al-cArabl(Anthology of Arabic poetry),^113 with its thematic divisions and
literary preferences. In these practices, Adnnls followed a selective method to
bring together samples that meet his poetic practice. Leaning on the Sufi
Shaykh Ibn cArabl’s (d. 1240) phrase “transgression of the habitual,” Adnnls
argues that creativity entails transgression, not obedience and subordination.
He derives support for his view of the human as an exuberant entity in
process from another saying by Ibn cArabl, for the human is a “totality,” not
a division, a sum, or a particle (Proceedings, 181). His emphasis on such issues
as totalization in mythical superimpositions, or poetics of synthesis, presence,
design, purpose, and creation carry the echoes of modernism in poetry. In this
poetics of modernism, creation stands against imitation, and progression
against fixity, as Ihab Hassan explains.^114
With an introductory critique and a validation of modernism as a constant
beyond periodization, the Adnnls of the Rome Conference had to intertextu-
alize his poetics of transgression within tradition, for the “... connection
to heritage should be one of creativity, supplementation and precedence”
(Ibid. 184). He suggested that,
while we...are far, historically and culturally, from AbnNuwms, for
example, we are close to him. Nevertheless, we still have our own
being and specific experience. While we should be aware of this
connection, we have to be aware of our separation from him, too.
(Ibid.)The demand for a new poetics to go beyond the circumstantial imperatives
of a constant was at the heart of the modernist drive, to be sure. Whether in
Khalll >mwl’s poems, Ynsuf al-Khml’s canticles of Al-Bi’r al-mahjnrah(The
Deserted Well, 1958), or al-Bayatl’s poems since the 1960s, especially Ashcmr
flal-manfm(Poems in Exile, 1961), there was a common commitment to work
out a modernist poetics with Tammnzlparadigms of rebirth. “Every year
Tammnz was believed to die, passing away from the cheerful earth to the
gloomy subterranean world, and...every year his divine mistress [Ishtar or
Astarte] journeyed in quest for him,” writes James Frazer. “During her
absence the passion of love ceased to operate: men and beasts alike forgot to
reproduce their kinds: all life was threatened with extinction.” Return and
revival were dependent on the great god Eanna’s intervention, and the stern
queen of infernal regions “... reluctantly allowed Ishtar to be sprinkled with
the Water of Life,” and to depart with her lover to the upper world.^115
National ideology throughout the 1950s took the place of deity, and mythi-
cal patterns of death and rebirth became the political motivations for national
revivalism against a background of stagnation. Applied to literature, this
movement from death to rebirth meant a movement from “...oratory
to vision, from subjects to experience, to intuition, logical and rational
sequentiality to unity of experience,” within a search for becoming.^116
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS