Politics and Literature Intertwined: The State Meets the Citizen in the Modern Arab World
Panel 066, 2012 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 18 at 2:00 pm
Panel Description
This panel examines the multiple layers of political and literary expression in the Middle East. Against the backdrop of authoritarianism, regimes in the region initiate strategies to legitimize themselves to their citizens as a part of political socialization to induce compliance and ensure their authority remains uncontested. After a close examination of the various ways in which authoritarian regimes reproduce themselves, we will deal with the issue of reception--how citizens internalize information and express themselves in these settings. One paper offers a literary study of the socialization of Egyptians under Mubarak through state-sponsored children's books from 2002-2007 aimed at indoctrinating the Egyptian youth in a way that reinforced the government's power. It explores the depth of influence Mubarak's regime had on literary production. It attempts to unveil how domestic trouble, like Muslim-Christian religious violence, and regional struggles like the Arab Israeli conflict, were exploited by Mubarak's regime to produce ideological literature which became a form of government propaganda. It is followed by a paper that offers an in-depth analysis of the various tactics used by the authoritarian leadership in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria to overcome their leadership crises after protests rocked the region in 2011. It examines the politics of the protesters through analysis of their poetry, slogans music, and graffiti in order to ascertain whether regime-type matters. It catalogues the modes of engaging the authoritarian state, in order to learn about the anatomy of these regimes. The last paper chronicles the political awareness and expression of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish whose extensive bulk of poetry from 1960 to 2005 attests to his legacy in the Arab world. The paper explores how Darwish has moved from a more confrontational political poetry to an introspective, identity-driven literature in his recent poetry. After years of shaking up the Arabs and drawing attention to the Arab-Israeli conflict, this work reflects an attempt to interact with and accept the "other," in a sign of political maturity. This political and literary study brings us full circle. It offers a comprehensive look at the political challenges faced by states in the region and the responses, individual and collective, to how the regimes have handled those challenges.
The protests in the Middle East present a unique opportunity to study and refine the literature on authoritarian regime classification as well as the broader assumptions made about the relationship between state and society in Middle Eastern states. In order to gauge the manner in which authoritarian leaders reproduce themselves, we will examine the politics of the protesters in Syria. We have collected data on the themes and messages of the protests in order to test whether their grievances and demands are centered on universal themes such as pluralism, citizenship, equality and rule of law, for example. Or, are the protesters “engaging the authoritarian state?” We question whether the protesters in these countries are entering into a discourse with the existing regimes to address the specific authoritarian strategies of each state. Are protesters keen to pinpoint the specific policies, identity constructions and tactics used by the state in question?
By addressing the issue of reception (how ordinary people receive, internalize and react to signals by the state), we hope to learn something about regime-types and the corresponding strategies in place to ensure their political survival. Since there has been a scarcity of collective, bottom-up resistance movements, we have never been able to present the position of the citizens in reaction to their leaders' survival strategies. Through informal politics, there is strong evidence that individuals in these states have transgressed and evaded regime censors, but the collective themes and symbols of resistance have never been catalogued.
The answers to these questions will help us gauge how much weight should be placed on specifying differences based on regime-type. We would like to explore the degree to which the protests are shaped by the authoritarian structures and tactics in a given state. This will help us begin to question whether regime survival strategies of the past have mounted to meaningless propaganda or whether they more closely shape the form and nature of protest.
Major 20th century political Arab movements and events like Nasserism, Arab nationalism and the 1967 Arab-Israeli war and literary movements like iltizam (Commitment) played a key role in the formation and development of modern Arabic literature. Examining the role of Arab politics in the poetry of prominent 20th century Arab poets like the Egyptian Hijazi, the Iraqi Bayyati and the Palestinian Darwish reveals a great deal of commitment in their poetry. However, their poetry witnesses a transition from commitment to maturity of poetic voice and identity, each in a unique way. This paper focuses mainly on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish from 1960s to 2005. I argue that Darwish’s poetry witnesses a transition from confrontational, militant and anti-Israeli to a poetry of close interrogation of identity in which the distinction between self and other begins to collapse.
This paper compares Darwish’s 1988 poem “Those Who Pass Between the Passing Words” to two of his poems published in 2003: "He is Quiet and so am I" and "She, in the Evening.” This paper addresses the following questions: to what extent has iltizam’s definition of the Arab poet’s role in defending his society by using “his aesthetic weapon, poetry, in the fight against Israel” influenced Darwish’s earlier poetry? How does Darwish represent the self and the other, the enemy, in his earlier poetry and does this representation change in his late poetry? This paper investigates the ways in which this shift/transition affects the perceptions of the self and the other of their mutual conflict and their self-enclosed identities. The paper argues, late poems like "He is Quiet and so am I" and "She, in the Evening” represent a turning point in the poetics of Darw?sh from commitment in its traditional sense to maturity of poetic voice and identity.
The Reading for All Festival is an influential, state-wide initiative, which was overseen by Suzanne Mubarak, former first lady of Egypt. Among the published goals of the program were to combat illiteracy among poor Egyptian populations and to encourage Egyptian youth to develop better reading habits. The Egyptian government monitored the authorship and production of books in this festival. Books were often provided for free, or for a marginal cost that enabled wide range of the Egyptians to acquire them. Themes of political, religious, or ethnic affiliation were common in books associated with this program. Particularly. Children’s books produced for the festival sought to ground the uncontested power of the National Party as legitimate, fair and even ideal. They exploited feelings of patriotism to translate them into obedience to the political system as a whole, starting from the school library or the government clinic, and moving up to the top of the pyramid, the leaders and political figures.
I seek to investigate a major series of children’s literature published in Egypt under this state-endorsed festival between 2002 and 2007. The series is titled The Peace Education Series and, with the support of the Egyptian Ministry of Information, it is directly aimed at raising youth’s awareness of pressing issues related to peace. At their relatively high and organized distribution rates, especially with the help of government-affiliated institutions and its infrastructure, the books of The Peace Education Series resemble textbooks, rather than voluntarily-purchased children’s books.
I examine how children’s books in this series accomplish the socialization of children through state-sponsored literature aimed at indoctrinating the Egyptian youth to reinforce the government’s power. I explore the depth of influence Mubarak’s regime had on literary production. I attempt to unveil how domestic trouble, like the Muslim-Christian religious violence, and regional struggles like the Arab-Israeli conflict, were exploited by Mubarak's regime to produce ideological literature which became a form of government propaganda.
