THE EMIGRANT POETS 180they were Christians and the educated amongst them were brought up in
missionary schools, and were imbued with modernist and anti-traditional
ideas. In America they found greater freedom for literary experimentation:
there they did not meet with the moderating influence of traditional Arab
culture to which their compatriots were subjected in Egypt. In America
they, or rather their intellectual leaders, fell under the influence of the
latter-day romanticism and transcendentalism of American literature which
characterize the work of Emerson and Thoreau, Longfellow and Whitman.
Secondly, unlike those who settled in Egypt, the immigrants to North and
South America suffered from a feeling of exile, of lack of belonging. Living
in countries where the language of their literary efforts and of their tradition
was not spoken, they felt that their very cultural existence was at stake.
Hence their association into societies, their setting-up of literary reviews
to guard jealously their cultural interest and to provide them with an organ
to express their views. Hence, too, their striking feeling of homesickness,
no doubt, intensified by their awareness of being outsiders. This feeling is
common to all the emigrant poets without exception, and often underlies
their yearning to return to nature and to simple rural Me. And related to
that feeling is an idealization of their homeland, and an opposition between
the spirituality of the East and the materialism of the West, an idea repeated
ad nauseam in the work of all these poets. Some of the romantic features
which we find in the work of these poets, like the sense of isolation and the
heightened feeling of individualism, are therefore not entirely consciously
developed intellectual or psychological attitudes, nor are they merely the
result of imitating certain postures in western Romantic poetry. They are,
in fact, based upon the real facts of their concrete situation in an alien com-
munity or culture. In the United States, Jibran, their intellectual leader,
in the words of one scholar 'neither participated in the real life of the people
nor acquired an imaginative sympathy with their outlook, but became a
rootless outsider'.^4
The need for local Arabic papers and reviews to give them the chance
to publish their work and consolidate their position was felt very early by
the immigrants. Arabic journalism in America started as far back as the
last decade of the nineteenth century, with the appearance of Kaukab Amrika
in 1892. This was soon followed by al-Huda in 1898, and in 1899 by Mif'at
al-Gharb in which Jibran and Abu Madi, among others, published their
work. In 1913 the poet Naslb 'Arida together with Nazmi Nasim set up
al-Funun review which played a significant role in the Mahjar movement,
and when al-Funun ceased publication part of its function was taken over