his call for a strong grounding in classical style. At a later stage she withdrew
from the maslak, or track, of modeling herself upon ancient poets as the
practice distracted her from the expressive in poetry, “deflected from genuine
experience to a concern for phrasing and selecting words with a ring and
reverberation to them” (Ibid. 73). Writing under the pen name Danmnlr, the
‘Abbmsld Ya.ymal-Barmakl’s slave girl (d. 825), she tried to give vent to her
chaste feelings of love (Ibid.). The choice is not random, not only because the
slave girl was faithful to her master, and was well educated in poetry and
music, but also because she provided FadwmYnqmn with a persona, enabling
her to go beyond her self-absorption toward freedom of the imagination, a
condition that Bloom articulates as anti-self-consciousness, or resistance to
self-absorption.^63 The slave girl was equal to the best musician and singer of
the day, Ibrmhlm al-Mnxill, who said to her master, “if you were ever deprived
of me and Dananeer is around, then you have not lost me.” In other words,
the choice of the persona cuts across a career and survives in the woman poet’s
experimentation. FadwmYnqmn followed tradition and made use of male
scriptoria, but she built up a female lineage, too, with its anxieties, gains, and
failures. She tried to learn the best in tradition while creating an independ-
ent individual talent. In retrospect, she was displeased with herself for
writing “... forceful poetry with a strong linguistic construction,” modeled
on the ‘Abbmsld tradition, but her amateurish pen name also reveals a taste
for the song, the lyric, and music at large. On the other hand, the persona is
important, not only as outlet, but also as an objectifying strategy that leads
to her rite of passage toward a self-sufficient poetic. The association with the
past gave birth to a linguistic repertoire, but her subsequent independence
and the culminating estrangement from the influential forebears integrated
her into the emerging romantic movement of the Apollo group, before a final
affiliation in the poetic sisterhood led by the woman poet and pioneer of the
Free Verse Movement, the Iraqi Nmzik al-Malm’ikah (b. 1923).
In preparation for that estrangement, FadwmYnqmn notes that the use of
“... classical style, and this preoccupation with a choice of words that were
resonant but contrived, was an obstacle to the flow and movement, the spon-
taneity and truth in the process of creativity” (Ibid. 74). In both phrasing and
direction, she joined a tendency that had been evolving since the Dlwmn
group. This awareness led her to poetry of experience, enhanced and furthered
by her readings of the Mahjar poets, that is, the Syrian and Lebanese poets in
Latin and North America, along with the Apollo romantics of the 1930s in
Egypt, Tunis, and the Levant. “From that time, I turned my back on the
Abbasid style, my main ambition being to write poetry deriving its beauty
from simplicity, flexibility, truthfulness, and poetic expression free of affecta-
tion” (Ibid.). Such proclamations imply a break with an early apprenticeship,
for the brother’s rejection of the Apollo group apparently fell on deaf ears, and
her evolution took a romantic road, which was to find further impetus under
the impact of her fellow woman-poet Nmzik al-Malm’ikah.
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION