confrontational or smooth literary discourses, there is, in the discursive effort,
urgency prompted by a sense of responsibility toward social justice, national
issues, and the human condition at large. Partaking of the Nah,ah (renais-
sance) discourse with its public intellectualism, poetics since the late 1940s
has forged for itself a number of registers and strategies whose common
ground is dissent. Nevertheless, dissent is not merely a wayward discontent,
for the political and the social, as well as the literary and the cultural, take
issue with what has been burgeoning since the Nah,ah without concluding
in a final settlement. Issues of modernity and tradition, renovation and
authenticity, Westernization and atavism were as real and urgent as they are
today, since the drive is toward an understanding of the self, its place in the
modern world, against a narrative of the past that has been undergoing some
deconstruction, but not a dissecting analysis. Although the 1950s were recep-
tive to these efforts, the hegemonic patriarchal, neo-patriarchal, and domi-
nating bourgeois discourses in different areas of the Arab world have been
staging a strong fight against innovation and open questioning of heritage.
However, discourses of convergence and opposition multiply in respect
to ideology, religion, and tradition in its pre-Islamic, ancient, and Islamic
manifestations, taking a number of tracks, which may be defined, in Michel
Pécheux’s terms,^76 as follows:
1 Ideologically interpellated intellectuals, that is, those who identify with
“the discursive formation that dominates them,”^77 may identify fully with
the ideology they subscribe to, as was the early Badr Shmkir al-Sayymb
(1926–1964) in his communist affiliation and cAbd al-Wahhmb al-Baymtl
(1926–1999) of the 1950s. Poetry in this ideologically interpellated stance
tends to be anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and committed to class and
national struggle. Poetics collapses the lyrical and the polemical, while striv-
ing to objectify its utterance, to reach for its goal and target. Its dramatiza-
tions and attempts to distance the poet from the poem and allow multiple
voices find, in al-Baymtl’s “The Village Market,” a good example.^78 The devi-
ational nature of this poetics manifests itself in speech-like language, daily
usage, and popular sentiments with no effort to court the classical language
of the qaxldah.
2 This same outlook may give way to counter-identification, too, for,
to use Issa Boullata’s re-phrasing of Pécheux, it “rejects the identity
inscribed in the ruling ideological practices, thus remaining more or less
subordinate to what it opposes.”^79 In responding to tradition or engaging
modernization, poetry here borrows from both. Contamination is the
imprint, which even paratextual devices such as dedications cannot dislodge.
Almost every modernpoet betrays this double indebtedness. Even when
al-Baymtladdresses, for example, a poem to the “reactionary poet T. S. Eliot,”
he cannot release his subtext from the presence of his forebear’s ghost.
T. S. Eliot’s influence on that generation “was eruptive and insistent,” writes
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS