It also shares a Tammnzlregister with other poets like al-Sayymb in his
“Death and the River.” If his 1957 poem “Rlshat al-ghurmb” (“The Crown’s
Feather”) despairs of endless waiting for a “ship that will circuit the
universe,” his perplexity and inability to bring himself to pray should not
delude us. In this poem, perplexity signals a spiritual crisis. “I want to kneel,
I want to pray / to the owl with the broken wing, / to the embers, to the
winds” (Pt. iii: 165).^84 There is a divided spirit, a broken soul, but there is
nonetheless a desire to recreate a communal prayer that works, not only
within Sufi perplexity, but also within an ideology of national becoming as
postulated by the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The pious and the secular
constitute this mixed register. Instead of a theologically ordained prayer, the
speaker’s performance indicates an innate Sufi departure from the secular
knowledge that he is simultaneously courting: “I want to pray to a perplexed
star in the sky, / to death and to disease— / and in my incense burn/ my white
days and my songs, / my notebook and the ink, and the inkwell” (Ibid.
165).^85 Seemingly, there is a rejection of a career, too, yet the following lines
turn the poem into a celebration of a communal solidarity effectively endorsed
in his other poem, “The New Noah” (1958).^86 In the “Crown’s Feather,” the
speaker says, “I want to pray / to all beings ignorant of prayer” (Ibid.). In
“The New Noah” the speaker, Noah, offers a revisionist politic of defiance.
“If time rolls back to the beginning / and water immerses the face of life
again,” he says, “I will not heed His words” (Ibid. 160). Rejectionist poetics
in the 1950s was in keeping with a popular secular model that attracted a
number of poets who found in the primeval and the mythical a free zone that
allowed them to superimpose a cyclical design of birth and rebirth outside
the authority of religion. Rejection of the available finds no better image than
that of the woodcutter, as in his other poem “A Vision” (Ibid. 163–64).
“And rejection is a woodcutter who lives on / my face—who collects me for
burning.” Death and rebirth work in this design of phoenix-like burning.
This rejectionist poetics takes many voices. The Iraqi Buland al->aydarl
(1926–1996), for instance, applies it to monotheism at large as a dehumanizing
and oppressive force, with astounding justifications for exploitation. In
“Journey of the Yellow Letters” (1968), religion “yellowed letters” to the poor,
For a thousand years, children of my poor village
we have slept the long sleep of history
and worshipped our frightful shadows in your eyes.
(In When the Words Burn, 81–82)The poet’s blame is leveled against institutions that have made use of
religious and historical narratives of subordination and submission to enforce
supremacy and control while driving the poor further into poverty. Its imme-
diate context is socio-political, for poets strive to uncover sham practices and
double standards, which they usually associate with fake mullahs(religious
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS