cUmar al-Khayymm and an anonymous Japanese poet are also quoted, for the
acculturated protagonist lives at an intersection of cultural traffic that
achieves some repose only when enveloped by the serenity and comfort of
faith. Hence, Beethoven’s devotional writing to his brothers to explain his
personal tragedy touches some sensitive chords, drawing him back to that
flickering faith: “it was as though a familiar scent rose from the words he had
read: these were the same words welling up from the same spring that had
produced the message of Near Eastern prophets” (Ibid. 143).
Of more significance for further comparisons with writers and poets, how-
ever, is al->aklm’s stand for authenticity against imitation, and asceticism
against materialism. In this context dedications assume other commitments
to the “forward trajectory” that resurrects exemplary ancestors while opting
for active participation in the current making of things. Faithful to his qui-
etism, al->aklm also tends to counteract the fatalist element in traditional
thought by privileging human agency in its interplay with faith as something
personal that sees, nevertheless, into the ramifications of historiography. His
very choice of his patron saint disorients orthodoxy, for the holy lady suffered
those times of oppression and cruelty after the murder of her brother Immm
Husayn and the rest of his family at Karbalm’ in AD680. The choice carries
more subversion than readers may first imagine. The “posthumous dedication
also allows the author to produce an intellectual lineage without consulting
the precursor whose patronage he is bestowing upon himself in this way,”
argues Gerard Genette in matters of dedications as paratexts.^24 Therefore, the
seemingly innocent paratextual dedication is an intentional insertion of his-
tory to subvert the proclivities of authoritative historiography while arguing
for a non-materialistic ideology.
Dedicatory matter: identity for acculturation
As a discursive strategy, dedicatory matter is no less significant than masks,
contrafactions, parody, and irony, in reaching for some epistemological disso-
ciation with inherent lines of thought, regarding agency, time, history, class,
and identity. Especially attuned to dynamics of reciprocity and exchange and
to the passage between filiation and culture, its retrospective nature sets its
sense of time in a contested space whereby human agency offers its reading of
history as a narrative terrain that calls for further investigation and analysis.
Rather than forsaking identity for acculturation, or dwelling on the binary
positions of one paradigm against another, the negotiatory stance of its
inconclusive, open-ended discourse keeps it receptive to further revisionism.
Dedication takes a number of forms. While mainly a prefatory matter, it can
also set its claim for a whole poem, significantly bound into a title addressed
to another poet, whether a precursor or a contemporary, living or dead. It may
also entail a total identification with the dead, using the precursor to resurrect
history as narrative from distortions and confusions. Nevertheless, whenever
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS