Adnnls’ early association between the critical reliance on ancient authority
and the seemingly resultant dormancy cannot hold for long, for his examples
fluctuate, offering both vindications and refutations of this association. The
opposing creative impulse has existed since ancient times, as manifested in
the supremacy of the personal in Imru’ al-Qays’ poetry. “He behaved, acted
and thought in terms that defy the tribal system and its dominat values”
(Al-Thmbit wa- al-muta.awwil, 1: 260). Its flowering is a modernist one that
cuts across tradition while building on the sense of an epistemological lack or
vacuum, not perfection, in the past. This lack is to be remedied by creativity
or borrowing from other cultures. Its landmarks are the emphasis on creative
freedom, endless discovery and search, plurality, difference, and multicultur-
alism (Ibid. 1: 19–21). In a word, the overall Adnnlsian critique stems from
a cultural overview of literary and political history as directed and overruled
by a hegemonic discourse that, if met with resistance, becomes even more
resilient. In this he is not different from his modernist counterparts, but he
is more advanced and sophisticated in putting theory and practice together
in a legible form.
Al-Baymtl’s tradition
A brief note may be desirable in respect to the Iraqi poet al-Baymtl(d. 1999),
who flourished in the early 1950s as a leftist, with a daring interest in exper-
imentation. He was already well-established when Adnnls’ presence began to
be felt. His recognition as the most challenging among the pioneers was
partly real and partly a myth, for leftist politics was in need of a respectable
name that could fit well in the call for progress and change. The Iraqi poet
al-Sayymb (d. 1964) was passing through difficult times, including a debate
of the mind with itself, as he was worried lest his leftist politics detract from
his poetic finesse. The rising recognition of his counterpart drove him grad-
ually away toward the other camp, where Adnnls and others were to gather
around a journal of their own, Shi‘r(Poetry). Al-Baymtlshared with this other
camp a distrust of “castrated poetry,” poetry of generalizations and clichés
that fit into authoritarian discourse and hegemonic culture,^123 but he also
related the inner poetic self to a stage in Arabic life that suffered castration.
Poetry for him could reveal a great deal about the society itself, yet it could
act on it, too. In other words, he derived his early poetics mainly from a
politics of historical materialism, before embarking at a later stage on a
conciliatory poetics of both urgency and vision, finding in the archetypal
image of the rover enough substantiation in tradition to account for the
modernist sense of dislocation, as I will argue in the last chapters. The per-
sona as a rover sums up the poet’s own experience. It is only through a spiral
inner journey, correlatively delineated through his own personal experience of
exile, and away from the factors that have led to stagnation and death, that
poetry resurrects itself (Ibid. 158). Al-Baymtlequates the interior journey
THE TRADITION/MODERNITY NEXUS