rose, underscoring a feminized lineage that endows the name with love and
appreciation. In the poem, he conjoins in the surname two pre-Islamic poets
‘Urwa b. al-Ward with Yarafa b. al-‘Abd. The former is a pre-Islamic xu‘lnk,
a brigand, whose Arab mother did not belong to his tribe and who was thus
called “son of the stranger,” a misnomer that made him blame his father for
a misalliance. The poet was an outlaw by choice and dissent, and his love
story, heroic feats, and life of brigandage endow the character with many
markers of contemporary resonance insofar as Qmsim >addmd is concerned.
Conjoining him with Yarafah b. al-‘Abd implicates tradition and modernity
in serious questions relating to individual freedom in the face of the author-
itarian and the tribal. This combination aligns the two poets in a simulacrum
of faith, revolt, royalty, and rebellion against circumstances of greater chal-
lenge. Yarafah’s poetry as well as his career and premature death in Bahrain
validates the ephebe’s stand and sets him genealogically in a line of volatile
and complex poetic succession. The combined pre-Islamic poets were remem-
bered for poetic excellence, but they were also rebels who anticipated death
as the end. Yarafah’s premature and gruesome death, his sense of independ-
ence, his exultation of desert life and fidelity, and his celebration of royalty,
as well as his hedonistic life style, are more in tune with the ephebe Qmsim
addmd, whose poetic career, imprisonments, and rebelliousness set him in
this line of succession which the ironic tone does not sentimentalize. The very
title undermines readings of correspondence, for Qmsim >addmd looks upon
tradition as segments that resist compartmentalization as a totality. This
fusion of names and details belies ancestry to the giants, and negotiates
elusiveness amid texts, people, and contexts of all times and space. Such
revisionism and authentication unsettle views of tradition as one solid
structure, replacing these with a modernity focus, “a break with tradition,”
in Foucault’s understanding, but with a “will to ‘heroize’ the present.”^26
The other side of this deliberate misnomer is contrapuntal, for the poet
alienates his ancestors and dislodges them from a unified tradition as major
figures of great impact on the present, while he recalls their misfortunes,
which are similar to his own. This poetics of dispersion and combination is
heterogeneous as it courts voices that intentionally debate lineage as succes-
sion and subordination to forebears. The poet in this instance does not invoke
them as classical giants, but as a record of a life ridden with difficulty and
confusion, albeit with the recognition of the poet’s great literary input. This
strategy of dispersion collapses names from among forebears, especially from
among rebels and vagabonds, debates single authority as promoted by neo-
classical tradition, and allows the modern text to be merged into the personal,
the societal, and the historical. The composite figure cannot perform fully as a
mask, but the combined career and poetry may lend itself to the modern poet
as far as his identity, location, and career are concerned. Poetry is no longer a
container of individual musings or shows of allegiance, but an experience that
aspires to be as polyvalent and contrapuntal as multivoiced narratives.
POETIC DIALOGIZATION