Qabbmnl’s poem is one of negotiation among a number of registers and poetics.
While it shares a purpose with tradition, its sites of frustration, anger, and
need for celebration of ideals and aspirations situate it within a large poetic
corpus of anxieties and subtle reliance on an Arab poetic legacy. Issues of
nation, state, politics, national discourse, and belief, are recalled and criticized
or celebrated. Self-flagellation is there, too, in line with a poetic that has been
growing since 1967. Another of Qabbmnl’s poems, “Notes on the Book of
Defeat,” expresses the opposition to the nation-state, its totalitarianism and
oppression, as perpetuators “have been walled in from / mankind’s cause
and voice” (Ibid. 18). There is no more faith in the superimposed myths of
regeneration and fertility, despite the celebration of the Nasserite discourse of
Arab rebirth. In the poem there is no more faith in the nation-state, and no
more trust in its apparatus. On the other hand, poetic lamentation addresses
a scene, and carries the scars and wounds of a generation of poets who felt a
considerable sense of betrayal, not only by the nation-state, but also by the
so-called democracies, the Western ideals that have been propelling the
modernist impulse for a long time since the revivalist movement.
Amid a scene of such complexity, with no hope for a good and decent life,
a poetic of exile, alienation, disappointment, and loss finds its sparks in a
personal moment of love, Sufi epiphanies, and engagements with forebears and
counterparts elsewhere. Even the traditional erotic opening is displaced by
urgency, for as the Palestinian poet Ma.mnd Darwlsh says in his “Rubm‘iymt” of
national celebration, memory fades and recollections are replaced by the new
reality of war, resistance, and defiance: “I seem to remember horsemen and a
Bedouin Leila / and herders milking the she-camels in westerly light,” but such
recollections are passing away. Addressing his homeland, he feels more com-
mitted to the present, not to the past: “My country! The Age of Ignorance
brings no nostalgia / since my tomorrow is more beautiful than my today or
yesterday.”^44 With a hope as defined by will and desire against heavy odds and
cruel facts on the ground, we may expect more nostalgia for the past, however.
Textual locations emerge as homelands, and identities are forged through
dialogic habitats, whereby multiple voicing and semiotic densities give the new
poem a character of its own. Treading into a world of neoimperialist politics of
violence, a weak nation-state, an arena of double standards and failures, the
modernist poetic is an in-between space. While the demands of postmodernity
lead to more experimentation with an outcome of fragmented sensibility, the
celebrated postcolonial awareness is trapped into a further need for an ongo-
ing investigation of, and challenge to, the overriding neoconservative strat-
egy as it reaches every corner of the globe. At these thresholds, Arabic poetry
has accumulated a large corpus that also makes new demands on readers
and critics. Its issues, concerns, and experimentation are no longer formulary
or placid. Nor are they as polemical as the early pioneers’ recapitulations.
Between these anxieties and past legacies, poetry evolves as dynamically
involved in the making of life and culture in the Arabic speaking world.
CONCLUSION: DEVIATIONAL AND REVERSAL POETICS