the “body of speech / on the bed of poetry” involves this poetic re-creation in
a dialogue of surrealist intersectional complexity. Al-Macarrlthe person, who
has been and will continue to be a controversial historical figure, is a poet
whose contribution to poetry is of utmost significance to Adnnls.
I reckon that I visited your eyes
In Macarrah, listened to your steps
I recollect that the grave is walking imitating your steps
But around the grave sleeps your voice
As if a quaver,
In the body of days or in the body of speech
Nor was al-Macarrah...
On the bed of poetry
Your parents were not there^50In other words, the poem negates the historical detail, which has already been
subsumed by, and erased from, memory. What counts, like a tremor or quaver,
is the voice, which is so concretized that it endows absence with presence, as
if to substantiate and fill the gap with a counter-detail. In a paradoxical inver-
sion, the substantial voice offers tangibility to surroundings in a context of
deep and intricate meanings. If historical accounts speak of al-Macarrland his
loss of eyesight before delving into a study of his genius, the poem character-
istically reverses chronology and historical sequentiality. The speaker visits
al-Macarrl’s eyes, which, metaphorically, grow into beingness. Enabled with
sight and insight, they no longer hold the poet captive. Even his steps defy
accounts of self-seclusion. The grave, which is as obscure as any other token of
relevance to al-Macarrl’s life, emerges as a person, and death itself is denied
supremacy. What survives is al-Macarrl’s voice, which fills the place with its
presence. Nevertheless, paradoxically, it resides “on the bed of poetry,” as if
awaiting a moment of enchantment or transfiguration. This perspective may
account for a surrealist stance in Adnnls’ career, which paves the way for other
engagements, including his intimate immersion in Sufi poetics.
Adnnls’ engagement with his forebears is also worth assessing in view of
his own poetics. Speaking of his character Mihymr the Damascene, he objects
to critics who “confuse Mihymr the Damascene with the poet Mihymr
al-Daylaml,” as “they share only the name Mihymr; otherwise they bear no
relationship to each other, none whatsoever.” However, Mihymr is a persona,
which Adnnls cites further on in the same interview as “a personal language,
symbolic, and objective.” Being “symbolic and mythic,” it is “more than a
mask,” he contends. In line with his timeless crossing, the spatial takes over,
and the persona becomes a site of interaction and exchange, “a vortex where
Arab culture would meet with all its dimensions into the central and pivotal
cause: crossing from the old world into the new one.”^51 Adnnls’ figures
are meant to retrieve a cultural crossing where criticism, historiography,
POETIC STRATEGIES