He elaborates on this interactional terrain whereby the poetic and the
narrative interweave:
And so it was with us: she, moved by poetry and drink, feeding me
with sweet lies, while I wove for her intricate and terrifying threads
of fantasy. She would tell me that in my eyes she saw the shimmer of
mirages in hot deserts, that in my voice she heard the screams of
ferocious ‘beasts in the jungles....In other words, narrative makes use of a poetics of seduction in such inviting sit-
uations. The tactic reveals a number of things, as the protagonist speaks for the
writer’s own reading and grounding and his belief in the power of deviational
poetics. The narrative carries within it a sense of faith in an identical power to
influence impressionable minds, brought up in context of exoticism. Poetry as
such is redeemed beyond the divide of the late 1940s, for the modernist fugitive
grows into a constant that belies the limits of time and space. Al-Yayyib Xmli.’s
practice attests not only to transgeneric poetics but also to the power of this con-
stant, which poets in the modernist tradition had to recognize in the aftermath
of the ideological and rhetorical clash with the conservatives and qaxldahpracti-
tioners. Poets hereafter were to reject historical divides, for modernity belies his-
torical limits. On the other hand, poetry is not a single structure and form, for
it exists in every utterance and gathers momentum to such an extent as to draw
attention to its presence. The whole discussion undermines social, political, and
generic hierarchy, and retains heterogeneity in the seemingly smooth terrain.
The second example of this transgeneric overlapping is from the
Palestinian poet Ma.mnd Darwlsh (1942). The case is not a passing revival
of prosimetrum as a validated norm of writing since some time in the late
tenth century, for poets like Ma.mnd Darwlsh find it needful to work out a
transgeneric mode to commemorate March 30, 1976, Day of the Land. In this
long piece of writing, “Yawm al-ar,” (The Day of the Land 1976), Ma.mnd
Darwlsh brings together the lyricism of hymns and songs with prose expli-
cations. Both conjoin to celebrate and set markers for a Palestinian discourse,
its significations of sacrifice, faith in rebirth, and the staunch and irresistible
attachment to the land, as these portions demonstrate:
Exit of Christ from the wound and from the wind
Green like plants that cover his nails
and my chains
This is my song
This is the ascent of the Arab boy to his dream
and to Jerusalem.With this confluence of the Biblical and the poetic, the religious and the
personal, the poet establishes an identity against erosion, an identity of strong
POETIC DIALOGIZATION