keep memory fresh, / and classical so I can interpret / shadows to their
shadows.”^90 These problematizations require some re-thinking of tradition in
poetry, its terms, and meanings. Ma.mnd Darwlsh’s call for the need to
connect to a native tradition, albeit in an ongoing process of recreation,
makes use of the following motifs or dominants: (1) Anat as myth and as
symbol of motherliness; (2) the carefree gypsy lore of the guitar player;
and (3) Lorca, as a reminder of the power of the song and the role of the poet
as a public intellectual.
The negotiated poetic spaceMa.mnd Darwlsh’s use of Anat is in line with the ongoing retention of
Sumerian and Babylonian lore as cultural continuity. His reading and poetic
recreations are in line with this understanding which looks upon culture
contextually. The roads taken by poets and intellectuals alike have many
things in common. The sense of urban growth and the emergence of educated
classes may have brought a poetics of some sophistication, whereby the image
eludes clear-cut representations and analogies while language frees its regis-
ters from classical rhetoric. In a consistent occupation with everyday speech,
it comes alive with the concerns and meditations of the Arab individual now.
Indeed, on many occasions early in the 1950s poets even exaggerated this
common life language and concern, as cAbd al-Wahhmb al-Baymtl’s “Snq
al-qaryah” (“The Village Market”) shows.^91 This use tries to go beyond
Wordsworthian intersubjectivity toward an objectification that allows com-
mon language to argue the common person’s plight. This language speaks up
for the repressed and the muted against a dominating orthodoxy that has
hijacked the sacred to justify continued exploitation. The meek are not made
to inherit the earth in the hegemonic discourse, but are asked to submit.
A dialogic poetic uncovers, for instance, the one-sided reading of the Qur’mn
as perpetuated by the dominating class. In “Death-in-Between” by the
Egyptian Xalm.‘Abd al-Xabnr (d. 1981), “the humble voice” of the common
person offsets the statements advanced by the “Grand Voice” in the text, yet
the underlying purpose is to debate hegemonic manipulation of the sacred.^92
On the other hand, the same consciousness draws poetry to the urban site,
involving modern poetics in new concerns and preoccupations that are neces-
sarily far from the early romantic interests that colored the poetry of the
immediate forebears like the Egyptian ‘AllMa.mnd Ymhm(d. 1949), the
Sudanese Ynsuf Bashlr al-Tljmnl(d. 1937), and the Egyptian Ibrmhlm Nmjl
(d. 1953). In modernist and postmodernist paths, there is no Wordsworthian
celebration of nature and its offerings, but a problematic relationship exists
whereby the speaker oscillates between love and hate, imprisonment and
belonging, and denial and recognition of the habitat. The concern with
urban life entails larger concerns, too, that go beyond the national and
the regional, for urban consciousness is broad enough to engage the human
POETIC TRAJECTORIES: CRITICAL INTRODUCTION