A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (11 page)

These themes can be seen in the ‘free verse’ movement that dominated post-war Arabic poetry, first in Iraq and then in Lebanon. There was, first of all, the rejection of past poetic practice, with poets such as Nazik al-Mala’ika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab in Iraq, and the poets associated with the reviews
Shi’r
(‘Poetry’) and
al-Adab
(‘Literatures’) in Lebanon, casting off inherited forms and diction in favour of poetry that was more direct and could speak to large audiences and not just to the elites that might traditionally have interested themselves in literature. Together with this emphasis on a new language and forms for poetry, ‘freeing’ it from the traditional constraints of Arabic verse, there was a call for subject matter that was more engaged with social themes, even if the poet’s individual voice was often as much in evidence as ever, some post-war poets continuing to achieve ‘celebrity’ status across the Arab world. Poetry was now often seen as a natural part of a ‘committed’ literature calling for social change. Finally, there were calls for the new poetry to have different ideas about itself, sometimes pointing in the direction of semantic investigation, as in the poetry of the Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Sa’ad, who has taken the pen name ‘Adonis’ and has been influenced by European, and especially French, ideas, sometimes being more explicitly political and capable of rousing large audiences, as in early works by the Palestinian Mahmoud Darwish or the Syrian Nizar Qabbani. New poems by the latter two poets, often coming after major public events, have been greeted in the Arab world as events in themselves.

All this is a far cry from poetry considered as a form of linguistic
ingenuity, or poetry as a form of aristocratic entertainment, with the poet acting as an ornament of the patron’s circle.

While we do not have space here to look in detail at the Arabic poetry of the 1950s and 1960s, anyone wanting guidance should perhaps be familiar with the work of certain ‘canonical’ modern Arab poets.
²⁷
Al-Sayyab would certainly be one of these, having fashioned what one critic calls a poetry of ‘myth and … archetype’ that suggests, something as Eliot had done in
The Waste Land
, that rebirth could only come from the ‘aridity of Arab life’ in a way ‘analogous to the falling of rain over a parched land’. It is to poems such as ‘In the Arab Maghreb’, written at the time of the Algerian war of independence in the 1950s, that ‘al-Sayyab owes his fame and supremacy in modern Arabic poetry,’ as well as to perhaps his best-known poem, ‘Song of the Rain’. Al-Sayyab’s compatriots, al-Malai’ka and al-Bayati, are also securely in the canon, the latter sounding much like Ezra Pound in calling for the ‘crushing’ of ‘Romantic sentimentality, Classical rigidity, oratorical poetry and the literature of ivory towers’ and the fashioning of a radically new poetry.
²⁸

From the Lebanese group and mostly Levantine poets publishing in the
Shi’r
and
al-Adab
reviews, Adonis calls for special mention. This poet, impossible to summarize, sees poetry as ‘a challenge to logic … a change in the order of things, a rebellion against traditional forms and the poetic order’, pointing to the influence on him of French ideas of the
poète maudite
and the poet’s ‘revolutionary’ role, at least with regard to language. Adonis has set out his ideas in essay form, for example in his
Introduction to Arab Poetics
,
²⁹
which argues for a ‘modernism’ in Arabic poetry that looks both to classical Arab models and to modern European, especially French, poetry. It imagines modern Arabic poetry as being in a state of permanent revolt against ‘traditionalist mentality’. A rather different poet, less obviously associated with the manifestos coming out of Beirut, is Qabbani (d. 1998), a poet who did more than most to bring the language of poetry close to the standard language, perhaps accounting for the popularity of his lyric poems and political pieces like ‘Footnotes to the Book of Defeat’, written in the wake of the 1967 war with Israel, and ‘When will the Death of the Arabs be Announced?’, a response to the 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinians. There are also Mahmoud Darwish and the Palestinian poets, whose work is discussed in
Chapter 4
.
³⁰

Your eyes are a forest of palms at dusk.

Or two balconies before the moon’s departure.

When your eyes smile the vines bring forth leaves,

And the lights dance like the moon on the river,

Trembling under the oars, softly in the dusk,

As if stars are glittering in the depths …

And then sink in a cloud of transparent sorrow

Like the sea open-handed, cloaked by night,

With winter warmth and autumn’s trembling;

Like birth and death, darkness and light.

My soul wakes to a tremulous weeping,

A wild rapture embracing the sky,

Like a child’s ecstacy when he fears the moon,

As if the arches of clouds drink in the mist

And drop by drop it melts into rain.

The children shouting in the vineyards

And the stillness of sparrows in the trees tickled by

The rainsong …

Rain

Rain

Rain.

10. From Iraqi poet Badr Shakir al-Sayyab’s poem ‘Song of the Rain’, translated by Mursi Saad El-Din

11. The Syrian poet Adonis, one of the last century’s great experimentalists

Naturally, there are far more poets than these in the post-war canon, even for the restricted period considered here. Egyptian readers, for example, brought up on the works of Egyptian poets in both the
classical and colloquial languages, such as Salah Abd al-Sabur, Ahmad Abd al-Mu’ti Hegazi and Amal Dunqul writing in the former, and Salah Jahine, Fu’ad Haddad, Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm and Abd al-Rahman al-Abnoudi in the latter, might be surprised to read one critic’s estimate
³¹
that despite its ‘long critical experience’ the country failed to ‘produce … a poet great enough to utilize all the knowledge gained’, unlike in the ‘poetic stronghold’ of Iraq.

In poetry, as in politics, there has long been a rivalry for leadership in the Arab world.

Modern Palestine has given rise to a literature that is in some respects unique in the Arab world, and Palestinian writers and intellectuals have enjoyed an influence in Arab letters out of all proportion to the country’s size, matching the role that Palestine and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have played in Arab affairs since the end of the Second World War. That much at least, lifted from the introduction to this book, is well known and relatively uncontroversial. However, the fact that modern Palestinian literature is in the main not politically propagandistic can be surprising to those who do not know it well. While Palestinian literature cannot help but be politically aware, its relation to politics is usually oblique.

Palestinian writers have tended to stand back from what has seemed to be the permanent state of crisis that has enveloped their country since at least the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, mostly choosing to address the human consequences of this situation. They have emphasized the suffering that this crisis has brought to individuals from every walk of life, sometimes employing a black
sense of humour to do so. They have also explored what it might mean to be identified as a ‘Palestinian writer,’ particularly when Palestinians have long been divided between those living ‘within’, whether in the Occupied Territories or in Israel proper, and those living ‘without’, in the Arab countries or further afield. Should Palestinian writers write about Palestine at the expense of everything else, aiming to serve as ‘spokesmen’ for the people from whom they come? Or should they have the same kind of loyalties as any other kind of literary writer, first and foremost to their writing? Questions of this sort are explored in this chapter, which gives an overview of main themes in modern Palestinian literature, including Palestinian historical experience, the fact of dispossession and exile, and the possibility of return.

The declaration of the state of Israel in May 1948 divided the British mandate territory of Palestine into three parts. There was, first of all, the part of it that became Israel, and most of the Palestinian refugees forced out by the violence that accompanied the declaration came from here. An estimated three quarters of a million of them poured into camps in neighbouring countries such as Lebanon, or into those parts of the former mandate territory that were ceded either to Jordan or to Egypt, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively. These areas now made up the second and third parts of what had until then been one Arab country. The experience of 1948 and its after-effects, whether in the bitterness of dispossession and exile or in the new problems that arose for the Arab citizens of the new state of Israel, henceforth became leading themes for generations of Palestinian writers.
¹

One of the best-known of these is Ghassan Kanafani, a writer, journalist and political activist who was himself caught up in the 1948 exodus from Palestine. Like many others in similar circumstances Kanafani lived an unstable life, living and working by turns in Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon and finally becoming a spokesman for the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, one of the political factions that emerged in the 1960s. He was assassinated in Beirut in 1972. Kanafani’s literary work, collected in various volumes of short stories published in the 1960s and several novels, captures Palestinian life in exile in the decades after 1948, notably in the novellas
Men in the Sun
and
All That’s Left to You
.
²

Men in the Sun
is Kanafani’s best-known work, and it is probably also one of the best-known pieces of modern Palestinian literature. In it, he describes the attempt of four Palestinians to cross the border from Iraq into neighbouring Kuwait in search of work. The latter country, experiencing an economic boom as a result of oil, is in need of cheap labour. However, the Palestinians, being stateless, do not have the necessary entry papers, and they are forced to fall back on one of the human traffickers that ply the desert roads between the two countries. ‘A man can collect money in the twinkling of an eye in Kuwait,’ one of the four assures himself, having first made the long desert crossing from Jordan to Iraq and now waiting to be smuggled across the border into Kuwait. Before he can collect that money, however, he must make the crossing, and as is often the case with such operations, extortion, or worse, is the norm. There are horrifying stories of Palestinians being abandoned in the desert by unscrupulous traffickers, who leave them to die under the baking sun.

The four eventually meet a lorry driver who agrees to take them across the border in exchange for five dinars, considerably less than the standard fee. The plan is for them to hide in the lorry’s tank as it crosses the border (it is a water-tanker), re-emerging from the stifling heat inside once safely past the border controls. All goes well until the driver is held up at a border post, and his human cargo suffocate before he is able to release them. As he drives around the outskirts of Kuwait City looking for somewhere to dump the bodies a question comes to his mind: ‘why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank? Why didn’t you bang on the sides of the tank? Why? Why? Why?’

Men in the Sun
presents the plight of Palestinians unable to find work in the sometimes appalling conditions of the refugee camps, or, legally, elsewhere.
All That’s Left to You
presents a variation on this theme, ‘what is left’ to the characters in this story being either poverty as refugees in the Gaza Strip, or death while trying to cross into Jordan. Like
Men in the Sun
, the story employs several narrators, and it is told from multiple points of view, including that of the surrounding desert. Also like
Men in the Sun
, it captures the ‘balance sheet of remnants, the balance sheet of losses, the balance sheet of death’ that lies in wait for Palestinians living as refugees in the camps and overtaken by feelings of frustration and bitterness. This half-life is buoyed up only by thoughts of escape or of return to a homeland that has now itself been absorbed by Israel.