Egyptian Modernism: From the Center to the Periphery of Arabic Literature From1907-1921, three young Egyptian intellectuals (led by ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad) revolutionized poetry in Egypt (Zubaidi 1970, 36). They focused on poetics (‘Abd al-?ab?r 1968, 74; quoted in Allen 1987, 52). The creative power of the imagination (al-khayal) embodied through emotion (al-wijdan) became their slogan. The unity of the entire poem—not just the single line—also preoccupied them (Jayyusi 1977:1, 154).Their promotion of a new modernity in Arabic poetry was extremely influential, not just in Egypt, but elsewhere (Allen 1998. 208) These fresh conceptions of verse in Arabic did not, however, translate into formalistic change. While ‘Aqqad, in particular, continued to publish poetic collections for decades, he did not deviate from the meter and rhyme of the qasidah (poem) developed in Preislamic times. By the 1940s, ‘Aqqad’s opposition to experiments with poetic form had hardened. He and his allies had in postwar Egypt obtained key positions within the various state cultural organizations (Dakrub 1971, 12) that attacked the practitioners of modernist verse (such as ?alah ‘Abd al-?ab?r and ‘Abd al-Muti‘ Hijazi) and prevented their access to publication (‘Abd al-?abur 1969, 50). This development negated experiments by the Apollo school (Zubaidi 1974; and Moreh 1988, 166) and a young Lewis ‘Awad (Khouri 1970) in previous decades, effectively moving Egypt from the center to the periphery of Modernism in Arabic poetry, opening an opportunity for young voices in Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and other parts of the Arab world to take the high ground in the development of the Arab Modernist movement. Bibliography ‘Abd al-?abur, ?alah. Madha yabqa minhim li-al-tarikh (Cairo: D?r al-K?tib al-‘Arab?, 1968) translated and quoted in Roger M.A. Allen, Modern Arabic Literature (New York: Ungar Publishing, 1987), 52-53. ‘Abd al-?abur, ?alah. ?ayati fi al-shi‘r (Beirut: D?r al‘Awdah, 1969). Allen, Roger M.A. The Arabic Literary Heritage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Muhammad Dakrub. “Al-Shi‘r al-?adith wa-al-thawrah wa-al-jumhur fi al-multaqa al-shi‘ri al-awwal,” Al-?d?b 19:1 (January 1971): 10-25. Jayyusi, Salma Khadra. Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, 2 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977). Khouri, Mounah. “Lewis 'Awad : a Forgotten Pioneer of the Free Verse Movement,” Journal of Arabic Literature 1(1970): 137-144. Moreh, Shmuel. Studies in modern Arabic prose and poetry (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1988) Zubaidi, A.M.K. “The Diwan School,” Journal of Arabic Literature 5 (1970): 36-48. Zubaidi, A.M.K. “The Apollo School's Early Experiments in ‘Free Verse’,” Journal of Arabic Literature 5 (1974): 17-43

In 1954, Palestinian poet, Tawfiq Sayigh, published his first collection of prose-poetry under the title: Thalathuna Qasdah. Ibn Manzur defines the qasidah as that form of poetry, which is “celebrated by its author and revised with fine articulation and carefully-chosen wording.” This definition of the qasidah did not elude Sayigh, for he sought to unsettle classical notions of Arabic poetry, influenced by his training in American poetic modernism in Harvard under the tutelage of Archibald MacLeish and alongside another Palestinian he met there in 1952: poet and novelist, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra. Sayigh’s goal reached a high-point with the publication of his last prose-poetry collection in 1963, Mu’alaqat Tawfiq Sayigh, where he took aim at the most honored form of Arabic poetry, that of the ‘suspended ode.' Yet, in spite of such creative vigor, Sayigh has yet to receive the attention he deserves intellectual historians studying the development of modern Arab poetry in the postwar period. Ironically, what Sayigh penned on the flyleaf of the copy of Thalathuna Qa?idah he gifted to Jabra: “I fear that you are my only audience,” was no hyperbole. Alongside a focus on Sayigh and on his efforts to transform Arab poetics, my historical investigation will survey other Palestinian contributions in the field of prose-poetry from figures such as Jabra and Thuraya Melhes – whose 1949 collection, an-Nashid at-Taeh, stands as one of the earliest volumes of prose-poetry in Arabic literature. The question is raised, however, what links prose-poetry as a modern Arabic literary form and the fact of exile shared by Palestinian intellectuals who lost their territorial/political/emotional anchor after the 1947-9 Nakba? Edward Said offers a tentative answer. For him, to be an exile – a poet in exile no less – is to be in a “jealous state,” seeing estrangement in all matters and “clutching difference like a weapon to be used with stiffened will.” Indeed, it is this exilic stubbornness and “refusal to belong” that could explain why Palestinian poets chose innovation over imitation, savoring a fleeting emancipatory moment from the straitjacket of the classical poetry meter. In effect, this presentation seeks to bring Sayigh and other Palestinian poets from the margins of Arabic intellectual history to its center. In studying such Palestinian contributions, I will interrogate the ‘origins story’ of the Arab prose poem, often associated with the Beiruti Shi’r collective of poets, in particular Muhammad al-Maghout and Unsi al-Hajj.

The notion of fasaha (eloquence, clearness, intelligibility) is instrumental in Arab language thinking, and reproving faults of speech (e.g. lahn al-qawl) in modernist poetic practices dominates debates in Arabic literary criticism. In a sense, Arabic was greatly built on a filtering process to distill and preserve its eloquence and its linguistic purity and correctness through fixing errors (akhta', lahn, khalal), fixing obscurity ('istighlagh, ghumud, lahn al-qawl), and fixing misconceptions ('isa'at al-maqsad). For example, lahn al-qawl (Q. 47:30), or “the allusive manner of speech” as Tarif Khalidi sharply renders it in The Qur'an: A New Translation (New York: Penguin Group, 2008), contributes to the perennial question of the untranslatability of the language of poetry. In this paper, I shall limit my analysis to the Syrian-Kurdish poet Salim Barakat (b. 1951) who is one of the major exponents of new aesthetics in form and language in Arabic poetics. Barakat’s poetic oeuvre has not received sufficient critical and scholarly attention because he adopts a stubborn style that exhausts language and that is rigorously resistant to translation. His modernist approach to language is both foreign and abstract yet stems from a rich classical repertoire, namely the long-standing legacy of gharib (linguistic obscurities) literature, and by extension the wahshiyy and hushyy (wild), nadir (rare), and mustaghligh (obscure) in the Arabic tradition. Fittingly, the critic Jaroslav Stetkevych tells us that “modern poetry creates itself, as it were, “in the wild” of language, not otherwise” (Stetkevych 2012, 155). I precisely argue that Barakat’s poetic project is linguistic and boils down to a single issue, namely the issue of 'ujma (obscurity, unintelligibility; antonym of fasaha). To this purpose, I will discuss the defining terms that govern Barakat’s poetic practice, and hence his theory of language, through exploring his concept of the opaque poem which reflects a deliberate and audacious use of ambivalent words and syntactic disruption. I will make use of an essay by Barakat titled “tasamim al-kayd al-lughawi: al-qa'ida fa l-khud'a” (Arabic Dislodged: Cunning and Linguistic Tricks) which argues that the linguistic conundrum is seminal to the Arabic literary discourse.

The aesthetic project of the Saudi modernist poet Muhammad al-Thubayti (1952-2011) was a defining moment in the modernist movement in the Arabian Peninsula, in general, and in Saudi literature in particular. Al-Thubayti’s project, particularly with the publication of his third collection al-Tadaaris (Terrains, 1986), attests to an acute awareness of tradition and presents a “creative misreading” of it. Furthermore, the overarching theme of his oeuvre hinges upon the idea of the poet as a secular prophet, preserving a collective, pre-oil identity and creating new forms of expressions capable of redefining the self, often in ways deeply rooted in the culture of the place. This is a dynamic poetic project aimed at creating a form of existence where modernity and tradition can co-exist in harmony. This paper is primarily concerned with an issue that appears central to al-Thubayti’s project, namely the poet’s self-image versus the reductionist, oil-based narrative about modern Saudi Arabia, a self-image that all so often transfers the poem into a site of commemoration, something like a talal (ruined abode) that is not yet ruined but the poet fears it might very well be, a talal upon which the poet stands to remember the past before taking the journey into the future. This site of commemoration provides the poet with an excellent vantage point for deconstructing the current narrative and for making possible a new re-imagining of the past, the present, and the future. To examine the overarching theme in al-Thubayti’s oeuvre, my paper will present an interpretive reading of his Mawqif al-rimaal ... mawqif al-jinaas (The Stance of the Sand... The Stance of Paronomasia), one of the poet’s last and longest poems, which stands as a heteroglossic, multi-layered masterpiece that culminates a lifelong project of experimentation with poetry as a way of redefining identity. This identity, while firmly anchored in the tradition of the place, is flexible enough to accommodate the innovations of modernity and, to use al- Thubayti’s words, to “make friends with them,” as friendship signifies understanding and complementarity. The paper argues that al-Thubayti’s primary “poetic event” is to devise a new imagining of the place, or, say, to imagine a new Saudi/Arabian identity, and that this event was condensed in the last of his long poems, i.e. Mawqif al-jinaas.