as if still living in al-Mafraq
or Salt, Karak or Ramtha
as if we hadn’t crossed
northern borders
to big cities and coasts
where cruel war rages
and a great sea roars
where strangers clutch at each other’s shirt collars,
from balconies
Shoot bullets through wash lines
(Ibid.)These intimations are ironic for another reason, however. The speaker is no
longer the same as his compatriots back home. With this self-critique, he
can no longer fit into a Bedouin community that lives also in reciprocal
relationship with the urban center. Homecoming sounds impossible, and
memory strives to establish another homeland free of tribalism. In poetry,
these recollections explode myths of good life in exile, and lead the reader
to the complexity of relocation. Memory becomes a trap, and assimilation
a myth.
This engagement with issues of traditional life, scenes of dislocation, and
conflicting models and mentalities, is no less fertilizing than sites of super-
imposed visions. The poetics here reaches to the deep concerns of narrative
and drama, and involves its encapsulations in greater tension. The effort
enhances the 1950s’ preoccupations with the worn out attitudes and inhuman
practices that linger in the background of change, as Nmzik al-Malm’ikah does
in “Washing off Disgrace” and “My Silence”; but they are released in poetic
horizons of expectation and invitation of change and joy, as in MunmSa‘ndl’s
“So Drunk am I with the Night, the Air, and the Trees.”^90
In Munm Sa‘ndl’s poem, the speaker probes another juxtaposed frame,
whereby commercial dealings and bourgeois life drive the addressee into
oblivion and neglect. The poem fits into a feminist critique that looks on the
speaker’s freedom in terms of deliberate release from old and new shackles, of
worn out customs and commercial spirit. The poem borrows from ancient
poetry the sense of freedom and challenge, but it takes from new poetics the
postmodernist self-awareness of marginalization. The speaker sees the self as
the one ignored and marginalized, not due to traditional ethics and misap-
plication of Islamic law, but because of a reigning commercial spirit. This sense
of self is augmented through a counter self-awareness of rapturous fusion into
the boundless and the vast. The sea and the waves become liberating horizons
that enable the soul to roam freely.
So drunk am I with the night, the air, and the trees
So drunk, I enfold the seas of forgetfulness.THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS