“Look behind you, Orpheus, learn how to walk in the world.” This imperative, taken from Adunis’ seminal 1961 collection Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, provides a preliminary glimpse of the complex role of intertextuality in Adunis’ early poetry. The intertextual moments in Mihyar are rarely simply allusive, but rather deeply transformative: a pseudo-Mohammad is hung and burned by his own partisans in Medina; the stone pursues Sisyphus; Adam denies the Garden. The mythic, religious, literary, and historical allusions in Mihyar have mostly been read in accordance with Adunis’ large body of literary and cultural criticism. At best, this lens adds a layer to interpretations of his poetry. At worst, in the case of Mihyar, it leads to skewed retroactive readings of the work. In this paper, I argue that the poetry of Mihyar resists the temptation to fall into the often overly simplistic binary distinctions that inform much of Adunis’ later criticism, specifically his 3-volume dissertation The Static and the Dynamic (1974, 1977, 1978). The static-dynamic dichotomy (together with the parallel dichotomies of conformity-innovation and imitation-creation) leads to one glaring irony that is not discussed in the dissertation: In using the derogatory term “static” to label such a large number of complex Arab thinkers, Adunis risks falling into the same mode of narrow, inflexible interpretation that he himself condemns. My reading of Mihyar thus challenges the pejorative notion of ‘imitative tradition’ (taqlîd) that the critic Adunis employs in binary opposition to the more positive ‘heritage’ (turâth), a term closely aligned with T.S. Eliot’s conception of tradition as presented in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” By examining several key intertextual moments in Mihyar, I argue that this poetry—through extraordinarily destabilizing evocations of seemingly stable cultural signifiers—implicitly calls into question the very possibility of ever successfully establishing the kind of binarisms that we find in Adunis’ dissertation.

Despite the obvious importance of intertextuality to Arabic poetry, its diverse Arabic manifestations have not been studied systematically or fully accounted for in the dominant western theories of intertextuality (Kristeva, Riffaterre, Genette, Bloom). This paper explores one particularly complex manipulation of intertextuality, the 1963 poem, “Mawt al-Mutanabbi” (“The Death of al-Mutanabbi”) by the Iraqi poet, ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati (1926-1999). Suggestive title aside, this poem does not conform to a simplistic Bloomian, or indeed other, model of intertextuality. This paper explores the unique workings of this dynamic case of poetic intertextuality and demonstrates how at the hands of al-Bayati, the poem becomes a transformative intertextual laboratory that enables the poet to articulate a new poetics that is in keeping with his declared Marxist ideology. Inevitably, the figure of al-Mutanabbi summons up for the poet and his audience the esteemed classical poetic tradition, as well as the colorful personality of a fiercely individualistic ersatz revolutionary. But for al-Bayati, it also evokes the existential dilemma of the paid panegyrist forced to ignore the corruption and venality of his patrons to produce, regardless of his true feelings, the conventionally required praise. An object of reverence and love, al-Mutanabbi is thus for al-Bayati also a symbol of the debasement of what he sees as the true role of the poet in society. Over the course of this poem, by means of a complex, polyvocal mobilization of al-Mutanabbi, his poetry, and details of his personal history and his relationship to those in power, al-Bayati negotiates for himself and his fellow modern poets a new poetic identity based on a Marxist reinterpretation of the Tradition. Framed in a scathing, lyrical, indictment of the corruption of the powerful and the sycophancy of past poets, this poem’s intertextual engagement elaborates a way to salvage the poet’s emotional connection to the tradition while affirming him in his rightful role as spokesperson of the people and defender of their rights. It is only through a dynamic use of unique intertextual practices that al-Bayati is able to accomplish this vital emotional reconciliation and political empowerment. This paper examines these practices, which not only shed light on the situation of the modern Arab committed poet, but also suggest a new theoretical model of intertextuality to be integrated into the currently dominant roster of theories.

In the wake of Algerian independence and the institutionalization of Modern Standard Arabic as the language of the State, two Algerian writers – Nabile Farès and Tahar Djaout – continued to explore the notion of Algerian national identity through literary expression in French. Contemporaries of Farès and Djaout, such as Tahar Ouettar (who writes in Arabic), have criticized their continued use of the French language as “one of the many ways in which French colonialism persists in Algeria,” asserting that “it is our right, indeed our duty [as Algerians] to oppose it.” Yet during the late 1970s and 80s, as the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) was gaining in popularity and confrontations between young Berber-rights activists and Islamic “intégristes” were wreaking havoc both in universities and on the streets of Algeria, the choice to write in Arabic would also have been fraught with a completely different and equally controversial set of political implications. It is in this environment that Farès and Djaout attempted to create a distinctly new poetics in which language, politics, and identity were inextricably interwoven. And it is precisely the high stakes of their aesthetic choices (grounded in fragmentation, hesitation, and writing followed by rewriting) that render their works so rich. Smattered across the pages of Farès’ L’état perdu, for example, are symbols borrowed from several indigenous alphabets that destabilize the eye in its path across the page, forcing it to recognize and integrate multiple systems of signs, including the kinetic, oddly spaced French. Djaout’s Insulaire & Cie, on the other hand, incorporates transliterations of Kabyle place-names and historical figures into poems that appear conventional on the page, but when read aloud give the French reader pause and the Kabyle listener the pleasure of identification. Through close readings of key passages of poems by Fares and Djaout and attention to reception of their works among both French and Arabic critical circles, this paper argues that both poets deliberately sought to eschew the notion of a singular, non-porous national or linguistic identity based on any one of the languages or ethnic affiliations that continue to exist in Algeria, including Modern Standard Arabic, dialectical Arabic, French, Kabyle, Tourareg, Mozabit and others. Rather, through the intertextual poetic practices that are examined in this paper, they privilege what Soraya Tlatli has referred to as “the act of becoming, the movement from one language to another that escapes linguistic and cultural categorization.”