Abstract
In the five years since Egypt’s January 25th revolution in 2011, a significant wave of art and literary production related to the revolution has emerged. Hassan Teleb, one of the 70's poets of Egypt, and a founding member of the IDaa'a Poetry Collective of the 1980's, published his _‘Anjiil al-Thawra waQur’aanuhaa_ (GEBO 2011) soon after the first wave of the revolution in the summer of 2011, articulating the revolutionary cry for change, the heady and temporary exultation of the revolution’s success, and the mourning of its terrible cost in lives, even as the problems and unmet demands of demonstrators soon resulted in their return to Tahrir square in the days and months that followed. As a philosophy professor in the Faculty of Arts at Helwan University, Hassan Teleb’s poetic production is deeply rooted in Arabic philosophical and literary traditions, even as his early poetic production as part of the IDaa’a Poetry Collective challenged the values of the Egyptian literary establishment at that time, to be met then by critical disdain and roadblocks to publication.
This paper , then, proposes to examine Hassan Teleb’s diwaan _‘Anjiil al-Thawra waQur’aanuhaa_ (GEBO 2011) in the context of the arc of his works (with 15 published poetry collections), his part in the broader developments in contemporary Egyptian poetry, and in the sweep of recent history and the relationship of cultural and literary institutions with the (now changed face of the) regime. In this fashion, this paper will consider how this diwaan reflects not only Hassan Teleb’s encounter with, participation in and reflection on day to day events of the Egyptian revolution of the winter of 2011, but also the pent-up frustrations from thirty years previous, when IDaa’a and ASwaat poetry collectives vied to produce the early diwans of each collectives’ members, marking those poets as voices of their generation, which were suppressed by the literary establishment at that time. Then too, this recent volume can only be understood as the distillation of Hassan Teleb’s philosophical and spiritual perspectives on the revolutionary coming together of Egyptians into an historical wave of change, despite the cultural and religious diversity which subsequent regimes have attempted to exploit to sow division and strife. In this fifth year since the onset of the revolution of 2011, Hassan Teleb has reissued his poetic part in an undaunted revolutionary spirit, hoping to outlast the new waves of repression which confront Egyptians today.
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