on a sense of dismay at the whole scene, including censorship and oppression,
but it also applies a reversal poetic through a careful manipulation of the Sufi
courting of the void to live in the vision of God:
Be careful not to listen
Be sure not to look
Be certain not to touch
Be sure not to speak
Halt! Cling to the tight rope of silence
The fountain of speech is deep...
(Works 429)Here, there is no Sufi positive striving for the bond with the God, and there
is no effort exerted to achieve a detachment from whatever worldly attach-
ment deters this bond. The imperative tense redirects attention to the scene
in Egypt in 1964, with the increase of totalitarianism and censorship. This
Sufi poetics turns into one of dissent, revitalizing modernist poetics with
contemporary intimations.
Elegizing a present
Elegy is another poetic mode and theme that undergoes a great deal of
revisionism to fit into the deviational, the reversal, and the revisionist. While
making use of the traditional marthiyah(elegy), this subgenre constitutes a
large portion of poetry since the revivalists of the second half of the nineteenth
century. One may say that until sometime in the first half of the twentieth
century, and even later, Arabic elegy rarely deviated from the poetry of lamen-
tation with its emphasis on the attributes, good deeds, and impact of the
deceased. There are a number of subsequent deviations that dilute the genre,
immersing it into a new transgeneric consciousness that looks upon the entire
contemporary scene as one of lamentation. As Adnnls says in “Marthiyyat
al-Ayymm al->m,irah” (Elegy for the Time at Hand 1958):
All men...mere scraps from everywhere,
Fresh baits of arsenic.
Under their sky what green can sprout?^40Elegies no longer work as expressions of lamentation and love for a single
individual, despite the resilient presence of such shades, nor do they necessarily
court the ancient combination of fertility rites or calls to revenge and blood
as functionally intertwined in future reclamation and victory. As if in reaction
to early Tammnzlregenerative cycles, Adnnls places the elegy in chants of
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS