Recollections
One way of dealing with the modernity–tradition nexus is to set recollections
of ancient poetry and poets against or in line with contemporary and modern
poets who provide innovation and dissent. It is my argument that the act of
recollecting classical Arab poets falls within this epistemological trajectory,
to uncover and expose the effete and the corrupt while buttressing the dynam-
ics of growth through stratagems of deviation, difference, and transgression at
large. The dynamics of commemoration is not necessarily confined to the need
“... to recover, in the name of a collectivity, some being or event either ante-
rior in time or outside of time in order to fecundate, animate, or make mean-
ingful a moment in the present,” as Eugene Vance suggests.^33 It may stand for
an individual choice, a moment of rupture, divested of other ramifications, and
offered anew as a resurrected instance to intensify a sense of uniqueness. The
effort was neither homogeneous, nor was it smooth, as the poets had their own
visions, backgrounds, readings, and affiliations. Significantly, each poet’s
career underwent transformation to cope with the rhythm of time and the
encroaching pressures. If poets like cAbd al-Wahhmb al-Baymtl(1926–1999) in
“The Village Market,” for instance, employed daily speech to account for the
material and the real and to engage poetically the life of the poor classes, later
efforts were more keen on indirection and depersonalization, using personae
and masks to that purpose. The whole effort recalls the classical Arabic empha-
sis on poetic erudition, or knowledge of antecedent authority to facilitate affil-
iation. Whether through masks, voices in Eliot’s terms, or personae, the
endeavor involves knowledge of classical and modern literatures as basic to
further initiation into the poetics of modernity, whereby recollection operates
strongly on its resources to gather the past into a focused moment of relevance.
Density means the encapsulation of a selected past, not only to measure up to
a present literary effort, but also to enhance consciousness of life as it stands at
the crossroads of modernity and tradition. This effort then evolved into more
intricate engagements in textual paradigms of either affiliation or opposition,
which gave way in turn to further experimentation with forms and stratagems
from which emanated poems of great textual resonance.
Analysis in the present chapter dwells on recollection in its intertextual
function as an act of alliance, engagement with, and different from, the past,
heritage, and forebears. Whereas the use of “engagement” or “commitment”
(iltizmm) since the late 1940s smacks of the political discourse of the
postwar period, better manifested in the Lebanese Suhayl Idrls’ first issue of
Al-Mdmb ( January 1953),^34 the most influential journal of the 1950s and
1960s, its use here also refers to and signifies textual appropriation and
referentiality. Hence, there was the poets’ need to fluctuate between more
than one register, be they existentialist, Marxist, or nationalist.
To escape accusations of ideological catering at the expense of literariness,
writers, and poets first, strove to demonstrate their engagements in a register of
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS