As elegy, this poem swerves from the canon. It shares with women’s elegy some
sense of incitement and instigation, but this is carried out through self-
castigation that may hamper the elegiac ritual obligation involved in war
exhortation. It does not meet the rituals of obligatory avenging of the dead, as
it upbraids a polity for being below the standards of the deceased. On the other
hand, it shares with the marmthlsubgenre a purpose, to preserve the memory of
the deceased leader, and hence to establishing through inscription the perma-
nence of the deceased as “a beautiful book” and “a land of innocence.” In other
words, the poem proves what Suzanne P. Stetkevych describes as “the permanence
of the individual which is of the essence, however, not his individuality.”^42
Qabbmnlcannot totally dislodge his poetics from the elegiac tradition. His
emotions of loss and frustration need to preserve memory through a poem
that must ensure permanence. Between the elegized and the poem, there is a
bond of survival. The permanence of each depends on the attributes of both,
and hence the poem borrows from tradition the celebration of the dead as
beyond the reach of time. As denial of death involves the elegy in a sharp
paradox, there is a need to invoke permanence through analogy. As Suzanne
P. Stetkevych notices, ancient poets used to draw on comparison to enhance
memory. One may add, by magnifying the dead, they allow their unbelief a
rhetorical outlet. Hence Zuhayr Ibn AblSulmmexpresses surprise, for “The
stars still shine on high, / And the ground is still firm beneath the foot” (Ibid.
170). Hence, Qabbmnlsays:
Mountain of pride, we’ve killed you,
the last oil lamp who could have lit
our winter nights, we’ve killed you
with both of our hands and blamed it
on fate!
(Ibid. 155)This attempt at reclamation from death and obliteration aggrandizes the
deceased, while it simultaneously buttresses the reciprocity and bond
between the mountain of pride and the poem. The interchange between the
two elevates the poem to the celebrated national register, and the fusion is
complete. The leader’s career and thought becomes the poet’s as much as the
poem becomes the leader’s discourse of fertility and regeneration:
Abu Khalid,^43 the poem you were
made ink sprout leaves,
Where did you go, horseman of dreams?
What good is any race when the steed is dead?
All myths died with your death;
Sheherezad (sic) committed suicide...
(Ibid. 156)CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS