Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

English woman live a moment that parodies platitudes and stereotypes.
By extension, the moment is also one of a double bind, as it challenges
generic divisions, collapsing poetry, narrative and travelogue into one
episode, and also lets memory operate on an otherwise alienating reality for
the newcomer from Sudan. To entice an already impressionable mind, the
protagonist in Season of Migration to the Northinfatuates Ann Hammond
with poetry, which, along with his luring narrative, answers her innate
need for diversion and release in an Orientalized East. The protagonist quotes
AbnNuwms:

Does it not please you the earth is awaking,

That old virgin wine is there for the taking?

Let us have no excuse, come enjoy this delight;

Its mother is green, its sire black as night.

Make haste, Karkh’s gardens hang heavy with bloom,

Safe and unscathed from War’s blighting doom.^68

He adds, and, I also quoted to her the lines:

Full many a glass clear as the lamp of Heaven did I drink

Over a kiss or in promise of a tryst we’d keep;

So matured it was by time that you would think

Beams of light out of the sky did seep.

(Ibid. 145)

Seeing her enraptured, he adds more:

When the man of war his knights for war deploys,

And Death’s banner calls alike to grey-beards and to boys,

When fires of destruction rage and battle starts,

We, using our bands as bows, with lilies as our darts,

Turn war to revelry and still the best of friends we stay.

When on their drums they beat, we on our lutes do play

To young men who death in pleasure count a sacrifice divine,

While fair cup-bearer, subject of our strife, restores to us the

plundered wine,

So insistent be, scarce a glass goes empty than it’s filled again.

Here a man reels drunkenly; there another by excess is slain.

This is true war, not a war that between man and man brings strife;

In it with wine we kill and our dead with wine we bring to life.

(Ibid. 145)

POETIC DIALOGIZATION