8
CONCLUSION
Deviational and reversal poetics—dissent,
not allegianceThe previous chapters have studied poetic sites of convergence, discontinuity,
and exile. They have also tracked poets’ pronouncements concerning Arabic
poetry, ancient and modern. It remains for this chapter to draw a comparison
between the ancient dominating poetic of allegiance and the modern one.
Modern Arabic poetry is often marked by difference, anxiety, and discontent.
In this sense, one can argue its secularity. In other words, it is no longer
under other obligations of allegiance, including those of authority and
subordination as partially sustained in the classical form. Its preoccupations
and engagements, as well as its experimentation with modes and strategies,
raise further questions regarding estrangement or continuity. But tradition is
not a form or a direction. Modern Arab poets and literary theorists, including
Adnnls and Bennls, looked on tradition as larger than the canon, and
therefore, as a debatable ground that should not be confused with hegemonic
discourse. While the normative element in poetry was accepted for a long
time as another term for the canon, this should by no means blind us to
patterns of transgression and dissent, as these validate and perpetuate moder-
nity against dormancy and immutability. In the past, not all tradition was
widely accepted and approved by the literati, the court, and the nobility.
Including poetry embedded in Kitmb al-aghmnl, as well as marginalized and
muted cultures, tradition was a site of contestation and debate, which
contemporary scholarship aspires to readdress and bring back to life. Being so
broad, it offers examples to substantiate different positions and arguments,
but the variegated nature of tradition also admits the existence of a privileged
hegemonic discourse whose power relations undergo change every now
and then. This corpus also contains deviational modes of difference and
dissent, that is, a counter-hegemonic discourse. If the “weaker” side in the
emulation process, as applicable to tradition, “is the more receptive to
the stronger influence of the other,”^1 as Foucault argues, there is also the
counter motion that builds up in time to supersede and replace preceding
norms. We should keep in mind that the court in the ‘Abbmsid period
(750–945, 945–1258) was not consistently the same, and that deviational
poetics, including the wine poem, paradoxically established its presence