate new world, printing gives a name its realness. A printed name is believed to actually participate in culture (thaqafa)

M O D E R N P O E T S A N D “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

163

and have depth, both of which have been largely conflated with literacy, to the exclusion of singers and demotic poets. Al-Batrawi went on to describe the ways publishing could give youth a sense of self-worth and self-fulfi llment in an otherwise frustrating age. As an affirmation of one’s existence publishing offers a break from the constant struggle against perishability. With his trust in the value of print, Al-Batrawi, unlike Kiwan, considered this age to be better for poetry than the previous one: Poetry today is a picture. . . . I don’t distinguish between prose and poetry. . . . In the past I used to like metered and rhymed poetry, which had eloquence. . . . As a Marxist, I hold certain aesthetic perspectives. . . . I am concerned with progress, and it is manifested in my reading of poetry. . . . The receiver is the one who owns the poem. . . . The recipient of a poem has more of a role to play today than the poet. The poet alludes to things. We have only poetry left to take us away in a human experience [infial]. This is because the world is mechanized. . . . The picture and the poem take us to the same place: peace with oneself. . . . The poet writes with a particular vision. . . . As a recipient, I rewrite the poem in a new form . . . because the stock of memories and pictures is different for me. . . . Experimentation is important, and I am for reaching for that which is better. . . . The world is moving from regionalism to that scale of broader humanity. . . . This is what makes a human being look for other ideas and other experiences that are not Arab. . . . I finally realized that the ultimate goal of poetry is to provide a mental picture through which the human can yudrik [sense or know] with his senses, as if he were in front of a painting hanging on a wall, which he is contemplating regardless of the sounds, external, oratorical, and loud sounds and slogans that might be in it.

Al-Batrawi did not bemoan poets’ desertion of song for painting; quite the opposite. And what poets do in their works, he helps us understand, has everything to do with the fate of the word as it expresses truth and knowing in this secular age as in any other one. For all his embracing of the present as progress-generated, there was a moment when al-Batrawi spoke from a place of defeat when he declared that poetry is all that is left. Poetry alone has been left to face the malignant present, whose symptoms he learned as a Marxist to diagnose as “mechanization.” This admission of defeat is a telling start into finding out more about how the secular has nourished al-Batrawi’s vocabulary and how it dwells in his epistemology, even if never fully comfortably so. Poetry in al-Batrawi’s secular

164

THE PICTURE

world takes on the task earlier thought to be religion’s: it offers distinct islands of reenchantment. Religion’s failure becomes poetry’s fortitude: fugitive experiences become transcendent. The point is that what secularists like al-Batrawi are likely to denounce in religion they all too frequently demand from poetry and the arts. It is a separate question whether this transference of functions from religion to the arts is between secularization as conqueror and religion as conquered, that is, immured in the private sphere, or between two equally vanquished, that is, sequestered realms (poetry and religion) joined in the struggle for the survival of the word in what al-Batrawi calls a mechanized world. Al-Batrawi has made it clear that as the grounds of going to the beyond have shifted, so have the goals. He helps us understand that the human self joins poetry in a struggle for survival. Only the self does more than survive. It thrives. It thickens and enthrones itself as the sole or prime party with which peace is reached. Peace is to be sought between the self and the self, not with an independently existing other. However, any charting of peace or war must presume a landscape of the self. To push this thought further, the visibility of such a map emerges from the invisibility within the self that charts it. The wars one fights and the kinds of truce one secures or the peace one desires obtain their details from the kind of knowledge and the self for which one searches. This is why al-Batrawi has remained consistent in his search for poetry grounded in human experience, which would also secure peace with oneself. (In contrast, Kiwan’s poetry has been grounded in Arab tradition.). The secularity of al-Batrawi cuts deeper than his manifest humanism (in all its varied forms of affinity to secularism), which renders human experience a greater authority than tradition. His secularity pierces through how he knows himself and the world. Experience becomes a more valid source of knowledge than tradition. Tradition and experience (without forgetting the latter’s affinity to experimentation) become antinomies. What binds them is mistrust and rivalry. Enmity makes the vulnerability and mutual sustainability of these two concepts readily forgettable. Each concept is self-sufficient to the extent that it can carry the presumption that it is sustainable without the other. And so it remains uncommon if not altogether awkward to speak about a “traditional experiment” or “supratraditional experience.” But is tradition or experience possible without the other? And what is the place of the other living within each?

M O D E R N P O E T S A N D “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

165

Both concepts have their potential for devastation, although the loss that lurks in them takes different forms. Tradition may ossify the threads of self, while experience and experiment may emaciate them. It should not surprise us that al-Batrawi, who values experience more than tradition, would also value painting more than singing, image more than sound, eye more than ear. They offer different ways of knowing and being in the world. Individualism finds a greater utility in eyes, paintings, or images than in ears, sounds, and song. Seeing does not require the kind of sociability that speaking might. The invisibility, absence, and deferral required in an orally driven world have little value for the modern apparition of the secular as within al-Batrawi’s Marxism. The point is not to assert that al-Batrawi as a Marxist is a secularist who commits religious reality to illusion, but rather to show how secularism works in complex ways through the Marxist-secularist orientation of his sensory complex. In contrast to Kiwan, who demands a poetry that continues to appeal to listeners through its music, al-Batrawi asks for a more “advanced” poetry, one that is founded on a picture. While Kiwan sees Arabic poetry in a state of loss and confusion, al-Batrawi sees Arabic poetry progressing in the multiplicity of its poets. Kiwan is likely to be labeled “traditional,” while alBatrawi is likely to be labeled “progressive” or the modern counterpart. But whom does each type seek to satisfy? I broached this subject with the poet Ahmad Dahbour. I thought that Dahbour, as someone who had published not only poetry but also articles about poetry, would have something to say about the twenty-first century’s relationship between a poet and her public—a relationship that signals the distance between self and other, between the personal and the political. I asked him what kind of relationship he seeks to have with his audience and what relationship he deems satisfying: There is a thorny, challenging, and exciting relationship with the audience. A hypocrite and liar is he who says he does not care for the audience. In our countries, where we speak one language and write another, the price of pleasing the audience is costly. The poet has to find his precise equation as if he were walking on glass, so he can keep the art and at the same time reach the widest audience. But if you are plagued with a cause, like many of us Palestinian poets, it becomes harder because the salafi [past-ist] taste is dominant and asks for the common thing. They are asking Mahmoud Darwish to write what

166

THE PICTURE

he wrote thirty years ago. The audience leans towards that which is itminan [soothing]. They clap for what they know and not for what they don’t know or for what the poet discovers. Consequently, there is not a solution to this battle. It is the right of the ordinary audience to tell you “I want to understand you.” The audience generally tends to be conservative. They are always in a state of schizophrenia. They are in need of change because they are poor, and long for rebellion and change. Yet in terms of expression, they lean towards that which is familiar. But, of course, the revolution is not compartmental. You cannot express the revolution in old language. Revolution is hadatha [modernity] . . . and adventures. One time, for example, there used to be a correspondence [between poet and audience]. When I get invited to a public mihrajan [festival] these days, I read a poem I wrote three decades ago, and ethically this is more correct, I feel. I don’t want to write in 2000 a poem of the 1960s, so instead I bring the 1960s poem itself. I don’t want to lie because if I write in that style now, I am cheating. It would be writing with the audience on my fingers, as if I am waiting for its clapping. No. It becomes a craft [sana] in the ugly meaning of the word. But if there is a poetry evening with a tough audience, I want the challenge. I want to challenge the audience’s taste and put it in battle with mine.

Defeat and disillusionment may have seeped into Dahbour’s words, but they certainly did not inundate them. He has persisted in reaching out to the public, and it is in that persistence that he has allowed us glimpses into the secular at work, in the way it governs the relationship between a poet and her public. Dahbour has not sought to dissolve the oneness of his poetic act, to segregate human action into smaller sovereign spheres, and to cloister poetry for the purposes of an extraordinary public. He has persisted in trusting the ordinary public, but he has learned how to do so judiciously. He fears the compromising effect of the public on his art, a fear coming to him from an alienation that escalates among advocates of prose in Arabic poetry, who are ascending to unprecedented visibility. Yet residues of a rebellious youth spent in Arab socialism and Palestinian nationalism during the 1960s mitigated Dahbour’s alienation from the public. In those decades, he witnessed the mobilizations of Palestinians in refugee camps (mainly in Jordan and Lebanon) and the establishment of the PLO, which marked a turning point in the history of the Palestinian national struggle, until then mainly the business of Arab regimes. This was the revolution

M O D E R N P O E T S A N D “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

167

that Dahbour lived during his twenties. Palestine, the abducted motherland, seemed capable of becoming home again during his youth, for this revolution promised her return and much more. With an additional four decades of experience, and waiting, he has learned that revolution does not mean only or primarily establishing sovereign political institutions. Revolution also means new ways of seeing things and new ways of saying them too. Pain, confusion, frustration, and excitement, all part of Dahbour’s relation to the public, reveal how struggles for and against varied forms of life are carried out in poetic forms, inside the materiality of a single form, and throughout the multiple layers of oneself. Dahbour’s native language occurs in two forms, a condition linguists call “diglossia.” Arabic, along with a few other ancient languages such as Amharic and Greek, exists in both demotic and literary varieties. The demotic varies across countries, regions, religions, tribes, villages, classes, and genders. The literary is classical Arabic, whose authority most notably derives from the fact that it is the revelatory language of the Quran. To speak in classical Arabic is to speak from a position of authority that the demotic generally fails to confer. Yet the demotic offers, potentially at least, a kind of access to a pedestrian public, which the classical, reverential register does not. Dahbour composes with the authority of the classical but struggles for the intimacy and immediacy of the spoken. He savors perpetuity in the former yet thirsts for the fleeting spontaneity of the latter. Within the power struggle between these two registers of Arabic language, Dahbour, as an Arab and not only a Palestinian poet, has had to constantly work out his relationship with the public. In addition to the polarity in Arabic, there are other factors that make him “walk on glass,” to borrow his phrase. His refusal to partition the revolution (for him modernity) does not preclude, as befitting a secular subject, his pitting art against the public. In keeping with a secular-liberal ethos of the autonomous self, Dahbour has seen that the wider the public, the greater the fear for the artfulness of his poetry. Art, or presumably the real and genuine variety, emanates from inside, and the danger of the superficial encroaches from outside. The collective Palestinian cause, specifically the common expectation it has solicited from poets and the public, has become something one is plagued with, not empowered by, and has testified to transformations in the world of Palestinian as well as Arab poets. A series of notable defeats from 1917 through 1993, from the Balfour Declaration to the Oslo Accords, which nonetheless allowed Dahbour to return to his homeland, taught him that artists can barely

168

THE PICTURE

redeem themselves, let alone other people. From these collective defeats, he and other Palestinian poets learned that art cannot be real if it is serving outside causes. And since their material is language, the real work turns out to be inside and through language, which has been bestowed with a transcendental command previously attributed to People, Nature, History, or God. At the time Dahbour spoke the words quoted earlier, modern realism, and defi nitely its socialist strand, had lost currency. Dahbour has not absolved himself or other poets from responsibility to a public. What he wants to do—and has not done enough before—is protect art from the perils of all kinds of ideologies. In his pursuit of this protection, the public becomes unusually problematic. Dahbour’s wanting to challenge his public constitutes an instance whereby free verse stands among multiple polarities as an intermediate between the classical ode and the prose poem. Between the monometered and monorhyming architecture of the classical ode and the total absence of metrics in prose stands the free verse poem, which insists on regularity of meter but not rhyme or number of feet in each line. Th is rhythmically middle position appears to parallel the relationship between poets and their public. Between the positive attitude that poets placed in the people during the middle of the previous century and the friction with them that poets in the 1990s saw they needed stands the modernity of free verse poets, wanting to reach the people but fearing their ruinous effects on genuine creativity. I believe variations in approach to a public among different poetic forms are affected by the dominant politics of the day in the Arab and Muslim world (themselves part of a profound political transformation) and have little to do with any supposed essential correspondence between inherent properties of a par ticular form and an attitude to a public that it presumably dictates. The point therefore is not to imply any inherent or total correspondence between rhythmical architecture and a particular relation it can dictate to a public. Dahbour helps us only to remember that sentiments for the public and sound structures of a poem are intimately linked. Perhaps trust or its antonyms are not precise enough to describe the change in poet-public relations. For mistrust exists along with a kind of anxiety, estrangement, alienation, and a specialization that separates poets from the public in secular ways that were not previously familiar. To begin to understand this secular kind of specialization, to begin to comprehend the radical difference constituting it, it would be helpful to imagine a hypothetical situa-

M O D E R N P O E T S A N D “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

169

tion: the Iliad could have been composed with the sense that Helen’s abduction and the ensuing Trojan Wars were a burden plaguing, not enabling, the epic’s genesis. In Dahbour’s presentation and in the imagined Greek instance, the collective is made to stand as an impediment to, not a possibility for, individual creativity. Dahbour’s art has been plagued by his people’s cause, restricting his possibilities at a time when he is striving to compose poetry that is neither common nor familiar. Locating freedom as completely internal (emanating from the self outward) and domination as external to it, liberating creativity within the individual and moving oppressive familiarity out in the social seems to resonate with secular-liberal notions about human action. In them and in Dahbour’s views, secular-liberal morality regulates ethics and secular-liberal poetics confines creativity to the private existence of an authentic and sovereign self embattling superficial existence outside it. Threats to the ethical or poetic faculties of the self emanate always from outside. It is improbable that this self will become its own enemy or its own victim. Typologies of self in Dahbour’s narrative have a corresponding vocabulary. Dahbour invoked a common secular adjective to describe the prevalent state after the Six Day War in 1967, when Arab nationalism retreated and religion began to recover legitimacy in politics under nation-states. He invoked the adjective salafi [past-ist] to place himself outside of what is frequently known as Muslim “fundamentalism.” He used this descriptor pejoratively to depict the hardships, which both he and his mentor Maurice Qabaq, in his case with the church, faced as renovating artists. Religious movements commonly refer to their efforts as an awakening (sahwa). Dahbour’s semantic elasticity corresponds to his temporality. What has seemed to retard or menace the evolution of Dahbour’s art is a conservative public that has kept pulling him back to the past, where religious texts and authority held sway. In keeping with secular temporality, Dahbour attached to historical change a positive essence and to stasis a negative one; one is inherently redeeming and the other ineluctably degrading. Stillness is stifling. From this secular sense of time also emerges Dahbour’s secular imagery of the social space in which he has located the poet as the progressive force pulled backward by a conservative public. Dahbour is not above them, as is Mahmoud al-Desouqi, but ahead of them. The spatial distance between the poet and the public transmutes to a temporal distance. It would be incorrect to conclude from the modern poet’s need to become an ordinary but progressive agent that Dahbour writes poetry equally accessible to all, in what

170

THE PICTURE

modernizing poets and sympathetic literary critics disparagingly call “direct language.” For hierarchy does not necessarily dissipate in the secular modernity of Dahbour’s poetry; it only changes its conditions. This is to say that even if his words were likely to be semantically more familiar and accessible, more so than those of the Quranic text and classical poetry, the logic that connects his words is not necessarily so. Lexicons of the language (in written or oral forms) may very well fail to mediate between a poet like Dahbour and the tough public he wants to challenge. The trained minds of specialized mediators (such as literary critics and certainly readers more so than listeners) become necessary for unlocking meanings. This creates a new incomprehensibility as one aspect of the quandary facing secular poets. One way to articulate this quandary is to note that secular poets want to compose lay, not sacred, texts whose interpretation is available to a public with extra-ordinary interpretive capabilities. As befitting an acclimated modern secular subject, the language of the therapeutic profession becomes quite helpful to diagnose reality: the people suffer from schizophrenia, from which the poet in this instance is presumably spared. The malady is psychic or mental, not ethical, political, spiritual, bodily, or theistic. Dahbour offers this one instance of a proliferating mental health language. His diagnosis may meet the approval of prose poets whose contestation of the Arab poetic tradition goes further than his own. But the prose poets are likely to dispute his prognosis because they, who live more acutely than any other cohort, suffer from an alienation between their inheritance and their aspirations. They are dismayed that free verse movements did not go far enough. Prose poets who rose to dominance after the retreat of Arab nationalism say that free verse failed to deliver a sufficiently radical revolution to the Arab world. Nowhere did I hear about the need to challenge audiences of Arabic poetry more frequently and more forcefully than from writers of prose poems. Where free versifiers had stopped, they wanted to continue. Nowhere did I hear more about poets’ annoyance with “conservative” audiences than from poets working with the prose poem, particularly from those who had dominated the Arab poetry scene for the previous fifteen years. If, generally speaking, the free verse poets in their quest to modernize their craft had found the people lagging behind them, for some of the prose poets, the people were obsolete. For some prose poets, the term “obsolete” also defines the concept and discipline of metrical measurement, whether in classical or free verse form. The world we live in, they say, is a world requiring prose—at least insofar as

M O D E R N P O E T S A N D “ C O N S E R VA T I V E ” P E O P L E

171

the Arab poetic present is concerned. The fulfi llment of a secular modernity is thus theirs to deliver. Without them, without the poets of prose, the story of secularizing Arabic poetry would remain fundamentally deficient. It is they who will push secularism ever more deeply into the Arab literary imagination. More steeped in the modern secular condition, they are better positioned to illustrate its intimate paradoxes. To their stories I turn in the following section.

10

REDEEMING PROSE

N O T T O O FA R from the ancient burial caves, among the almond trees his father planted as a gift for his mother after they had returned from their honeymoon—that was where Hussein al-Barghouti’s dream came true. AlBarghouti’s dream was to be buried there, in his ancestral village, Koubar, on the West Bank. He once wrote of a dream: “Fatigued, I slept under the shadow of trees / I dispersed in my dream like a flutter of butterflies” (2000, p. 56). Six months before his interment in early May 2002, al-Barghouti was kind enough to grant me an interview, which lasted for nearly five hours, at his sickbed at Tel Ha-Shomer Hospital, an Israeli hospital that accommodated the ill noncitizen. His lymphoma and some human connections brought him to the hospital, and my questions about the secularity of poets turning to prose brought me to him. Al-Barghouti published and taught a kind of poetry that many poets during the 1990s could have only dreamed about and for many more may have been undreamable. His form is the miracle that Baudelaire had sought: “Who among us has not dreamt, in his ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose? It would have to be musical without rhythm and rhyme. . . . This ideal, which can turn into an idée fixe, will grip especially those who are at home in the giant cities.” The poets discussed in this section generate poetry whose sounds are no longer tonally measured verse, rather poetry that is a dream, a dream of a  kind of salvation, a beyond of sorts, perhaps a listening to the unknown,

176

THE DREAM

perhaps like prayer, in the desert of the soul. Indeed, both prayer (salaa) and dream (hulm) have become not only potent underlying conceptions in the composition of many contemporary poems, but proliferate as actual phrases in them and as recurring states of writing them. The task of the poem now is to afford, at least to the poet, what the surrounding world of compromise and complicity cannot. The following poets’ narratives focus on conditions and consequences of this dream. Two main questions guide my investigation: In what ways do poets of highly secular sensibilities produce a seemingly otherworldly poetry? How does “the dream” of poets, their poems, underlie and undermine the secular to which they aspire? In the dreams that prose poets generate, measuring sounds becomes completely obsolete and an “ordinary” public borders on irrelevance. Prose poets travel ever deeper into their pursuit, at the risk of disconnecting from where they first began, and yet their efforts, while frequently confusing (to readers and themselves at times) help to illuminate the workings of the modern secular even as the poets may lose their way. If one may extend the parable by the wise man from ancient Greece, modern Arab prose poets, carry ing the torch of their poetry deep into the cave of secular modernity, bring their torches to unprecedentedly bright illumination, but the reach of their journey causes the torches to dim down to the faintest flames which first set them alight. The ways in which the flames of the secular in Arabic poetry have flickered is the subject of “The Dream” chapters. It was in the nascent metropolis of Ramallah where I first met al-Barghouti, at the Casbah Café, after a number of his friends and followers enthusiastically implored me to talk with him. Our first conversation, although awkward and embarrassing (due to his confronting me about including “nonpoets” in my study), propelled me to pursue yet another one. Our conversations revealed to me what modernizing Arabic poetry had become, especially among Arab prose poets. Those conversations also demonstrated what can happen in the pursuit of “rational” questions through an ethnography that takes certain poets as its interlocutors. My pursuit specifically revealed details about the rivalry, dissonance, and estrangement among different orders of truth, above all about the poetic and the academic in a globally dominant secular condition. Standing at the outer limit of that condition, and himself a self-proclaimed poet weary of poets, Nietzsche (1997, p. 124) once said about his relation to scholars, “We are alien to each other, and their virtues are even more repugnant to my taste than their falsehoods and false dice.”

REDEEMING PROSE

177

Al-Barghouti was both a scholar and a poet, as one has to point out after the splintering of these pursuits in secular modernity. He was born in 1954 and lived part of his childhood, after the 1967 Israeli occupation of the West Bank, in Lebanon and Jordan. His graduate studies were split between two cities: Budapest and Seattle. From the University of Washington he earned his Ph.D. in comparative literature, and with that he returned to Birzeit University, his alma mater, to become a professor in that field as well as in the field of cultural studies. Al-Barghouti began publishing poetry only in the last ten years of his life. While on the faculty of Birzeit, his circle of followers would meet in the student section of the cafeteria. These disciples later came to regard him as a master in poetry, among other things. It is probably this mastery in things “beyond the poetic” and in the art of living itself that led his followers to quibble over mourning and commemoration “rights” following his death. Following al-Barghouti to the hospital during Ramadan (November 2001), I thought, would allow me to ask questions of someone I had learned, rightly or wrongly, to associate with prose poets and generally with the condition of prose in contemporary Arabic poetry. In a certain way, it is unfair to alBarghouti to designate him as a prose poet; he already had professed during earlier interviews his belief in plurality of forms, genres, and beings. However, I came to consider him a beneficiary of the prose movement. A defining feature of this movement is its prominent claim that the poem is what I tentatively label “work on the self.” Conceptually the poet is no longer propelled to sing or to draw a painting in the poem’s constitution or delivery or to narrate cosmic stories and collective experiences. Instead the prose poem tells ordinary stories of ordinary people in ordinary places with ordinary things. This shrinking, as it were, has not been at all peculiar to al-Barghouti’s work, yet how he challenged some of my questions was. More than anyone else he allowed me to glimpse the outer limits of my understanding. These are “outer” limits not because they are externally beyond, but rather because, as al-Barghouti might say, they are buried and forgotten. Indeed my most simple questions, so readily answered by other poets, appeared very dull, lazy, trite, and superficial when I put them to al-Barghouti. His answer to the question that usually started my interviews—Why do you write poetry?—illustrates this point: Why poetry? Perhaps there is no answer today for this kind of question. It is like asking, Why music? Not that this is general, but it is in the nature of the

178

THE DREAM

human. The human, for example, is often moved by rhythm, that is his nature. This is how God molded him. Why do we have eyes? . . . Frankly, I don’t know, but maybe this is what brings satisfaction, the satisfaction derived from creating new things. . . . To create something is to transform something or many things. Whether material or mental, you transform many things, the least of which is yourself. When you create something new, there is something new in you. You see things in new ways; you articulate them in new ways.

At least one ambiguity surfaces in al-Barghouti’s answer. He starts by disavowing almost any narrative that is capable of telling a story for poetry. In other words, he does not initially locate any essence, that is, origin, as Heidegger might say, for poetry except for its biological necessity, like that of the eyes. It is humanly natural to pursue rhythm as it is humanly natural to have eyes— this seems to be al-Barghouti’s proposition. No telos other than biological datum can furnish a story for poetry. Yet if rhythm is essentially an act of measuring, of which sonic measurement is only a par ticular immanence, then al-Barghouti once more resonates with Heidegger, who defines poetry as measuring. But in a colonially carved Arab Muslim world that in al-Barghouti’s time is so tried, tired, and tattered, with many projects for and against the nation-state having faltered, the protagonist can no longer be the “measurer” but rather must be the “creative self.” If anything, al-Barghouti’s uncertainty compels us to see how a depleted tradition loses the clarity necessary for articulating its objectives as well as the coherence that allows such an articulation. Al-Barghouti’s radical stance resided in his incessant searching. While more traditional poets, those with collective pursuits—socialist, religious, or nationalist—might have readily responded to my first question by invoking this or that trite collective cause for writing poetry, al-Barghouti made the question of writing itself appear somewhat superfluous. Yet it was not superfluous enough to inhibit answers. His answers demonstrate that the previous fifteen years have led the Palestinian poetry scene to embrace the marginal, the partial, the prosaic, the quotidian, and the unheroic (Nasir, 2001, p. 9). This shift is perhaps in keeping with Arab poets who embraced the prose poem nearly five decades ago. Theirs, they say, is not a poetry that enchants. Neither does it describe. Nor is it a poetry that mobilizes the masses, promising a collective redemption in the “people’s future,” or answers questions with a realism adhered to by earlier poets (either in traditional or in modern forms

REDEEMING PROSE

179

of versification). Dismayed by what has been tried and motivated by what is yet to be tried, this new poetry speaks to no masses, and when it speaks it raises, we are told, only questions. No more talk about big revolutions taking place on city boulevards or in squares, as poets had done until the late 1960s. It is a prose-laden poetry that creates, transforms, and redeems, at least and perhaps only the author. One result of this general prosaic state is that not only readers but also sometimes poets themselves do not comprehend what they have written. My endeavor to understand why and what poets write or say seemed particularly daunting in the case of prose poetry because these poets themselves appeared not to know the reasons, or otherwise searched for entirely new ones, for what they did and for the meanings of words they wrote. Once again, al-Barghouti provides an example. In one of his books, Pouring Mirrors, he talks about jinns dictating things to him. I asked him who wrote the poems therein. Between breaks for his failing lungs to breathe, he said: They were not written in a state of consciousness, those poems. I dare say these were not ones I wrote. I wrote them while asleep or read them while asleep. A jinn handed them to me. I am talking seriously. It is not the “I” who brought them, and I am not speaking as a Freudian. I don’t know where the jinn came from: Wadi Abqar, Wadi Ramallah, or Wadi Ara. I don’t understand all that is written there. But the parts that I wrote, I do understand.

Although uncertain as to the wadis (valleys) that inspired his poetry—the wadis of his homeland (Ramallah and Ara) or the muse-land of Wadi Abqar, the ancient name of a place in Arabia thought to be the location of poetic inspiration and the source for the adjective abqari, meaning “genius”—alBarghouti made at least one thing abundantly clear: there is something to be learned about the making of secular reality in the modern era through the ways certain poets have come to dream. Only a decade after Nazik al-Malaika had called for free verse (shir hurr) in Baghdad, Adonis called for prose poetry in 1960 in Beirut through Shir, a journal reportedly affi liated with the Syrian Nationalist Party. Adonis advocated the prose poem based on his reading of Suzanne Bernard’s 1959 Le Poem en Prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos Jours. In arguing the case for prose poetry, he declares, “Mutability not stability, possibility not determinacy are the common staple of our age, and the poet who genuinely expresses our age, is the poet of severance—from that which is common, accepted and general. . . . In

180

THE DREAM

here lies the danger of the prose poem. . . . The prose poem is dangerous because it is free” (1960, pp. 78–79). Al-Malaika’s call came forth at a time when colonialism seemed on the wane, except where it was being exceptionally normalized in Palestine. Adonis’s call came forth at a time when pan-Arab nationalism seemed on the wane, especially in Egypt. The modernizing vehemence, which the free verse movement inaugurated after the 1948 war, is what the prose poetry movement seemed to have continued after the 1967 war with Israel. This latter defeat, commonly referred to as al-naksa (the setback), is said to have had the effect of a massive earthquake, turning certainties into disbelief in the promises of victory and progress that Arab leaders had made. Disbelief in the ability of the Arab free verse movement to deliver modernity to poetry also took root. Prose poets saw in the free verse movement a conservative reform of a tradition that needed radical transformation. Arabic poetry, as prose poets have commonly argued, needs to question and, if necessary, reject even its most fundamental tools and conceptions. For this reason prose poets are labeled or label themselves rejectionists (rafdiyyun). Adonis (1971, p. 99), whose poetics will be the focus the concluding chapter, wrote, “Rejection is my Bible.” In 1988 he even rejected an invitation to participate in the book fair in Cairo as an official guest of the Ministry of Culture. He declined in a telegram to his future wife, Khalida Said, a literary critic attending the same book fair, because Egypt had recognized Israel. “O Great Poet . . . I reject you” was the title of the prominent literary critic Rajaa al-Naqqash’s (1992, p. 443) response to Adonis. Al-Naqqash was rejecting the animosity of a poet affi liated with the Syrian Nationalist Party and its known resentment of things Egyptian and Arab, including the United Arab Republic, which for two years had unified the sovereignties of the Egyptian and Syrian nation-states. The defeat of three Arab countries at the hands of the Israeli army revealed not only the military impotence of Arab regimes, but also the impotence of socialist and nationalist projects in a neocolonial reality. In Egypt the regime’s language grew increasingly unpopular among both secular and religious segments of society. The regime’s socialist, romantic, optimistic, and nationalist projects appeared merely as hollow slogans. In Egyptian poetry, the rejectionist stand entailed in the prose poem grew increasingly acceptable, and even desirable, among the poets belonging to the “generation of the 1970s,” as those prose poets were called in retrospect. This generation was formed on

REDEEMING PROSE

181

the “ground of rejecting” authority in all its manifestations (Yousef, 2001, p. 167). The authority of Gamal Abdul Nasser’s regime and the project of Arab political unity that he had championed seemed to wither. In 1972, two years after Nasser’s death and one year before the successor regime began an episode of friendlier relations with the West, Cairo witnessed massive protests. Many university students were arrested, among them a handful of poets. Thirty years later, I found myself in the company of the poet Hilmi Salim, who had been among those imprisoned students. On a Friday after the noon prayer I took a taxi to Salim’s house on King Faisal Street, not far from the local ancient monuments of the Giza pyramids and across from a modern monument of globalization in the form of a Shell gas station; his neighborhood might be considered semipopulist for including a typical juice store, shisha café, and nuts store. On the second floor, the door to his apartment had a brass sign announcing his full name and profession: journalist. Salim was working for Adab wa Naqd (Literature and Criticism), a literary-political periodical well known in the Arab world. As I learned from the frequency of congratulations extended to him, he had just been appointed a chief editor in the state’s High Council of Culture. Th is position granted him the authority to review and determine the publishing fate of many literary texts seeking state support. Gradually, I learned about the prominence Salim enjoyed on the local Egyptian poetry scene. He was among a handful of avant-garde poets who had established a publishing space for the Egyptian prose poem through their periodical, Ida’a 77 (Lighting 77). From the village of al-Rahib in the al-Minufiyya province, Salim, whose beginnings were not in poetry but in politics, was born in 1951 to a father in the fruit business. He said that as a poet he learned much from his illiterate father: his working for wages and his democratic sensibility. Salim’s political beginnings were in Arab socialism and its literary manifestation of short stories. Then he discovered a new notion of poetry: As I matured, I realized that poetry is a human activity, something that people make and people change. The idea of sacredness in poetry collapsed. Poets have to develop it throughout history because people make language and people make poetry. Then in the 1950s, the movement of free poetry did half the job for us. It broke the hegemony of al-amudi poetry. It kept the principle of feet but eliminated fi xed numbers of feet or regular rhyme. This really paved half the way. At the same time, I read texts in our classical Arab tradition; these

182

THE DREAM

beautiful texts were not considered poetry. I would contrast them with what is regarded as poetry in Arabic, but is very weak [poetically]. Al-Niffari’s Sufi texts, for example, are beautiful, very loft y poetry, but Arab culture relegated them to prose, to theology or religious thought. They were not considered poetry because they were not metered. So this made me think. Then came the poets, such as Adonis and al-Haj, who discovered these Sufi and non-Sufi texts, such as al-Jahiz. Then we also had exposure to Western texts that led us to see that meter is only one principle, that it is human. We also saw through Western texts people like Rimbaud and Baudelaire. All this helped us with accumulating courage to reconsider concepts and create new ones, to create space for new creativity. All this brought about a change in my and others’ thinking.

Statements like Salim’s propelled my thinking about the place of the secular in the modernizing of the Arab poetic tradition. The secular dwells in Salim’s literary agency in at least two distinct but obviously related senses. First, the secular dwells in Salim in the same way that Auerbach designates Dante as a poet for the secular world. Removed as their worlds are from each other, secular reason, when constituted through historicism, animates their work as literature, imbued with insistence on human as opposed to divine agency, or another form of transcendental will. Salim is also secular in taking on a desacralizing agency: his interest in arriving at a poetic language that is not sacred but prosaic. Salim also allows us to see how a poetic tradition has remade itself along secular lines when the secular has become external to theology, its other. He does not want any religiosity, reverence, or sacredness attached to language, and specifically to rules of poetic practice. Yet the poetic may include the theological, the mystical, and the religious. Meter and measuring, which determined the precise and formidable line separating prose from poetry in the Arab tradition, have dissipated. It is for us to ask how this loss of standards based on a core and common public practice of metered composition might be related to the loss of clarity in objectives, as al-Barghouti’s narrative displays. Further, Salim compels the question: How do practices flourish or fail in relation to a coherence and clarity that traditions may or may not attain? His narrative about the secular itself as a distinctly modern tradition raises another question: How is it that modern secular reason among poets acquires its distance from the sacred by getting distinctly close to mystical and religious texts?

REDEEMING PROSE

183

This “change in thinking” leading to Salim’s literary prominence in Egypt, coupled with activism in the realm of human rights, is probably what earned him an invitation to a Sudanese cultural center in Cairo on the first night I met him. He invited me to come along. The evening was sponsored by the exiled American-African Committee against Torture to commemorate one of its activists who had been martyred (istashhada) in the cause of human rights in Sudan. The invited poets, Egyptian and Sudanese, came with works in varied genres and forms and were a mix of genders and ages. The first poet to read was barely five years old; he recited in the classical register of the Arabic language his panegyric poem in classical form, in honor of the martyr Moustafa Sayyid Ahmad, as if to assure the audience that the struggle was continuing with his generation. The child poet received thunderous applause, unlike the adult poets who, for the most part, read short but obscure prose-driven poems. In fact some readers did not introduce their works as poetry, preferring to call them “texts” (nusus). In general, prose poems did not fi ll the evening, not even the kind of poetry that Salim usually offered. He read a poem in honor of another martyr, Muhammad al-Durrah, a boy from Gaza who was shot seeking cover in his father’s embrace. Unlike most of Salim’s work, “Bitaqa” (“Postcard”), dedicated to the Gazan boy, was not a prose poem; instead it was in measured free verse. It is as if martyrdom and mortality make metron (measurement of sounds) an especially timely guest in poets’ work. My fieldwork taught me that Salim’s selective measuring is not peculiar to him. He did what poets usually do when the subject is traditional, as the subject of martyrdom is understood to be. For some it is even an exhausted subject. On such occasions, poets tend to compose in traditional forms; measured, versified, metered, and rhyming speech; prose hardly seems fitting. There is something here that goes beyond being attentive to the needs of a par ticular public and its sensibilities. There is, I think, also a sensitivity that a subject like mortality commands. I found it striking that the more prosaic the texts in Arabic poetry, the more likely they contain ideas about fear of death and dying. There are numerous questions about the relation that arises from this condition: How might forgetting of metron be related to the endemic fear or forgetting of death? What is the relation between measuring sounds in verse and measuring life and death? Could the loss of the practical ability to measure sounds in verse be related to or even emblematic of a secular condition in which preservation of life forgets the fact of human mortality? Does the prose of the culture of death extend to the sounds of prose in poems?

184

THE DREAM

During my first evening in Salim’s company, I observed him perform his poetry; on my last night, I heard him discuss it and debated with him until almost four in the morning. It was essential that I understood where he was coming from because he, like no one else I had met, was so explicit about the political weight of the poetic form he was using. I asked him if he sensed a crisis in the poetry scene since there seemed to be few readers and many poets. In the course of his response an articulation of a self that exists inside writing and defines itself through writing emerged: Now I no longer write for revolution and all these big ideas. I lowered the goal. I write because my writing saves me. It makes me feel as if I am a beautiful human poet. As such, it is not right for this human to betray his country, to be a reactionary, to be a son of a bitch, to be unjust, to be a thief, authoritarian, or a hypocrite. My writing therefore saves me from erring or falling. When I write, I fulfi ll myself. I feel creative and beautiful. I am producing. I don’t have to steal. It gives me the sense that value is in creativity, not in a battle for authority [sulta]. Those who struggle for authority think that it is authority or salary that gives value. . . . Writing saves me from vice [radhila]. Of course this is the illusion that I want to claim. . . . We have in the Arab world hundreds of thousands of poets, say 300,000 people. If writing saves every poet, then contemporary Arabic poetry around the Arab world is saving 300,000 people from vice each year, or at least during the time that they are writing. This is mightier than any revolutionary or moral influence. At least this is the theory that I constructed for myself.

Language is a sanctuary and literacy is redemption; the action of writing (not speaking) carries within it moral consequences. Salim’s secularity resides not in a typical severing of the aesthetic from the ethical; obviously they are intertwined in his narrative. His secularity dwells in his placing redemption in language. His language becomes a cause of existence and a mode of being, particularly through its visible form: writing. In writing, morality and politics begin and end. The theory that Salim constructed for himself is like those that many other poets have constructed. The writing self as an inherently ethical self is a view that I encountered among many prose poets who waged battles of being on fields of language. Both male and female prose poets told me that writing a poem is both the means and the end: to be something is to write it, and doing something is saying it.

REDEEMING PROSE

185

One very well known female poet who also has attached redemptive capabilities to writing is Aisha al-Mughrabi, originally from Libya. When I met her she was living in Egypt and considering going into exile in France with her family. We first met at the thirty-fourth Cairo International Book Fair. Outside the Cultural Café, hearing the call for an afternoon prayer, we sat on the steps of a huge hall on the fairgrounds. She had studied philosophy and married a literary critic, also from Libya. In the liberal tenor that frequently defines secular varieties of freedom, she told me that she was writing only prose, no free verse: “I don’t put rules to my writing.” Her tribe, al-Mughrabi, according to her, was full of poets and poetry and was among the prominent tribes to fight against Italian colonialism in Libya. Her father, an illiterate man, often asked her to read books to him. As a child she used to bribe her friends with candies in exchange for their consent to listen to her writing. The sense of I-write-therefore-I-am, which al-Barghouti at the hospital and Salim in his apartment conveyed, was also al-Mughrabi’s, but she elaborated on it more fully than they did. As usual when meeting poets, I opened the conversation asking about her need for poetry in the first place. As was usual with prose poets, the answer to that question was no longer about poetry per se but about writing or not writing, that is, being or not being. Her answer did not define the function of poetry as such, but rather writing itself— folding both poetry and language into a mode of literacy and in turn enlarging literacy so it could stand for existence itself. Here is how al-Mughrabi recounted her writing self: Writing for me is existence. To ask why I write is to ask why I exist. For me writing is inseparable from existence. It is the way I practice my life. This is how I was born. I feel this is how I am fulfi lled. I always dreamt that through writing I could change the world. With my little fi ngers, when I was a child— and in some ways, I am still in my beginnings—I thought I could destroy all the ugliness in the world and stand up for the wretched and the poor. I thought I could open a world of good things to the weak. I would draw on my paper houses, streets and lives—ones that are not connected to this ugly world. But this was entirely a child’s dream, the promise that poetry gave me. Then I was struck. I grew older and was pained to find out that poetry did not deliver its promise. I felt I was totally responsible for any sad voices anywhere in the world, and I felt particularly connected to the question of Palestine

186

THE DREAM

and Lebanon. I focused on the misery of the human condition, about emigrants off the shores of Morocco heading to Spain. [Then] there was a young man who wanted a different life, so he held on to the bottom of a van until he was burned. You cannot realize how much I wanted to reach that person, to tell of his suffering that led him to end in such a miserable way.

Writing about the misery of people is exactly what Hussein Muhanna has also wanted to accomplish in his work. Yet he could not accept what alMughrabi and others have accepted about writing—that it is a means and an end for a self in its search of salvation—nor could he accept the “contradictory” notion of prose poetry. For six hours, Muhanna and I met at his house in Buqaya, a mixed village of Christian, Muslim, Druze, and native Palestinian Jewish families who had lived in this Galilean village prior to 1948. Thirty-one years after it received electricity, there was no longer a need to carry water from its spring; only a few were working the land, once famous for its tobacco. The son of a poor and religious Druze sheikh, Muhanna was raised on socialist and communist ideals. Under Israel’s first military rule, he wrote under a pseudonym to avoid losing his teaching job in the village. He taught English and Arabic to high school students. He retired from teaching, but not from his commitment to serving “the people” and “the world” through his poetic work. Wanting to invest in the rearing of his grandchildren, he has been particularly saddened to see that the closeness he had had with his grandfathers through storytelling was becoming a rarity. Children were being sent to day care centers, and grandparents were more frequently being committed to geriatric centers. Signs of his unwavering commitment were manifested in his trilingual library and in the posters of Lenin and the Palestinian peasant past hanging on the walls. Alongside them was posted a line from Gibran Khalil Gibran in Arabic calligraphy: “Humanity is my family and Earth is my home.” Struck by the oddity of realities of homeland and martyrdom, Muhanna was particularly interested in reaching out to the mother of a martyr (shahid). If she read the poem he composed and was consoled, he would consider his poem delivered. For the martyr, according to him, poses enormous difficulties of comprehension as a concept and a reality. In poetic reality, Muhanna of Buqaya, unlike al-Barghouti or al-Mughrabi, has refused to work in prose poetry. In 2001 he published I Am the Witness, a free verse collection, through the al-Aswar Institute in Acre. He saw the poetic

REDEEMING PROSE

187

scene as deeply damaged and the abandoning of meter as calamitous. He did not see any sense in a name like “prose poetry.” It is either prose or poetry. Th is point was not his only disagreement with the prose poets. Unlike Salim of Egypt, he did not think that the possibilities of his age, the age of free verse, were fully exhausted: We should give more time for free verse to develop. I see it as still growing; it has not become so old that it should be replaced. If I want to call something prose poetry, then it has to rely on reality. There is no reality without a rhythm. Without rhythm, I cannot call it poetry. Poetry, by definition, has to rely on rhythm; let’s not call it meter, but it has to have a rhythm. Out of respect for poetry, for prose, for myself, when I write without rhythm, I call it prose. . . . Today we are in a state of chaos, there are no linguistic or prosodic restrictions. You can hear a poet saying “Language does not matter, the important thing is to have poetic pictures. The important thing is to deliver a meaning.” This chaotic group has flooded us with unfathomable poetry, the search for strange pictures. As if this were more poetic. The true poet does not contribute to this chaos. Today’s poets don’t want to work hard. Everything is published and is so easily available that no one cares for it. To make things easy is damaging for poetry. To distinguish between prose and poetry is not to contrast them and determine which is better. The distinction is professional, just as it is important to distinguish a blacksmith and a carpenter. Under the name of prose poetry, writers compose whatever they want. This is why we have lost touch with the receiver. Unfortunately today we want to be cosmopolitan.

Muhanna spoke from the place of a submerged poet. He was inundated by a literary scene where prose was conquering verse and images were subduing sounds. He thus pleaded for the acoustic to have a place where it could still live and flourish. As forms of materiality and kinds of immanence, the visual and the acoustic are battlegrounds for warring forces; chief among them are the globalized West, its secular markets, and an ancient local poetic tradition. These wars have resulted in the loss of measuring abilities on which sat standards of practice that gave the poetic tradition the coherence and historic distinctiveness that Muhanna knew. The proliferation of publications therefore signaled to him not progress, but rather the vanishing of fear, awe, and reverence that human words, especially written ones (although written words were not a common sight in his original, illiterate peasant society), used to

188

THE DREAM

generally solicit. That proliferation signaled to him the arrival of calamitous chaos if just anyone could write and publish. When the local peasant community that welcomed him to the world turned to the globe (read “the West”) for its food, clothes, and leisure, there was little to stop it from turning to that globe also for its theories about words, poetic words included. To be cosmopolitan is not exactly how Salim from Cairo described his aspirations, but something rather like it. Salim was drawn to an Arab Egyptian society that was embracing pluralism. He spoke of social diversity, a society that does not submit to what he with verbal playfulness has called monistic (wahdani) thinking, thus hinting at an ancient Middle Eastern tradition that stretches back to Akhenaten, the Egyptian pharaoh who spoke about one God. I do not think Salim was unaware of the almost whispered theological resonance in his proposition, but what he explicitly aspires to foster is a modern society in which concepts of oneness, repetition, and identity hold no authority. That was the social utopia Salim expressed in our last and longest encounter. During that visit, Amal, his Lebanese wife, gracefully prepared dinner for us and constantly supplied us with fennel tea and cardamom-scented coffee. When she and their two daughters went to watch TV at one end of the long living room, Salim and I retired to the study at the other end. What followed was a dialogue between someone who saw rebellion in prose poetry (Salim) and someone who was deeply skeptical about it (myself). In his rebellion (according to Amal, he rebelled against many things), Salim wanted the poetic tradition to redefine its fundamentals, including redefining the meaning of poetry. However, as Salim was seeking to question and undermine how the Arabs had defined their poetry, he was also questioning how they had defined political action and authority: In our Arab culture, expressing yourself in prose form is itself a rebellion because the poetic form has been hegemonic. You’re using a marginal tool of expression. You’re deviating from the main tool of expression among the Arabs. But there is also a transformation in our Arab life that has led to the rise of prose for several reasons. Those who have written in it are disassociating themselves from those rasmiyin [officials] who write in the classical form and represent a form of authority, because al-amudi poetry, with its meters and feet, constitutes a kind of authority. This construction, this custom of writing, whether you’re the ruler or the opposition, is in the same place. They’re the

REDEEMING PROSE

189

same even if the message is revolutionary. This is because form is not just an empty glass, it is an ideology.

Salim helps us remember how even distributing sounds in a poem situates its composer politically, and even more broadly, epistemically. He was also speaking as a poet who, more than two decades after the rule of Mubarak started in 1981, had seen how both the nation-state and the dissenting revolutions he espoused failed to deliver. His political dissent had migrated by the time I met him to his espousal of human rights politics and prosing of poetic language. When I met him, he was working with a Cairo-based NGO for human rights, which garnered the political energy he had formerly invested in a mass movement for bringing Egypt and the region to socialism. Through my encounter with Salim, specifically because of his insistence that form, any form, is ideological, I arrived at the possibility of understanding the ascendancy of prose in poetry as profoundly and complexly secular. While Salim saw the prose poem form as bearing ideological content that stands in opposition to the authority of Arab tradition and political rule, both being seen as inherent signals of oppression, Izz al-Din al-Manasra, a Palestinian poet living then in Jordan, saw the prose poem in a diametrically opposite way: as anathema to a “culture of resistance,” which no regime desires. This anathema took hold among Palestinians, according to al-Manasra, when the PLO was forced to evacuate Beirut and culminated in the establishment of a Palestinian Authority on the West Bank following the Oslo Accords. These views of the Palestinian poetic-political scene emerged as he became a recanting prose poet who was working mainly in free verse. He was also working as a professor of comparative literature at Philadelphia University in Amman, Jordan, and had written extensively about Arab literary criticism and prose poetry. It seems that to write under the Jordanian regime was to commit an inherently suspicious act. The word seemed constantly watched and patrolled, as if it were a threat. When traveling to the Hashimite kingdom, my books were searched frantically at the border by the kingdom’s security personnel. I would not have thought that an Arabic translation of James Henry Breasted’s Dawn of Conscience on pharaonic kingdoms and Egyptian morality could irk their evolved conscience. Everywhere I saw posters and slogans for the recently deceased King Hussein and his ruling son, Abdullah. All I could associate

190

THE DREAM

with those posters was fear, the fear of power constantly haunted by the specter of its own vanishing. This reminded me of Israel’s fear of the memory of Palestine. But while Israel’s fear involved fierce veiling of memories, Jordan’s involved constant revealing. If Israel wanted to keep Palestine under the ground, Jordan wanted to keep the monarchy above it. Between the fears of two regimes lies the Jordan Valley. Crossing it could have taken significantly less time were it not for the bureaucratic rituals on the borders of these modern states. The bus I took from Nazareth descended one chain of mountains to ascend another. Looking through the window into the distance, I wondered about what must have been the fear of tens of thousands of Palestinians fleeing across this valley in 1948 to later make up the majority of Jordan’s population. I imagined a flux of peasants marching on foot, riding donkeys or mules or in trucks, toward a new life in an old city, Amman. This ancient city of the Canaanite and subsequent Roman ages is located entirely in the mountains and peopled mostly by Palestinians. Surrounding the hotel where I stayed, near al-Manasra’s house, streets carried names of towns, cities, and regions that Palestinians sought to protect from an onslaught of forgetfulness that brings an end to things. Al-Manasra was living on one of these roads, and he had named his oldest son Carmel. Al-Manasra had not seen his hometown of Bani Naim near Hebron since 1964. When it was occupied in 1967 he was studying in Cairo. If he were to travel by car from Amman, it would have taken him no more than three hours to get there. Yet he would not go to Bani Naim as an occupied subject, even though he had been invited to return in the days of the Oslo Accords. His poetry speaks of a far longer ride, evoking Palestine’s loss not simply to a modern Zionist state but to biblical Israelite kingdoms. Al-Manasra is known in Palestinian poetry for resurrecting the memory of the Canaanites, a forgotten Semitic ancestry of the Arabs, as al-Manasra thinks of them, who peopled Palestine, or rather Canaan, before the conquest of the Israelite tribes. Al-Manasra and I first met on a Thursday afternoon in the lobby of the hotel where I was staying. We chatted for two hours and then headed to the poetry festival at the Jordanian House of Poetry, located in a mansion right above an ancient Roman amphitheater. Amman was designated the cultural capital of the Arab world for that year, and poets from various Arab countries came to read at the festival. Once again, pictures of the royal father and son were posted above the reading stage. Only one of the poets recited from memory, and only one recited classical poetry. Throughout my attendance, all

REDEEMING PROSE

191

talked about Palestine, recited panegyrics for the intifada, martyrs, and martyrdom, and lampooned the occupation even though the Israeli democratic regime had signed peace accords with the Jordanian monarchical regime sponsoring this event. But poets were silent about the sponsoring regime. No poem took Jordan as its subject that night. However, the subject of the Arab regimes was what I broached with alManasra in our conversation at his house. His concern was that Arab regimes in the age of globalization and Americanization were only paying lip ser vice to resistance. What really interested them, he said, was a “culture of peace.” For him, the prose poem was associated with Arab regimes in their pursuit of globalization and pacification. Prose poetry, the absence of measuring in it, did not measure up, according to al-Manasra, to the dissenting politics of the Palestinian cause, at once the scapegoat and the demon of discredited Arab regimes. If the prose poem signaled to Salim resistance to coercion, to alManasra it stood for co-optation: Prose poetry is one of the manifestations of lanizam [disorder]. It is an ideological manifestation of a state of fragmentation. The prose poem reached the zero degree of freezing. It is a resignation to cultural globalization. It negates what came before, and what came before was resistance. This cooling of political discourse fits the culture of peace with Israel. Why do three-quarters of the prose poets support peace with Israel and demand coexistence with it? . . . I am not against the prose poem as a form. I am against its conception, which goes against a Palestinian identity. Th is poem of prose is exported Western talk. The prose poem crosses genres just as multinational corporations cross continents. It is literary work but not poetic. . . . The prose poem horrified the audience because of its silence and its tranquilizing language. It is not right to blame society for a “backward structure.” Look at the modern buildings with swimming pools in Amman. . . . The prose poem is a manifestation of the destruction within us. It is the state of nonidentity. Modernity means to develop yourself, not to run away from your people. But there are institutions sponsored by the regime that work on spreading the culture of consumption. The prose poem became widespread in 1985 because what happened in the world destroyed existing ideals, which led to the birth of liberal imperialism. There is vengeance against the culture of resistance. It is the settling of scores with the culture of resistance, which triumphed from 1967 to 1985.

192

THE DREAM

Al-Manasra’s “culture of resistance” refers to the time in Palestinian nationalist memory beginning with the watershed establishment of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 and ending with the evacuation of Palestinian fighters from Beirut starting in 1982. Before the exodus from Beirut, faith in Palestinian resistance or revolution was still solid. Certain poets even paid for it with their lives. From the 1960s onward, Palestinian poetry became synonymous with resistance poetry in the Arab world. It was mostly composed in free verse, which al-Manasra abandoned only to return to it after the prose poem horrified him. This reversal to versifying has clearly been al-Manasra’s way of carving out a political capability for himself, and in a very par ticu lar way. Through his opposition to prose, his free verse tells the story of a Palestinian or Arab subject he sees as besieged. As he resiliently goes on to measure his sounds, that is, to versify, his poems insist on a sonic discipline that to him is dissociable from a disciplined, principled opposition to “progressive projects” that come in a variety of forms: the West, liberalism, imperialism, Israel, globalization, and literary prose that wants to be appreciated as poetry. When al-Manasra spoke of a “tranquilizing language,” he was referring to sound as well as tropes. This is because a prose poem entails a rebellion against sonic measurement as well as against par ticu lar content. Together the sounds and semantic content, linked in complicated ways, constitute the destruction, political acquiescence, and irrelevance that al-Manasra has attributed to the prose poem. Whether or not the prose poem concurs or collides with state ideologies, it is clear that this form, like any form, entails a shift to something extrapoetic, toward word and life, toward thinking and acting. What needs to be asked is this: Have prose poets fallen into a prosaic trap in their quest to salvage the vigor of the poetic and the basic vigor of the human word? Can prose poets wrest language from banality without the risk of contagion from the regimes that have dominated daily life: secularism’s modern apparition as a form of domination in its liberal inflections? While some poets saw an inherited Arab poetic tradition enabling resistance, others, such as Salim, saw it as generating servitude. Resistance through old poetic forms constituted no resistance for him or for his friends whom I came to know through him, friends in Libya, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and England. One evening guests at his house agreed on at least two things: that Amal’s famous milukhiyya (green mallow) that she prepared for dinner that

REDEEMING PROSE

193

night was delicious, and that they were all, like Salim, prose poets. They all began publishing, it seemed, in the late 1970s, after the dreams of grand revolutions were crushed. Most were in their late forties to early sixties. After the age of forty, many a poet confessed to me, they felt freer to pursue that which they could not or had not done before. As an example they referred to the Prophet Muhammad, whose prophetic revelations started at the age of forty. Forty was also, they reminded me, the number of days, as the Quranic (as well as the biblical) story goes that Moses spent on Mount Sinai. Salim and his guests also concurred on their disinterest in or rejection of the classical metered form. Salim told me of his reasons for not accepting that hoary form: Al-amudi is not value-free. It is an expression of a society, its values and views. It is a society of thunaiyyat [dualities]: heaven and earth, city and desert. Such a society compartmentalizes. Each verse line is independent. Th is is a taratubi [routinized] society and a society in which the intellectual is detached from the masses. He descends from heaven to address the rabble. This is an istinsakhi [self-copying] society. There is no diversity. All this is to say—while recognizing the arbitrariness of some of my judgments—that form is an ideology. Behind forms there are ideas. Therefore, leaning towards prose is a breakthrough deviation, a rebellion against this aesthetic, philosophical, artistic pattern. So if a poet talks about the need for change, diversity, multiplicity, and breaking patterns in al-amudi form, I don’t believe him, regardless of how much he writes about those subjects. This is because he speaks about breaking patterns from within one pattern.

Salim reveals, as all poets essentially do, the coalescence of poetic and political action. What struck me about his testimony is its typically secular stance that degrading repetition is inherently inimical to diversity, openness, and unpredictability. If poets who continue to defend measurement succeed in convincing us of something, it is, I hope, the vigor and versatility with which rhythmical measurement of sounds can be pursued. It is interesting that Salim, but not only Salim, values diversity at a time when the Egyptian state, and states worldwide, have been open to venture capital from around the globe but are increasingly divested from broad segments of their citizenry. To point to this coincidence (if it is such) is not to suggest that Salim’s poetics have simply reflected or expressed a social condition (a mode that he himself, in fact,

194

THE DREAM

established between the literary and the social). For, again, an encompassing assumption of this study is that the poetic also constitutes, contests, studies, and explores the political. Poets who have continued to measure their sounds have seen in the ascendancy of prose over traditional poetic verse the arrival of destruction, fragmentation, and chaos. For the prose poets, that destruction has been caused by the arrival of multiplicity. Their ascendancy was a rebellion against conditions, whose essence they saw as routine, piety, reverence, banality, and repetition. But the sense that has accompanied me throughout my exposure to arguments for the ascendancy of prose over verse in poetry is that the same ethic-epistemic-political grounds on which they rest are routinely deployed by liberal-secular states in constituting a normative citizen. Salim again reveals his position: The ideology of prose poetry is that it does not submit to wahidiyya [monism] of text; the poetic text is no longer sacred. By breaking the prescription, a multiplicity of forms, poetry, and therefore thought can take many paths and does not have one source. This ideology seeks to break the sacredness of the language. It seeks to break the mysterious relation between language and religion. It seeks to show that language is a social phenomenon and not heavenly. It is the property of those who speak it, not of heaven, or faqih, or dictionaries. This is not a simple point, especially if we connect language to thought and if we see language as expression of thought. Th is group sees the poet as an ordinary person. He is not a prophet, or hero, or sage. He is an ordinary person who walks down into the suq [market]. The authors of this poetry focus on reality.

Salim does not evoke ideology as a dismissive, disparaging concept. He uses the word in a positive sense to mean a critical constellation of ideas and thought. Thinking, including conditions of truth-speaking within the Arab world, invigorates his poetic quest as it would any poet in touch with how Arabs have traditionally called their poets. In Arabic, shair is the one who perceives and not only (though relatedly) the one who measures. Equipped with a forgotten yet active understanding of what a poet does, Salim has striven to work on reordering a regiment of perception to question or reject established modes and induce new ones. Striving to rearrange truths perceived from within the cave, as it were, of the modern secular, Salim brings the torch of Arabic poetry ever deeper into

REDEEMING PROSE

195

the abyss. This is the true reality, and it would seem, for him, the only reality there is. It is made up of the social belonging to the people and the ordinary persons among them. These are simple yet slippery words. Salim’s striving is secular, and complexly so, in its self-understanding as a desacralizing mission, tearing down, as it were, the illusory reality of religion. One way to understand the substance of this desacralizing is to observe the surfacing of the word suq in Salim’s narrative. That it is simply a leak in the tunnel of the forgotten or suppressed (as if it were a Freudian slip), and that class position is what is suppressed seems hardly convincing. I think what more significantly lurks in the shadow of Salim’s instance (a poet walking down into the market) and is therefore more instructive for understanding his secularity is the seed that Dante planted for the emergence of that preeminently secular institution in the West, namely, literature. An heir to the legacy of the New Testament in which the protagonists were distinctly pedestrians (e.g., Christ and Peter), Dante in a foundational move mixed in his works, Auerbach reminds us, vulgar Italian styles of speech with lofty Latin, the quotidian and the sublime. For which in part, and only in part, Auerbach conferred on him the title “poet for the secular world.” Yet the transcendence that Salim has wanted to evict (mystery, heaven, sacredness) has only transmuted into a reality in which the people and the social acquire the status of a transcendental will. And that reality, in the search for multiplicity, is paradoxically thinned down to being the singularly sovereign reality. Students of the French Revolution know this all too well: society supplanted God. For the secular Salim, the sacred has become no more than a sign for the unreal. The ordinary type of poet that Salim champions always focuses on, even constitutes a par ticular kind of reality. At the risk of sounding banal, I would say that any given poet and her reality are inseparable the way an earthly body is inseparable from a field of gravity. This was made clear to me in Egypt and other places. For example, Tawfiq Sayigh, a Syrian-Palestinian poet whose life ended while teaching at the University of California in Berkeley, published a collection of prose poetry in 1954 titled Poem K, which deals with his distance from his beloved Kay, Christ, and Palestine all at once: And we opened our mouths flames burned our tongues And we followed you all the way to your Absence and we founded Exile wherever you pleased,

196

THE DREAM

even in our dispersed bodies we went on The Cross upside down for you. (1960, ch. 1)

Forays like Sayigh’s into prose, initially singular and sporadic, first occurred outside the homeland, far from the grounds of a colonial reality. What a native public in the colonized land needed to hear or what poets had to say was largely confined to the immediate needs and consequences of that reality. There was a need to directly (not allusively) talk about defiant (not compliant) persistence and heroic human sacrifice in the face of military occupation. Talk of prosaic matters such as tomatoes, ants, hippopotamuses, ghouls, windows, beds, or handcrafts was simply out of place. Yet these are precisely the things Zakariyya Muhammad wanted to talk about in the 1970s, when he was a student in Iraq before returning to Palestine. When I met him in Ramallah he had quit his editorial work at the alKarmel literary magazine to serve as a functionary of the Palestinian National Authority in its Ministry of Culture and Education. An occasional sculptor, he recounted, in a post-Oslo moment of disillusionment with the struggle for national sovereignty, his beginnings with a poetry that is more like prose: From the beginning, when I started publishing in the mid-1970s, I was against this heroic mood in Palestinian poetry. So I was the voice of dissent. This is why no one heard of me then, and sometimes I was embarrassed to publish. Many did not accept my work. People were fighting; there were tanks, killing and blood, but I wrote about other things. . . . Perhaps it was because of my childhood, my personal mood. I was a meek, slim kid. I was not abu ‘ali. Others could beat me if they fought with me. So my makeup is not that of a hero. Also, when I studied in Iraq in the early 1970s, Iraqi poetry focused on the self far from the heroic. On the contrary, heroic poetry came from government poets. The simple poetry about little things, which talks about love, coffee, ants, and birds, was the poetry of the majority and the better poems. Th is helped me with facing the bravado mood in Palestinian poetry, which dominated then. Today almost no one speaks about politics in Palestinian poetry, in the sense of direct national poetry. Palestinian poets write about almost everything. Before, the homeland was the only subject, everyone wrote about it. But that wave has crashed. No wave can last forever, especially in this time. As soon as something begins, it starts to disappear.

REDEEMING PROSE

197

When the classical ode sank in the deluge of modernity, waves of experimentation began to roll at a faster pace onto the shores of the poetic scene. Muhammad was attending to that peculiar terseness of life forms, not their eternal transience. This terseness, I suspect, has to do with a frenzied and constant urgency to renovate, to ground, to latch onto, and, more importantly, to persist with a poetic tradition losing its compass and cohesion. The politics that mattered to Muhammad were starting to migrate out of nationalism, increasingly appearing as a faltering modern paradigm of collective deliverance. Speaking with the wisdom of the defeated, Muhammad saw that the flaw as well as redemption lay in something that extended beyond, beyond nationalism—itself a subdued wave in an unending struggle for sovereignty. What disappeared in Palestinian poetry was not only faith in the Palestinian revolution, but also faith that poetry could affect anything outside poetry. As the prized poetry of modernity in the Arab world started cloistering itself from the nation, multinational corporations and their nonprofit auxiliaries (notably NGOs) started crossing over and through it. Poetry has become a realm of existence and deliverance unto itself. It has become clear to poets that no poem, no PLO, and, of course, no Arab regime is capable of bringing back an ever more banished Palestine. A notable local literary critic wrote that poets of resistance, once a synonym for Palestinian poets in their commitment to collective causes, have realized that not only have they been unable to save the homeland; they have hardly been able to save themselves (al-Ustta, 2001, p. 5). One of the greatest things contemporary poets with liberal-secular versions of freedom have wanted to be saved from is poetic meter. It is so stifling and so outdated that it resembles the regimes of oppression that have governed their lives. Although the modern poet’s need to banish meter from the craft has been global, not just Palestinian, the par ticular place of uttering that global need generates its particular imprints. Mourid Barghouti (2003, p. 40), a Palestinian poet exiled in Egypt, depicts an atrophied state of poetry under occupation: “The prolonged Israeli occupation has brought sclerosis to our language. Our poems have been more pulverized than our streets. Yet, the majority of us are aware of the fact that we must resist military meter, simplistic imagery and khaki poems.” With the disappearance of a homeland, therefore, another monumental disappearance was surely set in motion in Arabic poetry. A tradition of the past sixteen centuries had defined poetic composition as that

198

THE DREAM

which is measured and that which rhymes. When the free verse movement began to spread in the 1950s, it did away only with the discipline of one meter, one rhyme, or a regular number of feet in each line. Arab poets working with free verse did not entirely efface meter and feet from their verse, as prose poets commonly do. The prose poets have wanted to deliver the final blow to meter. Shackles of tradition, regulation, and discipline could no longer confine the modern poet, the true and real poet. While the aim of this chapter has been to convey how the secular fi lls the concept and practice of poetry, the following chapter focuses specifically on the prose poet’s relation to rhyme, meter, and rhythm. In the stories that poets narrate about the modern fate of these devices, they reveal the kinds of struggles they have faced to ensure the vitality of their techniques along secular lines of belonging.

11

W H E N M E T E R M E LT S

I T WA S A C L E A R D E C E M B E R DAY I N     , after a week of long-awaited rain. Occupation was making itself felt even in this normally sedated city of Haifa; on the outskirts, a Palestinian had detonated himself on an Israeli bus. Normalcy, however, does not always negate military occupation. Occupation has had remarkable success in making its exceptionality appear as though it were normal. Determined to keep it a normal day, struggling to stay in touch with the questions that brought me to the field, I walked on the “Path of the Poem” (Darb al-Qasida), through the German Colony, established by the messianic Templars in 1869. Poems are by both Arab and Jewish poets, women and men. There are modern and contemporary poems, that is, free verse and prose poetry; none are classical. Moreover, none of the featured Arab poets is from the 1967 occupied part of Palestine, thus allowing identity to trail behind the borders of national sovereignty. Th is is in keeping with a Zionist dismembering of any viable form of Palestinian memory, economy, literature, or political entity. Memory, including the memory of Palestinian poetry, is a site of contestation in the struggle of national sovereignties. I reflected how it was very thoughtful of those who arranged the display of green and white posters, all laminated and bilingual, to locate the works of such notable poets as Darwish, al-Qasim, and Zayyad in front of the building housing the newspaper that had nurtured their beginnings, al-Ittihad, the Israeli communist newspaper and the only (barely) surviving Arab daily in Israel. Those three poets, among others, are ironically perceived as the founders of

200

THE DREAM

“resistance poetry,” for which Palestinian poets came to be known in the Arab world. The curious thing about this arrangement is that when those poets worked with the newspaper and its party during the “resistance days” of their youth in the 1950s and 1960s, they were considered a threat to security. Their words unsettled the security of the nascent Zionist enterprise, invariably subjecting them to reporting daily to the local police precinct, house arrest, and even imprisonment. It remains to be seen if the day will arrive when the postal ser vice of a secure, secular Jewish state will tolerate, say, a Zayyad commemorative stamp, as perhaps racial memory in the United States was able to tolerate Malcolm X postal stamps years after his passing. Searching for something tangible in this short excursion amid poetic pieces, I observed that Arabic poetry along this route was written in an accessible modern lexicon and the poems were formatted into paragraphs with verse lines separated by slashes. The poem in the native language of the featured poet was placed on the top of each poster, with its translation below. While lexically the language on the whole was rather accessible, the ideas expressed were often quite impenetrable at first. I found myself reading and rereading certain pieces until I began to comprehend their meanings, although I was still unsure where the poetry in the poems was. Perhaps it lay in their flights from realism, but I was uncertain about how precise it is to speak as though there were only one kind of realism, one layer of reality. The words of this poetry seem to have evolved much like schoolyards and other open grounds and gardens that, until recently, Haifa’s children accessed freely after school and on weekends, but which have been fenced off, secured, even patrolled. The immediate meaning of singular words was right before the eyes, but only certain readers could decode the meaning of their opaque combinations. Less opaque were the seemingly innocuous themes of the poems: the pleasure of reading literature, the beauty of nature, and the small things of daily life— all without a discernable bearing on the disparity in national sovereignty between Jews and Palestinians, which prompted this particular exhibition in the first place—as evidence of coexistence. My walk ended in the midst of the small stores of the quiet suq. I suspect some of those small stores were closed not only because it was Sunday, the day of rest observed by the Christian, as well as Muslim, shop owners, when the rest of Haifa was busy at the start of the week, but because malls with big stores had emptied the suq of many prior consumers.

W H E N M E T E R M E LT S

201

It was not about small things that Zakariyya Muhammad spoke to me. Like numerous poems displayed on the Path of the Poem, his poems also had left me uncertain about what made them poetic. But his poems were not included on the Path of the Poem because he belonged to the “wrong” population category to be part of this coexistence project. For Israel, admitting Muhammad’s poetry would have presented a demographic transgression since the population in which he is classified is not included in projects of coexistence between Arabs and Jews. Muhammad falls into the category of Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank. If the Palestinianness of these two populations (those living in the 1948 and 1967 occupied lands) were equally admitted (or ever admitted at all), then Israel’s epidermal democracy might need to admit it rests upon theocratic tissues. But it was neither borders between peoples or states nor claims of majority or minority rights that I wanted to discuss with Muhammad. He rose to prominence as a prose poet during the 1980s. In his office in the publication department of the Palestinian National Authority’s Ministry of Culture in Ramallah, he spoke to me about the borders between the poetic and the extrapoetic. I asked him what I thought was a simple question, but his answer made it clear that it was not: Where is poetry? That’s a very complex question. Where the shairiyya [poetics] of a poem lie is a difficult question. There are no criteria that distinguish poetry from nonpoetry. I know that it is poetry, but I don’t know why. Add to this that modern time opened the doors between prose and poetry. In Arab history, the issues were clear, the limits were meter and rhyme. No one could say that outside those borders there is poetry. Today this is no longer correct. These borders were broken. Poetry has melted into other arts, and other arts melted into poetry. So we cannot tell where the borders are. I personally feel when there is poetry, but cannot tell you why. Sometimes someone speaks to you in a regular way and you feel that he is entering the zone of poetry, then his words are poetry.

If poetry were fated to be felt, as morality has been, in this modern emotive age, the question remains: Where does one feel poetry, how, and in relation to what other fields of action? Obviously the foundational definition of Arabic poetry as a rhyming and measured speech has lost its authority over what Muhammad has defined and practiced as poetry. When much else in the

202

THE DREAM

modern era, prominently embodied in the secular nation-state, had to be quantified, measured, visualized, and specialized, rhythm, like belief, retreated to a matter of personal feeling, the unquantifiable stuff of inertia and sentimentality. The art (techne) of measuring sounds in poetry was consumed by the furnace of measuring governance out of which schools, academies, prisons, laws, and clinics in the nation-state were molded. That Muhammad stood at the remnants of that melted and disfigured tradition appeared in his self-admitted inability to express criteria that once gave poetry its coherent tradition. As discerning where poetry lies has become difficult, so has addressing the question of who is actually a poet—now an intractable question in unprecedented ways. If poetry’s residence is vaguely articulated as a zone, then “poet” is a title that may denote a zone or zones that have no bearing on words. In my fieldwork, it seemed as if the real poets were the ones who did not call themselves poets. For instance, during one of our conversations Maha Qassis, a poet from Ramah of the Galilee and a graduate student of Arabic literature at the University of Haifa, described her mother as a poetess (sha‘ira) “because she is a simple person who nonetheless has a unique perspective on the world.” She added, “I could call someone a poet even if he writes no poetry. The poet is someone who has thoughts that differ and are uncommon, one who has a desire for things to be different, for the world to be different.” At the same time, she said, “everything in the world is familiar.” One could hear that Qassis was troubled by a world turned trivial, banal, prosaic, and disenchanted. Against a torpid life, she proposed the poetic: a state of being, thinking, and perhaps even living, indeed, a dwelling, as Heidegger would have said in an attempt to counter the night of the world that befell Europe. The poetic as Qassis and doubtless many others have come to understand it is divorced from practical mastery of language and sounds. It is charged with recovering authenticity and reenchanting a world gone bland. The capabilities that earn one the title of poet in the world where Qassis has lived have nothing to do with measuring sounds but with qualities that push one against the world’s contemporary dominant tendencies. This expansive definition of poetry as a state of existence in and of itself has included in the local Palestinian poetic scene those who have done what all poets have said they want to do: guard the dream. Their dreams are not written with ink but with every drop of their blood, as they have been martyrs (shuhada) of occupation. They pointed to acts of martyrdom as dwarfing their work; to

W H E N M E T E R M E LT S

203

these wordsmiths, deeds of martyrdom surpassed the eloquence of many, many words. Darwish conveyed this sentiment on March 24, 2002, to a solidarity delegation from the Parliament of World Writers that included José Saramago and Wole Soyinka; he said, “I know that the masters of the words have no need for big words before the eloquence of blood.” The blood of those consumed by occupation is eloquent because it is terse. Bearing witness (shahada) speaks with no words about what takes pages, if not entire books, for poets to pronounce and scholars to analyze. Blood announces the absence of justice, truth, and hence beauty, whereas poets’ words fall as a mere murmur. The more time I spent with the poets, the more I felt as if they did not really care what they did, for their raw material inconsequentially lived in a cave all its own; they had lost its path to, at least, the local scene. Indeed in the globalized twenty-first century, certain poets have been better known abroad than in their own societies. Abu Nizar, more formally known as Taha Muhammad Ali, was one such poet. A prose poet, Abu Nizar was invited to read in many foreign countries and universities. Accompanied by an English translator, he was read in all corners of the globe, from China to Columbia University in New York. Yet wherever he went, he told me, he took with him his erased ancestral village of Saffouryeh (now the Jewish settlement Tzipori). After the 1948 war, when he was seventeen, he and his family found refuge in Nazareth, five kilometers from his ancestral village, after they had secretly returned from Lebanon, to which they fled when their village was attacked. While the relics of his village, as is typical of hundreds of other villages, gave rise to the Jewish state, it was that state five decades later, through its Ministry of Culture and Education (Arab Section), that awarded him a year-long stipend to support his poetic career. I met Abu Nizar on two occasions during my fieldwork: once at his house and another time at his souvenir shop in old Nazareth, near the Basilica of the Church of the Annunciation. The old trinket-fi lled house was an extension of the souvenir shop. Inside I saw the dead relics of an agrarian Palestinian society. In front of the house was a living relic, a traditional garden and an orchard (fruit trees have become increasingly scarce in the sprawling cement of the confined Arab residential space). Abu Nizar is an example of how I often found poets to be unusual kinds of beings—but only up to a point. Unlike Hilmi Salim of Egypt, Abu Nizar of Nazareth did not speak about distinct thought systems or ideologies invested in different poetic forms. He did not need the prose poem to question and undermine policies of the state

204

THE DREAM

or the authority of societal traditions. His needs appeared innocuous. Yet like Salim, Aisha al-Mughrabi, and Zakariyya Muhammad, he no longer had a need for meter. He too felt an “internal rhythm” in his poetry and he also felt for it. He told me that his poem was like his son, whom he would never desert; it made no difference whether he was handsome or not, retarded or not. Abu Nizar would never abandon his son to a mental institution, he said. The same was true for the prose poem. Expecting Abu Nizar to work in the classical form would be, using his own metaphor, like expecting a chicken to lay an alligator’s egg. His answers to my questions were always expressed through metaphor. Initially his figurative responses frustrated my analytical search for the “the real” within a quest for actual life experiences—until I learned from him (as well as other poets) to appreciate “the real” that inhabits the metaphor. In his metaphorical meditation on his poetic work, it was apparent that his choice of poetic form was like his having children; neither was a deliberate or premeditated act. Instead it was like being hungry or thirsty. He told me during the second interview, while listening to Western classical music, why he could not write in the classical Arab poetic form: It is impossible for a Greek poet today to be like Homer. It is impossible for an Arab poet to be like al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani because the life, environment, and psychology are different. If his voice and signature are lost, then he is not authentic, he lies and claims to himself a poetry he is not writing. Singularity is the principle of art. Poetry is an individualist work, the voice, and the metaphors have to be individual. Only Antara could have said what Antara said. It is not meter or rhyme alone that makes poetry. . . . My poetry is different. I don’t employ meter and rhythm. I stay away from meter because that makes it easier to express what goes on inside me. Arabic poetry historically comes with rich music; it is sung; it enchants, more than European poetry. It is singing. If you give up meter, you have to have a strong substitute for Arabic poetry’s rich music. You must have internal deep music. You don’t hear it with the ear, but you hear it in your spirit. It is not sung, but is read, and rarely aloud.

If the poetry that Abu Nizar has written is to be read quietly, we should not be surprised to discover that his work is particularly amenable to written translations for a Western public. To distribute sounds in a poem is in part announcing a public that one desires or deserts. Furthermore, arranging sonic structures in a poem announces the life forms they inhabit. The ancient Greek and Arab poetic names Abu Nizar cites, perhaps like the souvenir ob-

W H E N M E T E R M E LT S

205

jects he sold, can only be traces in the memory of a past that no longer partakes of the present. The words of a prose poem embody the prose of life outside it. A realness attaches to the sense of self (the individual) so that it becomes the primary guarantor of authenticity. And the way to discover that which lies in the beginning, that is, the authentic, as Abu Nizar would have said, is to silence the words of poetry, to engage with them visually, not acoustically, to activate a kind of freedom that surrenders restrictions. Authenticity thereby latches onto a sense of self as the island of realness in an ocean of falsehood. The paradigmatically authentic individual for Abu Nizar is one who knows the world and lives it primarily through seeing, not hearing. The sensory complex sustained in Abu Nizar’s story, in the most common of ways, contains a typical ocular assault on sound, which is severed from the search for truth in secular modernity. Seeing the world through prose is not only personally authentic, but can also be politically enabling, at least according to Mahmoud Amin al-Alim, an Egyptian Marxist intellectual known throughout the Arab world, not as a poet but for his involvement in human rights, freedom, and democracy efforts. At one point, these efforts led him to clash with the Egyptian state and consequently to be imprisoned. For his lifelong efforts he had recently received the Ibn Rushd (Averroes) Prize in Germany for freedom of thought, recognizing him as a beacon of indigenous secular intellect in Arab society. Appearing to be in his late seventies when I met with him, al-Alim was running the periodical Qadaya Fikriyya (Questions of Thought) with the energy of a much younger man and without any intention of retiring. He was writing in a multitude of publications and about a multitude of subjects, including defense of the prose poem, which was receiving a torrent of objections in its rise to dominance. Al-Alim told me that he felt compelled to defend the prose poem just as he had felt compelled in the 1960s to defend the free verse movement. I asked him if poetry therefore ends up either perpetuating or negating contradictions of reality: Poetry wants to abandon the picture of harmony that authorities give to reality. So when poetry is embodying contradiction in reality, it is destroying the official image and version of harmony that the authorities promulgate about reality. This is because authority wants to perpetuate the status quo. Each authority seeks to canonize its reality. Therefore, I distinguish between the culture of authority and the authority of culture. The authority of culture is not bound

206

THE DREAM

by the present. It is inhabited by the future. . . . What you hear on the street now is not what you heard in the desert in the past. Now unity of contradictions is a rhythm. The change and contradictions of rhythms is a rhythm. The rhythm of life has changed, and consequently its expression has too. The prose poem has expressed in contradictions the contradiction of reality. This is a rebellious expression in structure against that which is around it, against logical expression in the novel and other things. There is no logic in a poetic sentence. This is a genuine, dramatic expression for a new reality in the world—an expression of a torn-up reality.

Prose is not only a linguistic modality, according to al-Alim. It is also a mode of existence, particularly in relation to authority, the authority of the nation-state. Prose is a kind of rhythm both inside the poem and outside it, one that at different registers responds to and is made to engage with the project of the nation-state. Al-Alim was old enough to report from Cairo on the rise and the fall of that Egyptian project that left him disillusioned and distrusting of revolutions in the name of the nation. He lived through the toppling of the British-sustained monarchy in 1952 and lived, until his death in 2009, through the American-sponsored republic of President Mubarak, who before his overthrow in 2011 had ruled the country for more than thirty years and was grooming his son to succeed him. To disturb and unsettle the normalizing capability of authority, it became necessary to choose prose over verse. Puncturing the semblance of normalcy has become the task of prose designated as poetry. This preponderance of prose goes beyond ascribing to a type of politics. In prose is also the belonging to a place: the city. Place, no less than politics, is essential to the story al-Alim was telling about the fate of modern poetry. The odd thing is, of course, that while urban life has been taken as the quintessence of modernity, unlike deserts and villages, illogical, unrealistic connections have also been made of part of secular modernity. This is seen in the apparent illogic in content, which creates the distinct incomprehensibility of modern poetry. Al-Alim defended this rising incomprehensibility and “illogical” material as poetry’s wanting to enable a new future currently blocked by authority. The flight of logic in a poetic sentence has become the defensive rampart against the pervasive logic of undesirable political authority. The idea of expressing and resisting a “torn-up” reality through a “tornup” rhythm invites doubts; I doubt claims of rebelliousness in such a change

W H E N M E T E R M E LT S

207

in rhythm. I carried those doubts to my meeting with Nidaa Khoury, a Palestinian poet, then in her mid-forties. As a child she had become famous for her writing, and was frequently asked to write amorous poetry for her girlfriends to give to their boyfriends. One evening I called Khoury in her village of Fasoutta, a handful of kilometers from the border with Lebanon, and we arranged to meet. In preparation for our meeting, she sent through a middleman a dozen articles about her clipped from the local press that she suggested I read before meeting her. When we eventually met, it was in al-Meghar, the mixed village of Muslims, Druze, and Christians near the Sea of the Galilee otherwise known in Arabic as Tabariyya, where she had gone to attend a reading of “Mediterranean” poetry. This gathering had brought together French, Spanish, Jewish, and Arab poets. Palestinian poets “coexisting” on the West Bank or in Gaza were again excluded. I had already read a recent collection of poems by Khoury called The Most Beautiful of Goddesses Cries, published in Egypt and sponsored by the renowned Egyptian novelist who had also turned to writing prose poetry, Edwar al-Kharrat. I was able to understand little of what I had read and hoped that during our meeting Khoury would clarify her project. Her book seemed like highly liturgical prose. Although I did not know how to make sense of it, she appeared to approach her poems as though they were prayers. I asked her if this were indeed the case: My poem is not a state of prayer; it is a state of infidelity, denial of this sickly complex state of things. I import from the religious lexicon in order to penetrate the sacred. I want to make the sacred something of us, not above us. I don’t want to be stuck in that which is beyond, above, the godly. Let me value the daily, the personal. Let’s say they are a different kind of prayer. They are not begging, pious prayers. . . . The essence of faith and relation with the Creator is above such prayers and such texts.

What the secular self expunges as “religious” (namely, prayers), it admits back as “aesthetic.” A modernity that has instituted a very par ticular private place for religion, outside the public landscape, readmits the religious in distinct and increasingly visible ways in poetic manifestations. For the fact is that one is hard-pressed to find those distant from such modernity, namely, the traditional poets, who think of their verse or practice it as if it were a prayer. Khoury’s poetic project, which she also counts as an intellectual one, is concerned with the fragmentation of society, the patterning of the human self,

208

THE DREAM

the monist and religious mode of thought in the Arab world, the relation of the oppressors and the oppressed, and the connections between male and female. Once, during an attack of depression while in the midst of her intellectual endeavors, Khoury managed through connections to stay for a while in a monastery in Jerusalem (Latroun), where she was horrified by the monks “cloaked with religion,” as she put it. Many of my questions to Khoury were left unanswered, but a notable exception was my inquiry into her connection to Nietzsche: “[He is] my sweetheart because he was insane. Only he died young and insane. He was the bravest of the brave when he saw and captured the essence of our truth. He saw the nihilism of our existence.” But it was not her understanding of “our truth” that really interested me. I was interested in the truth about the prose poem she writes, and more specifically the truth that emerges when meter and rhyme are abandoned. Like male prose poets who abandoned meter, Khoury omitted meter in her poetry because of its affi nity with the “other” that modernity has named “tradition.” She sees poetic meter as affi liated with a gender politics that perpetuates male dominance; she wants her poetry to explore the feminine and new relations between the feminine and the masculine—an exploration that is not feasible with the restrictions of meter. Khoury said about herself, “Even in driving, I try not to miss any chance to violate rules. If I did not violate, I feel I missed something. . . . Being a married woman with children from an Arab, conservative, Oriental, peasant society, to chop my text freely is an act of contestation.” In “violating” metrical regulations in her verse, Khoury was redefining her relation with the public. I asked her about the kind of reader she aspired to have: I dream of a reader like myself, a reader who transgresses, ferocious, not satisfied with the trivial. The question is not what is the new thing to say, but how to say it. Most of what I have written was written in the late hours of the night, before sleeping and after distancing the reality of the day. It is a state of inbetween. There is an interaction between consciousness and subconsciousness. This is where you begin to reach places. To be disciplined, according to a system, distorts the act of creativity. . . . The dispersion of the Palestinian people, its undisciplined rhythm of life, the lack of map and methods, freed from commitment to a mold . . . make the prose poem fit the spirit of a dispersed, dismembered people. You can cut lines, you can write a paragraph, half a page or three lines and call them a poem, based on the length of a people’s lives.

W H E N M E T E R M E LT S

209

This is a form that fits Nidaa since Nidaa has been trying to write since [she was] fourteen years old, and to this day, after a thousand attempts and a thousand beautiful teachers of Arabic and grammar, Nidaa still cannot be domesticated to the rule of language and its movements. I consider myself an artist of the phrase and meaning and the connection of meanings and their associations. I don’t work on the discipline of language rules. . . . I am unable to succumb to rules.

What I find striking is not that Khoury invests in the prose poem such a grand meaning that she finds it congruent with Palestinian life. A Palestinian detractor of prose poetry, Izz al-Din al-Manasra found it anathema to the quest of recovering Palestine. Striking is how Khoury’s narrative invites us to probe beyond the multiplicity of meanings (condoning or condemning) that are invested in this prose poetry form. It invites us to consider practices and corresponding presuppositions necessary for this form’s arrival in the work of a poet. It invites a look at traditions of truth residing in different forms. The practices of freedom that appeal to Khoury presuppose a sovereignty that the self acquires only after discarding the authority of sound measurement. It is a freedom that presupposes pitting creativity against conventions. It also obliterates the inevitability of tradition as a habitat within which truths are found and founded—for recovering forgotten truths and discovering truths that are yet to live. While Khoury views both her personal rhythm and that of her people as fragmented or undisciplined, Mahmoud Amin al-Alim views this rhythm as the modern one, as the one appropriate for modern people, conquered or not, for the modern age itself. Speaking from a Marxist tradition, he considers the reality of this age to be the reality of globalization. The depletion of the country’s resources, the inhuman effects of globalization, and the national state’s becoming an instrument of an international process that disregards the local in both economic and literary conduct preoccupy him. Khoury speaks about the rhythm of a people without their nation-state, and al-Alim speaks about the rhythm of a people abandoned by it. As they see it, measured rhythm fits neither reality. Yet al-Alim also said to me: There has to be a particularity. Th is is why we celebrate literature from Africa, Latin America, and Shakespeare. We enjoy Greek struggle—and with due respect to cousin Marx—not because there is a child-parent relation between the Greeks and us, as he thought, but because we live a struggle with the same

210

THE DREAM

fundamentals, not against fate but against colonialism, authority, and society. . . . I still like jahiliyya (pre-Islamic) poetry because it represents an attempt to express the self in the face of necessity. . . . I am alive. I am facing difficulties. . . . This restricted dark person who is breaking the chains, the chains of traditions and closed customs. . . .  To talk about Western modernity is short-sightedness. There has always been modernity; the saalik [brigand] poets, [the poets] Abu al-Ala’a [and] Abu Nuwwas, [and] Islam are modern. Every historical epoch of renewal has hadatha [a modernity]. . . . The fundamentalist trend says, “Nothing will amend our present other than what amended our past.” This is a Wahhabi vision, but it applies to anyone who wants to persist in the old values of meter in poetry and foist it upon the new.

To measure sounds, to work with a metron, has to do with marking degrees of distances or closeness that the self establishes with a variety of times. Discarding sonic measurement becomes necessary in Egypt to renew the self without a slavish relation to the past. In combating the malignancies of the present, al-Alim pits his Marxist vision against a Wahhabi one that is caught in rivalry over the distribution of sounds in a poem. Speaking from a radical variant (Marxist) in the shrunken space of secularist dissent in Egypt, which is also forging some kind of reconciliatory relation with Islam, al-Alim cannot attribute to sonic measuring any genuine belonging to the present. It is a thing of the past. Sonic measurement belongs to a society whose progress has long demanded that it be left behind. Meter stands against modern poetry as the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia stand against the secular Egyptian state: as a menacing foreigner. As someone who has been a foreigner in many places, London being the last among them, Amjad Nasser spoke to me about how he sought to work out the relation between the old and the new, the parent and the child. He was practicing the kind of modern poetry that al-Alim embraced, that is, one fit for the modern age by virtue of banishing metrical discipline. Nasser found no common criteria of rhythm in poetry, not even in his own. A Jordanian poet, he lived in Beirut during the 1980s and then moved to London and was (and still is) editing the literary section of one of the city’s Arabic newspapers, al-Quds al-Arabi. When I met him at the Semiramis Hotel in downtown Cairo, he had been invited to read at the book fair, along with several other prose poets. Like that of Khoury, Nasser’s work had increasingly focused on the body and its desires. In the 1970s his Palestinian friend Zakariyya Muhammad,

W H E N M E T E R M E LT S

211

then returning from his studies in Baghdad, brought him a few books by Saadi Youssef, an Iraqi poet widely associated with the “small things” that prose poets have come to embrace and celebrate. On reading Youssef’s work, Nasser discovered the value of narrating—narrating stories of ordinary and intimate things—even though he, like the figure that influenced him, was still writing in free verse. In due time, he too rebelled against this form; he told me his life has seemed to have been a constant chain of rebellions. During his forty-seven years, while he lived in Yemen, Cyprus, and London, he said that he found himself always needing to rebel, mostly against his father and against the traditions of Arabic language and literature. For example, his father, a royalist, supported the Jordanian army, while he, a Marxist, supported the Palestinian resistance. Like Khoury, breaking rules always appealed to him. He found himself regularly making decisions contrary to the rules of his family. He described this impulse to rebel as crucial to his poetic path when I asked him how he builds his rhythm: You don’t even need meter sometimes for iqa [rhythm]. I think rhythm is built on a lot of things, not just rhyme. Some of the constituents of rhythm are words themselves. I can’t write outside a rhythm that is not out of me, peculiar to me, to my poetic sentence. I couldn’t move even one centimeter if I felt the rhythm was not appropriate to me, not peculiar to me, even though I write prose poetry that is not metered at all. But rhythm is necessary for the structure of a poem; you can call it rhythm of sentence, rhythm of breathing, rhythm of idea. I can’t give you rules of rhythm in poetry, not even my own poetry.

If a power struggle between the self and its sounds (actually, their measures) inhabits Nasser’s narrative, then the self emerges as the sovereign in this battle. It and only it determines the fate of measures. In fact, it becomes the measure. If measuring poets have to let go of the self in submission to and ultimately mastery of measures, the prose poets aggrandize the self to the point where measures submit to it in a way that the measures can become anything. They can be dispersed into prose sentences or dissipated as abstract ideas. They exist because the self merely feels or thinks them. That Nasser could not give me rules has as much to do with a self becoming the rule itself as moving from a state of coherence of tradition (not to be conflated with coercion or stagnation) has to do with a state of disintegration, where publicly recognizable standards guiding basic practices become indiscernible. The adequacy of

W H E N M E T E R M E LT S

213

self to the poetry of secular modernity (a retreating space measurement) seems to be diametrically opposed to the adequacy of self among citizenry of that modernity necessary for nation-states and globalized finance (as prevailing spaces of measurement). While Nasser, Khoury, and al-Alim see modernity’s banishment of metrical discipline as the “breaking of chains,” Zakariyya Muhammad sees modernity and its poetry as merely the transformations of those chains. For him, chains are a permanent presence in life and art. He believes that rather than dissappear, they are mollified by modernity. Poetry still has chains, but not the coarse chains of meter and rhyme, on which Arabs developed and sustained their tradition for at least sixteen centuries. The modern poet works with the inert chain of the picture or the idea. In our second interview, I asked Muhammad about a view he had expressed in our previous conversation, in which he maintained that “clear” chains have disappeared in poetry: This is the way of life generally. We dumped feudalism and had capitalism; old chains were dumped and new chains came. Capitalism replaced vulgar chains and put on softer ones. There is nothing in life without chains. The only difference is that chains get softer and less dense, but they remain chains. In the past, they used to mutilate your eyes or something else in the feudal or Ottoman period. Now they imprison you. . . . In Arabic poetry, we dumped clear, familiar chains and put ourselves in other chains instead, for example, size of a poem, cuts in lines, respiratory cuts, limits of a picture, a huge set of chains. Because I dumped the music I made the picture the limit, but it is a softer and more obscure limit. . . . The rhythm, my chain, used to be my way to the tradi-

214

THE DREAM

tional hearer. Meter was my way to his mind. I found that this path was not satisfying to me emotionally, this clear and familiar and agreed upon rhythm, if I wanted to have a different effect. The rhythm is so hackneyed, so understood that it does not add anything. It breaks my idea, prevents it from coming out.

As a world of spectacular punishments receded from Muhammad’s surroundings, so did spectacles of poetic recitations. Ideas read overcame sounds heard and recited in the grounding of truth. Among the poets of the secular world, composition based on the discipline of poetic meter and more publicly identifiable regulations of rhythm was not the only thing to disappear with the advent of modernity in the poetic craft; consider the prose poem “Horror” shown on pages 212–213, in which author Salwa al-Neimi abandons any commitment to meter and rhyme, as the poem’s image and scansion show. Without prosodic disciplines and regulations, the logic of binding words together seems to disappear. Obscurity becomes a tool for aesthetic accomplishment. Many poets and readers complained to me that modern poetry is easier to compose than to comprehend; they believe that a poet’s argotic language damages the scene and, above all, the relation to a public for poetry. Yet many a poet was also ready to contest what she saw as traditional positions standing in the way of modernizing. To counter traditional arguments, the modernizing poets hold that poetry has always been the craft of specialists. In their argument, poetry, good poetry, that is, has always been a specialization of the few for the few. Rather than appreciating the role of an audience, the new poet finds in the traditional public the source of art’s strangulation, not the locus of its valuation. The new public is more likely to read a poem than to hear it recited or sung. Hence one sees a rising popularity of the term “readership” over “audience.” As mistrust in a traditional public, and even in the notion of public, has grown, so has the poet’s need to develop an “inner rhythm” (iqa dakhili). Inner rhythms are not sounds that one hears; rather, they are sounds that one feels. Along with moral judgments and religious beliefs in the modern age, poetic rhythms live in the belly of a modern leviathan. Th is leviathan may at times take the name of “private feelings,” “personal experience,” “self-sufficiency,” the “autonomous individual,” or whatever other glamorous coatings may attach to the modern variant of solipsism. In the next and final ethnographic chapter, I discuss how the secular inhabits prose poets’ relation to the public. Unlike the traditional poets who

W H E N M E T E R M E LT S

215

situate themselves spatially above the public and unlike modernist poets of free verse who temporally posit themselves ahead of the public, prose poets are prone to position themselves in a place that contains the two earlier positions but also transcends them. They argue that poetry is its own realm. Paradoxically, their claims for poetry’s self-sufficiency are punctured by another claim: that their poetry requires mediation for the laity. These formulations of poet-public relations among prose poets permit a particularly close attention to details of secular entrapments.

12

THE LAITY OUTSIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

I N A N Y E T H N O G R A P H I C F I E L DWO R K , certain relationships open doors, and others close them. In my case, family relationships always opened doors. My uncle, Fathi Furani, enjoys considerable esteem in the local literary scene. For decades he had been an Arabic teacher at the Greek Orthodox Arab High School of Haifa, a beloved ustaz [teacher] of much of the professional and literati class for multiple generations. Once he campaigned but failed to save the local cemetery, part of the Islamic waqf in the city, from state appropriation. A dubious fatwa obtained from an Egyptian qadi [judge] is said to have rendered the cemetery’s demolition licit for the sake of “urban renewal.” And so bones and tombstones were relocated. Uncle Fathi no longer talks about the sanctity of bones under the ground, but he does of the struggles of tongues that speak, and try to speak, in Arabic above it. Poetry being his life-long avocation, my uncle sporadically writes it and on more rare occasions he writes it in English and Hebrew. For a number of years he was a literary editor at al-Ittihad newspaper and taught Arabic to prospective teachers at a local teachers college. Recently he began writing a memoir of his childhood in that big village the city of Nazareth once was and to teach Arabic to businesspeople, academics, physicians, and various professionals who want to live more fully in their native tongue. When poets learned of our familial relationship, they gladly agreed to meet with me; I suspect that some of my interlocutors would not have agreed were it not for my last name.

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

217

I always found myself entrusted with salamat (greetings) from poets in different parts of the country to be sent back to Uncle Fathi. Working with prescriptions of ethical boundaries between family and professional practice, I did not initially plan on conducting a formal interview with my uncle. But one night, while his family was visiting at my parents’ house, he asked me about my research. Uncle Fathi was curious to know which poets I had met so far. I took this frequently asked question as a way of measuring at least one thing: the seriousness of my pursuit, judged by the luster of names I could list in response. When asked to drop names, I generally had to employ tact and care, so as not to alienate anyone I was interested in meeting. Fortunately, losing an interview with my uncle was never an issue. He, like many of the poets I met, turned out to have a thirst to speak, to be heard, and there was much to gain from talking to him. As our conversation on poetry began to drift away from the interests of the people sitting with us in the living room, he and I relocated to the kitchen table for an extended conversation about modernizing Arabic poetry. That evening I did not have my digital recorder, which I had used in just about every other interview. Instead I located a pencil and note cards to record what my uncle, a recipient of modern Arabic poetry, told me about his reading practices and his observations on the state of Arabic poetry. When I asked about his general view of poetry today, he replied: The conception of what poetry is has changed. . . . It is influenced by Western theories, and that is a product of par ticu lar circumstances. . . . The reader of poetry today participates in forming the poem. . . . The difficulty of today’s poetry is not that it is lexically difficult. . . . I used to come across difficult words and would open the dictionary to fi nd out their meanings. . . . Today if we as intellectuals are having difficulty understanding this poetry . . . what would the case be for people who are not intellectuals?

What exactly has changed? For us there is a wide, broad zone of knowledge. We have books, Internet . . . Our world is wider than the world of the desert. . . . Today our poetry is called “whispered poetry.” . . . Today’s poetry is not written for tarab [musical ecstasy]. Tarab is not the function of poetry. Today poetry raises questions. . . . The simplicity of poetry has disappeared. . . . It is written to be read quietly, at home by yourself. In it is a package of meanings, which is transmitted from

218

THE DREAM

the poet to the recipient who might be pleased by it without necessarily knowing why. . . . You may like prose poetry, but you will not know why. New poetry is not read on stages. Today’s poetry is for a select few.

Along with the conception of a select audience and the presumed solitude of the poet, the desert takes on a special significance. In Uncle Fathi’s narrative, but not in his alone, the desert is a place that is also a time, a compass for being and an orientation for living. It seems as though a place’s materiality resides in vanishing and arriving ideas. The desert contrasts with another location, the West, not as distinct from modernization or globalization, but as a unique home for classical Arabic poetry. What my uncle does not say but implies is that spaces have epistemologies. Put differently, traditions (including traditions of thought) surely live somatically but also geographically, and they always occur in relation to the details of a place. Place constitutes no less than it contextualizes modes of knowing. If the West and the desert are contrasted as places, they also contrast in the ways they deal with truth. The modern apparition of secularism attests to the power of place no less than of ideas in shaping its identity. This is what my uncle presupposes in his contrast between the narrower world of the desert, which, strictly speaking, he never actually lived in, and his urban world that is split mainly between Nazareth and Haifa. The desert as a place and way of knowing had been powerful enough to extend its dominion all the way to the urban centers of the Arab world and all the way to the mid-twentieth century. Then the episteme-place known as the West became its substitute. The sense of speed and permanence that pervades rhythms of the urban and sedentary form of life in its modern Western variety has little appreciation for the nomadic form of desert life in which life’s fleeing tempo, its impermanency, are spread everywhere, like its sands. In any age or place where life is lived as a state of permanence, severed from its other, namely, death, it is to be expected, as al-Ghazali seems to suggest, that other sensorial layers will be emaciated by the visual layers of the intellect. That expansion of the ocular and the diminution of the acoustic is, I think, what compelled my uncle to optically experience his urban world as wider than that of the desert—a contrast typically espoused by advocates of modern secularity. But the desert’s apparent magnitude is, in a sense, a function of its distance from one’s vistas. That it seems narrower is also a way of

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

219

seeming shallower, and many urbane partisans of modern poetry have testified to its remoteness from their visceral condition of reading and thinking. It is that remoteness that Nietzsche (1997, p. 295) wanted to eliminate, coming out of Old Europe and having read consummately in many of its libraries, when he let Zarathustra sing, “The deserts grow: woe him who doth them hide!” Yet in a way, the desert does grow again in the scene that my uncle depicts. If the city is the common place of masses and loneliness (not solitude), in contrast to the sociability of common life in the desert, then the desert reappearing as a metaphor of deprivation resonates for a select few who follow the poet to his or her solitude and wilderness, to his or her sleep at a time when poets of secular modernity are increasingly going “to sleep.” Yet sleep, Nietzsche (1997, pp. 23–25) remarks, is “no small art . . . [but] the lord of the virtues.” A select few, hearing “whispered” poetry as though it surfaced out of a sleeping state, is precisely what I seemed to witness in attending my first poetry reading at the Cairo Book Fair. There were only about fifteen people in the Cultural Association tent, which was large enough for a hundred. Such a select few, I later learned, were called, with the aid of a market vocabulary, a “quality audience” ( jumhur nawi). Among these select few were my companion and host, Hilmi Salim, and a professor of Spanish literature from al-Azhar University, Hamid Abu Hamid. They were there to provide comment on the reading of a notable Egyptian prose poet, Muhammad Farid Abu Saada, a friend of Salim. Those who had come to hear him seemed to be in the main other poets, writers, university students, and professors. After the poetry reading, the floor opened for discussion. The audience’s difficulty in comprehending this poetry was a prominent subject. Repeatedly I heard references to textual isharat (signs) and ihaat (allusions), indicating the preponderance of professionals dealing with the business of whispering rather than proclaiming certainties or convictions in a time of rampant disbelief, confusion, and defeat in the world of poets and their public. One attendee at the session asked Abu Hamid about the difficulty of understanding allusions in prose poems. Abu Hamid replied by defending the prose poem: Abu Saada presents a new and useful experiment and enriches the prose poem, which is a global experiment, and I don’t know why we reject it. Perhaps because of a comprehension problem. . . . If there are smaller audiences for

220

THE DREAM

this kind of poetry, it is like the size of audiences for ulama [scientists], millions of whom are not read. And who is going to read them if they [the people] watch “Al-Haj Metwalli?”

Played by the movie star Nour al-Sherif, al-Haj Metwalli is the protagonist of an Egyptian TV melodrama by the same name that entertained millions in the evening during the month of Ramadan that year. Abu Hamid’s reference to him clearly derides the “uncultured” Arab public that a serious poet should not care to write for. With satellite dishes crowding roofs and balconies, Arab television stations had competed to produce soap operas for broadcast after sundown, when the fasting ended each day. Al-Haj Metwalli, the polygamous and successful fabric merchant, became the common subject of familial, scholarly, and even parliamentary conversations and criticisms. As cable channels have proliferated, amounting to more than four hundred in the Arab world today, a number of them are dedicated to poetry, and only poetry. The featured poetry on The Millions’ Poet program broadcast from a station in Abu Dhabi is either in the classical form or free verse—no prose poetry. Participants come mostly from the Gulf, frequently praising their rulers. It is not the kind of poetry that urban, urbane literary criticism can regard as serious, if at all. This poetry, ill-suited for modernity in literature, is deemed the only poetry suitable for programs such as Prince of Poets, dedicated to literary Arabic poetry, and The Millions’ Poet, dedicated to oral Nabatian poetry and modeled after Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Watching these programs, one can also follow streaming news about poetry (and another stream below it, fed by viewers who send text messages) at the bottom of the screen from none other than the Arabic Poetry News Agency. However, the news that matters enough to garner a concerted effort by Arab foreign ministers is what al-Jazeera and kindred channels broadcast. This is why ministers from all the Arab countries convened in Cairo in February 2008 to regulate and discipline the speech and images these steadily sprouting channels use to inform Arab citizenry about its overwhelming “new idol,” that is, the state, as Nietzsche labeled it. Nothing threatens this new idol in the melodrama of Al-Haj Metwalli (nor in poetry, for that matter); in fact, one evening session at the book fair was dedicated to this TV series and included the participation of its prominent cast members. The tent was so crammed that the audience spilled onto the grounds outside. No tent featuring prose poetry had anything close to that ferocious attendance, but prose poets did not necessarily lament sparse attendance. Some

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

221

may have liked to have had spectacularly large audiences, but they worried about the cost of such a crowd to their poetry. Many prose poets expressed distaste for large audiences, or even just the idea of an audience. One such poet, Zakariyya Muhammad, mentioned that his work was vying with entertainment sources. In fact, “entertainment” is the wrong word to describe Muhammad’s craft. He and his fellow poets no longer see the poem as providing any kind of collective reassurance or hope, let alone pleasure. The last thing they want to do is to entertain, in the sense of providing fun. In a world that has lost its wonder, they want to take their readers to the zone of the unfamiliar, to bewilder, shock, scandalize, and stimulate, because their unfolding world differs from the world they inherited. Each has its own rhythm. As Muhammad put it: The prose poetry that hit the Arab world in the past fifteen years goes to show that the rhythm of the world is a prose rhythm, not poetic. Of course picture dominates too. Poetry is one of the arts that faces an increasing number of competitive arts in the Arab world and worldwide. The profession of poet is no longer important. TV and the theater are more important. The social significance of the poet is less. So maybe this is why the poet turned self-centered. If society does not need the poet, then the poet does not need society. Maybe this is what has led us to write an obscure and self-centered kind of poetry. I don’t say I write only for the select, but in the end my poetry reaches only a select group of people. I am not searching for people to clap for me. When I write poetry I try not to submit to the blackmailing of people.

To defeat blackmail, the poet banishes the people from the act of creativity. The people are conceived not only as being outside this act, but also as threatening its authenticity. The measure of a work’s authenticity has become its distance from a large public and immediate political condition. The poet and the public have become aliens to one another and disconnected, as though they are the disfigured pieces of a disintegrating fabric. But the fear of diluting effects by the public has nothing to do with a self-sufficient history of poetry’s words, and everything to do with shifting realities in the life of language, especially the language of liberation. Muhammad was aware that this poetic shift has been a recent development in Arabic and, more specifically, Palestinian poetry. In the Arab world, the stateless Palestinian poets historically have not had the luxury of aesthetic experimentation that other Arab poets have had, whether they were inside or

222

THE DREAM

exiled from their established nation-states. So overwhelming was the national, collective struggle that only since the 1990s, upon the establishment of the Palestinian Authority’s institutions on the West Bank and in Gaza, have poets begun to find that they could broach the subject of the “self and its things” (al-Jarrah, 1999, p. 207). Public layers of identity can threaten poetry’s authenticity and undermine its search for truth. Fatigued by failed attempts at liberation, poets began to search for new topics, including the private body, memory, and death. These topics were chosen in anticipation of a reading by another poet or literary critic rather than by a pedestrian recipient. The days of poetry festivals that had brought together hundreds or thousands in defiance of military orders and bad weather had become more than rare; they were extinct. But in the 1990s confidence arose among Palestinians that they were no longer on the verge of oblivion. Moreover, it appeared that the loss of Palestine was a loss of many things other than a homeland. The world now appeared far more complex than once-promising victories and revolutions had expressed in the poems that embodied them. The obduracy of the Palestinian question is such that poets need to keep many questions open (such as liberation), and others required reopening (such as belonging). Furthermore, the commitment of the poet to those hoped-for revolutions has been replaced by a commitment to questions about poetry itself. Questions had sailed along with Palestinians when they had crossed the Mediterranean in 1982, a continuously deferred return. Beirut, which they in part ravaged and then had to evacuate for Tunisia’s portion of Africa’s northern coasts, had taught them that the flaw in liberation politics went far deeper than they had thought. Perhaps they then understood that no Arab capital could serve them as a base for recouping their home. Instead the attempt had to be made anew from within home itself. That was the intifada of 1987 on the West Bank and Gaza, a collective uprising against a modern and even postmodern colonialism using stones that had witnessed the pre-Israelite time of Canaanites and Jebosites. But the tragedy of Beirut was such that it led many to wonder if home itself was a viable possibility anymore. Perhaps new ways of thinking and living in a home had yet to be carved out. These new ways have complexified the relationship between poetry and public. According to Muhammad: The question of the poet-audience relation is complex, and it is difficult to understand it outside specific time periods. For example, between the 1950s

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

223

and late 1970s the poet in Palestinian society had a deep bond with the audience. The meeting with the audience was always through festival and poetry evenings. The generation of the 1980s got tired of this condition and wanted to react to it, so it turned its back to the people, to the audience. It was tired of the idea that poetry was employed to please people, to gain their applause. It appeared that in the 1980s people didn’t care about poets; therefore, they became more self-centered, more introverted, more obscure, open to the inside more than to the outside. Maybe it was a two-sided change. People got tired of poetry recited on stages, of poetry on politics, of poetry read in public courts but not at home or in the newspaper. At first, the people needed national awakening. Both sides needed this talk. Poets could not write ghazal or contemplate philosophical questions. They became the portes-paroles of their people, and that lasted for a long time. But that period when politics dominated everything ended. So by the 1980s, poets were bored with this. Even society itself was tired of this talk, because it had already established national institutions and no longer needed someone to scream and remind people of their identity. The world appeared far more complicated than what people thought in the 1970s and 1960s through heroic, naive, and optimistic poetry. There was no longer room for the sanguine spirit of that generation when poetry was a mixture of romantic optimism and mass-oriented, political oratory. In the 1980s all this changed. My poems have become closer to philosophical contemplation.

Throughout my fieldwork, I heard on poets’ tongues and in their texts the names of various thinkers who had tried to distance themselves, with varied degrees of success, from the Enlightenment’s way of arranging relations among the political, the philosophical, and the religious lives of truth: Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger, Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche. Ancient Greek paradigms of life were also compelling to these poets, as they were to some of these same thinkers in their search for exits and new beginnings, away from the tired thinking of a confused and forgetful Europe and from uprooted ideas that began with a mistranslation of Greek thought, as Heidegger would have it. Heidegger claims that since the Roman era, words in Europe have lost their authentic Greek world. And if Greece is taken as the beginning for modernist Arab poets, as was expedient for Heidegger to do, it should be no surprise that forests more than deserts attract them, as they did Western thinkers, save Nietzsche, who stubbornly admired the desert.

224

THE DREAM

In the proliferation of modern Western thinkers’ names, ancient Greek references, and antipathy to the desert in Arabic poetry, the secular makes one of its appearances. The secular is manifest in the sense of poetry becoming specialized in a professional, compartmentalized fashion, with its own separatist politics external to religion, marked by a distance from Islam, which is in keeping with the dictate of secularism as a doctrine. Its secular aspects presume a specialized intellect that is as inimical to religious reason as it is to the desert, foreign to the land of reason within a reality the secular alone inherits. A great deal of forgetting allows one to take the intellectual and the secular as synonyms. An antidotal question must therefore remain open: What does the secularizing of modern intellect entail? Thinking about this question helps when observing a paradox in Arab poets turning to the secular in its modern apparition. As I heard poets involved in philosophical contemplation, I also heard them frequently utter what sounded like liturgical meditations, reminding me again of Nietzsche (1997, p. 127), who observed that every time he fished in the waters of poets the head of an ancient god came out. Poets’ statements (both their poems and narratives about them) are replete with the names of gods and goddesses, mythical heroes and heroines. Words such as temples, prayers, rituals, fire, myth, and incense abound in poems aspiring to modernity. It is striking that the authors of these texts, so rich with religious imagery, have been invested in secular or even atheistic visions of the world. It is disorienting to read liturgicalsounding texts from authors who otherwise want to diminish the role of religion in public, political life in contemporary Arab-Muslim societies. This observation became much clearer during my last night in Cairo. I spent that evening at Salim’s house listening to and debating with him until the early hours of the morning. I was nonplussed by his stand on poetry as a means of transformation in society. He said that he wanted to democratize poetry, but he also expected his work to be mediated for the masses and not directly understood by them. He added that he had no expectation that poetry would be a medium of change—certainly not in any immediate way: I have no illusions about my poetry feeding the people and changing society. Is there a poem in the whole world that can substitute for a piece of bread, be it the poetry of Neruda or Darwish? I am a poet and I believe in the significance of the word, but I am not stupid and idealistic. Where is that poetry that has changed society? No. It is a social revolution that will change society.

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

225

Revolutions may or may not change society, but no revolution will change what humans are from the moment they are born: mortals. The fact of human mortality was what Abd al-Minim Ramadan feared. He was kind enough to meet me on late notice, only hours before I was scheduled to fly out of Cairo back to Tel-Aviv. He was a friend of Salim’s and, like him, wrote prose poetry. I had already met Ramadan at one of Salim’s dinner parties and discovered that his skills and passion for narration were staggering. I went to talk to him at Zahrat al-Bustan, a café in downtown Cairo. A friend of mine, Sayyid from rural Upper Egypt, joined us with enough alienation from the city to make me feel at home. We soon discovered that Ramadan’s skills in speech were cultivated out of necessity, even urgency. Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, Ramadan was warding off death by resorting to speech, to storytelling. A story I wanted to hear from Ramadan was why he never made it to the Cairo Book Fair, although his name appeared on the program on more than one occasion. To Ramadan, the book fair was “culture put on display” for the state to domesticate intellectuals. His name had been appearing at these festivals for the past thirteen years, even though he had long before stopped taking part. He said that, for some in the Ministry of Culture, “events materialize in advertising them, not in their actual happening. . . . This is part of our moral corruption, not just our literary one. This fair is a good way to conduct business.” The “business” that I found so pressing is what happens to poets and human words in the quest to be modern. From Ramadan I wanted to hear about poets’ commitment to poetry, to art in poetry that seemed to compel them to entertain certain questions and omit others. In Zahrat al-Bustan, with hot chocolate for Ramadan and lentil soup for Sayyid and me, his deep voice told me how in the business of poetry, form no longer matters. The struggle that matters to him is between the private and the public, not among poetic forms, giving the concept of the private poet a whole new meaning: I am an advocate of the private poet, in contrast to the public poet. This is the poet that I search for, regardless of form. What I mean is that, in the history of Arabic poetry, the poet was always occupied with expressing the collective. He was the porte-parole of the collective’s sadness and happiness and so forth. Of course there is nothing pure on this earth. There is no pure public poet. But since the late 1960s in Egypt, the private poet has begun to rise. The private

226

THE DREAM

poet is not a populist. The public poet arrives at a previously prepared audience that responds to him. The public poet produces for an already created audience. But the private poet has no audience. He creates readers. You cannot use the term audience with the private poet. You cannot use the term reader with the public poet. . . . The public poet is not pleased with a position lower than leader. Yet the private poet does not accept a position larger than that of a small creature. . . . The public poet is a poet of Bedouins. Therefore, in the city, there is less room for the poet. But in the desert, in the tribe, there is ample room for the poet. The tribe needs the unity, the leader, and the pillar. In the city, there is multiplicity; there is less room in it for the public poet. Perhaps Cairo, more than other Arab capitals, is most hostile to public poets since it is closer to the idea of the city.

The late 1960s provided an entry into a new era in Egypt’s history. The era of nationalism and liberation championed by Nasser was closing down, and Sadat, who succeeded him in 1970, began privatizing the state. It is tempting to dwell on the coincidence between what the markets of global capital were doing in Egypt and what Ramadan wanted to accomplish in poetry: their common valuation of the private. But the materiality of poets’ words should not be taken as tantamount to the market’s, whose web stretches across the sheer physicality of place in which it exists and unfolds. The city has come to command the allegiance of Ramadan’s words in a way that the desert no longer can assume. Repelling the desert happened at earlier points in the long premodern history of Arabic poetry. Yet Ramadan’s particular objection joins an established modern proclivity against “desert poetry” that dates back to the early decades of the twentieth century. It is markedly distinct from earlier, classical antecedents of objecting to the desert within a radius of poetic production that stretches from Granada to Baghdad. When classical poets evicted the desert from their works, they largely targeted themes and vocabulary foisted upon their habitat in urban societies of the Muslim empire. What sets the modern objection to the desert apart from its classical antecedents is its distinct secularity, emanating as it does from the par ticu lar but globally powerful history of European expansion in the world since 1492, the Protestant Reformation, and the Wars of Religion. The poetic self is resoundingly secular in the sense that its authenticity is thought to be secured and sheltered from superficiality and falsehood only in a private existence, “faithful” to poetry. The kind of secularism that demands the severance of theistic

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

227

belief from a public sphere of politics, for the purity and protection of each, seems very much at work in Ramadan’s valuation of the private self, as reflected in the title for his work describing his life, Stranger to the Family. That valuation of the private propels, I believe, an opening in thinking about secularism as a tradition always in relation to place. Ramadan’s narrative, like Uncle Fathi’s, raises the possibility that relation to place invites one’s own formations of being and knowing. Thus the secular may entail arrangements of one’s relation to the city and the desert, to nomadic and sedentary registers of time and being, and to the orders and modes of truth that nourish life in each of them. Indeed, in thinking about the desert and the city, one may end up confronting the possibility that each promotes in its sheer physicality different truths of being and thinking, different forms of worldliness if one remains etymologically alert to the Latin origin of the word secular, meaning “world,” “century,” or “age.” As such it becomes pressing to ask about “traditions of the secular” (of worldliness). Recognizing this connection is more useful than simply dismissing the secular or claiming to transcend it. The secularity of Cairo is something Ramadan shares with his fellow poet and friend Salim. Salim, epitomizing the kind of private poet that Ramadan advocates, has refused to reach out to a wide audience through his poetry. He has declared such a reaching-out to the masses as compromising art, the commitment to art in the poem. His work, a cultural, not aesthetic work, must have mediators—those who are capable of disseminating poetry. I asked Salim if he saw in his role as a poet and in his insistence that poetry be mediated a certain undoing of the secular, a reincarnation of a priestly class in a secular fashion: Yes, why not. . . . When you read a book in philosophy or sociology or economics, you still need the help of dictionaries, of teachers and friends, even though these books use dictionary language, definitional language. Poetry does not use indexical, communicative language. It deviates, it alludes. I am not saying that the word “night” is not night in poetry, but it may not only be night. Why should poetry be easy? It is one of the duties of poetry to change a sign into an allusion. My idea is that language in poetry carries the back meanings, secondary, assumed meanings, not primary, blatant meanings. Poetry doesn’t communicate information; it alludes, it does not report. The difficulty in poetry is not because of any holiness of the text; it is because we lack mediators and because the language of poetry is allusive. . . . Why should the

228

THE DREAM

content of economics and sociology need explaining, but not poetry? You will write your dissertation within scientific requirements and terminology. Would I ever accuse you of being detached and elitist? Of course not. Even though you will use more communicative language than I will, you will end up having a text that requires explanation.

Distrust of public meanings has permeated Salim’s work. Its distance from the public is its measure of authenticity. Out of fear of publicly shared meanings, his words have reached only a few, mostly literary critics and other poets. In Egypt I met a reader and even a follower of Salim’s work at her Madinat Nasr mansion in Cairo, Maysoon Saqr, who originally came from the United Arab Emirates. Saqr and her family fled to Cairo from their homeland in the late 1960s because of a coup d’état that led to the imprisonment of her father, a statesman and a poet. Entrusted with the keys and the cleaning of her imprisoned father’s library, Saqr tried to read everything that it contained. In the sixth grade she read One Thousand and One Nights, which she received as a graduation gift from her father. Yet while prose brought father and daughter closer, poetry wedged them apart. Later in his life, Saqr’s father had many objections to her poetry. Incidentally, she is also an avocational painter, but this pursuit did not trouble her father. At some point in the evolution of her poetic capability her father denied that she had any. Although conservative, he occasionally dabbled in free verse poetry. But she and her father collided in their discordant pursuit of freedom. It brought about a tectonic rift that struck beyond, she would even say “below” poetry. “Below” because the poetic in Saqr’s world is a mode of elevated existence, separated from what is perceived as commonly compromised by and complicit with ordinary reality. It has indeed become for some not at home in secular Cairo a mode of dwelling, a state of being, reminiscent of the dwelling Heidegger found in the works of poets, whether they were practicing poetry in the strict sense (poesy), like Hölderlin or Rilke, or in its wider sense, like Van Gogh. Saqr’s father insisted that her first collection of poetry be burned. And burning continued into her career, although at her behest, not her father’s. She told me about her habit of burning all the leftover copies of her published poetry anthologies, perhaps in order to only look forward. A recently published collection led to her invitation to read at the book fair. One afternoon, before driving us there in her Mercedes, she invited me, and a Moroccan journalist,

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

229

to her mansion for coffee and dessert. There I learned what appealed to Saqr about the prose poem. She had previously told a reporter that the prose poem allowed her to “express the personal and the feminine, the free and the marginal. I cannot express my femininity within fi xed fundamentals and measured rules.” While probing the secularity that Saqr and other women invest in their forms, it is tempting to account for her turn to prose as essentially motivated by gender. Moving away from her father’s traditional poetry was the liberating act of a feminist subject. However, to avoid rash conclusions about a given poetic form and an inherent, corresponding gender identity, one should remember that in the contemporary poetic scene, there is no lack of men who advocate, indeed excel in prose poetry and no lack of women who defend, indeed excel in metered poetry. The naive and reductive proposition about a form being essentially suitable to one’s gender collapses the minute it sets foot in the intractable politics of poetic forms. Saqr provides us with an instance of how gender is but one among the multiple lives that poets articulate, cultivate, contest, and explore through their choice of poetic form. All six female poets with whom I spoke during my fieldwork worked predominantly with prose and occasionally with free verse. A Manichaean account by which traditional versifying is perceived as a practice of the masculine and modern prose poetry is congruent with the feminine hardly explains this contingent absence of traditional female versifiers. The three poems by three different women in three different forms offered as examples in earlier chapters aim to preclude precisely this kind of facile thinking about poetic form and a corresponding gender. Neither writing prose poetry nor versifying adheres to a stable gender formation. However, two women poets I interviewed disagreed. They found the prose poem to be more feminine, presumably congruent with the secular freedom that feminism in its dominant modes advances. Those two prose poets locate in their poetic form not only a subversion of dominant poetic tradition, but also a subversion of dominant, patriarchal tradition associated with metered form, including free verse. Fleeing the regulations and “binaries” of the classical form, they are interested in flowing, fluid, and feminine architecture that they see as immanent in the prose poem. Whatever features one might actually confer on the prose poem, it is apparent that gender, like nation, religion, or class, is another layer of identity poets may invest in poetic form. Indeed, while Saqr emphatically expressed her choice of form’s relation to her femi-

230

THE DREAM

ninity and subversion to patriarchy, her defense of that choice remarkably resembles the perspectives of male poets I interviewed: All that I am trying to say is that the circle of intellectuals and writers is no longer the public, as it used to be . . . the poet near the sultan [the ruler]. Now politics is in one place, the masses in another, and the poet in yet another little normal place. The role of the poet diminished. The poet became an ordinary person, a different person. Before that, the poet did not play the real role of the poet. The poet served a role for other things. Now the poet’s role is in the poet’s writing. This has made him more specialized, deeper in writing. What is the shame of having a role in writing only? Th is is the real role of the poet, inside writing. What is the role of the doctor outside medicine? I don’t want the illusion that my writing as a shaira [poetess] will change society. I can change from my writing, from within poetry. I will not compromise or simplify my writing so it can be understandable to the public. . . . The tools for changing society are different from what they used to be. They used to put a poet in front of the army to mobilize it. But not today. Where is that society that will hear us? We hardly affect fi fteen people. The idea of the poet as a god or prophet no longer exists.

Although rebuked in the Quran, poets throughout Arab history were also amply feared, even revered. It is against that established reverence for poets, but obviously extending beyond it, to include reverence for and fear of words to which Saqr was reacting. A fear comes and a fear can disappear, but it can also continue in different forms. Fear may thwart life, but sometimes it lets life thrive. In the brave new world of poets, fear did not disappear. It changed forms. Like flesh, food, and friends, fear has also been formative in their lives. Throughout history, Arabic poetry and its poets were feared on occasion. Even, and of all people, Arafat, when stateless in Tunisia after sailing away from fighting in Beirut, confessed his own such fear. But when they solicited fear, poets did so neither as gods nor as prophets. Their words, past or present, have no sacredness to them. Rather, when they wrought fear, or for that matter repulsion, reverence, and awe, they did so mainly because their speech was thought to have emanated from suprahuman sources. Pre-Islamic Arabia used to believe that each poet had a shaytan (satan) or jinn (genie). When shaytan appears in the verb form shatan, it can mean “that which deviated from what is right.” This general belief in the suprahuman but nonsacred, even ungodly, source of poetic words explains in part why early

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

231

Arab attempts to undermine Muhammad’s credibility meant accusing him of being a poet, denying, that is, a divine source of his utterance. If historically poets engendered fear, repulsion, awe, or ridicule, they appear to have become distinctly irrelevant and politically inconsequential. From within their rising irrelevance they infrequently have written about their private fears—mostly fears of that eschewed presence in the secular world, death. If fear of poets seems irrecoverably lost, the sense of their distinctiveness is not. That poets are specialists is not an entirely new proposition. One has only to remember that before the modern notion of art as having fans came to dominate poetry, Arabs, along with other classical societies, traditionally regarded poetry as a craft, a techne (sana) that required craftsmanship: enormous training, expertise, and specialization in the rhythms and vocabulary of language. The technician and the artist were inseparable, not mutually estranged layers of identity. However, the kind of specialists that modern poets represent is new. Along secular lines, modern poets specialize in a practice that is conceived and instituted in segregation from other kinds of pursuits such as law, religion, politics, or science. Therefore the modern poet becomes like the modern historian, the modern botanist, or the modern mathematician. All of them pursue truth activities that are believed to be found outside political, ethical, and religious kinds of reasoning. No less crucially, they are constantly discouraged by the secular reason of their disciplines from seeing beyond the fragmentations through which their invariably partial truths emerge. Saqr’s secularly estranged subjectivity offers a site for observing the secular as a category and its kindred practices. Note, first, how the political doctrine that emanates from it—secularism—reverberates in her presentation. In keeping with a cardinal tenet of this doctrine, Saqr locates politics in one place and poetry in another. Quarantined from politics, the place of poetry, like that of religion in the secular imaginary, has become little, ordinary, and private. And in tandem with secular epistemology, the specialized truths of one have no bearing on the specialized truths of the other. Along with its mode of segregation, the secular also induces a reversal in the poetry of Saqr’s cohort. Life is no longer lived as though it were a poem, but the poem is lived as the summary of life. Allegory transposes: the omnipresence of poems in life retreats into a life inside the poem, or more precisely, inside specialized writing, a kind of visualization of permanence necessary for the age’s secularity. The secular redrawing of boundaries between poems

232

THE DREAM

and being, between poetry and politics, and the refurnishing of their contents underpin both Saqr’s relation to the public and the language she finds necessary to secure such sequestering of realms. In a tone of despair and triumph, resignation tinged with recovery, Saqr identifies the poet’s new place as ordinary, prosaic, and nonsacral, neither above nor ahead of the public, but perhaps beyond and away from it. This is not to say that secularizing the forms of Arabic poetry make them (or their authors) apolitical, even if they claim to be so. Rather, I suggest, the secular has obliterated old modes of poetic involvement with politics and introduced new ones in their stead. To begin understanding the significance of this secular replacement, one could, for instance, listen attentively to poets’ conceptions of poetic production itself. Consider how Saqr equates poetry with the act of writing and locates her agency inside it. Her secular memory points to poetry as something one conceivably writes, not sings, hears, recites, or takes any other action that may connote its beginnings in sound. This equation of poetry with writing whereby the written word is taken to be more authentic and deeper than the spoken caters to a particular kind of public. It thus creates a quandary of the secular’s managing of private and public realms. Poets want an ordinary place for themselves, yet attribute to their writing an extra-ordinary potency (potentially at least). Poets wanting to focus on reality also want their writing to take them to a land beyond, to private islands of enchantment that their poems can provide, which are frequently referenced as states of sleeping, dreaming, or praying. And for someone like the late Hussein al-Barghouti, who did a lot of sleeping and dreaming in ancient caves, there was no need to even identify or label his poems as anything other than text. He cared not whether people regarded his writing as prose or poetry. In fact, he likened his poetic pursuit to that of a mathematician. I asked al-Barghouti at the hospital to what kind of relation with the audience he aspires: I don’t think about readers. This is the concern of sociology, politics. Th is is not the concern of the act of creativity. The more you think about the audience, the worse is your writing. Second, there is no single audience. Writing for one audience is no more. Perhaps in the past, the poet wrote for one tribe. You also don’t write for the entire globe. I am aware that I don’t write for all. Of course, through experience, through knowledge, I have a select group of people that I have in my mind. It is dangerous for someone outside to interfere

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

233

in the moment of creativity. I compare my poetry with mathematics. If one wants to read and understand advanced mathematics, one has to master the basics. I don’t write for an ignorant reader. If a reader does not want to invest effort, then that reader is of no concern to me whatsoever. I have nothing to do with him. Is there someone who writes mathematical theory for someone who knows neither how to add nor how to subtract? For example, can Einstein stop where readers cease to understand him? If this were the case, we would never have had Einstein. . . . Let me be more precise: you take from poetry what your mind allows you to take. . . . The history of humankind is a history of specialization, since the times of pharaonic priests. . . . History has given birth to people of unequal strength and intelligence. This is why you get someone like Shakespeare and four centuries pass without someone like Shakespeare, but bring many hospitals for mental health in between.

If truth is hard to bear, and if certain truths are almost unbearable, then for some poets, madness becomes a bearable exit from the banality of contemporary life. Poets in conversations and writing have often lauded madness as an aesthetic or ethical strategy. In an obsolete grain warehouse built around 150 years ago in Nazareth and revived as a cultural café named the Palestinian House, I chanced to meet Wisam Jubran, a composer, musicologist, and poet who has chosen madness insofar as it was choosable. He was invited to read and play his oud, although the darkness of the domed brick ceiling coincided with the darkness of mood at the time. There was little enthusiasm for poetry, let alone for the Arabic and Spanish music being played. It was late April 2002, after the massive Israeli invasion of March 28, and reports were already seeping out, breaking through the closure, about a massacre in the Jenin refugee camp. This café, along with Jamiyyat al-Phinique (the Phoenix Association), had arranged an event of solidarity with the people of the Golan Heights. A week prior, villagers in the Golan Heights had observed Syria’s independence, and poets from there were now invited to read at the Palestinian House. The name Palestinian House has its own local reverberations. To call something Palestinian in Nazareth, inside Israel, in a certain way indicates the remoteness and the strangeness of the name Palestine, which invokes something lost or kidnapped, a forbidden name and an absence. That night’s gathering also had a significance of its own. To come together to read poetry and hear music with an endemic sense of helplessness entailed a certain act of defiance, or more precisely, an act of overcoming. It was an overcoming of the constant

234

THE DREAM

feeling of guilt and embarrassment for remaining alive, an overcoming of sheer debilitating anger at a malignant presence left almost unnamed as “the situation.” The first poet to read, Hussein Muhanna of Buqaya, admitted his verbal impotence in the face of the existing conditions. He said that he was “used to poetry being an action, not a reaction to events.” Now that the relation between words and events was rearranged, his poems, like the overwhelming majority of poems that night, were about occupation. Jubran’s, however, were not. He prefaced his reading with an apology for not delivering a poem on “the situation,” as all other readers had done that evening. His poem was not political, he said. It was neither about martyrs nor the homeland, two formidable moorings in his people’s poetry that evening. Wisam Jubran, a native of Nazareth, holds a Ph.D. in musicology, which led him to live for an extended period in Russia and Germany, two places that made him a speaker of five languages and a conversant of diverse subjects, something that Nazareth would not have enabled. In Germany he developed, I was told, close ties with Adonis, the grand modernizer of Arabic poetry in the twentieth century. Jubran dedicated some of his work to Adonis as a way of acknowledging his apprenticeship. The title of his piece that evening was “Empty him from the Speech of Palm Trees.” I found myself struggling to extract meanings from it. In general it seemed that Jubran’s conflict expressed in this poem is with something more primordial than military occupation, something that takes us to where Arabic speech first flowered: in oceans of sand and islands of palm trees, namely, the desert. With my fieldwork ending, Jubran was to be my final interlocutor. He agreed to meet at a café in the lobby of the Dan Hotel atop the Carmel Mountain in Haifa at the end of May. Our conversation included all sorts of topics and peoples. Prominent among them was Nietzsche. I wanted to know what Jubran found valuable about that philosopher-poet’s work for his own projects. While Hebrew songs emanated from a birthday party at the other end of the lobby, he conveyed to me his valuation of that German’s work and madness: For me, madness is an exemplary case in which the human leaves the pattern, the prearranged and the collectively consensual. In madness there is transgression against law and common values. Madness is closer to truth. It is a state between childhood and genius. The brain, in madness, is freer. If the ordinary brain is guarded, the madman’s brain is freed from guards.

THE L AIT Y OU T SIDE POETRY ’S TEMPLE

235

Madness can be seen as an aesthetic state of being. If you incarnate madness as you work with language, you can create new impulses for writing. It allows you to see things as not descending from the heavens. This is not my only way of writing, only one way. . . . Many prophets were accused of madness. The unique one is often thought of as insane. There is a state of rebellion within madness. Everything in our reality calls for it in Palestine. I am not exaggerating—especially when I think of the spiritual and intellectual aspects of our lives. This leads to resentment in my inability to reach out to people. What is more painful, this reality precludes people from reaching out to me. My hope exists in the people yet to be born, yet to come. My audience is not people present today, but [those] who can read me, understand me in the future.

In May 2002 I left Jubran after his not finding any readers for his poetry. Yet at the same time, I also left behind readers who found no poetry and even poets who swore that there was no poetry anymore. Among the former, I had met Alaa, a graduate student in international studies at Birzeit University, where he had also completed a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. Coming from a refugee camp near Bethlehem, Alaa had always liked poetry; he recounted to me how that liking of poetry was transformed: “I used to like the poems that I understood. Then I used to like the poems that I sensed, as with Darwish and Qabbani. Now I neither understand nor sense poems. The only thing left is to be fascinated by the distribution and ordering of words on the page.” But what exactly has been left on the poetic page? Where is the remaining poetry? In my final days in Ramallah, I wanted to put to rest the sense of mission that had driven my ethnographic pursuit. Realizing that I had little time left, I decided to stay in Ramallah and avoid the checkpoints that I had crossed daily. One night I stayed with Muhib al-Barghouti, the cousin and a disciple of Hussein al-Barghouti. Muhib shared with Jubran his admiration of both Nietzsche and madness. In fact, many have seen in Muhib nothing more or less than a madman, a suluk kind of poet, a brigand in the margins of the margins. In one conversation that stretched into the early hours of the morning, he swore to me, garnering all the heftiness that his oath could bear in Arabic, “Really, by God, there is no poetry.” He truly believed that poets and poetry were gone in what he saw as an age of defeat. The valorized madness of certain poets and the shrinking of their public face posed two suspicions at the end of this ethnographic pursuit. My first

236

THE DREAM

suspicion is that the experience of the poem—the guarding of the dream and the act of salvation—lies in a place other than what poets call poetry. Truth, or rather its remembrance, the remembrance of who one is, has begun migrating to places outside knowable poetry. Martyrdom has been described by poets as one such place. Among Palestinians struck by speech inflation, by words incorrigibly complicit, incapable of bearing witness to their plight and hopes, martyrdom has opened truths that poetry is simply too atrophied to disclose. Of course, the relation poets have with truth has long been the subject of doubt, if not outright denunciation. To state the obvious, I have not been concerned here with weighing the epistemic status of poetic utterance that has surely varied across and within histories and places. The kinds of truths that have ultimately interested me throughout this study, however, have to do with secular truths. And to the extent that secularity is a condition in our universe, I have used poetry as a field for examining its presence, which brings me to my second suspicion. My second suspicion is that there is something quite flattening and obliterating when one speaks about the modern advent of secular reason as the arrival of order, liberty, and rationality. Instead, with a vigilant view of the secular, its actualities and possibilities, one needs to ask how it enhances a distinct kind of order, liberty, and rationality, while debasing other realities as illusory, or unthinkable. The secular of the modern era should make us alert to varieties of the secular—as modes of worldliness—across times and places, itself made real in part because it has turned its other, namely, religion, unreal in claiming the world for itself and banishing religion to the otherworld. In the peculiarly modern secular order, the measuring of sound, the beginnings of the human word and truth, have become obsolete. No wonder that it is an age that conflates rationalization with secularization. For now, the ocular rather than measured sounds have become regnant to serve a present that takes itself to be eternity. Thus I suspect that the masters of speech, as poets in Arabic have been known, must seek asylum either in madness, silence, sleep, or in their dreams.

C ONCLUSIONS S E C U L A R P R AY E R S

W H I L E T H E P R E V I O U S N I N E C H A P T E R S have concentrated on forms of poetry, in this conclusion I focus on the content of poetry, or rather, the connection between form and content. Rather than analyze interviews and observations of poets, here I analyze poems themselves. This attention to the semantic content of poems (as distinct from their formal properties, although such distinction is not fully attainable) stems in part from poets’ insistence on the inseparability of form and content. Throughout my fieldwork, poets insisted that change in one has demanded change in the other. Moreover the content of poetic forms is the focus of this chapter because my arguments about secularizing forms remain woefully remiss if they ignore what poets actually say in their poems and their words’ relationship to how they say them. Of all the forms currently animating the field of Arabic poetry, I deliberately focus on prose poetry’s content. Recall the words by the prominent French endorser of this form, Charles Baudelaire. As also quoted in Chapter 10, Baudelaire wonders, “Who among us has not dreamt, in his ambitious days, of the miracle of a poetic prose? It would have to be musical without rhythm and rhyme” (quoted in Benjamin, 1968, p. 165). Baudelaire’s question compelled some of my own about the ascendancy of prose in modernity: In what ways are these days “ambitious”? Why do “ambitious days” open a space for poems that retain neither rhyme nor rhythm? In what kind of ethics and politics does this “miracle” find a home? How might this “miracle” of prose in poetry be part of the making of a secular time in modern life?

238

C ONCLUSIONS

The recent work of Arab prose poets lends itself more readily than that of the other two forms (classical and free verse) to analysis of the modern secular condition of their labor. The fecund and ceaseless efforts to modernize Arabic poetry through the use of prose seems to reveal the quick of that secular condition, its ambiguities and quandaries. Curiously there is a distinct and striking difficulty in understanding a great deal of contemporary literary Arabic poetry in that its authors often vindicate “rational” (read nontheistic) authority in society, but they pour into their poems increasingly “irrational” (read mythical) content. What is also striking about this poetry is that it employs familiar words of daily Arabic, yet binds them with an opaque significance. I want to address this paradox by examining the work of an eminent, indeed paradigmatic, modernizing figure in Arabic poetry: Adonis. To the extent that Adonis’s writing is paradigmatic, it permits general conjectures about the secularity of modern Arabic poetry. I mainly rely on his remarkable poetry anthology Songs of Mehyar the Damascene (1971), which includes measured as well as prose poetry. My aim is to advance the following argument: The peculiar difficulty of modernist poetry, of which Adonis’s is a stunning example, occurs within a quest to secularize Arabic poetry and society. In other words, the impenetrability of contemporary literary poetry distinctly belongs to the secular. The impenetrability of Adonis’s poetry occurs when he enacts a secular self, which takes the religious as its other. The distancing of a secular self from a religious other exceeds statements he makes about the falseness of religion or the imperatives he declares about sequestering it from the public realm of reason and politics, which are in keeping with tenets of modern secularism as a political doctrine. Adonis’s secularity resides in his delivery of metaphors and in his choice of prose over verse, his sense of a poetic self, his advocacy of the ocular as a regnant road to truth, and his conception of poetry as a kind of reaching to “the beyond.” In these enactments the power of the secular comes to demand from poetry what it decries in the religious, on which it depends as well as denies. This dependency furnishes the foundation of the complex and contradictory making of Adonis’s secular vocabulary. Adonis assigns the mythical figure Mehyar to sing in six out of the seven sections composing Songs. Each one opens with hymns. These introductory hymns lack the rhythm and rhyme one hears in the other, tonally measured rhythms in the versified poems of this anthology. This is why I count them as specimens of Arabic prose poems, the form Adonis rallied for in his journal,

C ONCLUSIONS

239

Shir (Poetry), which he cofounded with Yusaf al-Khal in the late 1950s. This journal’s radical, singular, and distinct commitment was to counter the then rampant socialist realism within Arabic poetry. Unlike literary realism’s subservience to politics, the poets of Shir wanted the words of poetry to be politics in and of themselves. As befitting the Arab world of the 1950s and 1960s, when Gamal Abdul Nasser’s Free Officer Revolution had not yet been widely discredited, Adonis spoke the language of revolution. Yet while the revolutions that surrounded him and attracted a great many other poets were driven by the languages of nationalist, socialist, communist, or postcolonial politics, the revolution that preoccupied Adonis was the Arabic language itself, one that could occur within poetry, standing as a sovereign and self-sufficient realm. For that kind of revolution, Adonis dedicated his Songs and selected “a great man,” Mehyar, to perform, as Nietzsche selected Zarathustra. If traditions always unfold in a place (topos) that inevitably marks their formation in time (tempo), then Adonis’s secularist writing appears to point to the place of Pauline Christian history, in which secular modernity has one of its beginnings. For example, the vestige of a geography peculiar to the modern apparition of the secular can be found in a single word such as “hymn.” Adonis speaks of mazamir (hymns) as distinct from anashid (songs); the former readily conjures the geography of Byzantium rather than its periphery, if not exterior, Arabia. Adonis thus affiliates his work with Christian and generally biblical sediments of the Arabic language. He thereby offers a useful reminder of the intimate affinity between modern secular life forms and strands of the Christian tradition in whose theology the secular was once at home, before it migrated out to the modern endeavor today recognizable as secularism. The affi liations Adonis establishes with Christianity as a Muslim-born poet in search of a secular mode of self-flourishing extend beyond his choice of single words (mazamir vs. anashid). His secularity also inhabits his poetic images, which are predicated on Christian motifs, as in “O madness you are my Lord and my Christ” (p. 148) and “My map is a land without a creator and rejection is my Bible” (p. 99). Adonis’s affinity for words such as Masih (Christ) and injil (gospel) is a way of distancing himself from Muslim affiliations as a source of religious identity—a distancing crucial for forming his secular identity as an Arab citizen of modern nation-states. Christianity therefore is not his newly found religion; it is a conduit for a vocabulary that leads a secularizing Adonis to ostensibly stand outside all religions.

240

C ONCLUSIONS

The poet’s name further illustrates the enactment of his secularity by specifically taking the Muslim marker of his identity as that which he must disavow. At the age of nineteen he rejected his identifiably Muslim birth name (Ali Ahmad Said) and excavated instead a pre-Islamic mythical name, signaling the secular identity he has struggled to fashion. In renaming himself, he committed a perfectly poetic act: condensation. He condensed the multifaceted working of the secular on his identity and also revealed in so doing a quandary of the secular: its simultaneous rejection of and dependency on the religious. Beyond his self-renaming, Adonis’s secular disavowal of and dependency on the religious extended to poetic renaming. Signs of the surreal, the religious, and the opaque prevail in Adonis’s hymns. Titles of sections include “Iram the Many-Pillared,” “The Dead Ilah,” “The New Testament,” and “The Magician of Dust,” all signaling the semantic density that lies inside the poems. This prevalent evocation of a transcendentalist vocabulary is a distinct achievement of Adonis’s complex secularity. The impenetrability of this contemporary poetic language, whose academic version Edward Said (1983, pp. 4–5) decries as “precious jargon” belonging to a “priestly cast of acolytes and metaphysicians,” becomes necessary for Adonis in a way that it never could have for nonmodernist poets. Adonis’s tropes make manifest how attaining a secular identity relies on the religious being its other; Islam and religion writ large serve as that other throughout Songs. For example, Adonis presents Mehyar and his secular vision of the world as lacking a “face with piety to the moon” (p. 15); Mehyar is indeed “the death of the moon” (p. 114) who “rejects the Imamate” (p. 29) and “extinguishes lanterns” (p. 119). And after adopting and adapting Marxist motifs, Adonis wonders, “Will a new people rise anew in the fields of opium and qat? Will a new wind blow against the sand?” (p. 199). Thus without evoking the word “Islam” but by referring instead to its metonyms (moon, lanterns, sand, Imamate), Adonis’s secularity expunges the religious as illusory (“fields of opium and qat”), which obstructs his reaching for what is real. It would be unduly restrictive to limit an understanding of the secular to statements that its proponents make about what religion is or where its place in society should be. Adonis’s enactment of the secular exceeds his disavowal of Islam and theistically driven life generally. His secularity—his formation of a modern self for whom the religious is the other—also resides in his turn to rhythms of prose, his crafting of a sovereign self, his promoting the ocular as an unrivaled vehicle of knowing, and his concepts of poetry.

C ONCLUSIONS

241

Adonis affirms in his writing a point that poets illustrate in my ethnographic interviews: the secular finds its way into the choice of literary form, and specifically to the choice of rhythm making its sounds. In his article titled “On the Prose Poem” (1960), which relied on a voluminous tome by the French literary scholar Suzanne Bernard (1959), Adonis compares the rise of the prose poem to the advent of a “new spirit.” Although he does not identify this new spirit as secular, which is what I have been proposing, he makes it unequivocally clear that the choice of rhythm is far from being simply an aesthetic one in the modern sense of the term. This new secular spirit infuses itself in the materiality of Adonis’s poem, its prose. If his taking rejection as his Bible may appear irreconcilable with his endorsement of a dominant (Western) literary form, it appears consistent with his wanting to avoid the need to patiently organize sounds. Prose does not require the patience that traditionally composed verse does. The latter demands a discipline, that is, a kind of patience for a traditionally authorized practice (measuring sounds) in a way that prose by definition does not. Adonis’s animosity toward the ethic of patience points to the secularity he fashioned through the prose form in Arabic poetry. For again the secular has in part to do with the kind of self that these poets either vindicate or repudiate: its freedom or submission; its oneness or its fragmentation; and its allocations of virtues and vices. It follows, then, that a poet whose secularist affi liations demand that he shed any piety toward “the moon” (Islam) should also reject one of its foundational ethical practices: the virtue of patience (sabr). Mehyar says he “stoned the face of patience and resignation” (p. 136). So fervent is Adonis’s ethics and politics of rejection in Songs that with an admixture of Marxist and Nietzschean sensibilities, he neglects to distinguish between patience that serves the ruler and patience that serves the ruled. His categorical equation of patience with acquiescence to domination places him in a perilous complacency with dominant modern liberal-secular ethics whose projects of freedom have no tolerance for the idea of patience as a form of power. Patience becomes the immoral interruption of a secular morality, interrupting its dominant sense of power and freedom. And so Adonis, a subject of dominant modern morality, divests from the concept of patience the power of self-deferral and self-mastery. Thus a patient self, a fossilized virtue in Adonis’s secularity, is pitted against a sovereign self, thought to be alone capable of willful action in the world. Stillness stands for sterility.

242

C ONCLUSIONS

Arabic and other etymologies attest to the difference between the demands of “prose” and “verse,” revealing the different kinds of patience required by acts of writing prose and of versifying. In Arabic, nathr (prose) connotes dispersion; nazm (composition) connotes measurement and regulation. This is not to imply that prose poetry does not demand fortitude whereas traditional verse does. In fact, a modernist poet is likely to speak about the discipline required by ideas, images, or internal rhythms in composing a poem. Yet the shift from rhythms living in what Walter Benjamin calls “the fabric of tradition” to what modernist poets call “internal rhythms” involves shifts from accountable and accessible public standards to private and idiosyncratic standards, if to any standards at all. Rhythms cease to be what one does and instead migrate into the interiority of what one feels. Thus Nietzsche’s observation about modern morality extends to liberality— as an inflection of its secularity—in the rhythms of modern poetry. Were he to diagnose contemporary poetry, he would probably notice that just as everyone in the morality of secular modernity is capable of feeling moral or mastering moral language, everyone in the field of modern poetry is capable of generating personal or idiosyncratic rhythms or of feeling them. What kind of feeling self arrives in this secular condition whereby prose poetry repudiates traditional practices of patience and versifying? In addition to “stoning patience,” two attributes of the secular self predominate in Adonis’s articulation: its freedom and its fragmentation. Adonis seeks freedom in relation to rhythm; what he does with sounds is inseparable from what he takes as the contours of his self, the space of its freedom. He pits modern poetry against the traditional, whereby the subject of the former enjoys a freedom of which the latter is deprived. When he contrasts traditional verse to the prose of modern poetry, he thus pits submission against freedom. Following Baudelaire’s espousal of prose rhythms, which was in turn adopted by the poets as discussed in the previous chapters, Adonis (1960, pp. 77–79) advocates, “In a prose poem there is music, but it is not the music of submission to old canonized rhythms, . . . rather it is a music that responds to the rhythms of our wavy experience and new life. . . . A prose poem by nature rejects external restrictions . . . [and] ready-made molds and rhythms imposed from the outside. . . . Hence the danger of the prose poem. It is dangerous because it is free.” Versifying annuls freedom secularly conceived. The autonomous individual to whom the secular Adonis aspires finds that the rhythms of verse, those “external” restrictions, undermine his autonomy,

C ONCLUSIONS

243

that is, freedom. If traditional poets like those presented in the “Song” chapters attained their freedom by internalizing verse, to whose sovereign meter they submitted, to whose rhythms they assimilated, Adonis’s secularity repudiates this submission. He supplants the sovereignty of meter with self-sovereignty that becomes a synonym of his secular self. He announces this idea when he uses bahr, which can mean either “sea” or “meter,” to express his status as sovereign over meter. Recall his words that open this book: “I give my steps their form and tell the sea to follow me” (1971, p. 147). Poets of modern secularity cannot afford to surrender to meter’s authority. As modern subjects following Kant’s demand for human maturity, they have a freedom that takes individual autonomy as a prerequisite; their freedom equates self-surrender with selfcessation. Adonis alludes to an affinity among forms of poetry, freedom, and society. In his work, the citizen of the poetic republic appears to be remarkably congruent with the republic of national citizens. The prose poetry of a modern society whose dominant paradigm of freedom is tantamount to aggrandizement of self-autonomy leaves little or no room for surrender (repudiating the sovereignty of the self) as a viable ethic of freedom. He articulates the affinity between the secular (as a social condition) and a corresponding freedom within poetic form through a dual dynamic of arrival and withering. As the subject of an atrophied culture where prose’s arrival fi lls the void that atrophy creates, Adonis (1971, p. 119) writes, “O Form befitting our dying do march forward.” Th is ushering of the prose poem as an emancipatory arrival in Adonis’s writing can be found in the work of other prose poets whose vocabulary simulates the political doctrine of secularism. These poets describe their disavowal of traditional poetry as their attainment of a historical consciousness that rebels against the sacredness of poetry and the holiness of its forms and devices. The “disenchanting” language secularizing poets deploy serves to illustrate how the attainment of a sovereign self by prose poets simulates the sovereignty of nation-states, a simulation that serves as another site of Adonis’s secularity. When describing what he and others were seeking to accomplish by founding the journal Shir in the late 1950s, Adonis noted, “All poetry in the Arab world in this period was either traditionalist or nationalist. . . . What we were trying to achieve was a rediscovery of the self, against the tribe, against the umma, against all these ideological forms of culture” (quoted in Shatz, 2002). Note how Adonis’s rediscovery of the self unfolds against codes—tribal

244

C ONCLUSIONS

and religious communities (aspects of Arab tradition and history)—while “the nation” does not make it to his list of targets to resist. His rediscovery in opposition to “others” shares an affinity with the sovereignty of the modern nation-state, whose ideological forms of culture he does not find it necessary to undermine. His transcendental identity as a citizen (either of the nationstate or the globe) is attained by stripping away par ticu lar nonnationalist identities (namely, tribal and religious). Adonis even quotes the German poet Hölderlin in the epigraph to his Songs to remind readers that the poet is “that awakening foreigner who falls on us and creates people.” This is a conception of a poetic self as distinct and self-sufficient, one who is capable not only of living but of creating life itself, from above. Adonis creates himself in the image of the nation-state, itself entangled in a secularizing history that delegitimizes divine sovereignty. His Songs go on to expand the space of resemblance between the working of the nation-state and the secularity of his poetry. In this state in which belief retreats to the private realm and politics is abandoned to the politicians, he sequesters poetry in a personal and transcendent provenance: I shall remain for I am self-fenced (p. 41). I am a foreigner and foreignness is my homeland (p. 89). I bear witness to poets residing in a nameless land. . . . I exit and bear witness to poetry (p. 213). Adonis’s sovereignty is thus established by his claim to a land (a land of foreignness) and by fencing the poetic self within it. His vision rejects reality outside poetry as illusory and transient while attributing depth, authenticity, and imperishability to his fenced self. The sovereignty given to the poetic self extends to its truth forms. The truth of the poetic self becomes the only one that merits his recognition. This is demonstrated by his borrowing the syntax of the Islamic shahada (attestation of faith). The conjugation of ashhadu (“I bear witness”) comes from the Islamic sediment of Arabic. The act of shuhada (attestation) as evoked by Adonis constitutes in Islam the necessary first and sufficient act for admission to the community of Muslims. However, the truth that he singles out as deserving attestation belongs to the sovereign and autonomous field of poetry. This autonomy is vital to attain the kind of freedom (to which Adonis aspires) that thrives on fragmenting that which is whole, damming up that which is fluid.

C ONCLUSIONS

245

Adonis’s freedom fragments the concept of human action and makes the sight of its oneness opaque. Familiar names of this fragmentation from the storehouse of secularism include “division of labor,” “specialization,” and “differentiation.” One of the ways to understand the working of the secular in Adonis is to observe how it compartmentalizes the wholeness of self into autonomous faculties engaged in disconnected truth formations. For example, a fragmentation of human capabilities occurs in Adonis’s notion of rhythm. Markedly like modern notions of disembodied ethics, politics, or belief, Adonis relocates rhythm outside the realm of bodily action. He transmutes rhythm from the public and practicable training of the ear into an ephemeral realm of “wavy experiences” (1960, p. 77). Just as he conceptually segregates submission from freedom, and rhythm from a practice in the body, he also segregates the human faculties of hearing from seeing, rather than considering all as part of a multisensory complex for truth formation. The legitimacy of the ear as a vehicle for receiving, announcing, or searching for truth vanishes within as it had outside poetry. Seeing becomes the distinct synonym for knowing. For example, a primary struggle ensues in Songs between good and evil. In the course of this struggle, and as befits a modern self, Adonis identifies the secular as the locus of knowing and points to the price of losing that position. Conveying the view that belief, whether in gods, God, or Satan, interferes with reason, Adonis (1971, p. 51) declares, “I chose neither God nor Satan / both are a rampart / both close my eyes.” Note that God and Satan shut eyes, not block ears. We see here how Adonis’s secularity cannot be confined to irreverent imagery or rejection of religious belief. To treat it as such is to superficially count religion as singularly about belief and to sever religious belief (by making it closer to “opinions”) from traditions in which they are practices that operate on how faculties of the self are conceived, cultivated, and garnered in relation to formations of both human subjects and their truths, unraveling belief from the fabric of living. Adonis further denigrates the ear as a legitimate participant in formations of truth and being by consigning it to tarab, a state of rapture brought about by music. Identifying traditional rhythms by the name of the medieval mathematician and grammarian who invented Arabic prosody, al-Khalil, Adonis (1960, p. 75) writes, “The al-Khalili rhythm is a physical feature of Arabic poetry. This feature is for tarab [musically induced ecstasy] in the first place. As such, it presents a pleasure to the ‘ear’ much more than it serves thought.”

246

C ONCLUSIONS

Thinking as separate from and incompatible with hearing indicates a reordered hierarchy of senses. Adonis relegates to the eye the sovereignty traditional poetry has relegated to the ear as a participant in truth formations. This much is evident in his description of his “professional” tools, “With crumbs I write the poem” (p. 211), as distinct from the act of composing the poem, “To the alphabet of rain I wed the ink” (p. 214) and “I take clouds to be my notebooks and ink” (p. 169). The ink and notebook signal a poetry steeped in literacy. Promoting a mode of truth in which literacy (and the immediacy of vision) prevails, Adonis’s Songs demand to be read, not heard (the invisible deferral of sound). Naming them “songs” becomes a nominal tribute to a world of hearing that once brought access to truth. When sound ceases to be a viable vehicle of truth formations, the poet is largely left with the possibility of only paying homage to it, as occurs with Adonis’s choice of title. In its ability to segregate religion from life and to segregate human faculties from each other, the secular has largely consigned truth to the realm of the visible. Truth has lost its other home in the invisible. Adonis reorders and segregates the senses and favors the visual in contrast to, for example, a Quranic mode of inquiry with a porous multisensory complex that merges variegated sensorial receptions or activations of truth. For example, the Quran reproves those who refuse to use all their finite senses to inquire about the oneness or wholeness of existence, who fail to see, speak, and, of course, listen. Unlike a nonsecular epistemology wherein learning involves giving credibility to all the senses and even admits their inability to reach out to the whole of truth beyond them, in Adonis’s secular world knowing becomes predominantly allied with reading, reading with seeing, and seeing with truth, which poetry can access in ways that religion has all but lost. Adonis (1996, pp. 19–20) grants poetry a sovereign, self-sufficient realm that exists in the beyond: “There is no function for creativity but creativity.” Th is is not to imply that he is promoting detachment from community. Indeed, he says to his public in the Songs, “I am knotted to your soil” (1971, p. 57). Yet the way he is “knotted” is exactly what marks his secularity, and more specifically the secular quandary inhabiting his work. He wants on the one hand to “release the Earth and imprison Heavens,” yet he goes on to start his “own Heavens at the end of Heaven” by erasing the page recording the near, more familiar heaven (p. 28). He thus supplants one form of metaphysics, the theistic, for another, the secular modern. He admits, “Any rebellion that does not deal with metaphysics is conceited and temporary” (1996,

C ONCLUSIONS

247

p. 37). His dealing with metaphysics surely does not lead him to deny its existence in his work, as is the case in the self-image of academic or political secular languages claiming detachment from any and all metaphysics. His clear foray into metaphysics in fact helps convey the secular quandary: Adonis’s Songs view religion as the place of the “supernatural” but then await a secular poet who “falls on us.” His Songs allow in poetry what they disallow in religion. Adonis’s work thus illustrates how the secular, when it contingently operates as a form of power in the modern era, fragments human action into autonomies, which secular partisans invariably identify and justify in the name of specialization, professionalism, division of labor, or differentiation, thus normalizing its forms of reality. Each autonomous realm within secular reality emerges as a fiefdom of eternity with its own forms of truth and transcendence. When separated into disciplines, for example, these autonomies inhibit a vision of the oneness of human action by delineating forms of knowledge and practice that each claims for itself, a repository of sovereign truth (aesthetic, philosophical, historical, social, ethical, economic, psychological, legal, political). And because this inquiry sought, as a point of beginning, to question the secular’s claims for self-sufficiency, I hope that the quandary of the modern secular has by now become clear: it erects ramparts that it then also ruptures. This is in part why I close this book by stressing that the secular cannot entirely name a power. It also signals a frailty, one that is commonly forgotten among the semantic sediments that have persisted within this ancient concept during at least two millennia of its evolution. In pre-Christian Latin, saeculum signaled life’s finitude and the invincibility of death. The secular marked the frailty of presence (such as human mortality and human perception) that has ironically turned forceful in the modern era. The secular has come to claim to be more real than religion (recall Freud’s “illusion” and Marx’s “opium”), whose absence the secular depends upon, which it simultaneously denies as deficiently real, or not real at all. If indeed the secular lacks a fi xed historic identity (not always having been a constantly desacralizing force), and if its rise in the ser vice of domination is distinctly modern, then the possibility opens up to remember that in its beginning, the secular was a mere marker of finitude. It announced and accepted the fact of death. Although this study has explored paradoxes in the modern working of the secular, for just this par ticular secular apparition seems to inhabit the world

248

C ONCLUSIONS

Arab poets have sought to establish, this focus should not ignore an ancient tension still reverberating in the secular’s conceptual history. Already in the secular’s Roman antiquity—an ignored cornerstone—the secular reverberated in the contestation between its proclivities: to fragment on the one hand and to mark the frailty of finitude on the other. In order to sense this ancient tension in the secular one must go beyond its modern chatter about the religious; one must even dig below its Christianity. What is required is a tracing back, as it were, down the branches and trunk of the conceptual tree which the secular has climbed, to loci antecedent to modern questioning of its conundrums, such as its claims for self-sufficiency as a form of life and its simultaneous denial of and dependency on the religious. To think fully through the secular demands sensing the frailty buried under its claims of sovereignty: how it migrated from Roman to Christian theologies into its modern stand for domination (as in state sovereign power), fortified by it its own “intractability” (Agrama, 2010, p. 499). Fortunately, traces remain of that frailty the secular once announced. If alertness to finitude enables a sense of the oneness underlying the plurality of forms of human action, as apprehended by those who in Plato’s allegory exited the cave and at last saw the sun itself and loved truth in its entirety, fragmentation then obstructs such a view, generating illusions, shadows, images, and reflections. A critical and comparative inquiry into the secular during any given age must attend to when and where a certain proclivity prevails over another, as reflected in al-Ghazali’s words in the previous chapter on how the balance of power tips toward “images” or tips toward “meanings,” and allows the visibilities of the world to detach from and prevail over its invisibilities. Perhaps in our studying the proclivity of the secular to announce finitude, it can ironically recover that which its modern career has obfuscated: the reality of human limitations and life’s fragilities, including the fact of death. In facing death and putting aside the secular’s cluttering the religious, we can also confront anew the question of death’s relation to freedom. Once its conceptual beginnings in antiquity are adequately weighed, might the secular help in facing a religious question Plato relayed from Homer: Will anyone who in his heart fears death be free?

R E F E R E NCE M AT T E R

NOTES

Introduction 1. From the poetic anthology Aghani Mehyar al-Dimashqi (Songs of Mehyar the Damascene; Adonis, 1971, p. 147). 2. For a clear and brief discussion in Arabic of views on poets and poetry in the Quran and prophetic tradition, see al-Quseibi 2006. Although the Prophet Muhammad’s sayings (sing. hadith) include denunciatory statements of poets and at times of poetry, one appears to value poetry: “In eloquence there is charm and wisdom in poetry” (al-Quseibi, 2006, p. 19). In the Western anthropological tradition, the affi nity between knowledge (gnosis) and poetry in Arabic has been registered by Messick (1993, p. 27), who observes that the versification of scholarly writing (including in legal texts) was “a principal channel for the assertion of scholarly views and rebuttal as well as for the display of erudition and ingenuity.” 3. To clarify my evocation of “tragic sensibility” I cite Scott’s (Scott and Hirschkind, 2006, p. 146) words about Asad’s work, in which that sensibility helps to “lever us out of the dead ends in which we have been led by the resolute one-sidedness of structure/agency debates that consumed so much of the 1970s and 1980s. The tragic sensibility pulls both against the idea of a self-sufficient subject as well as the idea of an over-determined one; it both affi rms the enlightened rationality of the subject’s potentially transforming relation to history and doubts the assumption that a selfmastering self can ever entirely transcend the past’s reach into—and hold on—the present. In short, tragic sensibility . . . is a paradoxical one.” 4. This is, for example, the definition with which Qudama ibn Jafar (a.d. 872–948) opens his Naqd al-Shir (Assaying of Poetry). See Preminger and Brogam (1993, p. 83) and Abbas (1971, p. 191). 5. It is largely because of the narratives upon which this book draws, which repudiate assigning to art the task of responding to social conditions, that I find it more useful to speak of modernity rather than modernism. In addition to responding, modernizing poets also advocate social conditions, and do so in the name of modernity (hadatha). Studies of modernism (as in modernism itself) acknowledge forces of disintegration and fragmentation in modern cultural reality, whereby the latter ultimately stands for an “artistic movement” or an “aesthetic response” to modern

252

NOTES TO INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER 

social conditions. For instance, Harvey (1989, pp. 24, 99) notes that modernism is “a complex and often contradictory affair” in which “a troubled and fluctuating aesthetic response to conditions of modernity [is] produced by a par ticu lar process of modernization.” 6. The annulment or at least doubt of the adequacy of the notion of the author belongs to criticism of modern notions of individual sovereignty and self-sufficiency as evident in poststructural writings. Famously, for example, Barthes (1977, p. 1) contests “the prestige of the individual,” which he locates within capitalist ideology; he declares: “[When] the author enters into his death, writing begins.” Similarly Foucault notes that the notion of the author “constitutes a privileged moment of individualization in the history of ideas, knowledge, literature, philosophy and the sciences” (Foucault, 1988, p. 101). 7. In this sense my account is closer to that of Schmidt (2000) and others (Hirschkind, 2006; Messick, 1993; Jay, 1993; Finnegan, 1988) as it departs from apologetic accounts that establish evolutionary and unilinear shifts from premodern orality to modern literacy (e.g., Ong, 1967). While retaining Ong’s insights of the religious (and by extension the secular) as effective grounds for exploring cultural hierarchies of the senses (see Ong, [1982] 2002), my work finds par ticu lar resonance with Schmidt’s (2000, p.  22) notion of “multisensory complexity,” whereby the secular appears to work on rearranging the hierarchy of the senses and their sovereignties, not simply constituting a shift form orality to literacy. 8. In addition, some readers may wonder why this study does not focus on poetry in modern Islamic politics. Although such poetry was included to some extent, my attention has been on movements in the literary scene writ large rather than its use by par ticu lar social or political movements. Furthermore such poets are on the periphery of this scene, in part due to its secular partisanship. 9. See Abu-Deeb (1997) for the influence of Adonis on modern Arabic poetry.

Chapter 1 1. Taylor provides one of the most sentient accounts of modern secularity. This is not the space to elaborate on its various insights or deficiencies. Suffice it to say that his Latin Christian commitment to tell the story of the secular through the notion of “an immanent frame,” which could redeemably tolerate equality of various beliefs and unbeliefs, does not accommodate what I call “a forgotten sediment” of the secular as a marker chiefly of temporal finitude irrespective of beliefs (or lack thereof). This sediment of the secular is evident in its Roman beginnings and informs my inquiry about conditions of living the oneness or fragmentation (“differentiation”) of poetic practice. Thus, whereas in Taylor’s (2007, p. 356) account poets and artists of the secular world are paradoxically depicted as occupying a middle space of neutrality and “undefined spirituality” while remaining in a zone of “unbelief” between religion and materialism, in this study the poets are engaged in a struggle (and not neutrally) to establish a decidedly secular (and autonomous) spirituality opposed to a religious and organized one they at once privatize (fragment) and invalidate, yet depend on.

NOTES TO CHAPTER 

253

2. Like Taylor, Owen (2001) and Viswanathan (2008) demonstrate the secular’s lack of self-sufficiency within the literary field by questioning its juxtaposing faith as inimical to reason or imagination. However, unlike Taylor, their focus on occult movements shows that a secular condition engenders a move toward “alternative,” “esoteric,” and “heterodox” beliefs defined by mixing faith with reason, rather than by “unbelief” or “undefined spirituality,” as Taylor holds. Despite their useful sensitivity to different orders of belief (e.g., orthodox vs. heterodox, elite vs. popular), Owen and Viswanathan do not avoid some entrapments of secularism’s language in their analyses, in which the secular is thought to be less secular because its literary adherents do retain beliefs, however unusual. I contend that a literary field’s maintaining an enduring belief does not necessarily detract from that field’s secularity. Such formulations that cede to the self-image of the secular as inimical to the spiritual lock one into an unnecessary stance that the “search for a spiritual dimension to life” continues, as in Owen (2001, p. 73), or to implicitly equate religion with doctrinal orthodoxy, as in Viswanathan (2008, p. 475), whereby art emerges as a realm retaining “dissenting aspects of belief.” 3. The phrase “secular quandary” is derived from the work of Connolly (1999). 4. Other examples for the articulation of this quandary whereby the secular both denies and depends on the religious occur in facets of Kantian-based politics: in relation to alleged disavowals of metaphysics, the fraught public-private division, and acts to discredit the visceral (Connolly, 1999, p. 32); in North Indian music’s secular pedagogy that relies also on religious rituals (Bakhle, 2008, p. 259); in French state policy’s working in a theological fashion to secure its secular identity in response to the challenge of headscarf wearing by female Muslim students (Asad, 2006, p. 40); and in the relation of “scientific” social theory to a theology it seeks to replace (Milbank, 2006, p. 3). Whether the secular lodges itself in poetic techniques, intellectual sensibility, philosophical postulates, social theory, or state ideologies, it acquires its identity and secures its presence through a relation to the other that it has come to name and depend on in the modern era as “the religious.” 5. That one of the basic conceptual sediments of the secular has to do with dividing and separating helps us recognize its modern career as a fragmenting power, authorized by a sociolog ical thesis that espouses “differentiation.” The endurance of this early sediment fi nds verification in the fact that of the three elements of the sociolog ical thesis of secularization (privatization of religion, decline of religion, and differentiation of societal spheres) only the third remains defensible today, as in Casanova (1994), who speaks of the contemporary world as witnessing “religious deprivation.” 6. Elsewhere also, Taylor (2009, p. 1153) speaks of secularism as a space of toleration of choices of belief and unbelief alike and as a space of managing diversity of belonging and enduring a free and popu lar sovereignty, since secularism is about “protecting people in their belonging.” 7. Sources that I have found helpful for a general understanding of the relation between secularism and the modern nation-state, from different and even opposing positions, include Agrama, 2010; Asad, 2003, 2006; Casanova, 1994; Connolly, 1999;

254

NOTES TO CHAPTER 

Gorski and Altinordu, 2008; Madan, 2004; al-Messiri and al-Azmeh, 2000; Nandy, 2004; Tambiah, 2004; and Taylor, 2004. 8. Viswanathan (2008, p. 456) attributes the relatively meager interest in secularism in literary studies partly to its self-definition as secular and to the perception of secularism as an “inaugural moment” of literature in the West. 9. For a highly effective presentation of the relevance of and debate over secularism in literary studies, especially concerning romanticism, see Jager, 2008. Within literary studies a debate prevails over the secular identity of romanticism (e.g., Abrams, 1971; Ryan, 1997; Ulmer, 2001; Priestman, 1999; Roe, 1997; White, 2006), criticism (Said, 1983; Mufti, 2004; Hart, 2000; Apter, 2004; Robbins, 1994; Gourgouris, 2004; Pecora, 2006), and the literary itself (see in addition Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, 1988). 10. My reference to 1492 as a point of departure for modern secularity in the West draws on various accounts, including those by Arendt ([1958] 1998) and most recently by Anidjar (2006), Casanova (2010), and Mahmood (2010), who posit it as a beginning for the advent of modern secularism via Eu rope’s expansion throughout the world, not, as typically presumed, from an autonomous interior, that is, the Reformation. 11. Markus (1970, p. 122) points out that in his rebuttal of Donatists, St. Augustine positioned two simultaneous orders of reality, church and world, sacred and profane, as existing within saeculum, a time and place lasting until the final judgment. 12. Blumenberg (1985, pp. 19–21) contends that by using it to name transfers to a realm outside the cloister, Canon Law made a metaphorical usage of secularization, a term it borrowed from theology of discernment and crisis (krinein), which later evolved as a sociological theorem variously applied to mean any alienation of a substance from its theological origin. 13. This is one of the ways Kant ([1784] 1996, p. 58) defines the Enlightenment. 14. Useful for my thinking about the relation between the worldly or the immanent and the secular has been Arendt’s notion of the word “alienation.” With it Arendt ([1958] 1998, p. 320) registers her refusal to accept a pervasive conflation of these two notions: “Whatever the word ‘secular’ is meant to signify in its current usage, historically it cannot be possibly equated with worldliness; modern man at any rate did not gain this world when he lost the other world, and he did not gain life either, he was thrust back upon it.” 15. For helpful reviews of the sociological debate on secularization, see Casanova, 1994; Gorski and Altinordu, 2008; Swatos and Christiano, 1999. 16. My interest in the secular as living in the senses takes its cues primarily from the work of Asad (2003) and Connolly (1999) and thus joins a wider line of inquiry in anthropology and beyond that is interested in the cultural arrangement of sensorial hierarchies. Instructive accounts of the cultural fashioning of the senses, particularly regarding the debate about the ways modern secular power fragments the senses into separate sovereignties, whereby the ear cedes to the eye, include Ong, [1982] 2002; Schmidt, 2000; Feld, 1996; Stoller, 1989; Connerton, 1989; Serematakis, 1994; Jameson, 1981; and Hirschkind, 2006.

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

255

17. For a very useful discussion of the primacy of autonomy in liberal formulations of freedom (positive and negative alike), see Mahmood, 2005. 18. Taylor (2007, p. 57) speaks of this dynamic in a much wider scope when he refers to humans, not just poets, as having “an irrepressible craving for eternity” that leads them to try to “invest [their] little parcel with eternal significance, and therefore divinizing things.”

Chapter 2 1. Specimens that illustrate the spatial spread of the classical qasida can be found in Sperl and Shackle (1996). For its resilience even in Guantánamo prisons, see Falkoff, 2007. 2. Abdul-Rahim Mahmoud (1913–48) was killed (martyred, in Palestinian parlance) in a battle fighting Jewish forces at Shajara, a destroyed village near Nazareth, where he met the end he presciently wrote about in a poem titled “Al-Shahid” (“The Martyr”): “the land wore the redness of his blood and the sirocco wore his scent . . . he slept to dream eternity, and to taste from it the sweetest of visions” (1985a, p. 43). 3. In the matrix of complex relations that exist between poetry and the Quran, it should also be borne in mind that one’s understanding of the Quran is aided by knowledge of Arabic poetry. Th is understanding is evident in a hadith (saying) by the Prophet Muhammad: “In poetry there is wisdom, so if something perplexed you in the Quran, seek knowledge of it in poetry.” See Lisan al-Arab by Ibn Mandhur (1955, p. 410). 4. Useful histories and anthologies of Palestinian poetry that I relied on include al-Yaghi, 1981; al-Kayyali, 1975; Kanafani, 1968; al-Asad, 2000; al-Khattib, 1968; and Jayyusi, 1992. 5. See, for example, sura 36 (verses 69–70), sura 37 (verse 36), and sura 69 (verses 40–42), where, in this last instance, the disbelievers are reminded, “(40) Behold, this [Quran] is indeed the [inspired] word of a noble apostle, (41) and is not—however little you may [be prepared to] believe it—the word of a poet, (42) and neither is it— however little you may [be prepared to] take it to heart—the word of a soothsayer” (trans. M. Asad, [1980] 2008). 6. For a narration of this encounter in English, see Nicholson 1923, p. 74. The Prophet Muhammad was thought to deliver saja (unmetered rhyme). Identifying certain patterns in the Prophet’s speech as saja is precisely what provides the more technical ground for refuting the accusation that he was a poet. Traditionally, Arabs admitted an utterance into the poetic canon only if it was metrical and rhyming. 7. Muhammad al-Maghout, for example, was a leading figure in Arabic prose poetry and the 2005 recipient of the Sultan Bin Ali al-Owais Cultural Foundation’s Prize for Poetry. He was described by a fellow Syrian literary critic in al-Nur, a Syrian communist newspaper: “Not the child of any ideology, his writing focuses on the individual and the experience of freedom where the angel and Satan reconcile in the search for redemption. He disrobes sacredness of everything. For sacredness in his [writing]

256

NOTES TO CHAPTER 

is a monist state contrasted with a dynamic and pluralist condition, beyond the priestly, the ritualistic and the tribal so poetry may become a purely secular [dunyawi] art” (al-Qadamani, 2007, p. 15). 8. On this shift in Europe Hannah Arendt ([1958] 1998, p. 52) writes, “Modern enchantment with ‘small things’ though preached by early twentieth-century poetry in almost all European tongues, has found its classical presentation in the petit bonheur of the French people. Since the decay of their once great and glorious public realm, the French have become masters in the art of being happy among ‘small things,’ within the space of their own four walls, between chest and bed, table and chair, dog and cat and flowerpot.” 9. See “The Poets” (sura 26, verses 224–27): “(224) As for poets—[they too are prone to deceive themselves, and so, only] those who are lost in grievous error would follow them: (225) Art thou not aware that they roam confusedly in every valley [of words and thoughts]? (226) And how they [so often] say that which they do not do? (227) [Most of them are of this kind] save those who have attained to faith, and do righteous deeds, and remember God unceasingly, and defend themselves [only] after they have been wronged and [trust in God’s promise that] those who are bent on wrongdoing will in time come to know how evil a turn their destinies are bound to take” (trans. M. Asad [1980] 2008). As for the Prophet himself, in the few sayings (sing. hadith) attributed to him about poetry, there are both those that condemn and those that condone poetry and poets; some of them are recorded by Ibn Rashiq (1963, 1: 27–31). 10. See the entry under shir in the Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language (Klein, 1987, p. 655). Also consider the biblical Shir ha-Shirim (Song of Songs). 11. Some examples of the poem as song include the Prophet’s poet, Hassan bin Thabit’s famous bayt (verse line): “Taghanna fi kulli shirin anta qailuhu / innana alghanaa li” (Sing all the poetry you utter, for singing is the sphere of poetry) and Ibn Rashiq (1963, vol. 1, p. 23) describing the encounter between the poet Kab bin Zuheir and the Prophet Muhammad by saying “anshada Kabun qasidatahu” (Kab sang his poem). 12. In modern Western philosophical tradition, Heidegger’s (1975) Language, Poetry, Thought comes close to this premodern sense of poetry in Arab history as enabling truth. He articulates a notion of aesthetics (in contrast to Kant) as “sensuous apprehension” etymologically apparent in the Greek aesthesis. 13. The Quranic revelation (sura 2, verses 11–12) evokes this very coalescence between knowledge and poetry as it describes the hypocrites’ responses to the calls of faith: “(11) And when they are told ‘do not spread corruption on earth,’ they answer ‘but we are improving things.’ (12) Oh verily, it is they, they who are spreading corruption but they know it not [la yashuru]” (trans. M. Asad). 14. Al-Jahiz (“the one with bulging eyes”) was a medieval phi losopher and polymath, born in Basra (a.d. 775); there he sold bread and fish prior to his rise to fame as the “master of Arabic rhetoric.” After producing works such as Al-Bukhala and Al-

NOTES TO CHAPTER 

257

Bayan wa-l-Tabyin, he lived to his nineties, when, as tradition has it, stacks of books fell on his already ailing, paralyzed body. 15. For example, Ibn Khaldoun (1984, p. 570; died 1406) notes in his Muqaddimah that “among the varieties of discourse, poetry was noble for Arabs as they made it the diwan [repository] of their knowledge and histories.” 16. These lines refer to Arabic poetry’s traditional classification into aghrad, that is, its “objectives,” as found in both classical (Ibn Rashiq, 1963; Ibn Tabataba, 1982) and modern (Dayf, 1961) discussions of them. 17. Nietzsche (1997, p. 123) had Zarathustra hear just that advice: “Do not go to man. Stay in the forest! Go even to the animals! Why do you not want to be as I am—a bear among bears, a bird among birds.” 18. A full translation of the Lamiyya appears in Stetkevych (1986, pp. 378–81), on which my partial translation is largely based. 19. For a brief discussion of how al-amudi as a name is given, inaccurately and degradingly, to traditional poetry in the modern era, see Abbas (1992, p. 27). 20. A notable recovery of this Greek inseparability of “doing” and “knowing” within modern Western philosophy occurs in Heidegger (1975, p. 59), as he observes that “techne signifies neither craft nor art, and not at all technical in our modern-day sense, it never means a kind of practical performance. The word techne rather refers to a mode of knowing. . . . Techne, as knowledge experienced in Greek manner, is a bringing forth of beings . . . out of concealedness.” 21. I take the phrase from the Aristotelian-oriented work of MacIntyre (1984, pp. 11–12), who speaks of emotivism as “the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitudes or feelings, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character,” which implies that “anyone and everyone can thus be a moral agent, since it is in the self and not in the social roles or practices that moral agency has to be located” (p. 32). 22. A version of this eleventh-century manuscript was located and edited independently in Saudi Arabia and in Egypt around the same time in the mid-1980s. I am referring here to the manuscript that was found in the Ahmadi Mosque of Tanta, Egypt, and edited by Sayyid al-Bahrawi (1997). 23. In his introduction to al-Akhfash’s manuscript al-Bahrawi (1997, p. 22) notes that the mobile sounds belonged to the Mutazilite school of philosophy, in which silence (sukun) was taken as the origin of all sounds and letters. The ancients did not work with the concept of syllables. On that point and for a short but detailed introduction to Arabic poetry and prosody, see Preminger and Brogam, 1993, pp. 81–94. 24. In modern scholarship of Arabic prosody, there have been attempts to establish alternatives to the al-Khalili metrical system (e.g., Abu-Deeb, 1974; Ayyad, 1968). 25. Among anthropologists there is an exposition in theoretical linguistics of this prosody (Caton, 1990) and a Bakhtinian reading of its ideology by Taminian (2001). The former strives toward a universal theory of meter, and the latter toward an ethnographic reading of Bedouin ideology, as manifest in prosody through the names used to describe meters.

258

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

26. Translation by Khaled Furani largely based on S. K. Jayyusi and C. Middleton’s translation found in Sperl and Shackle, 1996, pp. 87–89. 27. For a discussion of how the genres of maqamat and muwashahat relied upon the classical qasida, see Sperl and Shackle, 1996. 28. For instance, the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaika ([1962] 1989, p. 17) refers to English poetry as having an influence on her modernizing Arabic poetry during the 1940s. 29. As the senior Palestinian poet Abu-Hanna (1994, p. 107) puts it, “That time was a time of kufr [denying the truth] of everything . . . leaders and leadership, speeches and words; masks were torn asunder and fell, all that land on which we stood collapsed into the abyss of the earth, all that was established and relied upon broke like a hollow reed.” 30. A dismayed Nietzsche (1997, p. 127) captures in his own poetic idiom the secular predicament among modern poets: “They all muddy their water that it may seem deep. . . . I cast indeed my net into their sea, and meant to catch good fish; but always did I draw up the head of some ancient God.”

Chapter 3 1. This sense of threat the nascent state felt from the presence of the remaining Palestinians found expression in the Histadrut-aligned daily, Davar, in an article written by a young Shimon Perez, later Israel’s president. According to a scathing editorial in 1962 by the then twenty-year-old Mahmoud Darwish, Perez had garnered for that article specimens from subversive Palestinian poetry at the center of this discussion. Perez called it a “poetry of daggers” to justify the continuation of military rule over the Palestinian population within the newly founded Jewish sovereignty (Darwish, 1962). 2. Resilience in and through poetry in the aftermath of colossal and irretrievable cultural collapse was, of course, famously echoed by Hannah Arendt. She, whose memory retained a significant portion of German poetry after she relocated to the United States, points to the durability of language and especially poetic language in the wake of devastation. In response to a question about what remains after the vanishing of a Europe that she knew prior to World War II, she said, “What remains? The language remains. . . . The German language is the essential thing that has remained and that I have always consciously preserved” (2000, pp. 12–13). 3. As Arabic printing presses became even more rare following the 1948 collapse of Palestinian institutions, Abu-Khadra (2000) counted only eight poetry publications in the first decade, all printed in the one remaining city of Nazareth; the first among these anthologies was by George Najib Khalil, published in 1953. 4. An English-language discussion of these festivals recently emerged in the biography of the Palestinian poet Taha Muhmmad Ali by Hoffman. In her discussion of their significance, she (2009, p. 258) claims, “The mass nature of the festivals made it possible for the people to stand up—or, more literally, talk back. . . . It is no exaggeration to say that in their time . . . these festivals made poetry the most important

NOTES TO CHAPTER 

259

means of political expression for the hemmed-in, cut-off Palestinian (sic) citizens of Israel.” 5. In order to account for the prevailing of the poetic mode of protest over other literary forms among Palestinians inside Israel, Zureik (1979) refers to Fanon, who holds that poetry is the fi rst to appear (prior to short stories, novels, and plays) in the sequence of a literary articulation among a people whose native culture is colonized. 6. For further exposition on the life of Rashid Hussein, see Boullata and Ghossein, 1979. 7. Kanafani objects to the idea that “resistance literature” is an ancillary phenomenon in Palestinian cultural life. Instead he sees literature as constitutive from the beginning of the twentieth century and as an extension of the very armed struggle that brought about figures like Izz al-Din al-Qassam. Other sources on literary production under Israel’s first military rule include Touma, 1956; Abu-Hanna, 1994; alQasim, 1975; Ashrawi, 1978; Boullata and Ghossein, 1979; el-Asmar, 1975; Hoff man, 2009; Moreh, 1967; Qahwaji, 1972. 8. Describing the effects of Kanafani’s introducing that literature from inside Israel to the Arab world, Hoff man (2009, p. 31) writes, “These Palestinians had generally been suspected by Arabs elsewhere for having, it was thought, ‘collaborated’ by staying put and accepted citizenship in the Jewish state. And though Kanafani’s rhetoric was fairly programmatic and hostile to Israel . . . his book marked an important turning point in that it did not blame those Palestinians who remained in the land. Rather, Kanafani summoned a host of convincing details to make his case for the way the difficult conditions in which the poets and other Arabs in ‘occupied Palestine’ who had lived since 1948 had given birth to a new sort of writing.” 9. El-Asmar describes Zionist efforts at rivaling communist and nationalist politics in the literary scene. Toward that purpose, he notes that in 1958 Mapam founded the Arabic Book Company and the al-Fajr newspaper, and the Histadrut founded “independent” writers unions, none of which gained much credibility or longevity among Palestinian writers within Israel (1975, pp. 54–68). See also Hoff man (2009) for further discussion of literary activity by al-Mujtama, a group of noncommunist and “independent” poets. 10. It is important to note that although communist Palestinians orga nized under the League of National Liberation as early as 1944, communist politics broadened its constituency among Palestinians within Israel only after the internal split of the party into two factions, a Zionist one (Maki) and an Arab-based one (Rakah). See Jiryis, 1976. 11. The cultural politics of the ICP among Palestinians can be gleaned from the following party declaration, cited by the party leader and historian Emil Touma (1956, p. 10) in his essay on national Arab culture within Israel: “Our party struggles to develop a free culture among the native Arabs of Israel and against repressing Arab culture, especially its democratic foundations, and against the government’s efforts, in Arab schools, to disseminate disparagement towards Arab tradition whose values

260

NOTES TO CHAPTER 

we want to prepare for serving the working class and the Arab masses, for serving Arab-Jewish brotherhood, and for augmenting the cooperation between progressive men in the field of Arab and Jewish cultural production.” 12. Jiryis (1976, pp. 185–96), a founding member of al-Ard, recounts how this movement emerged in part out of tension between nationalists and communists among Palestinians inside Israel. See also Zureik (1979, pp. 172–75) for a brief history of the al-Ard movement. 13. Editorial. (1951), al-Jadid 4, pp. 1–2. 14. An example of this identification with struggles against racism and colonialism in other parts of the world can be seen in the publication in al-Jadid (9; September 1961, p. 52), of Langston Hughes’s “Negro” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” in Arabic and a poem titled “In Memory” (“Dhikra”) dedicated to Patrice Lumumba by the leading poet Salim Jubran (2; February 1962, p. 31). 15. This rule gained its official and formal legality only in June 1922, when the League of Nations approved the British Mandate of Palestine. 16. Although al-Jadid sponsored its first poetry festival only on March 8, 1958, in Haifa, the first and not yet massive poetry festival seems to have taken place in March 1955; see al-Qasim 1975, p. 52. This gathering was not initiated by the “extreme” communist poets, as they were often described in Israeli discourse. Rather, that earlier conference brought fi fteen “independent” poets (one of them a Jew) who distanced themselves at the time from public involvement with the politics of pan-Arab and Palestinian liberation. This much is evident in the conciliatory title of the conference and the association it sought to establish, Poets of Arabic in Israel, as mentioned in critical commentary on this conference by the prominent Iraqi Jewish scholar Sasson Somekh. Active in communist politics, Somekh sent al-Jadid (6; June 1955, pp. 56–57) a letter in which he rebukes the organizers, Michel Haddad and Suheil Muaamar, for excluding communist poets from this event, held in Nazareth in the summer of 1955. 17. Al-Jadid first appeared in October 1951 as a monthly literary supplement to alIttihad (Union), the Arabic newspaper of the Communist Party. In 1953 al-Jadid was licensed as a separate periodical. 18. In his discussion of the rise of “literature of combat,” which “calls on the whole people to fight for their existence as a nation,” Frantz Fanon (1965) refers to a similar relation between Algerian storytellers and their public. By resuscitating “inert episodes” into a new life, these storytellers, who were previously “stereotyped and tedious to listen to,” reinvigorated their public and in turn caught the attention of French colonial authorities, which began to systemically arrest them in 1955. Palestinian poets at these festivals, like the Algerian storytellers, seem to have revitalized a calcified and profoundly acoustic form by widening its reception among a native public and thus extended to the traditional qasida a life it began to lose elsewhere in the modernizing Arab world. 19. On the eve of that May Day in 1958 the poets Hanna Abu-Hanna and Tawfiq Zayyad and the novelist Emile Habiby were put under “administrative detention” (Hoff man, 2009, p. 281).

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

261

20. On the spread of these poems as lyrics for songs throughout the Arab world, see Massad, 2003. 21. Mandelbaum Gate in Jerusalem was used as a tunnel for smuggling books by Christian Palestinians on pilgrimage to East Jerusalem, under Jordanian rule until 1967. A less well known source for the entry of Arabic books into Israel was the migration of Iraqi Jewish writers who brought with them the latest that Iraqi poets had produced. See the story of Somekh bringing in books (Hoff man, 2009, p. 207). 22. In testimony published in al-Jadid, a leading modernist figure in Arabic free verse, the Egyptian Salah Abdul-Sabour (Abdul-Sabour, 1965), recounts that Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad, as president of Egypt’s Poetry Committee, declined to nominate any free verse works for the prizes of this committee, which was under the auspices of Egypt’s High Council of Arts and Literature. The subsequent president of this committee, Aziz Abaza, went even further, submitting a memorandum to the director of the High Council requesting the issuance of a government ban on publishing any works of free verse in any state-sponsored literature. 23. This quick shift in poetic practice resonates with Kanafani’s (1981, p. 39) observation that “daily Israeli challenges shortened the childhood of art works in the occupied lands, in contrast to modern Arabic literature, which spent a long time discussing the extent of arts’ commitment.”

Chapter 4 1. In seeking to trouble a historicist notion of time as “progress,” Benjamin (1968, p. 254) writes, “To be sure, only a redeemed mankind received the fullness of its past— which is to say, only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments.” 2. Although qasida is sometimes made to refer strictly to the classical poem or to the genre of classical poetry in English-language scholarship (e.g., Sperl and Shackle, 1996), in this study, as in contemporary Arabic poetic parlance, qasida means a poem irrespective of its historical time or formalistic features. 3. The left ist and Arab nationalist Beirutian literary journal al-Adab (Literature), edited by Suhil Idriss, introduced socialist realism, particularly the notion of “commitment” (à la Sartre), in 1953 (see Badawi, 1985, pp. 12–13). 4. Ahmad Shawqi (1869–1927), a leading neoclassicist poet from Egypt, was known also as “the Prince of Poets,” a title he earned in 1927 in Cairo. Antara bin Shaddad (died a.d. 614) was a poet-knight-slave of an Abyssinian slave mother in the Abs tribe. His amorous and chivalric poetry constitutes a rich oral epic tradition (sira) around the Arab world, and his poem dedicated to the cousin he loved, Abla, belongs to the pre-Islamic body of canonical poetry called al-muallaqat (the hanging ones), which are said to have been hung on the walls of the Kaaba in Mecca. 5. The Al-Aqsa Mosque is in the Noble Sanctuary (al-Haram al-Sharif); it is better known in the Western world as the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. 6. The basmala refers to the Islamic invocation of God whose content is “In the name of God the Most Merciful and the Most Compassionate,” which the pious are

262

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

induced to utter (silently or aloud) prior to the start of any licit action, ranging from writing to sexual intercourse. 7. The United States also served as the focus of the last poem (when the stage was, whimsically, open to all on the second and last day). However, this verse was a parody, not a eulogy. Two poets, a woman and a man, performed a zajal (colloquial form of poetry) in a local Bedouin dialect. The father cajoled his daughter, Munifa (a burlesquename for Monica), to go and visit President Clinton in the hopes of accomplishing what the Arab rulers failed to do: “advance the Palestinian cause.” 8. The first Palestinian Poetry Festival took place a year earlier in Kufr Manda in the Galilee. 9. Suq ‘Ukaz is an ancient, annual fair of commercial and literary pursuits, strategically located southeast of Mecca on the Spice Route of Western Arabia. 10. Both the lives of Antara bin Shaddad and Abu Zayd al-Hilali are recorded in ancient epic poetry that is recited and occasionally sung, albeit decreasingly so, in the contemporary Arab world. For an ethnographic attention to sira (epic) such as by Abu Zeid al-Hilali, see Dwight, 1995. 11. Learning began at Al-Azhar University in Cairo in a.d. 988. To this day it attracts Muslim students from around the world. 12. Diwan here means “a poetry collection,” which is another way this word functions in addition to meaning “a historical repository.” 13. A kuttab is a religious school for learning mainly the Arabic language and recitations of the Quran.

Chapter 5 1. Tamadur bint Amr (575–646) is known in literary history as al-Khanasa, from the tribe of Banu Sulaym. Her brothers, Sakhr and Muawiya, died in tribal feuds. Sakhr stood by her materially and morally on many occasions in her life. She invokes his prominence by comparing him to a mountain on whose peak stands fire in line 17, which is not cited in this excerpt. 2. During my fieldwork I regularly found poets conflating “prosody” with “meter” in their speech, a terminological conflation bespeaking a conceptual confusion in their field. They made the former stand for the latter, although prosody is the conscious knowledge and mastery of identifying meters. In this sense, a poet can be a great master of meters, but not a prosodist. A poet of this sort, upon hearing a verse line, can quickly detect if the meter is “broken” or “aligned,” but may not know the meter’s name or its classification in the entire metrical system, as a competent prosodist would. 3. I learned from poets during my fieldwork that the average cost of publishing a poetry anthology is $800 to $1,000 (generally for a thousand copies). 4. Muallaqat is the pre-Islamic poetic canon composed of seven to ten odes, which are said to have hung on the walls of the Kaaba in Mecca and inscribed in golden script. Hence muallaqat (the hanging ones) and mudhabbaat (the golden ones) are two of the names by which they are known.

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

263

5. Both Abu Nuwwas (a.d. 757–810), who died in Basra, and Abu Tammam (a.d. 804–45), who died in Musil, are of canonical standing in the history of Arabic poetry during the Abbasid rule (749–1258). The Abbasid caliphate (“succession”), the center of power in the Islamic empire, was based in Baghdad. Its collapse under the Mongol attack is commonly taken to mark the end of the classical era in Arab culture and literature. 6. Dhyab bin Sakhr al-Aamiri, letter, al-Quds al-Arabi, January 18, 2003, p. 18. 7. Michel Saba, “The Philosophy of the Stone,” Fasl al-Maqal, January 11, 2002, pp. 20–21. 8. Sheikh Raid Salah is the founder of Al-Aqsa Foundation and a leader in the Islamic movement in Israel. His poetry appears in the literary section of the Islamic movement’s weekly publication, Sawt al-Haq wal Hurriya. 9. According to tradition, the pre-Islamic poet Tarafah (born a.d. 564) was killed at the age of twenty-six by the ruler of Bahrain to whom he carried the letter ordering his execution from the local king of Hirat, against whom Tarafah had composed a lampoon. The quality of Tarafah’s work was considered so high, in spite of his young age, that his composition of 104 verse lines belongs to one of the pre-Islamic muallaqat. 10. Turki’s stance on the label “poet” did not preclude the second Palestinian Poetry Festival, held in the town of Tamra, from honoring him in absentia as a shair raid (pioneering poet). 11. Wadi Najran, currently part of Saudi Arabia, is an oasis in the southwest bordering Yemen. 12. It should be borne in mind that many Russians are practicing Christians of the Orthodox Church, yet they count as “Jews” and thus help the state retain its desired demography.

Chapter 6 1. Sdoud is the Arabic name for a village where now sits the Israeli town of Ashdod. 2. Muawiya Bin Abi Sufyan was the first of the Umayyad caliphs. He ruled the Muslim empire from Damascus between 661 and 680. After his reign, the caliphate became a hereditary position. 3. Marx (1977, p. 64) put it thus: “Religion is only the illusory sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself.” 4. That the very concept of shab (the people) belongs to a modern-secular era is evident in the previous and now obsolete terms in Arabic to denote societal hierarchies, such as amma (commoners) and khassa (elites), prior to modern encounters with the modern nation-state, nationalism, and socialist realism. 5. In Arabic: “yahiqqu li-l-shairi ma la yahiqqu li- ghayrihi.” 6. Anat, a Canaanite goddess of fertility, sex, hunting, and war, is considered the consort of the major Canaanite god, Baal. Her name and worship of her traveled to the religions of neighboring civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Greece.

264

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

7. Yabus and Ore-Salem are considered the pre-Israelite, largely Canaanite names for Jerusalem. Al-Quds literally means “the holy” and is the current Arabic name for Jerusalem. 8. The prose poet Zakariyya Muhammad warns about the reliance on Canaanite motifs: “I have to say that the ideology of Canaanism is based on an illusion. Although it might be useful as paraphernalia to artistic creativity, it is a losing ideology when arguing with the Zionist movement. For Canaanism concedes a priori that the central thesis of Zionism is correct: namely, that we have been engaged in a perennial conflict with Zionism and hence with a Jewish presence in Palestine since the Kingdom of Solomon and before. Those who adopt Canaanism are actually seeking a Palestinian presence that precedes the claims of Jewish nationalism. If Israel goes back a thousand years before Christ, then Palestinians go back much earlier than the ancient Hebrews, but then one cannot assume that Zionism is a European movement, propelled by modern European contingencies” (in Tamari, 2008, p. 99; originally in Muhammad, 2003). 9. In mid-August 2001, missiles from an Israeli helicopter killed the PFLP leader Mustafa Abu Ali in Ramallah. In retaliation, the Israeli tourism minister, former general, and Moledet (Homeland) Party founder Rehavam Zeevi was shot in a hotel in West Jerusalem.

Chapter 7 1. Nazik al-Malaika ([1962] 1989, p. 61) claims that in her anthology Shazaya wa Ramad (Shrapnel and Ashes), published in 1949, she was the first to call for free verse. The appearance of her first free verse poem in December 1947, titled “Cholera,” coincided with the appearance shortly thereafter of another free verse poem by a fellow graduate of Baghdad’s Teachers Training College, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926–64). The latter published Hal Kana Hubban? (Was It Love?) in the form of free verse, also at the end of 1947, thus causing a commotion over precedence in shir hurr (free verse; see DeYoung, 1998, pp. 190–91; Jayyusi, 1977, p. 558). Yet there are studies claiming that Arabic verse of irregular rhyme and feet was produced already in mid-1924 (see Moreh, 1976, p. 205). 2. In fact in “Like Almond Blossom or Beyond” Darwish (2005) cites the following words by the classical phi losopher Abu Hayyan al-Tawhidi (circa a.d. 930–1023) in an epigraph: “The best of speech . . . is one whose form [suratuhu] is built upon measuring that is akin to prose and on prose that is akin to measuring.” This is one way by which to understand why Subhi Hadidi (2009, p. 20) called Darwish nathir al-wazn (the proser of measure) upon identifying the thin but steady receptivity Darwish had toward the prose poem. 3. When introducing my project to Hussein al-Barghouti (presented in the next chapter), upon hearing my disinterest in the literary merits of poets angrily responded that I must uphold criteria to distinguish between Shakespeare and trash. 4. The Law of Return, enacted by Israel in 1950, enables people whose Jewishness is sufficiently certifiable (even if among Indians from the Amazon) to govern the mobility of non-Jewish natives.

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

265

5. The Moroccan House of Poetry lists Jacques Derrida on its board of trustees. 6. The Barmakids are a family of secretaries and wazirs of the early Abbasid era (a.d. 749–1258). See Bearman et al., 2006.

Chapter 8 1. Kabir (big, great, or grand) is one of the most commonly used adjectives in Arabic for referring to master poets. 2. A Saint-Simonist engineer and social scientist, Charles Lambert, who was also director of the Ecole Polytechnique, reported to Muhammad Ali Pasha, the governor of Egypt between 1805 and 1848, “What Egypt like the rest of the Levant has never possessed is order” (cited in Mitchell, 1991, p. 33). 3. Instructive to my thinking about the notion of tradition is the work of MacIntyre (1984). In contrast to Edmund Burke’s pitting tradition against reason and conflict, he notes that “traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead. . . . A living tradition then is a historically extended, socially embedded argument and an argument precisely in part about the goods which constitute that tradition” (p. 222). 4. Abu Nuwwas al-Hassan Ibn Hani al-Hakami, an Arab poet of Persian descent on his mother’s side (circa a.d. 755–813), like al-Mutanabbi (discussed in Chapter 2), lived in the Abbasid period (a.d. 749–1258), specifically during the time of Harun al-Rashid and al-Amin. See Meisami and Starkey, 1998, vol. 1, pp. 41–430. 5. Auerbach’s ([1929] 1969) title is translated as Dante: Poet of the Secular World, whereas in the original German Auerbach employs irdischen, which is closer to “earthly” than “secular.” In any event, he notes that Dante was the first to configure what classical antiquity had long configured very differently, and the Middle Ages not at all: man, not as a remote legendary hero, not as an abstract anecdotal representative of an ethical type, but man as we know him in his living historical reality, “the concrete individual in his unity and wholeness” (pp. 174–75). 6. Plato wrote in the Laws, “For the beginnings, because it contains its own principle, is also a god, who, as long as he dwells among men, as long as he inspires their deeds, saves everything” (quoted in Arendt, 2006, p. 205). 7. Al-Zir Salim is a sira, an indigenous Arabic genre that can be translated as “folk epic.” Alternating between prose and verse, this par ticu lar sira narrates the chivalrous life of Abu Lila al-Muhalhil (aka Adi bin Rabia). 8. The Mules’ Court (Sahat al-Hanatir), a hub of transportation on mules, now also has the Hebrew name Kikar Paris (Paris Square), which it obtained after a French firm introduced underground transportation to the city in the late 1950s. 9. Eid here refers to one of the two Muslim holidays: either Eid al-Adha (the Sacrificial Feast), on the day pilgrims sacrifice in the valley of Mina, or Eid al-Fitr (the Feast of Breaking the Fast), on the first day after the fasting month of Ramadan. 10. Strictly speaking, a military ordinance barred my entrance to any locale on the West Bank as well. Yet during my fieldwork Ramallah was never the sealed-off place that Gaza had become.

266

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

11. I have not been able to ascertain what exactly appeared threatening to them about my laptop. Perhaps it was the presence of Arabic icons on the computer screen; my disclosing to them that I had enabled the Arabic language on my computer at Birzeit University on the West Bank; or a collection of poems (although not on my laptop) they perused, which was given to me by the literary critic Sayyid al-Bahrawi, whose cover depicts a boy confronting soldiers, and whose dedication names Muhammad al-Durrah, killed in Gaza by Israeli soldiers in September 2000, while seeking protection in his father’s arms. 12. It is worth recalling here the attention Heidegger gave to the relation between modernity, measuring, and poetry. When Heidegger (1975) wrote about the need for poets “in the age of the world’s night,” he saw poetry as an act of measuring and sensed how strange the concept of measuring (which of course is irreducible to the sonic) in poetry had become. This is why he writes, “Why should this measure, which is so strange to us men of today, be addressed to man and imparted by the measuretaking of poetry? Because only this measure gauges the very nature of man” (p. 223). 13. Suq, meaning “marketplace” in Arabic, connotes that which is base and unrefined; hence the pejorative adjective suqi, meaning “plebeian” or “vulgar.” 14. Al-Ayyam is a daily out of Ramallah, which has been seen as aligned with the increasingly discreditable PNA. 15. During one visit in May I learned that the Israeli army had raided student fi les and found a safe with several thousand Israeli shekels in the basement of the Ministry of Education and Culture in Ramallah. 16. Mahmoud Abu Hashhash is among the thirteen contributors. 17. Idiomatically this saying means “to each his own.” Lila is a reference to a character from the romantic folk epic of Majnun Lila (Lila’s Madman). The name Lila is invoked here to mean “a loved one.” 18. Salah Abdul Sabour (1931–81) was also a dramatist who served as an undersecretary of state for culture, and is most famous for his poetry collection, People of My Country, and a play, The Tragedy of al-Hallaj, translated into English as Murder in Baghdad. 19. See, for example, Rajaa al-Naqqash’s (1992, pp. 441–61) response to Adonis’s writing.

Chapter 9 1. Manaqish are Palestinian pastries made of zatar, a blend of local hyssop, roasted sesame, sumac, and olive oil. Shai is “tea” in Arabic. 2. In Palestinian colloquial Arabic al-Sibat means “arcade.” 3. Natzeret Elite (Hebrew for “Upper Nazareth”) is a Jewish settlement town on a hill that once was part of the city. An increasing number of Arabs, facing a shortage of space in the old city, have moved to Upper Nazareth, where they live side by side with Jews, many of whom came from Ethiopia and Russia. Bringing people identified as Jews from abroad has been part of successive Israeli government projects to effect a “Jewish character” in the Galilee, to “Judaize” it. 4. The name Edmoun is an Arabic rendition of the English name Edmond.

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

267

5. A dunum is a measure of land that equals approximately 1,000 square meters. 6. The “Iraqi way” refers here to the free verse (shir hurr) movement that erupted out of the Teachers Training College in Baghdad, starting in the late 1940s with the poet Nazik al-Malaika (born 1922) and two fellow Iraqi poets, Abd al Wahab alBayyati (1926–99) and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926–64). 7. In Sahih Muslim, book 4, hadith 1416. 8. For example, at O’Hare Airport on September 27, 2001, George W. Bush implored his citizens to “fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010927 -1.html (retrieved on March 21, 2010). New York City mayor Rudolph Guiliani echoed his sentiments: “Show your confidence. Show you’re not afraid. Go to restaurants. Go shopping.” http://nationalreview.com/articles/205017/giulianis-finest-hour/deroy-mur dock (retrieved on March 21, 2010). 9. Th is is a reference to the fact of diglossia in Arabic, as written in one form (fusha) and spoken in another (amiyya).

Chapter 10 1. These words appeared in a dedicatory essay Baudelaire wrote to Arsene Houssaye, editor in chief of La Presse, by way of introducing his Le Spleen de Paris (quoted in Benjamin, 1968, p. 165). 2. In Songs of Mehyar, for example, Adonis (1971, p. 98), writes, “I tell the dream to be my bread” and “I prayed for madness to lead us.” 3. Immediately following this reflection on scholars Nietzsche (1997, pp. 126–27) writes about poets: “Ah, how weary I am of the poets! . . . They have learned from the sea also its vanity: is not the sea the peacock of peacocks?” 4. Based on his stay in Seattle, al-Barghouti also produced, and later a friend translated into English, an autobiography, Al-Daw’ al-Azraq (The Blue Light), documenting his encounter with madness and with the “philosophy of void,” which he learned from a Turkish Sufi master while living in the city. 5. For Heidegger (1975, p. 219), authenticity of presence demands measuring one’s place in the universe: “Measure-taking is no science. . . . This measure-taking has its own metron, and thus its own metric.” 6. Contrasting the prose poem with what he calls “the poem of measurement” (wazn), Adonis (1960, p. 83) notes that the prose poem “as an expression of our deepest aspirations [presents] the clandestine rejections and obscure spiritual shifts in our lives, and the face hidden in shade and darkness, which is more complex, healthier and richer. It abundantly emanates from our human condition with no aim but to surpass it. This fayd [deluge] is our ark and flood at once.” 7. Jinns are suprahuman spirits in Arab Muslim tradition. 8. The first two wadis (valleys) that Al-Barghouti mentions are Palestinian, while the last, Wadi Abqar, is the ancient name of a place in Arabia thought to be the source of poetic inspiration, as the muses were for the ancient Greeks.

268

NOTES TO CHAPTER 

9. Shisha in demotic Egyptian is the word for “water pipe” or “hookah.” 10. Al-Niffari was a renowned mystic from Niffar, ancient Nippur in Iraq who died circa a.d. 967. 11. Unsi al-Haj (born 1937) is a Lebanese poet who, like Adonis, iconoclastically championed the cause of prose poetry through his collection, Lan (Never). 12. Auerbach ([1929] 1969, p. 179) attributes to Dante the discovery of the “historical time world” and a sense of “self-sufficiency of earthly life [that] spread to all of Europe.” 13. It is helpful to remember here that a few lines after Heidegger (1975, pp. 221–22) asserts that “the measure-taking is what is poetic in dwelling,” he goes on to add, “To write poetry is measure-taking, understood in the strict sense of the word, by which man first received the measure for the breadth of his being. Man exists as mortal.” 14. In relating the influences to which he was exposed throughout his life, Salim mentioned Abd al-Minim Tlima, who told him, “In Egypt there are more than a million political leaders but not five poets,” and goes on to comment, “Th is was a great sentence coming as it does from a person who is a politician to begin with” (recorded in Yousef, 2001, p. 76). 15. Libya fell under an Italian occupation in 1911 that lasted until 1943; during this period tribal resistance was famously led by Omar al-Mukhtar, who was born in 1862 and hanged in 1931. 16. He was speaking of Umm Aseel of Arrabah village in Israel, whose son, Aseel, a high school student, was shot by police in fall 2000. 17. The very first sign I glimpsed at the border was a poster bidding farewell to the late King Hussein as “The Master of All Men.” Later I saw posters proclaiming: “The Most Decent of Kings and King of the Decent.” 18. Al-Manasra told me that while a student in Cairo in 1968 he was the first poet working with the then iconoclastic free verse to receive the Egyptian universities’ prize for poetry. 19. Another pioneering poet whom I interviewed about his role in the resurrection of the Canaanite past in modern Palestinian poetry is Ahmad Hussein, brother of the legendary Rashid Hussein from Musmus village within what is considered Israel. His turn to Canaanite history is evident in his anthology Anat: Or the Departure from Hijiri Time (1983), on the premonotheistic goddess of fertility. 20. “Tranquilizing language” is my rendition of al-Manasra’s phrase, lughat tabrid, which in a more literal translation is “cooling language.” Al-Manasra uses the phrase to describe a language in poetry that extinguishes the flames of resistance against Israeli occupation, Arab corruption, and American hegemony. 21. Kamal Nasser, a spokesperson for the PLO, was murdered in Beirut. Bullets riddled his mouth and right hand, fired from a death squad reportedly led by the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who is said to have dressed up as a woman with a blond wig for the occasion. 22. Faqih (pl. fuqahaa) in Islamic legal terminology is one knowledgeable of and specialized in Islamic doctrine, namely, a jurisconsult. The past form of the verb, faqiha, means “understood” or “knew.”

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

269

23. Whether the absence of page numbers in this collection of poetry is a deliberate decision by the poet or an unintended error is unclear; only chapters are numbered. At any rate, Tawfiq Sayigh (1923–71) was born in southern Syria and raised in Tabariyya of the Galilee, studied at Harvard, and taught Arabic literature at Cambridge and Berkeley. 24. Abu ali is an idiomatic phrase meaning strong and manly. 25. This essay was originally published under the title “War Butlers and Their Language” and is available at http://mouridbarghouti.net/mouridweb/english/essay /war20butlers.htm.

Chapter 11 1. To the question that he raises, “What are poets for in a destitute time?,” Heidegger (1975, p. 91) offers the following: “Poetry, as the authentic gauging of the dimension of dwelling, is the primal form of building. . . . Poetry is the original admission of dwelling” (p. 227). 2. Fasl al-Maqal, March 29, 2003. 3. Unlike the other poets in this ethnography, I refer to Taha Muhammed Ali by his sobriquet, Abu Nizar. He became a poet late in life and was known by this common appellation rather than “poet” or “teacher” as most poets are known. Abu Nizar passed away in 2011. A biography has appeared in English: Hoff man 2009. 4. Jesus’s birth is said to have been announced in the location of that church. 5. Al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani (“the genius of Dhubyan”) is the sobriquet of Ziyad ibn Muawiya (circa a.d. 535–604), a pre-Islamic Christian poet of the Banu Dhubyan tribe near Mecca. 6. This is a reference to the aforementioned pre-Islamic poet Antara bin Shaddad. 7. Ibn Rushd (a.d. 1126–98) the phi losopher, theologian, and scientist, is better known in the West since medieval times as Averroes and as the “commentator of Aristotle.” 8. The Arabic version, Tabariyya, comes from Tiberius, the second Roman emperor. The Hebrew name of the lake is Kenneret. 9. Jahiliyya is a reference to the pre-Islamic age. Jahala and yajhalu are verbs denoting the state of ignorance. The age of ignorance, summarily called jahiliyya, connotes the time of ignorance of monotheism, which prevailed among the Arabs (save in the Christian and Jewish communities) before Islam. 10. He is referring to the classical pre-Islamic poet-slave Antara bin Shaddad. 11. The saalik poets, Abu al-Alaa in Syria (a.d. 973–1057) and Abu Nuwwās in Iraq (a.d. 756–810), are of canonical standing in classical Arabic poetry. 12. Wahhabi (more commonly transliterated as Wahabi) is used here as in the West pejoratively to mean “reactionary.” The name derives from Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab (1703–92), who led a movement of Islamic reform calling for the purification of Islam from all accretions by applying only the teaching of the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad, and the Righteous Ancestors (al-salaf al-salih). His doctrine gained

270

NOTES TO CHAPTERS 

support when he struck an oath of mutual support in 1744 with the emir of the Saudi dynasty, Muhammad bin Saud, the father of the fi rst king of Saudi Arabia, King Abd-al Aziz bin Saud, during a time of hostility with the Ottoman Empire and other dynasties of Arabia. 13. Saadi Youssef (born 1934 in Basrah), exiled in London, is known also for translating Walt Whitman, Constantine Cavafy, and Yannis Ritsos, among others, into Arabic. 14. From Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire ruled much of the eastern Muslim world from 1452 to 1917. 15. As a prose poet, Adonis (1960, p. 80), says about the subject of rhythm in this new form, “The world of music in the prose poem is [a] private, personal one. . . . The poet of measurement in this regard is one who accepts the rules of the ancients and adopts them while the poet of prose is rebellious and rejecting. He is not a pupil. He is a creator and master.”

Chapter 12 1. Waqf is a Muslim charitable endowment commonly in the form of land to be used for communal purposes. 2. An instance of a classic articulation in the Muslim tradition of death’s relation to visibility and invisibility of the world can be found in the work of the twelft h-century jurist, phi losopher, theologian, and mystic Muhammad Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. Working with terms that today would translate as “form” or “image” (sura) and “content” (mana), al-Ghazali (1992, p. 67) writes in his Resuscitation of Religious Sciences, “Images in this world prevail over meanings; meanings are in the interior of images; in the otherworld, images will trail behind meanings and meanings will prevail.” 3. About the nation-state and its media Nietzsche (1968, pp. 45–46) has the following to say: “I, the state, am the people . . . the state, where the slow suicide of all—is called ‘life.’ Just see these superfluous ones! . . . Sick are they always, they vomit their bile and call it newspaper.” 4. The word sura in contemporary Arabic is closer to the English “picture,” though it traditionally meant “form” or “image.” 5. Ghazal in Arabic is a reference to a genre of amatory poetry. This word traveled to other languages, such as Farsi, Pashto, Urdu, and Turkish, in which it acquired a distinct sense of referring to a poem’s form, not theme. 6. This evocation comes from Heidegger’s (1975, p. 23) statement, “Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic experience of what they say without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation.” 7. The contempt Ramadan had for the state-sponsored book fair as “a cultural event” mildly resonates with Nietzsche’s (1997, p. 46) far more mordant denunciation: “Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture they call their theft—and everything becomes sickness and trouble unto them.”

NOTES TO CHAPTER  AND C ONCLUSIONS

271

8. See especially Heidegger’s (1975, pp. 213–29) account of the phrase “man dwells poetically.” 9. Interview with Maysoon Saqr, al-Quds al-Arabi, November 19, 2002, p. 10. 10. To thwart any assumptions about an inherent relation between a par ticu lar gender and an allegedly corresponding form, it is helpful to recall the life and works of Nazik al-Malaika, commonly known as the “mother” of free verse (see al-Naqqash, 1992, p. 213). Al-Malaika’s ([1962] 1989, pp. 50–65) retrospective account of her advocacy for free verse is articulated in national, not gendered terms. Moreover, the excitement she expresses for it at the age of twenty-four in the introduction to her Shazaya wa Ramad (Shrapnel and Ashes) ([1949] 1971) is nowhere evident in her later writing, when she warns against the “misleading features of free verse” and its “glittery emancipation” and advises, “Free verse should not completely prevail over our modern poetry because its meters are not suitable for all subjects” ([1962] 1989, p. 48). 11. To his interviewer, the Palestinian poet Muin Bseiso, Arafat claimed, “You know that I am completely weak when I face a poet. And you know that I am capable of having a journalist wait for one hour after another, but I can’t do that with the poets.” (Th is statement originally appeared in the Egyptian daily al-Ahali and was reprinted in al-Jadid, 1983, p. 32). 12. Heidegger (1975, p. 96) makes this point when he states, “The time remains destitute not only because God is dead, but because mortals are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality.” 13. I build on Connolly’s phrase describing the work of Nietzsche, Arendt, Foucault, and Deleuze as a “fugitive space of enchantment.” Regarding none of them as a secularist in the common sense of the term, Connolly (1999, p. 15) finds in their work a space for cultivating fugitive enchantment “lodged between theistic faith and secular abstinence.” Interestingly, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, and mostly Nietzsche were commonly read and even referenced by poets in the 1990s, thus raising the question of how their texts can be understood as concomitantly affi rming and undermining secularism. In Songs of Mehyar Adonis (1971) says, “I want to pray to anything that is ignorant of prayers” (p. 177). and later in the same anthology he adds, “Poetry remains with us, the sea and the dream remain with us too. . . . And dreaming I will walk away” (pp. 200, 204). 14. Nizar Qabbani (1923–98), a Syrian poet and diplomat, is renowned throughout the Arab world for a poetry that merges themes of love, erotica, and politics.

Conclusions 1. So pervasive has become the veering to prose in modern literary Arabic poetry that despite his commitment to measuring in verse, even Mahmoud Darwish can be found in its grip. For example, in his State of Siege he considers rhyme “unnecessary . . . a needless fly hovering over the meal” (2002, p. 31). 2. As a most recent testimony to the stature of Adonis in the Arab poetic scene, I quote the laudatory words extended to him by the Qatari ambassador in Paris, Mohammed al-Kuwari. As part of Qatar’s celebrations selecting Doha to be the

272

NOTES TO C ONCLUSIONS

capital of Arab culture for the year 2010, al-Kuwari awarded Adonis a prize for his contributions and told him, “You are a living legend of Arabic poetry. . . . You have never been traditional in creating your art.” See http://www.jehat.com/Jehaat/en/Poets /5-1-11.htm (accessed February 13, 2011). Given Adonis’s repeated failures to become the second Arab Nobel Prize laureate, after the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz, Charles McGrath of the New York Times referred to him as “a perennial favorite to win the Nobel Prize in Literature” and called him an “outspoken secularist.” See http:// www.nytimes.com/2010/10/18/books/18adonis.html?_r=1 (accessed February 13, 2011). 3. Responding to a New York Times reporter’s query about what he understood as dominant “didactic” poetry in Arabic, Adonis said, “It is a tradition, beginning with Islam, which introduced the ideological use of poetry to the world long before Communism.” The reporter goes on to describe him as “an outspoken champion of secular democracy and ferocious critic of orga nized religion” (Shatz, 2002). In the same report, the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, who took secularism as his creed, considers him “today’s most daring and provocative Arab poet.” 4. For a recent and detailed analysis of rhythmical structures in this anthology, including its measured portions, see Amal, 2007. 5. It is possible that Adonis took it upon himself to perform in the Arab world what he believed Nietzsche did in the West. At a 1961 conference in Rome on Arabic literature, Adonis reportedly complained that it was still difficult to question the fundamentals of religion and the existence of God, as had Nietz sche (Badawi, 1975, p. 234). MacIntyre (1984, pp. 258–59) notes Nietzche’s entrapments: “It will be to condemn oneself to that moral solipsism which constitutes Nietzsche’s greatness. . . . It represents individualism’s final attempt to escape from its own consequences . . . and we may therefore expect liberal individualist societies to breed ‘great men’ from time to time.” 6. See Hans Blumenberg (1985, pp. 19–21) on the native place of secularism within a Christian theology of “division and crisis” prior to its migration as a category that became external to theology. 7. Adonis left Syria, where he was born in the village of Qassabin near Latakia in 1930, after his imprisonment in 1955 for political involvement with the Syrian Nationalist Party. He relocated and became a citizen of the French former colony of Lebanon, which he then left for varied residences in Paris and Berlin. For a brief biographical introduction, see Ghossein (1971, pp. xiii–xix) and Abu-Deeb’s entry for Adonis in the Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (Meisami and Starkey, 1998). 8. The word ilah in Arabic denotes “god” with a small “g” as opposed to Allah (God). 9. Iram is a pre-Islamic town mentioned in the Quran (sura 89, verses 6–8). Both Adorno and Benjamin addressed the difficulty of understanding modern poetry, specifically the works of the French pioneer of this literary form, Baudelaire. While Adorno (1989) attributes this difficulty to the struggle of modern poetry to remain alive despite an individualist, “rationally organized,” and “demythologized” society, Benjamin (1968, p. 156) locates this difficulty within poetry’s struggle to retain an eye

NOTES TO C ONCLUSIONS

273

toward “complementary existence” despite the “standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses.” In contrast to Benjamin and Adorno, who also endorse Baudelaire’s lyrical subjectivity as the poet’s attempts to overcome crisis in modern modes of perceptions and modern individualism, respectively, I analyze Adonis’s work to examine predicaments of a secular presence, which Adonis wants to secure, not overcome. 10. Adonis’s reference to a “new spirit” resonates, of course, with Mikhail Bakhtin’s partisanship of prose as the immanent materiality of the novel, which the latter famously espoused. Bakhtin similarly valorizes the “novelistic spirit,” in contrast to an epic one, which he discredits as a “zone of absolute distance from reality.” While Bakhtin’s account of the novel as “an indispensable step in making possible free, scientifically knowable, and artistically realistic creativity in European civilization” (1981, p. 23) helps with formulating questions that attend to the epistemic implications of prose as a materiality, he nonetheless presents a number of irreconcilable positions in his account. Prominent among them is his claim that a dialogic principle structures the novel, endowing it with a distinct ability to appreciate difference, while simultaneously claiming that “a lengthy battle for the novelization of other genres began, a battle to drag them into zones of contact with reality . . . thus liberating [them] from all that serves as a break on their unique development” (p. 39). What respect for difference can be reasonably claimed by the novelistic spirit if it must “drag” other genres to contact with reality? It is precisely accounts like Bakhtin’s that compel my interest in the rise of prose in poetry as a powerful secular formation. 11. Recall the words of the Palestinian prose poet Zakariyya Muhammad: “Where is poetry? That is a very complex question. . . . There are no criteria at all that distinguish poetry from nonpoetry. . . . In Arab history, the issues were clear; the limits were meter and rhyme. . . . Poetry has melted into other arts, and other arts melted into poetry. So we cannot tell where the borders are. I personally feel when there is poetry, but cannot tell you why” (interview, Ramallah, 2001). 12. MacIntyre (1984, p. 236) defines virtue after the expulsion of Aristotelian and Christian teleologies: “It is not so much or at all the replacement of one set of criteria by another but rather a movement towards and into a situation where there are no longer any clear criteria.” Similarly, Asad (1993, p. 39) observes another dynamic of disappearance in religious training: “Discipline (intellectual and social) would . . . gradually abandon religious space, letting ‘belief,’ ‘conscience’ and ‘sensibility’ take its place.” 13. Similarly, as in the contemporary unfolding of Arab reality, a journalist critic saw this situation happening with Arabic poetry. His observation about the proliferation of poets also entails a testimony on its conditions: “We are struck when we scan statistics from [literary] publishers and associations about the number of poets in our Arab world. In this oppressed and unnerved geography, there is for every twenty thousand patients one physician and a few beds. Yet for every hundred citizens there is a poet, two novelists, three narrators, and twenty journalists. . . . What appears as a freedom or translation of the notion ‘let a thousand flowers bloom’ is in fact a chaos in the midst of neglect and desertion” (Khairi Mansour, Shuara al-Anabib [Test-Tube Poets]. al-Quds al-Arabi, February 17, 2007, p. 10).

274

NOTES TO C ONCLUSIONS

14. Recall, for example, the Egyptian prose poet Hilmi Salim: “As I matured, I realized that poetry is a human activity, something that people make and people change. The idea of sacredness in poetry collapsed. Poets have to develop it throughout history because people make language and people make poetry” (interview, Cairo, January 2001). 15. Taylor’s (2007) account demonstrates the relevance of (as well as his own ability to think about) the secular in terms of wholeness and fragmentation of human action, or rather self, into autonomous spheres—for the latter term (self) seems more at home in Taylor’s terminology as, for example, in his formulation of the secular as a move from a “porous” to a “buffered” self (e.g., pp. 37–43). The relevance of this tension between unity and divisibility of action to his understanding of the secular is tellingly evident when he speaks about one major accomplishment of the romantic period: the identification of beauty as the key element to restoring our lost unity (p. 359). However, the power of his “deeper account” (p. 4) is curtailed by a language that does not, as I noted earlier, take into account the Roman “depth” of the secular. Consequently Taylor narrates the story of a secular age as a move toward “conditions of unbelief,” “enclosed immanence,” the “eclipse of transcendence,” and “exclusive humanism.” This, I contend, is a language of secularism that itself needs to be questioned, first because it is bound to treat as an age that which has occurred and is bound to reoccur anytime humans conflate the immanence of the world with its transcendence, the absolute with the relative, or the finite with the infinite. The abundance of these conflations is the abundance of what is better known in theological quarters as “idolatry.” Second, it should be asked whether “exclusive humanism” remains humanism at all. Or does self-sufficient immanence remain immanence at all? Third, this depiction of the secular as “immanent frame” elides a language of inquiry into the secular as having to do with the wholeness or divisibility of human action, one that is further away from its modern hegemony. This language, though, evacuates our analytical lexicon when we analyze the secular in terms of a struggle between belief and unbelief or immanence and transcendence, rather than as a struggle of various ages between the wholeness and fragmentation of human action. 16. Quran (sura 2, verse 18): “Deaf, mute and blind, they will not return.” 17. Benjamin (1968, p. 224) refers to Mallarmé’s poetry as belonging to “the secular cult of beauty” in its calling for “art for art’s sake.” 18. Taylor (2007, p. 57) similarly speaks of an “irrepressible craving for eternity,” which in secular modernity takes the form of “invest[ing] our little parcel with eternal significance and therefore divinizing things.” 19. Writing from an Aristotelian position about the place of death in Homeric societies, MacIntyre (1984, p. 124) asserts, “The man therefore who does what he ought moves steadily towards his fate and his death. It is defeat and not victory that lies at the end. To understand this is itself a virtue; indeed it is a necessary part of courage to understand this.” 20. Both Gorski and Ong help with making the case that excavations in the conceptual antiquity of the secular can show its having an enduring meaning of finitude.

NOTES TO C ONCLUSIONS

275

Gorski and Altinordu (2008, p. 60) note that many layers of meaning, including ambiguities and contradictions, have accumulated in the secular’s conceptual history and that “there is little in the present definitions that was not anticipated to some degree in the historical definition.” Ong ([1982] 2002, p. 12) offers a more general remark on the history of concepts: “Concepts have a way of carry ing their etymologies with them forever. The elements out of which a term is built usually, and probably always, linger, somehow in subsequent meanings, perhaps obscurely, but even powerfully and often irreducibly.” 21. The forgetfulness of death in the modern secular imaginary, the attrition of an ability to sense its oneness with life, relates to Heidegger’s (1975, p. 96) line about modern subjects as “mortals [who] are hardly aware and capable even of their own mortality.” The political implications of this line of thought is further developed by Arendt ([1958] 1998, p. 55) when she speaks of “the almost complete loss of authentic engagement with mortality” in the modern age, which stands as testimony to the loss of the “public realm,” which she takes as the realm of politics and hence of freedom. At the same point in history, with Levinas-infused ethics, Bauman (1992, pp. 142, 134) writes, “Survival is reconfigured as my private matter and my private responsibility” since “death [is] an emphatic denial of everything that the brave new world of modernity stood for. . . . [It] has become unmentionable.” 22. In his later writings about ethical freedom, where power means mastery of the self by the self, not domination over others, refraining from abusing one’s power even if one could, Foucault (1988, p. 8) writes, “The risk of dominating others . . . only comes from the fact that one did not care for oneself and that one has become a slave to his desires. . . . If you know finally that you should not fear death, well then, you cannot abuse your power over others.” Mbembe (2003, p. 39) follows with his discussion of necropower, whereby death is “that space where freedom and negation operate.”

BIBLIOGR APHY

Abbas, Ihsan. 1971. Tarikh al-Naqd al-Adabi ind al-Arab. 4th edition. Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafa. ———. 1992. Ittijahat al-Shir al-Arabi al-Muasir. Amman: Dar al-Shorouq. Abd al-Minim, Ramadan. 2000. Gharib ala al-Aaila. Casablanca: Dar Toubqal lil-Nashr. Abdul-Sabour, Salah. 1965. Bayna al-Shir wa Lajnat al-Shir. al-Jadid (1), 29–31. Abrams, M. H. 1971. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton. Abu-Deeb, Kamal. 1974. Fi al-Bunya al-Iqaiyya lil-Shir al-Arabi. Beirut: Dar El Ilm Lilmalayin. ———. 1997. Conflicts, Oppositions, Negations: Modern Arabic Poetry and the Fragmentation of Self/Text. In I. J. Boullata and T. De Young (eds.), Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Literature. Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press. Abu-Hanna, Hanna. 1957. Lafta ila al-Shir al-Arabi fi Biladina. al-Jadid (4), 26–27. ———. 1994. Shiruna fi al-Khamsiniyyat. In Rihlat al-Bahth an al-Turath. Haifa: Al-Wadi, 101–16. Abu-Khadra, Fahd. 2000. Al-Bunya al-Shakliyya fi al-Shir al-Mahalli: Al-Marhala al-Ula. In M. Ghanayim (ed.), Maraya fi al-Naqd: Dirasat fi al-Adab al-Filastini. Kufr Qara, Israel: Dar al-Huda, 15–34. Adonis. 1960. Fi Qasidat al-Nathr. Shir 4 (14), 75–83. ———. 1971. Aghani Mehyar al-Dimashqi. 3rd edition. Beirut: Dar al-Awda. ———. 1992. Al-Shar wa al-Shir. Fusoul 11 (3), 66–70. ———. 1994. Language, Culture and Reality. In F. Ghazoul and B. Harlow (eds.), The View from Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic Literature. Cairo: American University Press. ———. 1996. Siyasat al-Shir. Beirut: Dar al-Adab. Adorno, Theodor. 1989. Lyric Poetry and Society: A Reader. In S. Bronner and D. Kellner (eds.), Critical Theory and Society. New York: Routledge. Agrama, Hussein Ali. 2010. Secularism, Sovereignty, Indeterminancy: Is Egypt a Secular or a Religious State? Comparative Studies in Society and History 52 (3), 495–523.

278

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amal, Mansour. 2007. Adonis wa Bunyat al-Qasida: Dirasa fi Aghani Mehyar alDimashqi. Irbid, Jordan: Alam al-Kitab al-Hadith. Anidjar, Gil. 2006. Secularism. Critical Inquiry (33), 52–77. Apter, Emily. 2004. Saidian Humanism. Boundary 31 (2), 35–53. Arafat, Yassir. 1983. Interview. al-Jadid (1–2), 32. Arendt, Hannah. (1958) 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2000. What Remains? The Language Remains: A Conversation with Gunter Gaus. In P. Baehr (ed.), The Portable Hannah Arendt. Penguin Books: New York, 1–23. ———. 2006. On Revolution. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books. Asad, Muhammed. (1980) 2008. The Message of the Quran. Watsonville, CA: Book Foundation. al-Asad, Nasir al-Din. 2000. Al-Haya al-Adabiya al-Hyaditha fi Filastin wa-al-Urdun Hatta Sanat 1950. Amman: Muassasat Abd al-Hamid Shuman. Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. ———. 2003. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press. ———. 2006. Trying to Understand French Secularism. In H. de Vries and L. Sullivan (eds.), Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World. New York: Fordham University Press, 494–526. Ashrawi, Hanan. 1978. The Contemporary Palestinian Poetry of Occupation. Journal of Palestine Studies 7 (3), 77–101. el-Asmar, Fouzi. 1975. To Be an Arab in Israel. London: Pinter Press. Auerbach, Erich. (1929) 1969. Dante: Poet of the Secular World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ayyad, Shukri. 1968. Mousiqa al-Shir al-Arabi. 1st edition. Cairo: Dar al-Maarifa. Badawi, M. M. 1975. A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. ———. 1985. Modern Arabic Literature and the West. London: Ithaca Press. al-Bahrawi, Sayyid. (Ed.). 1997. Kitab al-Aroud lil Akhfash: Tahqiq wa Dirasa. Cairo: Dar Shaqiyat. Bakhle, Janaki. 2008. Music as the Sound of the Secular. Comparative Studies in Society and History 50 (1), 256–84. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. M. Holquist (ed.). Austin: University of Texas Press. al-Barghouti, Hussein. 2000. Maraya Saila. Jerusalem: Ittihad al-Kuttab al-Filastiniyin. Barghouti, Mourid. 2003. The Servants of War and Their Language. In Autodafe: A Manual for Intellectual Survival. Vol. 3/4. New York: Seven Stories Press, 39–47. Barthes, Roland. 1977. Image, Music, Text. New York: Hill and Wang. Bauman, Zygmunt. 1992. Mortality and Immortality and Other Life Strategies. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

279

Bearman, Peri, Th ierry Bianquis, C. Edmund Bosworth, E. van Donzel, and Wolfhart Heinrichs. (Eds.). 2006. Encyclopedia of Islam. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Benjamin, Walter. 1968. Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. H. Arendt (ed.). New York: Schocken Books. Bernard, Suzanne. 1959. Le Poeme en Prose de Baudelaire jusqu’à nos Jours. Paris: Nizet. Blumenberg, Hans. 1985. The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. R. M. Wallace (trans.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Boullata, Kamal, and Mirene Ghossein. (Eds.). 1979. The World of Rashid Hussein. Washington, DC: Association of Arab University Graduates. Casanova, Jose. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2010. A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight. In M. Warner, J. Vananterpen, and C. Calhoun (eds.), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 265–81. Caton, Steve. 1990. “Peaks of Yemen I Summon”: Poetry as Cultural Practice in a North Yemeni Tribe. Berkeley: University of California Press. Connerton, Paul. 1989. How Societies Remember. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Connolly, William. 1999. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Dahbour, Ahmad. 1997. Huna, Hunak. Amman: Dar al-Shurouq. Darwish, Mahmoud. 1961. Raay fi Shirina. al-Jadid (9), 40. ———. 1962. Suyoufun min Khashab. al-Jadid (2), 32–33. ———. 2000. Jidariyya. Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes. ———. 2002. Halat Hisar. Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes. ———. 2005. Ka-Zahr al-Lawz aw Abad. Beirut: Riad El-Rayyes. ———. 2006. Fi Hadrat al-Ghiyab. Palestine special edition. Beirut: Riayd al-Rayyis and Dar al-Shurouq. Dayf, Shawqi. 1961. Al-Fan wa Madhahibuhu fi al-Shir al-Arabi. Cairo: Dar al-Maarif. ———. 1963. Tarikh al-Adab al-‘Arabi: al-Asr al-Islami. Vol. 2. 3rd edition. Cairo: Dar al-Maarif. DeYoung, Terri. 1998. Placing the Poet: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq. Albany: State University of New York Press. Dwight, Reynolds. 1995. Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Per formance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Falkoff, Marc. (Ed.). 2007. Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Fanon, Frantz. 1965. The Wretched of the Earth. London: MacGibbon and Kee. Feld, Steven. 1996. Waterfalls of Song: An Acoustemology of Place Resounding in Bosavi, Papua New Guinea. In S. Feld and K. Basso (eds.), Senses of Place. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 91–136.

280

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Finnegan, Ruth. 1988. Literacy and Orality: Studies in the Technology of Communication. Oxford: Blackwell. Foucault, Michel. 1988. The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom. In B. James and D. Rasmussen (eds.), The Final Foucault. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1–20. al-Ghazali, Muhammad abi Hamid. 1992. Ihyaa ‘Ulum al-Din. Beirut: Dar al-Jil. Ghossein, Mirene. 1971. Introduction. In S. Hazo (ed.), The Blood of Adonis: Transpositions of Selected Poems of Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said). Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, xiii–xix. Gorski, Philip, and Ates Altinordu. 2008. After Secularization? Annual Review of Sociology 34, 55–85. Gourgouris, Stathis. 2004. Transformation, Not Transcendence. Boundary 31 (2), 55–79. Hadidi, Subhi. 2009. Nathir al-Wazn. al-Quds al-Arabi (March 16), p. 20. Hart, William. 2000. Edward Said and the Religious Effects of Culture. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Harvey, David. 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. London: Basil Blackwell. Heidegger, Martin. 1975. Poetry, Language, Thought. A. Hofstadter (trans.). New York: Harper & Row. Hijazi, Ahmad Abdul Mutti. 1970. Madinatun bila Qalb. Beirut: Dar al-Awda. Hirschkind, Charles. 2006. The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoff man, Adina. 2009. My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Hussein, Ahmad. 1983. Anat: aw al-Khuruj min al-Zaman al-Hijri. Nazareth: Hakim Publishers. Hussein, Rashid. 1977. Thawratun ala Safar (A Traveling Revolution). al-Jadid (3), 11. Ibn Jafar, Qudama. 1981. Naqd al-Shir. Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya. Ibn Khaldoun, Abd al-Rahman ibn Muhammad. 1984. Al-Muqaddima. 5th edition. Beirut: Darl al-Qalam. Ibn Manzur al-Ifriqi, Muhammad ibn Mukarram. 1955. Lisan al-‘Arab. Vol. 4. Cairo: Dar Sadir. Ibn Qutayba, Abu Muhammad Abd Allah ibn Muslim. 1969. Kitab al-Shir wa alShuara. Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafa. Ibn Rashiq al-Qyrawani, Abu Ali al-Hasan. 1963. Al-Umda fi Mahasin al-Shir wa Adabihi wa Naqdihi. 2 vols. 2nd edition. M. Qarqazan (ed.). Cairo: Matbaat al-Saada. Ibn Tabataba, Muhammad bin Ahmad bin Tabataba al-Alawi. 1982. Iyar al-Shir. 1st edition. T. al-Hijazi and M. Z. al-Salam (eds.). Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya. Ibrahim, Hanna. 1984. Al-Shir al-Filastini Bayna at-Tahliq wa al-Dhabdhaba. al-Jadid (108), 105–10. Jager, Colin. 2008. Romanticism/Secularization/Secularism. Literature Compass 5 (4), 791–806.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

281

———. 2010. This Detail, This History: Charles Taylor’s Romanticism. In M. Warner, J. Vananterpen, and C. Calhoun (eds.), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 166–192. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. al-Jarrah, Nouri. 1999. Shir min Filastin al-Jadida. Shuaraa (1), 205–20. Jay, Martin. 1993. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. 1977. Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry. Vol. 2. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. ———. (Ed.). 1987. Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (Ed.). 1992. Anthology of Modern Palestinian Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Jiryis, Sabri. 1976. The Arabs in Israel. New York: Monthly Review Press. Jubran, Salim. 1965. al-Shir al-Arabi al-Thawri fi Israeel. al-Jadid (2), 17. al-Jurjani, Abd al-Qahir. 1989. Kitab Dalail al-Ijaz. 2nd edition. M. Rida (ed.). Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji. Kanafani, Ghassan. 1981. Al-Adab al-Filastini al-Muqawim. 2nd edition. Beirut: Muassasat al-Abhath al-Arabiyya. Kant, Immanuel. (1784) 1996. An Answer to the Question, What Is Enlightenment? In J. Schmidt (ed.), What Is Enlightenment? Berkeley: University of California Press. al-Kayyali, Abd al-Rahman. 1975. Al-Shir al-Filastini fi Nakbat Filastin. Beirut: AlMu’assasa al-Arabiyya lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr. al-Khansa. 1963. Diwan al-Khansa. Beirut: Dar Sadir. ———. 1986. Diwan al-Khansa. Damascus: Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi. al-Khattib, Yusuf. 1968. Diwan al-Ard al-Muhtalla. Damascus: Dar Filastin. Klein, Ernest. 1987. Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the Hebrew Language. New York: Macmillan. Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, and Jean-Luc Nancy. 1988. The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Albany: State University of New York Press. MacIntyre, Alasdair. 1984. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd edition. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Madan, T. N. 2004. Secularism in Its Place. In R. Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 297–320 Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 2010. Can Secularism Be Other-Wise? In M. Warner, J. Vananterpen, and C. Calhoun (eds.), Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 282–99. Mahmoud, Abdul-Rahim. 1985a. Diwan Abdul-Rahim Mahmoud. Al-Taybeh, Israel: Markez Ihyaa al-Turath al-Arabi.

282

BIBLIOGRAPHY

———. 1985b. Ruhi ala rahati. Al-Taybeh, Israel: Markez Ihyaa al-Turath al-Arabi. al-Malaika, Nazik. (1949) 1971. Shazaya wa Ramad. Beirut: Dar al-Awda. ———. 1987. Shrapnel and Ashes. In Salma Khadra Jayyusi (ed.), M. Sorenson and C. Mathews (trans.), Modern Arabic Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. ———. (1962) 1989. Qadaya al-Shir al-Muasir. 8th edition. Beirut: Dar al-Ilm lil-Malayeen. al-Malouhi, Abdul-Muin. (Ed.). 1966. Al-Lamiyatan. Damascus: Mudiriyat Ihya alTurath al-Qadim, Wizarat al-Thaqafa wal Irshad al-Qawmi. Markus, R. A. 1970. Saeculum: History and Society in the Theology of St. Augustine. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl. 1977. Selected Writings. David McLellan (ed.). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. Massad, Joseph. 2003. Liberating Songs: Palestine Put to Music. Journal of Palestine Studies 32 (3), 21–38. Mbembe, Achille. 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15 (1), 11–40. Meisami, Julie Scott, and Paul Starkey. (Eds.). 1998. Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature. London: Routledge. Messick, Brinkley Morris. 1993. The Calligraphic State. Berkeley: University of California Press. al-Messiri, Abdul Wahab, and Aziz al-Azmeh. 2000. Al-Almaniyya Tahta al-Mijhar. Damascus: Dar al-Fikr al-Muasir. Milbank, John. 2006. Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Mitchell, Timothy. 1991. Colonizing Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press. Moreh, Shmuel. 1967. Arabic Literature in Israel. Middle Eastern Studies 3 (3), 283–94. ———. 1976. Modern Arabic Poetry 1800–1970: The Development of Its Form and Themes under the Influence of Western Literature. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Muft i, Aamir. 2004. Critical Secularism: A Reintroduction for Perilous Times. Boundary 2 (31), 1–9. Muhammad, Zakariyya. 2003. Deek al-Manara. Ramallah: Muwatin. Nandy, Ashis. 2004. The Politics of Secularism and the Recovery of Religious Toleration. In R. Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 321–44. al-Naqqash, Rajaa. 1992. Thalathuna Aaman ma al-Shir wal al-Shuara. Cairo: Dar Suad al-Sabah. Nasir, Amjad. 2001. Mashhad al-Shir al-Filastini al-Jadid. Al-Shuara (15), 7–9. al-Neimi, Salwa. 1999. Dhaba al-Iadhina Uhibbuhum. Cairo: Dar Sharqiyyat. Nicholson, Reynold Alleyne. 1923. A Literary History of the Arabs. London: T. Fisher Unwin. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1968. The Portable Nietzsche. W. Kauff man (trans.). New York: Viking Press. ———. 1997. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Hertfordshire, England: Wordsworth. Nuwwar. 1958. Li-Yafk har al-Shir. al-Jadid (10), 56.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

283

Ong, Walter. 1967. The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. ———. (1982) 2002. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge. Owen, Alex. 2001. Occultism and the “Modern” Self in Fin-de-Siecle Britain. In M. Daunton and B. Rieger (eds.), Meanings of Modernity: Britain from the LateVictorian Era to World War II. London: Oxford University Press, 71–96. Pecora, Vincent. 2006. Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation, and Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Preminger, Alex, and T. V. F. Brogam. (Eds). 1993. New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. New York: MJF Books. Priestman, Martin. 1999. Romantic Atheism: Poetry and Freethought, 1780–1830. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. al-Qadamani, Radwan. 2007. Shiryyat Qasidat al-Nathr fi Nas Muhammad alMaghout. Al-Ittihad (September 23), 15. Qahwaji, Habib. 1972. Al-Arab fi Dhill al-Ihtilal al-Israeeli Mundhu 1948. Beirut: PLO Research Center. al-Qasim, Nabih. 1975. Ard Tarikhi li-Adabina al-Mahalli. al-Jadid (3), 47–55. al-Quseibi, Ghazi. 2006. Man Hum al-Shura al-Lladhina Yattabihum al-Ghawun? Beirut: Dar al-Saqi. Robbins, Vernon. (Ed.). 1994. The Rhetoric of Pronouncement. Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature. Roe, Nicholas. 1997. John Keats and the Culture of Dissent. New York: Clarendon Press. Ryan, Robert. 1997. The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789–1824. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Saba, Michel. 2002. Falsafatu al-Hajar. Fasl al-Maqal (January 11), 1–20. Said, Edward. 1979. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Press. ———. 1983. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1996. Peace and Its Malcontents. New York: Vintage Press. ———. 2002a. Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2002b. What Price Oslo? Counterpunch, March 24–30. Sayigh, Tawfiq. 1960. Al-Qasida K. Beirut: Dar al-Maktaba al-Assriyya. Schmidt, Leigh. 2000. Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Scott, David, and Charles Hirschkind. 2006. Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press. Serematakis, Nadia. 1994. The Senses Still: Perception and Memory as Material Culture in Modernity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shatz, Adam. 2002. An Arab Poet Who Dares to Differ. New York Times (13 July). Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/13/arts/12ADON.html (accessed July 23, 2011).

284

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Sperl, Stefan, and Christopher Shackle. (Eds.). 1996. Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa: Classical Traditions and Modern Meanings. Vol. 1. Leiden, the Netherlands: Brill. Stetkevych, Suzanne. 1986. Archetype and Attribution in Early Arabic Poetry: Al-Shanfara and the Lamiyyat al-Arab. International Journal of Middle East Studies 18 (3), 361–90. Stoller, Paul. 1989. The Taste of Ethnographic Things: The Senses in Anthropology. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Swatos, William, and Kevin Christiano. 1999. Secularization Theory: The Course of a Concept. Sociology of Religion 60 (3), 209–28. Tamari, Salim. 2008. Lepers, Lunatics and Saints: The Nativist Ethnography of Tawfiq Canaan and His Jerusalem Circle. Mountain Against the Sea. Berkeley: University of California Press, 93–112. Tambiah, Stanley. 2004. The Crisis of Secularism in India. In R. Bhargava (ed.), Secularism and Its Critics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Taminian, Lucine. 2001. Playing with Words: The Ethnography of Poetic Genres in Yemen. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan. Taylor, Charles. 2004. Modern Social Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ———. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2009. The Polysemy of the Secular. Social Research 76 (4), 1143–66. Thaalabi, Abu al-Abbas. 1993. Sharh Diwan al-Khansa. Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi. Touma, Emil. 1956. Al-Thaqafa al-Qawmiyya al-Arabiyya fi Israeel. al-Jadid (10), 10–17. ———. 1965. Al-Shir al-Arabi al-Thawri fi Israeel. al-Jadid (1), 5–8. Tuqan, Fadwa. 1981. Qasaid Siyasiyya. Acre: Dar al-Aswar. Ulmer, William. 2001. The Christian Wordsworth 1798–1805. Albany: State University of New York Press. al-Ustta, Adel. 2001. Anta Katiban . . . Madha Taf‘al fi al-Intifada? Al-Ayyam (September 29), 5. Viswanathan, Guari. 2008. Secularism in the Framework of Heterodoxy. PMLA 123 (2), 466–76. White, Daniel. 2006. Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. Wolf, Eric. 1999. Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Wormhoudt, Arthur. 1973. Diwan al-Khansa [Collected Works of al-Khansa]. Oskaloosa, IA: William Penn College. al-Yaghi, Abd al-Rahman. 1981. Hayat al-Adab al-Filastini al-Hadith min Awall alNahda Hatta al-Nakba. 2nd edition. Beirut: Dar al-Afaq al-Jadida. Yousef, Shaaban. 2001. Shuara al-Sabiniyyat: al-Sira, al-Jeel, al-Haraka. Cairo: alMajlis al-A‘la lil-Thaqafa. Zayyad, Tawfiq. 1958. Min Wara al-Qudban. al-Jadid (6), 38–40. Zureik, Elia. 1979. The Palestinians in Israel: A Study in Internal Colonialism. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

INDEX

Abaza, Aziz, 261n22 Abbasid Dynasty, 32 Abd al-Karim, Ali, 150 Abdul-Sabour, Salah, 261n22 Abu al-Alāa (al-Miarri), 210 Abu Bakri, Iman, 99 Abu Firās al-Hamadāni, 32 Abu Hamid, Hamid, 219 Abu-Hanna, Hanna, 44–45, 48, 91–98, 92–93, 94–95, 258n29, 260n19 Abu Hashhash, Mahmoud, 120–24, 146–48 Abu Khashan, Abd al-Karim, 161 Abu Nuwwās, 79, 130, 210, 263n5, 269n11 Abu Risha, Omar, 84 Abu Saada, Muhammad Farid, 219 Abu Salma, 81 Abu Tammam, 79, 263n5 Achebe, Chinua, 62 Acre (Akka), 186 adab al-muqāwama (resistance literature), 41, 199–200, 259n7 Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said), 1, 14 Christianity and, 239 meter and, 36–37 modernity and, 36 name of, 36, 240 prominence of, 271–272n2 prose poetry and, 36–37, 179 the secular in, 238 Adorno, Theodor, 272–273n9 Ahmad, Faiz, 74 Ahmad, Moustafa Sayyid, 128, 183 al-Akhfash, 30 Akkadian, 24 Aleppo, 32

Alexandria, 35 Ali, Taha Muhammad (Abu Nizar), 203–5, 269n3 alienation, 114, 254n14 al-Alim, Mahmoud Amin, 205–6, 209–10 allusion, 219–20, 227–28 amiyya (demotic Arabic), 7, 42, 136, 167 Amman, 4, 5, 86, 189, 190 al-āmūdī (ode), 4, 8, 42–43, 54–56, 64–65. See also ode (qasīda) Anat (goddess), 263n6 al-Aqqad, Mahmoud, 261n22 Al-Aqsa Mosque, 61, 261 Arabic demotic (amiyya), 7, 42, 136, 167 diglossic nature of, 167 diversity of, 128 grammar, 7, 8, 68, 69–70, 79 literary (fushā), 7, 42, 93, 136, 167 Quran as exemplar of, 121–22 Arabic Poetry News Agency, 220 Arab League, 88, 89 Arafat, Yasir, 40, 68, 76, 115, 117, 230, 271n11 Aragon, Luis, 43 Aramaic, 24 architecture, 125 al-Ard (The Land) (political movement), 42 Arendt, Hannah, 17, 254n14, 256n8, 258n2, 271n13 art, the secular and, 114 Asad, Talal, 15, 16, 251n3 al-Aswar Institute, 186 audience. See also public; readers alienation of, 114 challenging, 168

286

INDEX

audience (continued) as conservative, 169–70 free verse and, 156 ignorant, 233 meter and, 89, 93–94 in ode form, 99–100, 104, 106–7 for odes vs. free verse, 131–32 preference for familiarity by, 166 prose poetry and, 170, 220–21, 222–23 relationship with, 165–66, 168–69 rhythm and, 214 as separate from poet, 168–69 as source of strangulation, 214 Auerbach, Eric, 136, 182, 195, 265n5 aurality. See also orality; sound(s) audience and, 107 meter and, 53 primacy of, 34 Quran and, 24 reading vs., 214 scansions and, 4 the secular and, 19 thinking vs., 246 visual vs., 95 author, death of, 6, 252n6 autonomy rhythm and, 242–43 the secular and, 15–16, 20, 160 al-Ayādi, Qis bin Sāidāt, 84 al-Azhar University, 219 Baghdad, 32, 79, 111, 125, 267n6 bahr (sea) in Adonis, 1 coinage of, as poetic term, 70 as poetic meter, 1, 30 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 273n10 Balfour Declaration, 40, 167 Barghouti, Mourid, 197 al-Barghouti, Hussein, 175, 176–79, 232–33, 264n3, 267n4 al-Barghouti, Muhib, 235–36 Barmakids, 117 al-basīt (outspread) meter, 71, 73 basmala, 61, 261n6 Basra, 70 al-Batrawi, Muhammad, 161–65

Baudelaire, Charles, 35, 175, 237, 267n1 beauty, poetry and, 24 Bedouins, 79, 226 Beirut, 151, 179, 189, 192, 210, 222, 230, 268n21 Beit Dajan, 87 Beit Hagefen, 92 Bekheit, Ahmad, 64–65, 67, 69–70, 71, 75, 85–87, 89, 99–100 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 242, 261n1, 272–273n9, 274n17 Bernard, Suzanne, 179, 241 Bible, 102–3, 190, 193, 239, 256n10 al-Bireh, 5, 115 Birzeit University, 88, 121, 161, 177 body of knowledge (ilm), poetry as, 3, 24, 25 brigand poets (sālīk), 26 al-Buayna, 58 Buhayrid, Jamila, 43 Buqaya, 186 Burke, Edmund, 265n3 Bush, George W., 162, 267n8 Cairo, 4, 5, 55, 86, 99, 127, 133, 139, 227 Cairo Book Fair, thirty-fourth International, 87, 127–28, 185 Canaanites, 190, 264n8 censorship, 40 chaos (fawdā), 75, 76–77, 126, 187 checkpoints, 115, 116, 120, 235 Christianity Adonis and, 239 Dante and, 195 monastic, the secular and, 18 nonsecularism and, 106 the secular and, 17–18 Christian Youth Association, 44 classicism, 134 colonialism meter and, 77 prose poetry and, 195–96 Communist Party, Israeli, 5, 39, 41–42, 48, 58, 114, 162, 259n11 compartmentalization, the secular and, 19 Constantinople, 34 consumption, 162 craft (sana) of poetry, 29, 63, 69, 231

INDEX

Cultural Association (al-Muntadā al-Thaqāfi), 5, 63, 101–2, 104–5, 129–30 culture of reading, 22–23 dabit (discipline), 77, 78, 125–26 Dahbour, Ahmad, 137–46, 165–69, 170 Dahir, Mona, 60–61, 155 ad-Damūn, 41 Dante Alighieri, 136, 182, 195 Darwish, Mahmoud, 5, 49, 70, 113–15, 119, 122, 165–66, 203, 258n1, 264n1 death announcements, 84 of author, 6, 252n6 Bauman on, 275n21 being ignored as, 149 fear of, 183, 231 Foucault on, 275n22 Heidegger on, 271n12 as poetic topic, 222 power of, 131 the secular and, 247, 248, 275n21 defects (ilal), 30–31, 71 demotic Arabic (amiyya), 7, 42, 136, 167 Derrida, Jacques, 223, 265n5 desert, 218–19, 226 al-Desouqi, Mahmoud, 62–64, 65, 67, 75–79, 83, 89, 101–4, 108 al-Dhahya, 115 al-Dhubyani, al-Nābigha, 204 diglossia, 167 discipline (dābit), 77, 78, 125–26 disorder (lanizām), 191 al-Durrah, Muhammad, 69–70, 183 Egypt, 4, 5, 55, 86, 99, 128, 135, 206, 226, 261n22 Eliot, T. S., 35, 143 emotivism, 257n21 epistemology, 20, 65, 127, 157, 163–64, 218, 246 ethnography, 1–3, 6, 8–9, 13, 54, 56, 68, 114, 139, 146, 176, 216 Fanon, Frantz, 260n18 Fasoutta, 207 fawdā (chaos), 75, 76–77, 126, 187

287

fear, of poets, 230–31 feet (tafāīl), 30, 31, 37, 43, 48, 71, 125, 140, 142, 181, 198 Festival of Palestinian Poetry, second, 5, 60–62 festivals, poetry, 38, 43, 44–47, 93, 104–5, 114, 258n4, 260n16 form, poetic. See also meter, poetic; specific forms choice of, 204 death of, 131 festivals and, 44 identification of, 4 ideology and, 189, 193 power and, 188 preeminence of, 6–7 secularizing, 7, 127 self and, 31, 60 textuality and, 34–35 time and, 78 Foucault, Michel, 223, 271n13, 275n22 fragmentation, 101, 191, 245, 247, 252n1, 253n5 Frazer, Sir James, 102 freedom ethical, 275n22 free verse and, 122, 125, 147 meter and, 69, 71–75, 79–80, 197 poetic, 49 prose poetry and, 242 restriction and, 69 rhythm and, 69, 126–27 of speech, 59–60 writing and, 147, 148 Free Officers Revolution, 135, 239 Freethought Movement, 18 free verse (taf īla) Adonis and, 36 audience and, 131–32, 156 defense of, 124–25 difficulty of, 140 etymology of, 141–42 exegesis and, 103 freedom and, 122, 125, 147 imagery and, 96 imagination and, 130 liberalism and, 141

288

INDEX

free verse (continued) measurement and, 36 in poetic scene, 3–4, 36 progress and, 94–95 quotidian nature of, 135–36 as restricted, 68 romanticism and, 134–35 social hierarchies and, 135 social roots of, 124–25 as timely, 134 Freud, Sigmund, 223 Furani, Fathi, 216–18, 227 fushā (literary Arabic), 7, 42, 93, 136, 167 Galilee, 5, 46, 53, 60, 68, 154, 158, 160, 202, 207, 262n8 Garcia Lorca, Federico, 43 Gaza, 5, 138 gender meter and, 208 prose poetry and, 229–30 General Egyptian Book Organization, 55 genie ( jinn), 179, 230–31 geometry, 125 al-Ghazāli, Muhammad abi Hāmid, 218, 248, 270n2 Gibran, Gibran Khalil, 45, 92–93, 186 globalization, 209–10 Golan Heights, 233 Golden Bough (Frazer), 102 grammar discipline and, 7 form and, 8 importance of, 68, 69 meter and, 79 Greeks, ancient, 223. See also Homer; Plato Habiby, Emile, 260n19 Haddad, Michel, 45 Hagar, 102–3 Haifa, 4, 44, 58, 83, 84–85, 88, 91, 120, 138, 151, 216 al-Haj Metwalli (television program), 220 Hamdanid dynasty, 32 Hamid, Abd al-Majid, 87–90, 89 harassment, political, of poets, 43–44, 76

Harb, Joseph, 149, 150–51 hearing. See aurality; sound(s) Hebrew, 24 Heidegger, Martin, 17, 178, 202, 223, 228, 256n12, 266n12, 267n5, 271n12 Hems, 137 Hijazi, Ahmad Abd al-Muti, 132–36, 140 Hikmet, Nazim, 43 al-Hilāli, Abu Zeid, 63–64, 262n10 historical repository (diwān), poetry as, 3, 25–26, 39–40 historicism, 182 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 228, 244 Holyoake, George J., 18 Homer, 169, 204, 248 House of Poetry Jordanian, 190 Moroccan, 265n5 Palestinian, 5, 115–17 Hughes, Langston, 43, 260n14 humanism, 45, 164, 274n15 Hussein, Ahmad, 268n19 Hussein, Rashid, 40, 43 al-Husseini, Abd al-Qadir, 158–59 al-Husseini, Faisal, 158 hymns (mazāmīr), 238–39 Ibn Khaldoun, 257n15 Ibn Rashīq, 28–29 Ibn Rushd, 269n7 Ibn Rushd Prize, 205 Ibn Tabātabā, 29, 257n16 Ibrahim, Hanna, 57–60, 69–70, 89, 96–99 ICP. See Israeli Communist Party (ICP) Idaa 77 (Lightning 77) (periodical), 181 ideology, 168, 189, 193, 194, 272n3 al-Ifriqī, Ibn Manzūr, 24–25 ilal (defects), 30–31, 71 Iliad (Homer), 169 illiteracy, 29, 37 ilm (body of knowledge), poetry as, 3, 24, 25 imagery, free verse and, 96 imagination, 130 immobile sounds, 30 impenetrability, 157–58

INDEX

intellectualization, 95, 101, 217 International Book Fair (Cairo thirtyfourth), 5, 55, 99, 127–28, 185 interpretation, 170 Iram, 272–273n9 Iraq War, 118 Islam, 240–41, 244 Israel Arabic language in, 42 Law of Return of, 264n4 military occupation, 89, 115, 116, 120, 197, 202–3, 235 military rule (1948–66), 39–40 nationalism of, 47 Oslo Accords and, 56, 76, 115, 117, 118–19, 124, 167, 189 secular transcendence of, 148 10-year celebration of, 46 Zionism and, 42, 61, 91, 103 Israeli Communist Party (ICP), 5, 39, 41–42, 48, 58, 114, 162, 259n11 al-Ittihad (The Union) (newspaper), 5, 58, 81, 82, 139, 162, 199, 216 Jabra, Jabra Ibrahim, 102 al-Jadid (The New) ( journal), 5, 39, 44–45, 46, 94, 260n16 Ibn Jāfar, Qudāma, 30 al-Jāhiz (Abu Uthman Amr ibn Bahr), 25, 256n14 jamāhīr (masses), 57, 98 Jamiyyat al-Phinique (Phoenix Association), 233 al-Jazeera, 68, 88 Jerusalem, 61, 92, 103, 261n21 jinn (genie), 179, 230–31 Jordan, 4, 5, 86, 189, 190 Jubran, Salim, 49, 50, 119 Jubran, Wisam, 233, 234–35 al-Jurjānī, Abd al-Qāhir, 25 Kaaba, 261n4, 262n4 Kanafani, Ghassan, 41, 259nn7–8 al-Karmel ( journal), 5, 56, 78, 88, 113, 196 al-Khalīl, Ibn Ahmad al-Farāhīdī, 30, 70, 136, 245 al-Khalili, Ali, 149

289

al-Khansā, 71, 72–74, 262n1 al-Kharrat, Edwar, 207 al-Khattab, Omar Ibn, 26 Khoury, Khalil, 140 Khoury, Nidaa, 207–9 kibbutzim, 154–55 Kiwan, Ahmad, 158, 159–60, 165 knowledge, poetry as, 3, 24, 25, 29, 65–66 Koubar, 175 Kufr Yasif, 43, 46, 47, 53 kuttāb, 65, 92, 262n13 Lamiyyat al-Arab (al-Shanfarā), 26–28 The Land (al-Ard) (political movement), 42 Lebanon, 5, 203, 222 Lenin, Vladimir, 57 liberalism, 20, 141 Libya, 5, 185, 268n15 literary Arabic (fushā), 7, 42, 93, 136, 167 literary criticism, 34–35 literary prizes, 85 Lotus Prize, 113 Lumumba, Patrice, 43 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 257n21, 265n3, 273n12, 274n19 madness, 234–36 al-Maghout, Muhammad, 255n7 Mahmoud, Abdul-Rahim, 22, 255n2 al-Malaika, Nazik, 48, 112–13, 124–26, 156, 179, 258n28, 264n1, 271n10 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 35 al-Manasra, Izz al-Din, 189–92, 209, 268n18, 268n20 Mandelbaum Gate, 261n21 maqāmāt (rhyming prose), 34 al-Maqha al-Thaqāfi (Cultural Café), 129 marginality, of odes, 80, 81 market (sūq), poetry as, 159–60 martyrdom, 22, 183, 186, 236 Marx, Karl, 18, 57, 99, 263n3 Marxism, 165, 210 masses ( jamāhīr), 57, 98 mathematics, 232–33 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 43, 93

290

INDEX

mazāmīr (hymns), 238–239 measurement (wazn). See also sound(s) creativity vs., 178 in free verse, 36, 141–42 martyrdom and, 183 progress and, 54 prose poetry and, 176 rhythm and, 29–30 selective, 183 self and, 210 the visual and, 187 al-Meghar, 83, 207 memorization, 63–64, 65–66 memory, 25–26, 64, 139 metaphor, 89, 204, 219, 238 metaphysics, 240, 246–47, 253n4 meter, poetic. See also prosody (ilm al-arūd) Adonis and, 36–37 audience and, 89, 93–94 al-basit (outspread), 71, 73 chaos and, 76–77 colonialism and, 77 critiques of, 2 defense of, 2, 70–71, 75 depth and, 117–18 discipline (dābit), 77, 78, 125–26 disorder (lanizām), 191 diversity in, 71 freedom and, 69, 71–75, 79–80, 197 gender and, 208, 229–30 globalization and, 209–10 as hallmark of poetic skill, 69–70 Ibn Tabātabā on, 29 lines in, 31 mastery of, 69–70 in al-Mutannabi, 32 outspread (al-basīt), 71, 73 personal, 137 politics and, 114–15, 117–18 al-Qasim and, 67–69 rejection of, 1–2, 36–37 restrictions and, 68–69, 79–80 rhythm and, 211 in al-Shanfarā, 28 sounds and, 30–31 in strophic form, 80

submeters, 71, 75 as subversion, 86–87 tafāīl (feet) in, 30, 31, 37, 43, 48, 71, 125, 140, 142, 181, 198 “the sea” as, 1, 30, 70 time and, 78–79 traditional, 1 verse, 123 withdrawal of, 49 zihāf (relaxations), 30, 71 methodology, about, 4–6 Mihrajān al-Shīr al-Filastīni (Festival of Palestinian Poetry), 5 military checkpoints, 115, 116, 120, 235 The Millions’ Poet (television program), 220 mobile sounds, 30 modernism, 251n5 modernity, 36, 93, 104, 112, 122, 126, 167, 170–71, 251n5 Mourad, Moustafa, 60–61, 62, 158 muallaqāt (pre-Islamic poetry), 78–79, 83, 262n4 Mubarak, Hosni, 132, 206 al-Mughrabi, Aisha, 185–86, 204 muhaddithūn (renovators, modernizers), 79, 102 al-Muhalhil, Abu Leila, 138 Muhammad, Prophet, 23, 26, 142–43, 159, 193, 255nn3–6 Muhammad, Zakariyya, 196, 201, 210–11, 213–14, 221, 222–23, 264n8, 273n11 Muhanna, Hussein, 186–87, 234 al-Mukhtar, Omar, 268n15 al-Muntadā al-Thaqāfi (Cultural Association), 5, 63, 101–2, 104–5, 129–30 music, 65, 86, 204 musical ecstasy (tarab), 217, 245 Muslim Brotherhood, 88 al-Mutannabi (Abu al-Tayyib Ahmad bin al-Hussein), 31–34, 64, 70, 130, 142 al-Mutawakkil, Taha, 116–19, 117 muwashahāt (strophic form), 34, 80 myth the secular and, 14–15, 224 as source, 102

INDEX

Nablus, 87 Napoleon, 35 al-Naqqash, Rajaa, 180 al-Nashashibi, Isaaf, 40 nashīd (song), poetry as, 24, 42, 47, 119, 150, 163, 239, 246, 256n11 Nasser, Amjad, 210–11, 213, 226 Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 98, 135, 181, 239 Nasser, Kamal, 268n21 an-nās (the people), 93–94, 104, 107, 223, 235, 258n4 nathr (prose) as dispersion, 123 increasing valuation of, 96 place and, 206 poetry vs., 28–29, 89, 187 rhyming, 34 as term, 242 nationalism, 47–48, 56, 121, 135, 180, 197 Nationalist Assembly Party, 5 National Liberation League (NLL), 58 nation-state, 98–99, 140, 178, 189, 202, 206 Nazareth, 4, 44, 46, 60, 68, 92, 105, 154–55, 203, 216 al-Neimi, Salwa, 212–13, 214 Neruda, Pablo, 43 Netanya, 76 The New (al-Jadid) ( journal), 5, 39, 44, 46, 94 New York City, 40, 61 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 36, 126, 176, 208, 219, 220, 223, 224, 234, 235, 239, 241–42, 257n17, 258n30, 267n3, 271n13, 272n5 al-Niffari, 182, 268n10 Nijm, Ahmad Fuad, 132 1948 (year), 3, 35–36, 38, 39–41, 43–46, 55, 58, 63, 98, 113, 121, 148, 180, 190, 258n3 1967 (year), 48, 50, 57, 169, 180 Nuaima, Mikhail, 45, 49 obscurantism, 89 obscurity, 214 occupation, 89, 148, 197, 202–3 ode (qasīda) accountability and, 106 after 1948 fall of Palestine in, 43 ancient rebellion against, 79

291

audience and, 89, 100, 104, 106–7 continued use of, 54–56 defense of, 71, 75, 82–83 depleting validity of, 122–23 discipline and, 78 dismissal of, 82 history of, 21 in poetic scene, 4, 8 lines of, in meter, 31 al-Malaika on, 111 marginality of, 80, 81 modern appearances of, 82 persistence of, 85 pillared (see al-qasīda al-āmūdiyya) preservation of, 79 public and, 106 publishing practices and, 80–81 rebellion against, 111 resurrection of, 64–65 struggle and, 131 as subversion, 86–87 as term, 261n2 time and, 78–79 translatability of, 80 orality, 34, 37, 44, 45–46, 117 Orient House (Jerusalem), 158–59 Oslo Accords, 56, 76, 115, 117, 118–19, 124, 167, 189 Palestine Israeli Communist Party and, 41–42 nationalism in, 47–48 1948 fall of, 3, 35–36, 38, 39–41, 40–41, 43–46, 55, 58, 63, 98, 113, 121, 148, 180, 190, 258n3 Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), 118, 141, 166, 192 Palestinian House of Poetry, 5, 115–17, 233–34 Palestinian National Authority (PNA), 5, 115, 117, 161, 196, 201 Palestinian Poetry Festival, second (Mihrajān al-Shīr), 5, 60–62, 158, 263n10 Paris, 84, 113, 122, 133 Parliament of World Writers, 113 Pasgout, 161 “Path of Poetry,” 92, 199, 201

292

INDEX

patience, 28, 241–42 Peace of Westphalia, 18 pegs (awtād), 30 “the people” (an-nās, ash-shab), 93–94, 104, 107, 223, 235, 258n4. See also audience; public persistence (summoud), 3 PFLP. See Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) piety, 117 pillared ode (al-qasīda al-āmūdiyya). See also ode (qasida) architecture of, 55–56 asbab (cords) in, 30 awtad (pegs) in, 30 bayt (line of verse) in, 31 as diwan (historical repository), 3, 25–26, 39–40 ilal (defects) in, 30–31, 71 ilm al-arud (prosody) in, 30 parallelism of, 75 the secular and, 55–56 al-Shanfara and, 28 traditional ode as, 28 place epistemology and, 218 prose and, 218 tradition and, 218 Plato, 248, 265n6 PLO. See Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) PNA. See Palestinian National Authority poet(s) awe for, 23–24 brigand (sālīk), 26 celebration of, 23 detention of, 43–44 fear of, 230–31 grand, 121–22 as iconoclasts, 202 identity of, 202 illiterate, 29 modernizing, 7 political harassment of, 43–44, 76 private, 225–26 Prophet Muhammad and, 23 in Quran, 24

rejection of title of, 83 reputations of, 162–63 reverence for, 230 selection of, 6 as separate from audience, 168–69 “silence” of, 1–2 standings among, 121–22 poetic form. See form, poetic poetic license, 102 poetic meter. See meter, poetic. See also prosody (ilm al-arūd) poetry attacks on, as attacks on people, 86–87 definition of, 4, 30 as dreams, 143, 175–76, 232 etymology of Arabic word for, 24 as historical repository, 3, 25–26, 39 as knowledge, 3, 24, 25, 29, 65–66 in Lisān al-Arab, 24–25 loss of significance of, 22 as market, 159–60 materiality of, 6 as medium of change, 224–25 as picture, 94, 96, 156 power of, 136 as prayer, 175–76, 207, 232 Prophet Muhammad on, 26 prose vs., 28–29, 89, 187 as public, 57, 60, 89, 100–101, 106 reciting, 24 scope of, 24–25 self-sufficiency of, 246 as singing, 24, 31–32, 42, 47, 119, 150, 163, 239, 246, 256n11 song and, 24 supremacy of, 41–42 as writing, 78, 148, 232–33 political harassment, of poets, 43–44, 76 Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), 105 postcolonialism, 56, 239 Pound, Ezra, 35 power as arche, 3 of death, 131 form and, 188 over self, 3, 275n22

INDEX

patience as, 241 of place, 218 of poetry, 26, 58, 97 of poetry, decline in, 24 rhythm and, 136, 152 the secular and, 13–14, 15, 17, 112, 238, 247 sovereign, 243 prayer, poems as, 175–76, 207, 232 Prince of Poets (television program), 220 private poet, 225–26 prizes, literary, 85 progress free verse and, 94–95 the secular and, 95 prose (nathr) as dispersion, 123 increasing valuation of, 96 place and, 206 poetry vs., 28–29, 89, 187 rhyming, 34 as term, 242 prose poem (qasīdat al-nathr) Adonis and, 36–37 allusions in, 219–20 audience and, 170, 220–21, 222–23 authority and, 188–89 Baudelaire on, 237 colonialism and, 195–96 as contradiction in terms, 187 criticism of, 88–90 defense of, 205 exegesis and, 103 fragmentation and, 191 freedom and, 242 gender and, 229–30 as idée fixe, 175 ideology of, 194 measurement and, 176 nationalism and, 180 ode poets and, 67 pacification and, 191 in poetic scene, 3–4, 8 public and, 23–24 rebellion and, 188–89 as rejectionist, 180 rhythm in, 270n15 roles of, 175–76

293

the secular and, 14, 238 self and, 184 severance and, 179–80 sound in, 37, 192 sovereignty and, 196–97 understanding of, 179 prosody (ilm al-arūd), 30, 71, 257nn24–25, 262n2. See also meter, poetic Protestant Reformation, the secular and, 17, 18, 254n10 psychology, rhythm and, 147, 151–52 public. See also audience authenticity and, 228 modernity and, 89 odes and, 106 poetry as, 57, 60, 89, 100–101, 106 private vs., 225–26 prose poetry and, 23–24 rhythm and, 143 the secular and, 14, 112, 168, 238 publishing, 80–81, 163, 258n3 Qabaq, Maurice, 139–40, 146, 169 Qabbani, Nizar, 271n14 Qalansuwa, 104 al-Qasim, Samih, 62, 67–69, 133, 141 al-Qassam, Izz al-Din, 259n7 Qassis, Maha, 202 al-qasīda al-āmūdiyya (pillared ode) architecture of, 55–56 asbāb (cords) in, 30 awtād (pegs) in, 30 bayt (line of verse) in, 31 as diwān (historical repository), 3, 25–26, 39–40 ilal (defects) in, 30–31, 71 ilm al-arūd (prosody) in, 30 parallelism of, 75 the secular and, 55–56 al-Shanfarā and, 28 traditional ode as, 28 qasīda (ode) accountability and, 106 after 1948 fall of Palestine in, 43 ancient rebellion against, 79 audience and, 89, 100, 104, 106–7 continued use of, 54–56

294

INDEX

qasīda (continued) defense of, 71, 75, 82–83 depleting validity of, 122–23 discipline and, 78 dismissal of, 82 lines of, in meter, 31 al-Malaika on, 111 marginality of, 80, 81 modern appearances of, 82 persistence of, 85 pillared (see al-qasida al-amudiyya) preservation of, 79 public and, 106 publishing practices and, 80–81 rebellion against, 111 resurrection of, 64–65 struggle and, 131 as subversion, 86–87 time and, 78–79 translatability of, 80 qasīdat al-nathr (prose poem) Adonis and, 36–37 allusions in, 219–20 audience and, 170, 220–21, 222–23 authority and, 188–89 Baudelaire on, 237 colonialism and, 195–96 as contradiction in terms, 187 criticism of, 88–89 defense of, 205 exegesis and, 103 fragmentation and, 191 freedom and, 242 gender and, 229–30 as idée fixe, 175 ideology of, 194 measurement and, 176 nationalism and, 180 ode poets and, 67 pacification and, 191 in poetic scene, 3–4, 8 public and, 23–24 rebellion and, 188–89 as rejectionist, 180 rhythm in, 270n15 roles of, 175–76 the secular and, 14, 238

self and, 184 severance and, 179–80 sound in, 37, 192 sovereignty and, 196–97 understanding of, 179 al-Qasim, Samih, 62, 67–69, 133, 141 al-Qasim Izz al Din, 259n7 Qassis, Maha, 202 al-Qattan Foundation, 121 al-Quds al-Arabi (Arab Jerusalem) (newspaper), 6, 80–81, 149, 210 Quran as exemplar of Arabic writing, 121–22 Gibran’s use of, 93 importance of, 23 al-Jurjānī on, 25 as meant to be heard aloud, 24 poetry and, 22–24, 251n2, 255nn3–6, 256n9, 256n13 poets in, 24 rafdiyyun (rejectionists), 180 ar-Raineh, 92 Ramadan, Abd al-Minim, 225–27, 235 Ramallah, 4, 5, 88, 113, 115, 120–21, 149, 160, 176 al-Rashid, Haroun, 117 readers, 48–49, 98, 124, 129, 156, 208. See also audience reading, culture of, 22–23 realism (wāqiiyya), 45, 48, 57, 93, 98, 103, 157 reality, 157, 205–6 redemption, 15, 20, 98–99, 100, 184, 185 Reformation, the secular and, 17, 18, 254n10 rejectionists (rafdiyyun), 180 relaxations (zihāf ), 30, 71 repetition, 123, 124, 125, 139, 193 reputation, 162–63 resistance literature (adab al-muqāwama), 41, 199–200, 259n7 restrictions, 68–69, 79–80 return, 61, 103, 123 revolution, 95, 98, 224–25, 239 rhyming prose (maqāmāt), 34 rhythm. See also meter, poetic audience and, 214

INDEX

authority of, 28 autonomy and, 242–43 chaos and, 87 discipline and, 77, 78, 125–26 early, 21 emotion and, 143 evolution of, 21 freedom and, 69, 126–27 image and, 143 importance of, 4 internal, 54, 204, 214, 242 literacy and, 28 measurement and, 29–30 meter and, 211 modernization of, 35 power and, 136, 152 in prose poetry, 270n15 psychology of, 147, 151–52 public and, 143 repetition and, 123, 124 as “screaming,” 117 the secular and, 20, 46, 49, 50, 123 self and, 143 sovereignty and, 136 symmetry and, 96 tiers of, 30–31 tonal, 65 tradition and, 124 transcendence and, 148 understanding and, 29 undisciplined, 37 al-Rifai, Hisham, 88 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 228 romanticism, 35, 45, 93, 103, 134–35, 140, 180, 223, 254n9, 274n15 al-ruh (soul), 99, 100, 151–52 Saadi Youssef, 211, 270n13 Saba, Michel, 82 Sabour, Salah Abdul, 150–51, 266n18 Saffouryeh, 203 Said, Ali Ahmad. See Adonis Said, Edward, 35, 115, 118, 240 Said, Khalida, 180 Sakakini Cultural Center, 5, 113 Salim, Hilmi, 128, 181–84, 188–89, 192–95, 219, 224–25, 227–28, 274n14

sālīk (brigand poets), 26 sana (craft), of poetry, 29, 63, 69 Saqr, Maysoon, 228–29, 231–32 Saramango, José, 203 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 57 Sayf al-Dawla, 32–33 Sayigh, Tawfiq, 195–96, 269n23 al-Sayyab, Badr Shakir, 48, 156, 264n1 scansion (taqtīa), 4, 71, 73, 142, 214 screaming, 48, 56, 96, 98 Sdoud, 92, 161, 263n1 sea (bahr) in Adonis, 1 coinage of, as poetic term, 70 as poetic meter, 1, 30 secular, the in Adonis, 238 arrival of, 35 art and, 114–15 autonomy and, 15–16, 20, 160 Christianity and, 17–18 Communist Party and, 42 compartmentalization and, 19 definition of, 15 demotic Arabic and, 136 as domination, 127 epistemology and, 163–64 fragmentation and, 247, 252n1, 253n5 Freethought Movement and, 18 history of concept, 17–18 importance of, 2 intellect and, 95 as legal process, 18 monastic Christianity and, 18 morality and, 169 myth and, 14–15, 224 1948 fall of Palestine and, 35–36 patience and, 241 pillared ode and, 55–56 power and, 13–14, 15, 17, 238, 247 power of, 13–14, 17, 238 progress and, 95 prose poetry and, 14, 238 public and, 14, 112, 168, 238 as reality, 15–16 reality of, 247 redemption and, 15, 20, 184

295

296

INDEX

secular, the (continued) Reformation and, 17, 254n10 rhythm and, 20, 46, 49, 50, 123 in Roman period, 17–18 secularism and, 15 secularization vs., 15 self and, 243–44 self-sufficiency and, 2–3, 14, 17, 18, 248, 253n2 senses and, 16, 19, 165, 254n16 silence and, 14 soul and, 100 sound and, 35 the visual and, 95–96, 231 as worldliness, 19 “the self,” 60, 143, 157, 165, 184, 185, 205, 210, 243–44, 275n22 self-referentiality, 37 self-sufficiency of poetry, 246 the secular and, 2–3, 14, 17, 18, 248, 253n2 sensation. See also aurality; sound(s); visual, the hierarchy of, 157, 246 knowledge and, 65 the real and, 95 the secular and, 16, 19, 165, 254n16 September 11, 61, 162, 267n8 ash-shab (the people), 93–94, 104, 107, 223, 235, 258n4 Shaddād, Antara bin, 57, 63, 69, 83, 84, 261n4, 262n10 al-Shahawi, Ahmad, 99 al-Shanfarā, Thābit bin Aws, 26–28, 32 Shawqi, Ahmad, 57, 64, 261n4 shaytān (satan), 230–31 Shehadeh, Edmoun, 155–58 shir (poetry) attacks on, as attacks on people, 86–87 definition of, 4, 30 etymology of, 2, 24 as historical repository, 3, 25–26, 39 in Lisān al-Arab, 24–25 as knowledge, 3, 24, 25, 29, 65–66 loss of significance of, 22

as market, 159–60 materiality of, 6 multiple meanings of word, 25 Prophet Muhammad on, 26 prose vs., 28–29, 89 as public, 100–101 reciting, 24 scope of, 24–25 as singing, 31–32 song and, 24 supremacy of, 41–42 Shousha, Farouq, 150 al-Shuarā (The Poets) (periodical), 5 significance, loss of, 22 silence as origin of sound, 257n24 of poets, 1–2 prose poetry and, 191 rhythm and, 148 the secular and, 14 singing, poetry as, 31–32 Sitwell, Edith, 35 Six Day War, 39, 48, 56, 169, 180 socialism, 56, 181 socialist realism, 48, 57, 93, 98 Songs of Mehyar the Damascene (Adonis), 14, 36–37, 238–39, 243–44, 245, 271n13 soul (al-ruh), 99, 100, 151–52 sound(s). See also measurement (wazn); meter, poetic cords, 30 defects, 30–31 feet, 30 immobile, 30 letters vs., 29 meter and, 30–31 mobile, 30 pegs, 30 primacy of, 24, 28, 29–30 in prose poetry, 37 prose poetry and, 192 of Quran, 24 regulation, 30 relaxations, 30 the secular and, 35 tiers of, by duration, 30–31

INDEX

truth and, 108 the visual vs., 49, 117, 245 sovereignty, 136, 196–97, 243. See also power Soyinka, Wole, 203 Spain, 34, 80 specialization, 101 speech, freedom of, 59–60 strophic form (muwashahāt), 34, 80 Sudan, 5 al-Sudani, Murad, 149 summoud (persistence), 3 sūqī (vulgar, plebeian), 62 sūq (market), poetry as, 159–60 surrealism, 48 Sykes-Picot agreement, 40 syllables, 30, 31, 141–42 symbolism, 95–96 symmetry, 94, 96, 124–25 Syria, 5, 32, 36, 137, 180

Tarafa bin al-Abd, 83, 84, 263n9 al-Tawhīdi, Abu Hayyān, 264n2 al-Taybeh, 4, 5, 63, 76, 101 Taylor, Charles, 252n1, 274n15 techne (craft), 29, 63, 231, 257n20 Tel Aviv, 121 Temple Mount. See Al-Aqsa Mosque “textuality,” 34–35 Thābit, Hassān bin, 256n9 time, 78–79, 123 Tlima, Abd al-Minim, 268n14 transcendence, 148 transformation, literary, 1–2 translation, 80 Trotsky, Leon, 57 Tunisia, 5, 128, 130, 138, 222, 230 Tuqan, Fadwa, 142, 144–45 Turki, Daoud, 82–85 Tzipori, 203

Tabariyya, 207 tafāīl (feet), 30, 31, 37, 43, 48, 71, 125, 140, 142, 181, 198 taf īla (free verse) Adonis and, 36 audience and, 131–32, 156 defense of, 124–25 difficulty of, 140 etymology of, 141–42 exegesis and, 103 freedom and, 122, 125, 147 imagery and, 96 imagination and, 130 liberalism and, 141 measurement and, 36 in poetic scene, 3–4, 36 progress and, 94–95 quotidian nature of, 135–36 as restricted, 68 romanticism and, 134–35 social hierarchies and, 135 social roots of, 124–25 as timely, 134 Tamra, 5, 60, 158 taqtīa (scansion), 4, 71, 73, 142, 214 tarab (musical ecstasy), 217, 245

Ukaz, Sūq, 62, 262n9 Umm al-Fahem, 46, 105 United Arab Emirates, 5 visual, the ascendancy of, 8, 49 aurality vs., 95 authenticity and, 205 epistemic shifts and, 127 form and, 4 measurement and, 187 modernity and, 119, 161 order and, 122 permanence and, 218 reality and, 157 the secular and, 95–96, 231 sound vs., 49, 117, 245 writing and, 148 Wadi Abqar, 179 Wadi al-Nisnas, 84–85, 91, 137 Wadi-Najran, 84, 263n11 al-Wahaybi, al-Munsif, 128–29, 130–31 Wahhabism, 210, 269–270n12 wāqiiyya (realism), 45, 48, 57, 93, 98, 103, 157

297

298

INDEX

wazn (measurement). See also sound(s) creativity vs., 178 in free verse, 36, 141–42 martyrdom and, 183 progress and, 54 prose poetry and, 176 rhythm and, 29–30 selective, 183 self and, 210 the visual and, 187 Weber, Max, 18, 126 West Bank nationalism in, 121 1987 intifada in, 222 Palestinian House of Poetry in, 5, 115–17, 233–34 segregation of, 139 2002 reinvasion of, 81, 146 Whitman, Walt, 35 worldliness, the secular as, 19

writing as conception, 37 eternity and, 162 existence and, 185 freedom and, 147, 148 madness and, 235 morality and, 184 poetry as, 78, 148, 232–33 reciting vs., 14, 34 redemption and, 15, 20, 185 as salvation, 184 self and, 157, 184 transcendence and, 148 Yemen, 21, 211, 263n11 Zayyad, Tawfiq, 41, 53, 54, 56, 260n19 Zionism, 42, 61, 91, 103, 148, 264n8 Al-Zīr Sālim, 137–38, 265n7