Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

There is much to corroborate Derrida’s “simulacrum of narrative.”
However, poets proceed at times from claims counter to gift exchange in
order to highlight their vocation while meeting the expectations of the
donee, the patron in this case. Indeed, al-Mutanabbl(d. 354 H) tends to
annul casual formations of exchange in order to establish another paradigm
of restitution. Addressing AbnShujm‘ Fmtik in 348 H, the poet sets himself
apart from current exchange:

You have no steeds to offer, neither do you have money

Let utterance help, if status doesn’t.^12

Whenever al-Mutanabbl’s (the prophetizer—he who claimed to be prophet)
panegyric searches for both reward and absolute distinction, the address is
toward the self as much as it is toward the emir of Aleppo. In addressing him-
self in the third person, al-Mutanabblvalorizes his mission and his career as
a poet, while establishing the basis for his address to the emir.
Through this double-edged repayment, the poet maintains equal footing
with the emir in the hierarchy of positions and merits, as Suzanne Stetkevych
aptly notes.^13 While this panegyric assumes its own invocation of self-
generating poetics independent of divinity, its play on the components of
the panegyric (i.e. the utterance and the reward) involves it in the very politics
of dedication as gift. Significantly, in another instance of incomparable self-
aggrandizement, the poet openly objects to the patron’s acceptance of other
poetic shows of allegiance and homage, stipulating that he is to be rewarded
for every other panegyric recited, for it is no more than an echo of his poems:

Time itself is a reciter of my odes;

I compose a poem, and then time recites it.

Recluses rush out to bruit it abroad;

With it the tuneless raise their voice in song.

Reward me for every poem recited to you;

For what panegyrists bring is but my poems repeated.

Leave off every voice but my voice;

Mine is the uttered cry, the others, echoes.^14

To use Marcel Mauss’ reading of the gift, there is in the panegyric a tendency
to restitution, for between the patron and the poet there is a contract of
giving and repaying.
What is also distinctive of al-Mutanabbl’s panegyric, however, is the
insistence on the originality of his gift, its unique nature that, paradoxically,
invites servile imitations. To use Derrida’s reading of Mallarmé’s “Aumône,”
al-Mutanabbl’s poem “is compared to a work that would have been born from
the poet alone, without couple or without woman.”^15 In fact, the verb
“to offer,” and next to it “reward” are used in line with an ongoing tradition

DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS