should be devoid of dreams and metaphors, for “... from my language you
derive your dreams once a year /...and from my language you arrive at truth
in two words: permitted and tabooed / therefore never look in dictionaries for
a language unsatisfied with this model” (Ibid.).
Although presumably penetrating a cultural climate and gaining acceptance
through pervasive dissemination, the dictator’s discourse suffers from its
impositions and limitations which will give way in time to opposition. As its
ritualistic tone and value-laden language revolve upon limited paradigms,
its maneuvering potential loses ground, and its coercive mechanisms limit
creative space and life at large, leaving the dictator’s discourse sovereign in a
muted land. As always, there is a counter movement within hegemony. Even
oblique styles and indirect pronouncements yield in time to shows of disobe-
dience inside and outside hegemony, driving unitary discourse to become
mere ultimatums and statements of threat and reprisal. This assault is often
the culminating point in discursive battles, and it defines, in retrospect, other
techniques of dissent, not only against immediate hegemony, as the examples
cited later demonstrate, but also in the burgeoning poetics of diversity,
difference, and multiple critiques. The unitary discourse sets its constraints
on language, and deploys abundant limits and restraints to restrict compet-
ing languages. Poetry has either to succumb to its insinuations and orders,
and thereby suffer stagnation and death, or to work out its own challenging
tactics. Yet, which Arabic language do we speak of here? Arabic in this
instance is not a hegemonic legacy, but the one that, in Mu.ammad Bennls’
words, “roams in the streets and in the hearts, loaded with Qur’mnic verse,
traditions of the prophet, laden with slogans and national canticles.”^8 This
Arabic is not the one of torture and pain, as jurists apply it, but one of joy and
rapture, says Bennls. This language is as large as life,^9 and the battle for it is
no less demanding and hard than any other battle and war.^10 No wonder the
battle for words and communiqués occupies so much space in our macabre
world.
In an instant of urgency in defying hegemony, poetry invents a variety of
registers. Whereas narrative manipulates indirection and resistance to the
utmost, poetry deploys suggestion, irony, sarcasm, and concretization to
develop a counter-message. The Iraqi exile in London, the late Sharlf
al-Rubay‘l(d. 1995), titles a poem “Dm’irat al-khawf’ (The Circle of Fear),
insinuating that his homeland is now one of torture and death, but he has to
look forward, nevertheless, and retain it.
I will call you space
And I will pray to see your shadow covering questions
Date palms or scaffolds, or shreds of a bomb,
However, not mere uncared-for wounds, or ransacked ruptures
Then, I cannot call you homeland.^11POETIC DIALOGIZATION