My research paper undertakes a reading of al-Shanfará’s Lamiyyat al-ʿArab inspired by two broad areas of inquiry, one investigating the way that literary texts articulate theoretical positions, and the other seeking to expand ways of analyzing classical Arabic poetry in order to address contemporary questions of language and meaning. My study situates al-Shanfará in the pre-Islamic Arabian context and elucidates his status as a suʿlūk poet. I posit that these mythical-historical circumstances frame the suʿlūk as an outsider positioned to critique tribal structures and values including the traditional qasida. My central claim is that al-Shanfará’s exilic position was not merely reflected or represented in his qasida but that it was a constitutive force in his poetics. More specifically I argue that al-Shanfará’s qasida embraces the death sentence that his status represents as a positive site of productivity in order to explore the possibility of thinking identity outside inherited structures of thought and society. I engage Deleuze and Guatarri’s concept of minor literature to foreground how al-Shanfará’s qasida makes subversive use of language and works within and against the conventions of the classical Arabic qasida to articulate a destabilized model of identity as becoming. I argue that al-Shanfará’s ode pushes poetic form to its limit, using language and images to stage a crisis wherein the power to represent and draw relations on the model of resemblance breaks down. Further, I trace a series of displacements that follow from the poet’s choice to forego/invert the nasib, a rejection of origins and points of reference that I assert de-centers notions of subjectivity and signification. Likewise, I elucidate how al-Shanfará disrupts the traditional trajectory of the qasida, one of development and progress toward reintegration, such that the transformative aspect of the rahil, the modality that dominates his qasida, becomes an end in itself. Overall, I attempt to show that the ode stages the collapse of foundational concepts of poetry, including the capacity for language to represent stable identities and the centrality of the human for structures of meaning and belonging. I attempt to show that at the conclusion of Lamiyyat al-ʿArab, the highest treasure of tribal culture, the qasida, becomes a vehicle for a destabilized vantage point that is no longer strictly the space of the human.