Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

In other words, poets in that age of prosperity attempted to manipulate a
discourse of daily transactions while setting a higher value on their own prod-
ucts. In those scenes of competitive exchange of gifts and privileges, poets
close to the dominating groups forged a discourse of their own that was
commercial at the outset while vying strongly for refinement at its core.
Indeed, to offer a competitive gift, the poet has to specify its distinction first
as part of himself. In Emerson’s words:

Rings and jewels are not gifts, but apologies for gifts. The only gift

is a portion of thyself. Thou must bleed for me. Therefore, the poet

brings his poem; the shepherd, his lamb; the farmer, corn; the miner,

a gem; the sailor, coral and shells.^9

To offer other presents is an act “fit for kings and rich men who represent
kings” (Ibid.). Especially in this connection, the poem offers more than mere
obligations, seen by Boas as substituting publicly for the absence of writing
in archaic societies. Writing then becomes a re-enactment of perpetual reci-
procity whereby the addressee and the addresser are entangled in a relation-
ship that is no less binding than blood. In a deconstructionist reading that
lays no less emphasis on the process of giving than its contents, Derrida
argues for the text as “the marking of a trace”:

The gift would always be the gift of a writing, a memory, a poem, or

a narrative, in any case, the legacy of a text; and writing would not

be the formal auxiliary, the external archive of the gift, as Boas

suggests here, but “something” that is tied to the very act of the gift,

actin the sense both of the archive and the performative operation.^10

The implications in Derrida’s reading tend to revise the whole concept of the
gift. He asks, “Why must one begin with a poem when one speaks of the gift?
And why does the gift always appear to be the gift of a poem, the don du poème
as Mallarmé says?” (Ibid. 40). Indeed, Derrida suggests first that to recognize
the gift as such is to annul it, for it demands reciprocity: “gift as giftought
not appear as gift: either to the donee or to the donor” (Ibid. 14).

Poetic simulacrum of narrative^11

On the other hand, the gift differs from “every other operation of pure and
simple exchange in that the gift gives time,” for “there must be waiting with-
out forgetting,” he adds (Ibid. 41). In other words, the gift as such buys its
way through a narrative of some sort, which is another name for time or
“waiting for time,” or “waiting without forgetting.” He suggests, “the thing
as given thing, the given of the gift, arrives, if it arrives, only in narrative.
And in a poematic simulacrum of narrative” (Ibid.).

DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS