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Surviving Poetic Suicide
Abstract
This paper concerns the Lebanese emigre poet, Wadi` Sa`adeh, whose poetic writings in exile have been a major contribution to the contemporary Arabic Poetry and to the literature of the new Arab Diaspora. This project builds on two previously published articles concerning Wadi` Sa`adeh's poetic output since his immigration to Australia in the late 1980's, concerning four of his earlier collections of poetry. This new work to be presented at MESA will concern his two most recent poetry collections, Ratq al-Hawaa' "Darning the Air," and Tarkiib Aakhar li-hayaat Wadii` Sa`aadah "Another Set up for Wadi` Sa`adeh's Life," in which he writes out whatever recovery he has enjoyed from the literary suicide attempt of the earlier works. The remarkable prose poetry of Wadr' Sa'odah (b. 1948), emanating from the horrors of civil war in Beirut and the experience of emigration, has been first and foremost elegiac, articulating an attempted (but impossible) reconstruction of what has been lost. He constructed the internal geography of alienation and loss arising from exilic remoteness in spacetime and the inescapable emotional burden of memory. Sa'adah's work is both important in its own right, and also as an example of the new Mahjar/Emigration poetry in Arabic. For just as Gibran's emigre. literature had profound influence on contemporary Arabic Literature as a whole, and also spoke to the world at large, so the literature of the current Mahjar/Arabic Diaspora breaks open Arabic literary discourse to new voices of dissent, conscience, and awareness of the depths of human experience, whose audience includes and exceeds the Arab world. The work of this emigre Lebanese poet bespeaks the universality of exile, emerging from an Arab experience, but reaching to the heart of the human condition. This paper will evaluate, and analyze his two most recent collections of poetry, which continue and contrast with the earlier writing. In the paper I will provide a close reading of these two volumes of poetry in the context of Wadi` Sa`adeh's full corpus to date, and in the context of contemporary Arabic Poetry, Arabic Literature related to the Beirut Civil war, and the literature of the recent Arab Diaspora. I will translate sections of the poetry or specific poems, for use in building my argument concerning the trajectory and primary message of the new works in contrast to the sweep toward literary suicide which characterized Sa`adeh's work in exile up to 2006.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Other
Sub Area
Modern