broad affiliations that subsumed Neruda, Lorca, and Alberti, along with Arab
classicists. Ideological registers are carefully kept in the background through
masks and multiple voicing. Certainly, accusations against the direct politiciza-
tion of poetry were many, but the sharpest ones usually targeted the issue as a
sign of poetic failure. The association between mechanical response to issues and
occasions and the rhetoric of commemoration, celebration, or lamentation, may
be a sign of impoverished vision and poetic failure, argues Adnnls.^35 Shows of
poetic recollection are different from this rhetoric. Recollection of poetic texts
and figures through expressive devices is an active engagement, whereby mem-
ory plays intentionally on this material, to measure up to its moment of cultural
affiliation beyond the limits of filiative origination. As Edward Said argues, “The
filiative scheme belongs to the realms of nature and ‘life,’ whereas affiliation
belongs exclusively to culture and society.”^36 Societal and cultural realities
involve the process in adaptation, change, resistance, and repression, too.
Why precursors?
To focus the discussion, I propose to concentrate first on Arab poets’
recollections of, and engagements with, their predecessors, before tracing the
latter’s lurking presence in modern engagements with other cultures, mate-
rial realities, and current poetics. I will limit the discussion here, and for
a good reason, to such precursors as Abnal-Yayyib al-Mutanabbl(915–965
CE) and Abnal-cAlm’ al-Macarrl(973–1057 CE), within the context of the
challenge of the modern and the symbiosis of tradition and modernity. Other
recollections of self-elegy, like the Palestinian Ma.mnd Darwlsh’s (b. 1942)
intertextualization of AbnFirms al->amdmnl’s (d. 968) Byzantine odes, will
be considered in the section on dialogization. The choice of the two ancestors as
masks or voices is not random. They provide the modernists with defiant and
rebellious personas. Al-Macarrllooked upon his precursor, al-Mutanabbl, as
unique in talent and mastery of language, setting the terms thereby for
further recognition of the great forebear. Both brought into poetry and
poetics artistic freedom, rebellion against gravitational centers of authority,
creativity versus fixed norms, interrogational strategies, distrust of subordi-
nation, and glorification of the human and the personal. There is no separa-
tion between the poet and his poem, and in al-Mutanabbl’s poetry, writes
Adnnls, there is “...a whole nature of words, up to his own aspirations, for
they challenge, progress, sweep away, attack, conquer, and transcend...as if
they were the inward answer of his inner self, its very extension and supple-
mentation.”^37 Al-Macarrlis even more appealing for being subversive, not
only in matters of thought and belief and in his incessant questioning of
beliefs and the cosmic order, but also for his innovative techniques, especially
his Luznmiyymt, or Luznm mmlmyalzam (The necessity of what is not neces-
sary, or observing rules that are not prescribed; Obligations), which he
applied to his adoption of a second, third, or fourth invariable consonant
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS