She realized the significance of this grounding, not only to benefit from
Arabic prosody, rhetoric, and the art of poetry, but also to establish the right
relationship with tradition, “... studying and memorizing thousands of lines of
ancient Arabic poetry cleansed my soul from the torment of mulling over my
feelings of self-pity and injustice” (Ibid. 63). This objectifying process compli-
cates matters as much as it seemingly solves them. It counteracts a romantic
recoil, but it also brings about a Keatsian negative capability, or in the words
of Geoffrey H. Hartman, a “... way out of the morass of inwardness.”^60 To
escape the present, she found life in the past, “The pre-Islamic, the Umayyad
and the Abbasid poets lived with me. They ate, drank, did household chores
and bathed with me. They talked to me and I talked to them” (Ibid.). She adds,
“I would fall in love with one poet at a time, until I exhausted his works,”
reaching thereafter her “last love amongst the ancient poets,” namely AbnFirms
al->amdmnl(d. 968). Tradition as such works its way in the ephebe’s sensibil-
ity through love, but it is a substitutivelove that proves conducive to creativ-
ity, “My absorption in my new world taught me the taste of happiness. I was
immersed in the act of creating myself, building myself anew, in an eager
search for the potentialities and abilities that constituted my life’s capital”
(Ibid.). Although this immersion becomes “an internalization” for “therapeu-
tic purposes,” in a reversal that may not meet Harold Bloom’s quest-romance
theory,^61 there is still a possibility of combining this personal rebirth with
freedom from “acute preoccupation with self.”^62 Her brother was the first to
warn her against a narrowed consciousness as concomitant with self-preoccu-
pation, “Sister, people aren’t interested in our personal feelings. Don’t forget
this fact” (Mountainous Journey, 70). Her brother’s remark came as a comment
on her elegiac verse to express her sorrows at his illness. This remark did not
come as a surprise, for her “... attempts at poetry,” she writes in retrospect,
“have revolved mainly around my personal feelings and sufferings” (Ibid.).
Her feelings were ones of a “melancholy, introverted nature,” which, she
writes, “always made me withdraw completely within myself” (Ibid.). Yet, to
see the difference between the brother and the sister in clear-cut terms
may not lead us further. He warns against introspection, introversion, and
self-preoccupation, and he strongly believes in literary revivalism, for he
belonged to a generation that had grown up aware of a widespread
movement to revive this heritage through resurrecting its artistic
values; its terseness of phraseology, its clarity of expression and its
beauty of style, beginning with al-Barudi, at the dawn of the revival-
ist movement, on through Shawqi and his contemporary Egyptian,
Iraqi, Lebanese and Syrian poets.
(Ibid. 72)At that stage, she seemingly accepted his objections to the Apollo school
of the 1930s as “... colorless and weak in style” (Ibid.), for she concurred with
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION