Since the first half of the twentieth century, poets, scholars and critics of Arabic Poetry have defined features of poetic expression which distinguish Modern Arabic Poetry from the forms and conventions which have been categorized as Classical and premodern Arabic poetry. This panel will delve into the delimitation of Modern Arabic Poetry, the delineation of various developments in Contemporary Poetry which distinguish it from earlier Modern poetry, and the violation or contestation of such or any other boundaries - literary, national, historical, cultural, or linguistic in the work of the poets under consideration. Each of the five papers treats how Arab poets and critics have traversed and challenged boundary types in their poetic work. With a paper entitled “New (al-Jadid) Modern (al-Muhdath or Hadith) and Contemporary (al-Mu`asir): Literary Period Terminology and the Arabic Example,” one panelist interrogates how Arabic Poetry exemplifies how such terms may impose artificial boundaries on literary phenomena which hinder rather than clarify. In “Kaisar Obama and the Prince of Poets,” moreover, another panelist examines how Arab Renaissance poet Ahmad Shawqi challenged conventional limits of praise poetry, nationalist poetry, and poetry as diplomacy in poetic engagement with foreign dignitaries. These very boundary contestations, continues the panelist, extend even further in the contemporary colloquial poetry of ‘Abbas Jijan in his poem on Obama, delivered on the “Prince of Poets” program. In “Were Modernity a Stone,” another panelist traces the use of stone as metaphor from Jahili Poetry through that of ?Abbasid muhdathin, and ultimately unto Adunis’s Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi, arguing that the transmutation and persistence of the stone metaphor reflects the transmutation and continuity of Arabic poetry across boundaries of time, tradition, genre, and linguistic code. In “Salim Barakat and Poetry as Linguistic Transgression,” a fourth panelist analyzes the work of the Syrian-Kurdish poet Salim Barakat in its disruption of genre, grammar, syntax and Arabo-centric identity boundaries of Arabic poetry, suggesting that only such violation of previously well-established borders of what is known as poetry allows poetry to innovate and survive in contemporary environments. A fifth panelist compares how the use of pre-Islamic myth of Zarqa’al-Yamamah in the contemporary poetry of Thuraya al-`Urayyid and Nur al-Din `Azizah perpetuates and violates boundaries between myth and painful realities. The panel examines the establishment, negotiation, and violation of limits in Modern and Contemporary Arabic Poetry,and the continuities with and ruptures from previous delimitations of Arabic poetry.
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Mr. Rawad Wehbe
“Were youth a stone,” laments Adunis in his Introduction to Arabic Poetry. Recalling the verses of the Jahiliyah poets, Adunis echoes their praise for the stone’s impervious nature and its capability to withstand the vicissitudes of time. The beginnings of Arabic poetry take root in the dialogue between the poet and “mute immortals”, that is the stones that marked the ruins of the beloved’s campsite. In Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi, Adunis raises the stone as a mirror to reveal the resilience of the poetic tradition as well as an opportunity to pulverize it and—from its broken fragments and shards—create language and poetry anew.
This paper explores the poetic schema of the stone in Adunis’s poetry, but also in how it resonates with the poetic tradition of the Abbasids which extends to the Jahiliyah. While the stone for Adunis is the sedimentation of tradition that contains the potential for a new poetic language, the stone for Abu Tammam constitutes a volatile substance which he could transform into water, a necessary figure of speech to the badi? style for which he was known. Thus, the stone is at once a metaphor employed by the ancients and a metaphor for poetic tradition itself. By reading the metaphor of the former through that of latter, I argue that the stone operates upon a larger metaphorical structure based on the ambiguous nature of its substance between two different states: static/dynamic, solid/liquid, stillness/motion, tradition/modernity. For Adunis, this metaphor is both rooted in the tradition and generated by creativity.
While previous scholarship has treated Modernist Arabic poetry and its relationship to the tradition of the ?Abbasid muhdathun, this paper identifies a pattern that draws attention to the study of isti?arah (metaphor) in the Arabic poetic tradition. Far from becoming obsolete, this paper reorients the significance of metaphor in the development of Modernist Arabic poetry in the 20th century.
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Dr. Terri L. DeYoung
Literary period terminology sometimes creates artificial boundaries that impede, rather than facilitate, understanding the context of a particular literary work. This is especially noticeable in the Arabic context, where terms from Western literary criticism mingle, sometimes uncomfortably, with period or movement labels coming from within the tradition. An example is the word "modern--in its various forms (see title of paper)--where words used to render the Western idea of "modern," "modernism" and "contemporary" have been used in distinct ways throughout Arabic literary history. For example, the term muhdath (modern) is used in medieval times to refer to the poets of the early Islamic period (c. 680 C.E. to 900 C.E.). The cognate term hadith (modern) will be revived in the twentieth century to refer to the literary movement (heavily influenced by Western models) known as “modernism”
I will begin with the work of Husayn al-Marsafi, whose Al-Wasilah al-adabiyah was the most influential literary work of the nineteenth century. Marsafi hewed closely to traditional categorization of literary works, which made no provision for dealing with literature after the 5th Islamic century. The task of creating terminology for describing recent and current literary efforts fell to his successors. By 1910, the Diwan Group was able to draw on a stable set of literary terms centered on the idea of the modern. A crucial bridge between Marsafi and the Diwan lies in the work of Hasan Tawfiq al-‘Adl (1862-1904). The work done by these early twentieth-century intellectuals will be disrupted and refashioned after World War II. This paper will examine how the words related to modernity have been re-appropriated and modified by these individuals in their quest for the contemporary.
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Samuel England
This paper examines poetic methods of characterizing foreign officials visiting Arab cities. I trace a literary arc beginning in the period of Ottoman decline and “the Arab Renaissance” of the late 18th century, continuing through the current post-revolt era in the Middle East. I counter the popular critical idea that nationalist arts rely upon a self/other binary in order to resonate with their audiences. While such a binary structure applies to much narrative prose, in the field of poetry that I explore in this paper, diplomatic visitors to the Middle East are not precisely foreign. Instead, they emerge as part-Arab interlocutors, whom the poet stations just barely outside an extended conversation with the audience. My study therefore challenges the predominant, overarching theories of self-and-other in Arabic discourse. The dramatic and rhetorical tools of Early Modern Studies provide a superior, more adaptable lens to view poets’ performance of international statesmanship. Whereas the language of self/other issues from an ethnographic account of literary history, we scholars would now profit from more closely analyzing the conditions of literary performance. Arab poets use strategies such as the “dramatic aside” to the audience, recalling Renaissance comedies and Shakespearean dialogue. With it, they evoke the delicacy of formal political negotiation. Marking Kaiser Wilhelm’s 1898 tour of major Levantine and Egyptian cities, the “Prince of Poets” Ahmad Shawqi praises the emperor as an intimate of Saladin, but also asks his modern Arab audiences why they should need a German to teach them about Arab kingship. More than a century later, the television program “Prince of Poets” gives Iraqi writer ‘Abbas Jijan a platform from which to proclaim that Barack Obama has become a kind of African Arab. Although “Prince of Poets” television viewers have appreciated Jijan’s emphasis on Obama’s patrilineal connections to Islamic history, I contend that the poem more subtly recalls Shawqi’s political project with Wilhelm. Giving his bombastic verses historical depth, Jijan makes use of a long series of 20th-century diplomatic poems subsequent to Shawqi’s career. Ultimately, the act of versifying a foreign leader in Arabic relies less upon the familiar ethnographic conceit of “othering” than it does upon venerable dramatic techniques that Middle East scholars neglect. The convention of addressing the audience while pretending to speak directly to a politically powerful visitor, which we generally associate with early modern theatre, helps us to understand current trends in Arabic composition and entertainment.
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Dr. Huda J. Fakhreddine
Salim Barakat is a Syrian-Kurdish poet and novelist, whose emergence on the Arabic poetic scene in the early 1970s was resounding. This paper will examine samples of Barak?t's poetry in the larger context of the Arabic prose poem project. Although in his early work, Barakat experimented with a mixed form of verse and prose, he ultimately took up prose as matter for poetry, positing a distinct definition of the "poetic" rooted in an interrogation of the Arabic language and a close attentiveness to and aggressive playfulness with its grammar and syntax. "Poetry," he states, "is a "bloody" wager which drains language, like blood-letting, so it may either live or die." A living language, as he sees, it is not language as accumulation but language as perpetual fascination. Poetry thus becomes an violent and deliberate dispelling of the comfort and familiarity we settle into with language.
Salim Barakat's confrontational relationship with Arabic, is often tied to his preoccupation with what critics have called "Kurdish themes." However, if the Kurdish cause (if we may call it that), is a motivating factor in the background of Barakat's project, it most resonantly manifests itself, not as theme or subject matter, but as an invasion of the Arabic language and an "othering" of it from itself. Sidelining the debate over form which has accompanied the prose poem since the early 1960s, Barakat reveals the Arabic prose poem's potential in re-imagining the notion of the "poetic" as a linguistic intervention.
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Dr. Clarissa C. Burt
Zarqa’ al-Yamamah, the legendarily clear-eyed Cassandra-like figure found in poetry and narrative from pre-Islamic Arabian cultural traditions, is cited as a metaphor for recent or impending disaster in political, military, and societal spheres throughout Arabic literary history. This continues to be the case to this day, with a number of examples of poetic invocation of Zarqa’ al-Yamamah in the last several decades, including most recently after the wave of revolutions sparked by the uprising in Tunisia in December 2010. While Jeries Khoury explored the use of the persona of Zarqa’ al-Yamamah in the poetry of Amal Dunqal and `Izz al-Din al-Munasira in his 2008 article in Journal of Semitic Studies, entitled “Zarqa’ al-Yamamah in the Modern Arabic Poetry, a Comparative Analysis,” this paper seeks to focus on more recent invocations of Zarqa’ al-Yamamah in poetry, specifically in the work of Thuraya al-`Urayyid, entitled “Ayna Ittijah al-Shajar?” [Where is the Trees’ Heading?] from a 1995 poetry collection of the same name, and in Nur al-Din `Azizah’s “Zarqa’ al-Yamamah waHiSan QurTajah” [Zarqa’ al-Yamamah and the Horse of Carthage] in his like-named poetry collection of 2015. While equally participating in the myth of Zarqa’ al-Yamamah, each poet deploys the story and the poetic persona of Zarqa’ to his or her specific ends, manipulating and embellishing the tradition to forge poetic, political and social commentary on specific historical circumstances. This paper will analyze these two poems by Thuraya al-`Urayyid and Nur al-Din `Azizah for their aesthetic and literary qualities, their deployment and use of the Zarqa’ al-Yamamah myth, and the poetic message they encode to the specific historical circumstances of the production of the poem, as evidenced by the content. Through comparison and contrast with other diachronic invocations of the myth of Zarqa’ al-Yamamah in Modern Arabic Literature, we consider the ongoing productive power of this myth in Arabic literary and popular culture, and how traversing the border between myth and reality contributes to the power of these pieces.
