4
POETIC DIALOGIZATION
Ancestors in the text—figures and figurations^1
He stretched a hand out, holding a rolled cigarette,
and I stretched a hand to take the cigarette.
And smoke spread, hiding two men
waiting at the locked door
on the sidewalk of Abu Nuwas Street.
(FawzlKarlm, “At the Gardenia Door,”
2004, p. 81)Like the smoke hiding the two men in the Iraqi FawzlKarlm’s (b. 1945)
poem, “At the Gardenia Door,”^2 textual heterogeneity allows independence
and fusion while entrenched in space. Nonverbal gestures and acts operate as
voices, too. The actual space in front of a locked bar in a Baghdadi street
along the Tigris tells a story of a new wave of repression that puts an end to
a tradition of wine drinking and revelry that is usually associated with the
poet AbnNuwms (d. 813) after whom the famous street is named. In such a
small textual space, the Iraqi poet brings together a number of voices, ancient
and modern, with a number of issues, registers, attitudes, and expectations.
Although many theorists find poetry immune to dialogization as a plurality
of independent voices,^3 modernist trends, since early attempts at dramatic
monologue, have collapsed poetry and narrative, though at the expense of the
lyrical at times. The English Poet Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues
are among the best examples of the art, and one may trace in Arabic poetics
many examples where narrative and poetry coalesce in an intricate manner.
Poetry is less hospitable to dialogization, however, in the sense that poetic
language is not representational. Mikhail Bakhtin’s differentiation, for
instance, lies more with the understanding of the novel, not poetry, as
dialogic. “The language of the novel is a system of languages that mutually
and ideologically interanimate each other.”^4 Foucault assigns to the poet an
“allegoricalrole,” for there is a search “... beneath the language of signs and
beneath the interplay of their precisely delineated distinctions,” to capture
“... the language, without words or discourse, of resemblance.”^5 Nonetheless,