For my Master thesis I studied the personal archive of the Egyptian poet Husayn ‘Afif (1902-1979), an avant-garde romantic poet, who had experimented with prose poetic text models, adopting the form of the so-called “al-shi‘r al-manthur”, since the beginning of the 1930s. As a romantic poet, ‘Afif had been active and interactive with several literary groups; above all, the Apollo group, known for its modernist approach towards poetic innovation. He had also published more than ten prose poetic collections - including two poetic theater plays and one novel - over his lifetime. Nonetheless, ?Afif gets marginalized or mentioned as an “unknown” poet in the mainstream historical narrative about modern Arabic poetry. However, the contrast between the size of his legacy on the one hand, and the absence of his name, or the lack of accurate information about his literary contribution on the other hand, leads one to question paradoxes that occur within the historical narrative not only about this particular poet, but also about al-shi’r al-manthur as a literary/poetic form. In that respect, my ambition, which at first did not exceed the documentation of ‘Afif’s archive material and answering the question of his presence within his contemporaneous literary scene, eventually expanded to search for the controversial literary form he had adopted, and to question the difficulty of positioning it within the historical narrative about modern Arabic poetry. Moreover, although some of the literary magazines found in this private archive, such as Apollo, al-Hilal, al-Risala, al-Thaqafa, and al-Majalla al-Jadida for example, are well known - to the public, as well as to specialized researchers – the material, draws attention to the role of the literary press of the time, and points to a variety of literary periodicals, which - similar to ‘Afif - could be described nowadays as "unknown". A closer look at those magazines, raises more questions about interrelations within the literary community of the 1930s and 1940s; a significant era in regards to the formation of literary groups, centering periodicals that represented their views and literary approaches, as well as the textual manifestations of those approaches in different newly introduced literary and poetic forms. It was, thus, inevitable to reconsider the historicity of this material and to think of the interrelations that govern the cultural discourse and the process of history writing, which carries in it the canonization as well as the marginalization of particular literary models.

Syrian-Lebanese poet and translator Fu’ad Rifqa (1930-2011) composed an extensive corpus of philosophical poetry and translations of German Romantic poetry into Arabic. Though his poetry has been widely translated into German, his work has gone largely untranslated into English. Rifqa has been peripheral to discussion of Shi?r within critical circles as well, despite his significant early involvement with Shi?r. Rifqa’s compact poetry often creates environments in which a solitary individual meditates in the wilderness before ultimately dissolving into the atmosphere. Each poetic narrative differs only slightly from those prior, but when viewed closely, a trajectory of ideological transition and mediation of conflicting influences can be read through his treatment of the relationship between the individual and the landscape. Anxious individuals in claustrophobic landscapes characterize his early poetry, which was published in the first three issues of Shi?r and bore the influence of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party’s irredentist political and cultural agenda. However isolated the subjects of his poetry appear, the evolution of Rifqa’s poetry over time foregrounds the importance of civic institutions in helping to disentangle public discourse from exclusively political uses. Mediation of three different modes of communication about German thought in Lebanon—the educational mode of the philosophy program at the American University of Beirut, the cultural diplomatic mode of the Goethe Institut in Beirut, and the political mode of the SSNP—contribute to Rifqa’s eventual development of phenomenological poetry in Arabic, as does his doctoral study of Heidegger at the University of Tübingen in the early 1960s. Following his MA in Philosophy at AUB, his break with the party, and move to Germany in 1961, Rifqa’s poetry reflects Germanic landscapes and speaks directly of and to German predecessors, often neglecting contemporary Arabic poets. Rifqa continues to revise his theme and, in the 1980s, achieves a productive synthesis of German and Arabic influences through his poetic journal experiments. His mature poetry intertextually engages both Arab and German poets in environments that invoke Rilke’s concept of “the Open” to explore Christian Existentialist themes.

The Lebanese poet Khalil Hawi (b.1919-d.1982) is approached with apprehension. The grotesque aesthetic and malaise which permeates his poetry has been criticized for breathing the “enchantment of despair” into the generation of the sixties and seventies. Horrific, alienating, nightmarish, and apocalyptic are only a few words critics have used to describe Hawi’s poetry. However, Hawi successfully created a poetic language which was celebrated as modernist to its core. Mahmoud Darwish’s cryptic re-staging of Hawi’s suicide, on his apartment balcony in 1982, highlights the poet’s keen insight into the world but also his propensity to repulse his readers and associates. In an interview, Darwish says that “Hawi is a poet he read once and will not go back to reading a second time.” What do we do with a poet who is, on the one hand, an exemplar of modernist poetry and, on the other hand, labeled as unreadable? This paper teases out the centrifugal force of Hawi’s poetry which diverts our attention away. I explore the function of unreadability/repulsiveness and its connection to the modernist project. I argue that Hawi’s grotesque imagery alone does not define his poetry. It is the difficulty associated with confronting his poetry that constitutes his modernist style. By difficult, I do not mean linguistic and syntactic complexity, but rather visual and aural intensity. Hawi is difficult to read and listen to insofar as he disturbs and disrupts humanist and modernist sensibilities. The scope of this paper focuses on his last collection of poetry, Min jahim al-kumudiya(1979), which appears after a decade of poetic silence, and three years before his suicide. It represents a late style that weaves together intertextuality, mythopoesis, a lexicon of the grotesque, and culminates in the ominous silence of a poem with no text. Hawi occupies a complex position among the modern Arab poets and their literary predecessors. He poses a challenge to scholars of Arabic literature as he invites us to suspend Darwish’s advice and revisit a poetic vision which is at once unique and marginal, repellent and ensnaring.

In 1993 Dafatir Kalimat, an imprint of the avant-garde, short-lived, but highly esteemed literary journal Kalimat, published an edited volume entitled Al-Bayanat (The Manifestos). The volume, introduced and assembled by the Tunisian Muhammad Lutfi Al-Yousfi, brought together three manifestos by the Syrian Adunis (“The Manifesto of Modernity” (1979-1992)), the Moroccan Mohammed Bennis (“The Writing Manifesto” (1981)), and the Bahraini Qassim Haddad and Amin Saleh, who co-authored “The Death of the Chorus” (“Mawt Al-Chorus” (1984); hereafter “Chorus”). The first three authors were already well on their way to producing massive works of literary scholarship, namely, Al-Yousfi’s Fitnat Al-Mutakhayyal, Adunis’ Al-Thabit Wal-Mutahawwil, and Bennis’ Al-Shi’r Al-’Arabi Al-Hadeeth, texts which have since become mainstays of research into Arabic poetry from the second half of the twentieth century onward, aside from their influence on the self-understanding of modern Arabic poetics. These multi-volume studies can be seen as materializations of their respective authors’ condensed theoretical statements as found in Al-Bayanat. Haddad/Saleh’s “Chorus” stands orphaned by comparison. The two Bahraini authors also stand awkwardly beside Al-Yousfi, Adunis, and Bennis for their non-academic orientation: “Chorus” was written by a practicing poet and a storyteller (of sorts), neither of whom was academically trained. Of the collection, “Chorus” reads the least like prose, having been written rather as an imaginative statement of poetic principles. And while the three other manifestos were eventually complemented by the aforementioned scholarly projects, “Chorus” was followed by a perverse work of oneiric writing, penned by the same two authors, entitled Al-Jawashin (plural of jawsh, “al-sadr min al-insan aw al-layl,” according to Ibn Manzur; roughly, the foremost part of a person’s body -- thus “sadr” = chest -- or the night). The relationship between “Chorus” and Al-Jawashin appears tenuous until we learn that “Chorus” was originally written as an introduction to Al-Jawashin. I propose the perhaps ill-advised task of reading Al-Jawashin through the lens of “Chorus,” that is, as an expression and extension of the theses suggested by the latter. To this end I will bring together the critical artillery presented in “Chorus” and “Al-Damm Al-Fadheh” (the only other text co-authored by Haddad/Saleh) to bear on Al-Jawashin. Above all, I will be concerned with anchoring the aesthetic concerns of Haddad/Saleh to the cultural and political “night” with which they brand the historical moment of the 80’s and 90’s in the Gulf and the wider Arab context.