on by the desires and interests of Others. To overcome banality, loss, absence,
disintegration, and other negative categories of modernity, Arabic poetry may
not be different from others, as it too invests the scene with enough imagi-
nation to objectify the personal in a dramatized effort to cope with the real.
Still, it relies on rich resources of history, heritage, and myth, not only to
objectify experience in the manner of T. S. Eliot, but also to invest it with
enough life and energy from the Arab past. The result is not an accommoda-
tion of tradition and modernity in a poetic settlement, for, in the best poems
under discussion, negotiation is the generator of creative anxiety in its many
poetic manifestations. Navigational efforts between tradition and new poet-
ics are not smooth, however, and we need to look at some autobiographical
accounts to make sense of their complexity.
FadwmYnqmn’s autobiographical itinerary from
tradition to modernismOne way of answering the question, and summing up these configurational
sites, or ensembles of voices and trends, is to read through autobiogra-
phical records, like the Palestinian woman poet FadwmYnqmn’s (d. 2003)
A Mountainous Journey: A Poet’s Autobiography. This is a significant documen-
tary record of her poetic maturation in time and place that provides a syn-
thesized review of trends and movements in relation to the past tradition.^57
In this autobiography, there is first a context, which is the socio-political
scene. Second, there is an emerging sensibility that vies for freedom in the
context of an awareness of social and religious limits. Third, there is her
literary grounding, first in literary tradition (mostly the classical and the pre-
Islamic), an attachment to women poets, and faith in strong male scriptoria.
Fourth, there is a further mediation between past tradition and the encroach-
ing modernity through a romantic lens that was represented, to some extent,
by FadwmYnqmn’s brother, the poet Ibrmhlm Ynqmn (d. 1941). This autobi-
ography may well be a Bildungsroman, a novel of apprenticeship and growth,
as other writers of the same age could have undergone the same change
and offered a similar poetic experience, albeit with a personal tint and an
individual poetic.
In so far as material reality, including power politics, affected her, Fadwm
Ynqmn found in Emile Touma’s The Roots of the Palestinian Question, enough
material to account for her changing sensibility. The British authorities in
Palestine arrested her father in 1917, “... banishing him to Egypt along with
others aware of the dangers of western imperialism,” she writes.^58 This personal
detail fits into the larger context of colonization, for, as she quotes Emile Touma:
Egypt, Libya and North Africa were distributed amongst the
colonizing states: Britain, Italy, France and the Ottoman Arab
States became targets of French and English greed. With the growthPOETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION