strictures. “Opening doors onto the unsayable, it insists on the absence of any
correspondence between things and words, which entails a questioning of the
truth of any discourse whatsoever, be it human or divine” (Ibid. 106). Anynn
Sa‘mdah’s views on culture and religion are not absent here, and they are never
absent from the modernist stance and its recapitulations. Innovation “...is a
result and not a cause,” he argues, and questioning should become therefore
central to the method and outlook that leads to change.^27 Language becomes
both the refuge and the means to question and subvert. In a collection enti-
tled Nahr bayna janmzatayn(A River between Two Funerals), the Moroccan
poet Mu.ammad Bennls (b. 1948) looks upon the two sides of the Arab world,
the eastern and western flanks, as funerals, where language carves its road in-
between. Language figures as a lively promising river, whose richness is one of
fertility and renewal.^28 In another collection by the same poet, Nabldh(Wine),
there is interfusion between language and wine as both release the mind and
offer unlimited prospects for further experimentation.^29 It is not surprising
that a verse from AbnNuwms (d. 813) serves as paratext for a poem titled
“Lughatun” (Language). Inverting the logical and the seemingly rational, wine
as much as the referential paratext informs the poem with freedom rather than
with limitation. The verse from AbnNuwms reads as follows: “O tongue before
whom all tongues bow down / an enraptured lover has woven you and made
you impenetrable.”^30 In one part, the speaker in the poem lets the verse to
speak in its own terms, beyond the representational, for language becomes,
in Foucault’s explanation, “without words or discourse, of resemblance.”^31
Certain nudity
Masked by a vine tree
of a land, unlike another, that would seem to flee
The lapidation of its descendants
And I give my body to the overflowing waters
Your fire has not set in my members
Yet, I plant specters
I almost saw them as secrets
Lingering behind my blood.
When looking for them
The desert glittering
Becomes my land
A throbbing overcomes me, and mysterious birds
Those forests of the night divide among them.^32Recollections of tradition suggest a rich encounter, not only with the
shadows of the past, but also with the self in its new and innovative form.
While playing this sense of change and transformation against the old rhetor-
ical devices, themes, and clichés, the poet finds the past also intriguingly
consolidating the present with moral responsibility and commitment.
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS