87 Mahmoud Darwish, Psalms, trans., Ben Binnani (Colorado Springs, CO: Three
Continents Press, 1994), p. 53.
88 Trans., Hussein Haddawy, in The Adam of Two Edens.
89 See for instance his “Speech of the Red Indian” where “We still hear our ancestors’
voices on the wind,” p. 137.
90 “Hooriyya’ Teaching,” trans. from Why Have You left the Horse Alone? By Sinan
Antoun in ibid. p. 86.
91 In trans. and eds Mounah A. Khouri and Hamid Algar, An Anthology of Modern
Arabic Poetry(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), pp. 115–17.
92 For a translation, see M. M. Enani, An Anthology of the New Arabic Poetry in Egypt,
pp. 79–84.
93 Although no longer tenable among Arabists, R. A. Nicholson’s view of race and
poetics is worth citing, as it had some echoes among some Arab innovators like
the Tunisian al-Shmbblin his discussion of imagination and fancy in Al-Khayml
al-shi‘rl. ‘inda al-‘Arab(Poetic Imagination among Arabs). In an effort to
explain the reason behind the emergence of an exquisite poetics among Persian
Sufis, especially after the steady deterioration of the Caliphal center in Baghdad
since the second half of the tenth century, Nicholson did not question the
peripheral national upsurge, for instance, outside the Islamic center that was
collapsing even prior to the Mongol invasion of Baghdad in 1258; nor did he
debate the resulting cultural freedom from the Arabo-centric discourse to jus-
tify the emergence of new modes of writing. Rather, he found explanations in
racial difference. He argues, whereas the Semitic race, that is, Arabs, lacks the
synthetic mind, and hence produces fragmentary poetry, the Aryan race, that is,
Persians, is endowed with the capacity to produce a more spirited and coherent
literature. The piece is worth citing in full.
The main reason, I think, lies in racial endowment. The Arab has no
such passion for an ultimate principle of unity as has always distin-
guished the Persians and Indians. He shares with other Semitic peoples
an incapacity for harmonizing and unifying the particular facts of
experience: he discerns the trees very clearly, but not the wood. Like his
art, in which “we everywhere find a delicate sense for detail, but
nowhere large apprehension of a great and united whole,” his poetry,
intensely subjective in feeling and therefore lyrical in form, presents
only a series of brilliant impressions, full of life and color, yet essentially
fragments and moments of life, not fused into the substance of univer-
sal thought by an imagination soaring above place and time. While
nature keeps Arabian poetry within definite bounds, convention
deprives the Arabic-writing poet, who is not necessarily an Arab, of
the verse-form that is most suitable for continuous narrative or
exposition—the allegorical, romantic, or didactic mathnawi—and
leaves him no choice but to fall back upon prose if he cannot make the
qaxidaor the ghazalanswer his purpose. Both these types of verse are
associated with love: the ghazalis a love-lyric, and the qaxida, though
its proper motive is praise, usually begins “with the mention of women
and the constantly shifted habitations of the wandering tribesmen seek-
ing pasture throughout the Winter and Spring; the poet must tell of
his love and its troubles, and, if he likes, may describe the beauty of his
mistress.” Thus, the models of Arabic mystical poetry are the secular
odes and songs of which this passion is the theme.
NOTES