a contextual horizon of expectation, but also the appeal of an oracular testimo-
nial with promises and/or portents. The ancient record of the ten long poems
implies an existing tradition that was so captivating as to resist displacement.
Nostalgia, as discussed in Jaroslav Stekevych’s The Zephyrs’ of Najd, emanates
from a recognition of loss, and “rises to the plane of the subjective past, and from
there continues rising steeply to the psychological present of memory as reverie,
only to drop from there precipitously to the original level of the past as radical
loss.”^10 The opening works among levels of the past that lead to the present as
vindication in keeping with the aspiration and vocation of the speaker in terms
of what Suzanne P. Stetkevych terms dialectic of transgression and redemption.
The dialectic works therefore in contexts of legitimacy as an authoritarian given,
whereby power claims legitimacy and ordains supplication and conformity. In
other words, patterned and designed as such, a poetic structure acts as avehicle
to ensure allegiance and celebration of the self within a privileged position
that is sustained only through this allegiance. Even personal merits like
Arabness and manliness as celebrated by poets in this vein are the merits that
fit into authoritarianism. While these digressions fall within a comparative
prospectus, they also shed light on the significance of efforts, like Suzanne P.
Stetkevych’s, to develop a critique of the genre as it manifests its characteris-
tics in texts of topical and historical relevance to issues of legitimacy. These
are of a tribal, religious, and political nature, and poetry was as entangled in
this mechanism as present-day propaganda and the media in general.
The complexity of form in traditional contexts resists mere technical analy-
sis, and Suzanne P. Stetkevych has made this clear in her critique of scholars,
Arabs, and Westerners, who have thought of form in its later maturations as
“slavish imitation.” Taking issue with the Syrian scholar Wahb Rnmiyyah,
she argues that “the high Jmhillpanegyric ode was established as the author-
itative poetic paragon for the Arabo-Islamic poetic tradition: it is at this
moment that the Jmhillqaxldahis canonized.”^11 Drawing on Tarif Khalidi’s
“vision of a legitimizing past,” she adds that while legitimizing the Umayyad
ode through a process of modeling on an antecedent authority, the Umayyad
poet also conferred legitimacy on that antecedent through acclaim and
recognition (Ibid. 82). This reciprocity works within a new political system,
however. The Umayyads, especially the Sufymnids, were badly in need of this
authority,^12 not only to benefit politically from the poetic scene, but also to
re-establish their presence within the Jmhillculture, which recognized their
economic and social prestige. As translated by Suzanne P. Stetkevych,
al-Akhyal’s ode of homage to the Umayyad Caliph cogently fits into this
argument. Here are some verses:
O BannUmayyah, your munificence
is like a widespread rain;
It is perfect,
unsullied by reproach.CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS