First World War has been noticed by many readers and critics, but the
complexity of Tammnz as a symbol relates not only to cycles of life and death,
but also to the attending Babylonian rituals, Jerusalem hymns, and Greek
vegetation practices. “Under the names of Osiris, Tammuz, Adonis, and
Attis, the peoples of Egypt and Western Asia represented the yearly decay
and revival of vegetable life, which they personified as a god who annually
died and rose again from the dead,” writes Frazer.^51 One member of the
Tammnzlmovement, the Syrian cAllA.mad Sacld (b. 1930), was already pen
named Adnnls in an act of ideological initiation and apprenticeship in the
Syrian National Party.^52 Yet, neither the group nor Adnnls could sustain the
mythical Tammnzlpattern for long, for, as myth “is consciousness investing
the world and the self with meaning” by categories of unity and contiguity,^53
material realities remain too complex to be poetically shaped as such.
The stark scenes of the wasteland, the “landscape of ruins,”^54 as poetic
images of dismembered reality, coincided with encroaching geopolitical chal-
lenges to perpetuate modernity-consciousness beyond the reach of the newly
emerging states, compelling poets and intellectuals alike to feel an urgent
sense of responsibility toward their art and their community. The poetic out-
come is one of diversity and loaded manipulation of the historical, the myth-
ical, and the literary. The dialogue with other cultures, especially with Lorca,
Neruda, T. S. Eliot, Pound, and Baudelaire, among others, helped poets,
nationalists, and outcasts to create substitutive textual homelands. No mat-
ter how mitigated by remembrance and recollection, these dialogues and
negotiations speak of the modern predicament, whereby the poet, as Hugo
Friedrich puts it, “... writes out of himself only insofar as he considers him-
self a sufferer of modernity.”^55 The emerging speaker in a large number of
poems under consideration is a wanderer, a rover, an alien, an exile, and a
rebel. Hence the exilic in this confluence of modernity and tradition assumes
significance. To cope with a reality of greater complexity than, perhaps, the
one in European cultures, Arabic poetry has to be more innovative, ransacking
other traditions in the face of the pressures of modernity, while investigating
and mapping its own.
“Modernity” may be more difficult to gauge, not only because of the
typical reference to Enlightenment markers and the demarcation of world
civilizations in terms of Greco-Hellenic referentiality, but also because of the
innate ambivalence of the term, for “[I]n the heart of the world of hard
science, modernity floats free” (Ibid. 39). However, in Arabic usage since the
last decades of the nineteenth century, the term modernity indicates change
as propelled and perpetuated by Western scientific and cultural achieve-
ments. This understanding involves “consciousness of the discontinuity of
time: a break with tradition, a feeling of novelty, of vertigo in the face of the
passing moment,” writes Foucault of the general concept.^56 For the Arabs, it
lies more with tensions at crossroads whereby every moment demands an
answer, not only in respect to a complex past, but also to a present as acted
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION