Kierkegaard, that repetition “involves no giving up, but a self-possession
carried to the point of no return.”^59 The historical detail raises questions
about power relations, struggles, lies, achievements, and losses. Although
there is no painful introspection as in Romantic lyricism, there is a configu-
ration of texts that allows space for both the self and the anti-self, the voice
that speaks, in a Yeatsian fashion, of a lack rather than complementarity.
Adnnls’ voice is present, for it cannot achieve total detachment because of the
nature of the endeavor itself, its prose and poetry, which echoes many of his
early writings.
Trajectories of modernity and tradition
Applied to the poetic scene, these examples from Adnnls, al-Baymtl, and cAbd
al-Xabnr may represent the main tracks in modern Arabic poetry. Examples
from other major and minor poets are bound to offer deviations and side-
tracks, too, but there is here enough disenchantment with the classical rhet-
oric of poetry. At the same time, poets are intelligent enough to understand
that the poetic practice grows among other texts, both vertically and hori-
zontally. Poetic strategies reveal as much, because they demonstrate how
closely connected these poets are to tradition as a lively and dynamic blend of
stability and rupture. Subsuming modernist poetics, its use of masks, myth,
and history within a new awareness of the potentialities of language, poetry
has been forging its paths within broad poetic strategies, which one may
summarize in preparation for the next chapters, as follows:
1 Poetic dialogization The classical poet is present, not necessarily for the
sake of identification or fusion, but significantly for the purpose of compari-
son. The modern poet recognizes a cultural gap that makes it impossible for
him/her to dream a position or recognition similar to the one achieved by the
forebear. In Xmlmh cAbd al-Xmbnr’s “Mudhakkirmt al-Malik cAjlb.. .” (Memoirs
of King cAjlb.. .), for example, there is an intersection where poets are pres-
ent as if for a feast, with all the signs of joy and rapture. Yet it is the young
king, the mask, who detects insincerity amid that joy. These poets voice a
stand and a position, which is made possible through their subordinationto, and
generation of, a hegemonic discourse that dislodges others. Significantly, the
opening lines of these panegyrics are of great classical resonance. They betray
cAbd al-Xabnr’s grounding in literary tradition and, indeed, unwitting
attachment to the classical mode of poetics. Set against the speaker in “Aqnln
lakum,” the mask, al-Malik cAjlb, confronts the reader with the fact that he
acceded to kingship by succession. “I didn’t obtain kingship by the sword,
but by succession and inheritance.”^60 He listens to poets, as they “... were
standing in rows at the door / and poems roll on in abundance / Elegizing the
late king, as so pure even in death / Glorifying the attributes of his successor,
the Just King” (Ibid. 421–22).
POETIC STRATEGIES