poem of 1967 “I Shall Never Cry.” According to the editors and translators
of Ma.mnd Darwlsh’s Selected Poems(1973), these quatrains appeared along
with her poem in her The Night and the Knights(1969).^90 The remark is
important as it negates the anxiety of influence, if we take the dedicatee
FadwmYnqmn as the one present in the speaker’s mind. He agrees with her,
complements her poem, and establishes a new poetic of defiance. In this
poem, “Diary of a Palestinian Wound: Rubaiyat for Fadwa Tuqan,” there is a
connection and a tie, “what gathers us at this hour in this place/ is the way
back from an age of wilting.”^91 While entertaining love for her eyes, as the
elder sister, there is now a common ground that holds them together: “Once
my heart could hold nothing but your eyes / and now it’s enriched with the
homeland.”^92 The meeting with her after 1967 brought about a change in his
poetics and ignited a new politic, for he no longer lingers over memories lest
“there would grow on my forehead the grass of regret.”^93 The defiant voice
contends: “I am not a traveler. / I am the lover and the land is the beloved.”^94
What brings about the change, however, is the defiance in her poems, the
decision not to cry, which he also echoes, affirming to make his voice one of
joy to celebrate revolt and resistance. While seemingly a show of solidarity,
the poem is a poetic transposition of agenda and registers. Recurrent words
in this poem celebrate joy, resistance, land, martyrs, stars, banners, and rip-
pling water. Downgraded or displaced are such words as memory, wound,
suitcase, and the traveler. He is “not a traveler”, nor is his homeland “a suitcase.”
On the other hand, “I spit in the wound which fails/ to set fire to the night
with foreheads.”^95 Language itself changes according to these new priorities:
“My language is the sound of rippling water in the river of storms.”^96
In conclusion, then, modern Arabic literature has been on a journey toward
self-awareness, the recognition of failure, and achievement on individual and
communal levels. What is seemingly a passage from innocence into experi-
ence, from filiation and nature toward culture, is actually ridden with sharp
analysis, tension, desire, and fear. Using many discursive strategies, writers
and poets are on the lookout for the new to account for a sense of bewilder-
ment, not only regarding other cultures, but also as intellectuals of some
responsibility toward their own people, in dialogue with their present
predicament. Shocked by the modern state, they suffer another disappoint-
ment of even larger proportions than their ancestors’ cultural shock in the
early 1920s. Thus, some will dedicate their poems to each other, as little men,
in hiding or exile, whereas others bewail the death of prophets and prophecy.
Nevertheless, determined to put up a good fight, others embark on many
discursive strategies, including dedications and identifications with ancestors,
for the terrain of contact and exchange lies in this intersection of erudition
and dialogue: “The cities break up,” writes Adnnls in “The Desert,” “The
train is a land of dust / Only poetry knows how to marry this space.”^97 The
emphasis on this vast space, its emergence in a semi-apocalypse, retains for
poetry a perennial vocation whereby exiles, gypsies, rovers, and vagabonds
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS