This panel seeks to reintroduce poetry into the fold of contemporary Arabic literary criticism. While the Arabic short story and the novel are increasingly inducted into discussions and debates of World and Comparative Literature, the critical reception of modern Arabic poetry has not been as fortunate. This panel aims to curtail the increasing marginalization of the study of Arabic poetry by approaching the poetic form critically and theoretically. The panel approaches modern Arabic poetry through the connected rubrics of world literature, comparative literature, and translation studies. These hybrid approaches allow us to approach the different historical and political directions of modern Arabic poetry while also attending to poetry's formal elements. We ask, how can these new approaches to modern Arabic poetry define the future of Arabic poetry, as both a practice and an object of study?
The papers in this panel focus on a number Arab poets, writing both in Arabic and English, to consider the relation between poetry, language, and the world. We consider how Ounsi el-Hajj's poetry approximates and approaches the writings of Georges Bataille, reflecting a post-war society in need of an overturning of values through the figure of the acephalic prophet; we also investigate how the Mediterranean is a thematic anchor for Etel Adnan’s poetry as well as the significance of punctuality in her prose work; we also turn to Sargoun Boulus's multi-lingual poetry and translation to study the intimacies between exile and translation within diasporic Arabic literature, and their relation to American literature (also translated by Boulus). From these towering figures of modern Arabic poetry, the panel proceeds to investigate how contemporary Arabic poets are reinventing traditional motifs of Arabic poetry through social media platforms. We look at how Palestinian resistance literature is given new avenues of expression on social media platforms, while also serving as new avenues of persecution, as in the poetry of Dareen Tatour. We then turn to look at how a pre-Islamic ethos of the desert is channeled through contemporary Arabic poetry as a form of ecocritical scholarship in the work of Fanis al-Ajami.
This paper will discuss the work of Etel Adnan by reading how her poetry relates to the Mediterranean Sea and her use of punctuality in her prose work. Reading the poetics of Adnan’s Of Cities & Women: Letters to Fawwaz, To be in a Time of War, and select interviews with the author, this paper aims to engage the ways the sea portrays themes such as the relationship between colony/colonizer, migrant and state, and linguistic impositions. Her narrative attempts to create unity, both geographically and historically, as she rewrites the landscape around her by integrating history through her meditations on wandering. Often her articulations of place are consistently punctuated. For example, To Be in a Time of War is broken into small fragments that together leave the reader sensing the fragmentation of time and space as the Iraq War unfolds as it operates simultaneously through punctuated time and formally as a work of prose that reinforces the power of a full stop deployed within her text. Between every full stop comes an oscillation between daily living and the war in Iraq. Her periods stop the flow of reading enough to see her working back and forth through chores and war. She expresses her sensation of placelessness and later in her work notes the subtle differences and othering at work within the metropole; despite having settled. Her long work on Iraq fully punctuates the oscillations evident in daily leaving between worlds, spaces and times as it seems one who may never truly settle despite the number of years spent away. Often writing in-between, Adnan’s work uses both her relation to the sea and the period as a placeholder, which becomes formally interesting for the reader stylistically as she consistently conveys a pause—between—through her prose and punctuation.
In a 1972 letter to Nizar Qabbani, Ounsi el-Hajj (1937 – 2014) writes that “the poet in the Arab world is without a country [watan]”, and describes the former’s poetry as “images for a poet hung on a cross made up of idiots, friends, and poets.” El-Hajj writes of a place where poets have been abandoned and crucified. When the Civil War in Lebanon broke out, el-Hajj retreated from poetry and found shelter in journalism. This poetic silence only ended at the end of the fifteen-year war with the publication of his last book of poetry, “The Banquet.”
“The Banquet,” may seem like a chance for the poet to be reborn again. Its first poem, “Definition” (Ta’r?f), echoes el-Hajj’s first published poem, “Identity” (Hawiya). However, this rebirth differentiates itself from the myths of rebirth that had permeated modern Arabic poetry in the mid-twentieth century. El-Hajj resurrects the crucified poet to point blame in all directions. This paper will investigate the motif of prophecy in “The Banquet.” It starts with a definition of this new understanding of prophecy that el-Hajj deploys through images of crucifixion, resurrection, and the sacred, showing its proximity to Georges Bataille’s concept of the acephalic man. I then contrast the image of this new acephalic prophet-poet with el-Hajj’s other poetic protagonist, the female messenger who rewrites the genesis of the world in his long poem from 1975, “The Messenger with Her Hair Long Until the Springs.” I support these findings with references to El-Hajj’s journalistic writings during the war, showing a correspondence between his thought and poetry.
The paper examines the court case of the State of Israel vs. Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian-Israeli poet who is charged with inciting terror based on a video-poem she posted to Facebook. The entire court case is taking place in and through translation, as both the Arabic poem and the poet's statements are recorded exclusively in Hebrew. By reading the poem, its translations and the court protocols, I show how the court's practice of translation constructs the poet's intention as fully knowable and fixed, and yet, paradoxically, as completely inaccessible on its own terms. After considering new technologies that detect Palestinian "inciters" on social media based on statistics and algorithms, I take on the rising ubiquity of the charge of incitement in Israel, claiming that it is an Israeli translation of Palestinian resistance. Thus, instead of a reaction to a specific historical and political context, Palestinian resistance now appears in Israel as a kind of contagious evil intention that materializes out of thin air and must therefore be controlled bio-politically. I claim that this move marks a shift in the state's approach to Palestinian struggle, one that foregrounds juridical individual intention and erases the historical and social conditions in which resistance is embedded.
Adonis describes the ethos of pre-Islamic society by the famous line ?? ?? ????? ??? (were that man were a stone). This melancholic longing for self-abnegation— the desire for consciousness to dissolve into the desert sublime— pervades the language’s greatest early poems and set up an aesthetic ideal that has influenced each new age. Even today in the high-tech cities of the gulf, the desert is revered and mystified by artists and instagrammers alike. The respect and sense of wonder for the desert ecosystem of the Arabian peninsula has produced some of the most beautiful depictions of the natural world in any language, and about the desert no less. However, the use of ecocriticism for examining this tradition is still in its infancy.
This paper will look at some of the brand new ecocritical scholarship on Arabic poetry in order its influence on a new genre of Arabic writing on the desert: Twitter. In particular, the posts of the Kuwaiti engineer and labor activist Fanis al-Ajami. Mr. al-Ajami posts unsettling videos of poachers and murdered animals in order to bring awareness about environmental conservation in his country. As well, he highlights stories of stewards and animal lovers: a local man cuddling with his pet Hyrax, kids petting a monitor lizard and learning that it’s harmless to humans. In both his rhetoric on conservation, and the active conversations taking place around his posts, we see the legacy of the pre-Islamic ethos towards the desert, and an attempt to wield Islamic ethics for the sake of environmental stewardship.
