The mask works effectively in such a language. The mask for him is one way
of multiple voicing, as it allows the poet to develop both a self and an
anti-self, an image of a character that has something of the poet, but which
chiefly stands for the qualities the poet lacks.
The idea of the mask came mainly from Ezra Pound, however. His recapit-
ulations in respect to the use of the mask and the persona deserve attention, as
they were so popular as to drive the Lebanese poet Ynsuf al-Khml (d. 1987),
the founder of the Beirut journal Shi‘r(Poetry 1957), to dedicate his Al-Bi’r
al-mahjnrahto him, as will be explained in due course. “In the ‘search for
oneself,’ in the search for ‘sincere self-expression,’ one gropes, one finds some
seeming verity. One says, ‘I am’ this, or the other, and with the words scarcely
uttered one ceases to be that thing.”^9 The mask as such perpetuates life by
annihilating the power of time; it enables the poet to speak while it eludes
identification. He writes in the same place, “I began this search for the real in
a book called Personae, casting off, as it were, complete masks of the self in each
poem.” Whereas the mask may turn into one image of a character, the persona,
in Pound’s later experiments, may evolve from an imagined character distinct
from the poet, to another identified with him, before the narrating Idis-
tances himself/herself from the imaged character as in Pound’s Hugh Selwyn
Mauberley.^10 Yet, the mask poem is distinguished by a combinatory voicing,
for as the Egyptian critic Jmbir ‘Uxfnr rightly notices, “... the mask is a char-
acter that the poet borrows from history or myth, to speak through it, but the
mask is simultaneously not the poet’s voice,” for the emerging voice “...is
made of an interactional voicing between the poet’s voice and that of the
character.”^11 The mask then distances the poet from the romantic “I” which
was dominantly present in early romantic groups such as the Dlwmn and
Apollo. The Palestinian Ma.mnd Darwlsh (b. 1942) offers a pertinent notion
of the mask in a poem titled “Qinm‘ li-Majnnn Laylm” (A Mask for Layla’s Mad
Lover), “I found a mask, and I got interested to be my Other.”^12 The self and
the anti-self release their tensions in this poetic space, enabling the poem to
capture the sense of bewilderment, urgency, and search for meaning.
The use of the persona entails the use of an I, which may well alternate
with masks and images, achieving even greater multiple voicing. Eliot’s
mythical method offered a way out for a short while as signified by the
Tammnzl Movement before its demise. There was no separation, then,
between this epistemological stance and poets’ engagement in the struggle
against exploitation inside and the fight against the threat from outside. The
Palestinian poet Ma.mnd Darwlsh looks with suspicion on the separation
between the techniques of modernist poetry and the need for a populist
address. In “Of Poetry,” 1964, he directs a populist poetics against both
rhetorical obsessions and obscurism and ambiguity.
Our poems are without color,
Voiceless and tasteless.THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS