of homage and allegiance whereby the poem as an intertextual space betrays
its dialogue with other utterances while laying claim to originality.
The significance of this panegyric, in line with the dedicatory, or as an
independent mode of address, lies in its drive for recognition within the
poetics and politics of that classical age of affluence, competition, and
intrigue. Placing itself in an immediate cultural and political space, the
panegyric and hence all poems and writings of address claim no spiritual
transcendence.
Aside from its immediate desire for repayment and recognition, the poem
in this vein is in desperate search for reclamation of what Suzanne Stetkevych
specifies as a “backward trajectory”^16 of tradition, maintaining lineage and
ancestry through a number of components that Stetkevych designates as “pas-
sive perpetuity” (Ibid.), in comparison with its ascendancy in matter and
manner, “a forward trajectory.” The latter involves some “active perpetuity”
(Ibid.) within the dynamics of influence, transformation, and change, as a
centering text at one moment or as provocatively conspicuous at the next, to
draw parody, contrafaction, borrowing, appropriation, raid, or confiscation, as
al->mtiml’s term goes to apply to cases of total possession.^17
The prefatory and dedicatory in poetry
Between the desire to belong and the aspiration for present and future
dynamism, there is a liminal space, a threshold of some anxiety and uncer-
tainty. This is usually occupied by prefatory and dedicatory material, as if to
account for an attitude, to intensify a pledge, to show gratitude overtly, or to
rebuke the self for undue forgetfulness in the passage between filiation and
affiliation, nature and culture, or tradition and European cultures. It is this
threshold, this very “stereographic space” of Roland Barthes, the “weaving of
voices,”^18 that betrays patterns of contact and exchange in contemporary
Arabic literature.
Thus, while dedications among poets or toward patrons may well be signs
of homage, allegiance, and self-identification, they also reveal a sense of dis-
placement, fear of betrayal, loss, and “anxiety of influence,” to use Harold
Bloom’s popular term. Dedications also manifest a cultural dialogue, not only
among Arabic texts and contexts, but also with other cultures, east and west.
The significance of these increases in works of cultural implication, in poetry
and narrative, such as Tawflq al->aklm’s (d. 1987) cUxfnr min al-sharq/
Bird of the East(1937; French amended edition 1960),^19 al-Baymtl’s elegies,
Ynsuf al-Khml’s dedicatory poem to Ezra Pound, and Adnnls’s reclama-
tion of al-Mutanabblin his revisionary construct of an allegedly validated
Mutanabblmanuscript, “edited and published” by the belated poet Adnnls.^20
As the following argument suggests, these dedications and textual engage-
ments convey much of the Arab consciousness in respect to issues of religion,
practices and rituals, history and culture.
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS