The surviving past
The effort to found a new tradition is not an easy task, however, for the effort
takes place within the poet’s self that has its grounding in a cultural milieu.
Torn between the new sensibility and the formidable grounding in the clas-
sical tradition, along with the resilient ways of life and customs, the Arab
poet is even more divided and driven to soul searching, and experimentation
in technique. The woman poet Nmzik al-Malm’ikah (b. 1923) says as much in
“‘Indammqataltu .ubbl” (When I killed My Love). As if anticipating her pro-
nounced discontents later on in her career, she wrote this poem in 1952. She
was disillusioned with the classical Arabic tradition, its poetry and language,
augmented perhaps by personal anxieties. In this poem she speaks of a delib-
erate rejection of her love, killing it, and eroding everything that relates to
it. The first movement in the poem evokes a personal sense of relief and even
elation, like a “new poem,” that achieves rejuvenation through total rejection
of the past. The poem has a pictorial quality that shows her old love as a com-
bination of images, rhythms, and forms, which she has cherished for so long
that they have become obstacles and shackles. To murder this love is to put
an end to a past that impedes a joyful birth.
I despised your name,
Its shadows and echoes,
I loathed its color and tune, rhythm and form
and the rough memories
Which fell, were consumed
and dwelt in eternity all in a moment:
and I was resurrected as a new poem
which says that the past is only a word?Enjoying a moment of triumph, and planning to bury the corpse of the
murdered past, the speaker intimates with surprise and further awareness that
this act is no more than murdering herself.
The night was a mirror where I beheld my hatred
and my dead past, but not the center of my being.
I knew then,
having killed you in my cup and night
and borne my murdered slowly to the grave—
knew, by the lugubrious hue of my face
that I had only killed myself.^17The poem appeared later in her collection of 1957 Qarmrat al-mawjah(The
Trough of the Wave). The implications here are many in view of the poet’s
known pioneering advocacy of the Free Verse Movement, her writings on
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS