Huxley, nor does he settle for the supposedly mystical East. In other words,
identity can never be restored through mimicry. To use Frantz Fanon’s
formulation for false identity, “white masks” never provide identity.^33 It
should not be surprising that, despite differences in performance and outlook,
modern Arabic poetry is populated with rovers, questers, strangers, and exiles
who signify some epistemological crisis.^34
Arabic poetry resists claims for closure and settlement when searching for
escape. Here lie simultaneously its anxiety, ambivalence, and strength.
Dedicatory poetry highlights these conflicting positions and attitudes, for its
subtext gathers its preliminary matrix from a wide-ranging dialogue before
its ultimate transformation into texts.
Al-Sayymb’s lyrical–elegiac mood
Drawing on an enormous subtext of fragments, lore, vegetation myths, and
vernaculars, while manipulating the lyrical–elegiac mode of ancient and clas-
sical Arabic poetry, poems since the late 1940s have been widely submerged
in crisis of one sort or another, concluding in either an apocalyptic vision or
a desire for rebirth. In dialogue with texts and figures, poetry swarms with
mythical characters, historical personages, precursors, and contemporaries. In
such a poetic space there is so much negotiation and soul-searching that it
emerges as the textual terrain for contact and exchange.
The present rather than the past often provokes the lyrical–elegiac mood,
for the modern poet, like al-Sayymb in “Unshndat al-Mayar” (Canticle of the
Rain), is concerned with capturing the human condition against a back-
ground of fertility and wealth. Hence, identification with figures of sacrifice
and atonement, in the manner of al->aklm’s Mu.sin in The Bird of the East,
is another pattern of affiliation that, nevertheless, ransacks cultural terrains in
search of further support. Many poets search, through dedications or identi-
fications, for some meaningful stance in an otherwise bewildering experience.
In “Al-Nahr wa-al-mawt” (Death and the River), for example, al-Sayymb
identifies with Christ:
I wish as I fly through the night
To help those who struggle,
And clench my fists to strike at fate
I wish if I were to drown
In the depths of my blood,
To bear the burden with mankind,
To bring forth life;
In my death is victory.^35On the other hand, al-Baymtlis more at home with the Sufi experience,
despite his reluctance to adopt Sufism as a practice. Identifying textually
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS