Arab-nationalist spirit.”^77 In the same memoir, the poet searched for a
meaning to this predicament, finding its source in the idealist rhetoric
lavishly stressed by its advocates and believers, especially by the leader Jamml
‘Abd al-Nmxir (d. 1970), whose national commitment and vigorous political
presence made him bypass social and national heterogeneity, class and ethnic
issues, and search for sweeping solutions to internal and external problems.
Ma.mnd Darwlsh’s belated critique pursues and culminates many poetic
pronouncements of disenchantment, especially after June 1967. Poets like
the Iraqi ‘Abd al-Wahhmb al-Baymtl(d. 1999), the Syrian Nizmr Qabbmnl
(d. 1997), and the Syrian-Lebanese Adnnls (b. 1930), wrote biting poetic
pieces that draw on the need for serious revisionist reading of language and
history.^78 Ma.mnd Darwlsh also argued in Dhmkirah lil-nisymnthat nationalist
rhetoric addressed a collective identity, not the real facts of fragmentation,
ethnic and tribal interests, and petty alliances.
Nasser...spoke to their acute sense of loss, naming the banks of the
river in such a way as to disguise the mud there—sects and dregs of
the Crusaders coming back to life in the darkness, under the ringing
speeches. But when the nationalist thesis collapsed, these sects put
forth their own almost-shared language.
(Ibid. 46–47)There are other critiques directed also against other discourses of the second
awakening, that is, after the 1952 revolution in Egypt. Taken together, they
make up a poetics of great political and intellectual vigor. This poetics
contains much revisionism, misreading, and recapitulation that guide poetry
on to new horizons.
This book, therefore, concentrates on these communicational paths and
markers, and follows up their manifestations in readings of heritage and the
misreading of ancient and Islamic poems. It investigates the underlying
secular mode in revisionism, whose questioning of representational ethics and
codes culminates in a view of identity as “less an inheritance than a creation,”
as “man creates...identity by creating his life and his thought,” says Adnnls.^79
IdentityThe road to this conclusive remark is not that smooth. Between inheritance
and creation of identity the road is rife with problems and troubles that shape
and mark every aspect of life. Each writer’s biography reveals as much. Let us
take as an example the Palestinian poet Ma.mnd Darwlsh, whose poetic
career problematizes respectively the terms of identity and its formation as
in the following itinerary. (1) rhetorical poetics of shock and resistance;
(2) dialogical poetics of multiple layering and voicing to account for the
complexity of the ongoing loss; (3) a poetic of transcendence that valorizes
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION