Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

In section five, he exchanges voice with “Yarafah,” anticipating death while
elegizing the loss of his homeland.

I read that I’ll die, assassinated

And that my country is made sleepless by words

But my sad wedding becomes trivial

For my country is besieged by invaders

The pre-Islamic poet Yarafah Ibn al-‘Abd had already anticipated death,
concluding as follows regarding selfhood amid confusion and neglect.

I see death choose the generous and the noble,

While picking over the best part of the hardened miser’s spoil.

I see life a treasure, shrinking every night

Shrunken by days and time, and then gone.^28

What brings Qmsim >addad closer to his forebears is this controversial
character, for he is no less of a rebel and regal compatriot, as he says in section
eleven.

I am given the choice, rose of ambiguity

Between defile death and martyrdom

A fighter and a knight and take the risk of life and death

I am not the one to be uncertain in matters of choice

Between the sword and the pillow

The last section, eighteen, warns us that, as the saying goes in English,
“blood runs thicker than water.” This has already been prepared for as the
poet recalls the murdered youth Yarafah.

It will be said, I am the murdered youth

Because I refused to submit

Reject

Wake up

A death like mine is beautiful, beautiful, beautiful

The emphasis on the need to recognize difference to go beyond the present
impasse has contemporary overtones. Poetic tradition becomes another
dynamic in a multiple critique of some immediacy. In another poem,
“Al-Kawmsir” (The Rapacious, or Birds of Prey), Qmsim >addmd polyphonizes
the poem in an intertextual engagement that debates and counteracts
theqaxldahrite of passage, for the present moment offers a different story
of alienation where many voices whisper and participate in gossip and
talk. The tribe no longer needs a poet, and its languages speak against a

POETIC DIALOGIZATION