innovation, her lectures on the place and position of women, and her
amateurish critique of Arabic language.^18 Paradoxically, the poem also offers
a foretaste for her consequent reaction against the radical poetics of transfor-
mation and total rejection of traditional prosody. In this poetic intersection,
the past, the self, and biological and acquired identity coalesce in a moment
of further creativity that supersedes the first offspring or the first poem,
exploding the idea of biological succession and involving the moment in
a density of psychological potency that shatters linearity and progression.
As Edward Said argues, “the past is not a set of such births, and time does not
move like a clock, in discrete moments.”^19 The poet in this context is not
separate from his or her poetry, and the self undergoes a sense of battling as
many poems indicate. Indeed, it is this sense of division and the search for
rapprochement that gives poignancy to modern Arabic poetry.
There is no absolute faith in tradition behind the search, and the emerging
consciousness of the late 1950s was a mixture of Baudelairean defiance and
hesitation at the threshold of modernity. Two short poems by the Syrian-
Lebanese cAllA.mad Sacld, pen named Adnnls (b. 1930),^20 tell as much.
In “Lughat al-khayl’ah” (“The Language of Sin,” 1961),^21 there is a rejection of
a duplicated tradition as an imitation of the ancients. The speaker challenges
counter-accusations of transgression as he comes up with a redemptive poetic
of virginal space. Burning operates in eschatological and semiotic terms and
prepares for the white page, a disconnected stance waiting for inscription.
I burn my inheritance, I say that my land
is virginal, that there are no graves in my youth.
I am above God and Satan;
my ways are deeper than theirs.
In my book I walk
in the procession of the blazing thunderbolt,
in the procession of the green thunderbolt.
I shout: there is no Paradise, no Fall after me,
and I erase the language of sin.^22In another poem, he impersonates the new Noah, as the speaker insists on
redefining Biblical and Qur’mnic traditions, finding a selfhood only in the
company of fellow rebels, “I will come in my ark with a poet and a free
rebel; / we shall travel together careless of God’s words.”^23 The presence of
English and French Romanticism is not hard to trace. Both strains built on
a Miltonic free space as in Paradise Lost, whereby Satan is given enough
voice to justify rebellion. The prototype may be al->allmj’s Yawmsln, how-
ever, for Satan is given much larger space as the great lover who rejects any
medium that stands in the way of his love for God. Transgression in this
text is an act of love, and disobedience is an assertion of total submersion
in love. Adnnls revolutionizes the moment, however, and broadens the
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS