of the National Movement, the Arabs had formed groups and secret
societies in various provinces of the Ottoman Arab States, in a strug-
gle to attain their rights. In the first Arab Congress held in Paris in
June 1913, the agenda had stated, very clearly, that the Arab
National Movement saw that its path lay within the framework of
the Ottoman Empire, not outside it. The leaders of the movement
were convinced that this declaration would deter the European
imperialists away from the Ottoman Arab States.^59Political issues in the anti-colonial struggle were not as straightforward,
however, and intellectuals found themselves at crossroads, as even a cursory
study of the period shows. Forebears and parents were so involved in the anti-
colonial struggle that they secured the affection and solidarity of the young
literati who were otherwise resistant to patriarchy. The young FadwmYnqmn,
for instance, both feared and recoiled from her father’s response to her early
poetic endeavor:
[H]e doesn’t believe I am good for anything, I said to myself. He has
no feelings for me except indifference, as though I’m nothing, as
though I’m a nonentity, a vacuum, as if there is absolutely no need
for me to exist.
(Ibid. 59)Yet, the father’s attitude was one of indifference, not oppression, despite her
subsequent emphasis on the increasing “rift” between the two (Ibid.). Once
she expected him to react angrily at her publication of a poem in a news-
paper, but “to my astonishment,” she wrote, “the roof didn’t fall. Father
didn’t allude to it and I heaved a sign of relief” (Ibid. 69). Between the under-
lying familial and social values and ethics and the desire for freedom and
release from traditional shackles, there is this intermediate space that becomes
the site for a poetic anxiety. Attachment to her brother, the poet Ibrmhlm, is
no less controversial, for she “... clung to.. .[him]with the tenacity of a
drowning person to a lifeboat” (Ibid. 53). Due to his care and attention, she
received this amount of love, “He alone became the air I breathed, the air of
health and personal happiness. His love and special concern for me gave me a
feeling of contentment as a human being” (Ibid.). If he had been as withdrawn
as his father, her response to him might have been different. In other words,
in the familial and social context of a traditional upbringing, there is a con-
frontation between the desire for individual freedom and the terms by which
the society moves and reacts. Yet, this is only part of the story for our reading
of cultural interaction. The brother cherished the same common faith in
literary tradition because without a good literary grounding in the classical
tradition there is no chance for a talent to grow, “he came to me holding
al-Hamasa, the famous anthology of Abu Tammam [d. 846]” (Ibid. 57).
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION