A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (16 page)

In concluding this chapter something should be said about developments in poetry and drama. While the free verse of the 1950s and 1960s has been widely translated, non-Arabic-speaking readers have been less well served as far as contemporary poetry is concerned. Only some major trends have been picked out in what follows, together with the work of poets available in translation.

In the 1970s, Arabic poetry entered a period of crisis. Earlier poets such as al-Mala’ika, al-Sayyab and, predominantly, Adonis, had brought about major changes in the forms and language of Arabic poetry, but as a result poetry exhibited a kind of paradox: while on the one hand it had cast off traditional rhetoric in favour of language that was closer to that of educated speech, on the other it had absorbed many of the lessons of European modernist poetry, al-Sayyab borrowing from T. S. Eliot and Edith Sitwell (oddly for English readers) and Adonis finding inspiration in the work of the French surrealists, whose ‘revolutionary’ poetic programme he adopted. Arabic poetry now sounded more ‘modern’ and conformed more closely to international norms. However, it also sounded more elitist and more off-putting to ordinary readers. ‘A whole generation of poets from Bahrain and Yemen to Morocco sank deeper and deeper into inventiveness for its own sake, unguided by any informed criticism,’ writes one critic. By the beginning of the 1980s, ‘a large amount of bad poetry had accumulated’, some of it marked by experiment for its own sake, some of it loudly attitudinizing in the manner of ‘platform poetry’.
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Among this material there was nevertheless more modest work, poetry, in other words, that reacted against the grandstanding of the earlier generation by choosing deliberate, anti-heroic deflation. One might think, in British terms, of the puncturing of reputations carried out by the poets associated with ‘the Movement’ in the 1950s, who were unable to bear what they saw as the posturing of their immediate forebears. The Egyptian poet Salah Abd al-Sabur is an example of a poet who wrote in a more ironical, self-critical tone, the Iraqi Sa’di Yusuf another. One might point, too, to the poetry of the Egyptians Amal Dunqul, Ahmad Abd al-Mu’ti Hegazi and Muhammad Afifi Matar, all of whose work departed in one way or another from what had come before it. The latter has the reputation of being a formidably ‘difficult’ poet, his work marked by a ‘rich intricacy and wonderful
strangeness’ and ‘appealing to connoisseur readers rather than the general Arab public,’ in the words of his translators.
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These poets, like those discussed earlier, write in the ‘classical’ language, in other words in the Arabic generally used throughout the Arab world for written materials and in formal speech. Yet, the post-war period also saw developments in poetry written in the colloquial, the local Arabic vernacular or dialect, and some of the best-known poets writing in Egypt, for example, have written in the local dialect, though they have not always been recognized by the critics. Such poets include Salah Jahine, Fu’ad Haddad, Ahmad Fu’ad Nigm and Abd al-Rahman al-Abnoudi.

Both Jahine and Haddad began to write in the 1950s, and both looked for inspiration to the vernacular poetry written by the earlier Egyptian poet Bairam al-Tunsi. However, both poets invested their work with aesthetic and political dimensions that poetry in the vernacular had perhaps not previously had: Haddad in particular, of Levantine origin and at home in both French and Arab culture, could hardly be described as ‘untutored’ despite his choice of the vernacular language, and Jahine used the dialect as a way of mobilizing popular support behind Nasser’s policies (which he enthusiastically supported) and finding new audiences for poetry. His best-known work includes the
Ruba’iyyat
(Quatrains) and the ‘Songs of the Revolution’ in support of the Nasser regime, though he was also a gifted cartoonist.

While Jahine and Haddad died in the 1980s, Nigm and al-Abnoudi, their heirs, are very much alive, and reading them is an invigorating experience for foreign readers, used, perhaps, to a different idea of the poet and of the poet’s audience. Both men made their names through performance poetry written in the colloquial language, and their appeal is to an audience that might not have much time for the formal language or difficulty of ‘high-brow’ poets like Matar. Much of their work has been set to music as songs. Nigm, in particular, became a minor celebrity thanks to his performances of poetry containing
often scurrilous satire, these being circulated,
samizdat
fashion, on tape cassette. A performance of work by al-Abnoudi can have an atmosphere more familiar from a sports event than from a poetry reading, which in European countries tend to be sedate, almost apologetic affairs. Nigm has identified himself with the ‘ibn al-balad’, the perpetual underdog or ‘salt of the earth’, on whose behalf he claims to speak, and visiting him in the Cairo district of al-Darb al-Ahmar in the 1990s was quite unlike visiting a European poet of comparable fame, or, indeed, like visiting one of Nigm’s own fellow poets, for example at their offices at
al-Ahram
. Nigm did not have a telephone, and it was necessary to track his movements from street vendors on the way. He was friendly and affable, though not particularly interested in receiving visitors, especially foreigners with whom communication tends to be limited.
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One has the feeling, visiting Nigm or attending one of al-Abnoudi’s poetry readings, that theirs is a genuinely popular poetry. There are also traditions of vernacular poetry outside Egypt, for example in Iraq, where one of the best-known vernacular poets is Muzaffar al-Nawwab (b. 1934), who has also written poetry with a directly political content.
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Finally, a new generation of poets emerged in the 1990s whose work is also still under-represented in translation. These poets, ‘rebels’ according to their translator Mohamed Enani, have ‘rejected the idea of serious art and [embraced] an eclectic mix of cultural input[s].’ They have a marginal position with regard to the cultural establishment, shunning publication in mainstream reviews and setting up independent magazines instead with names like
al-Garad
(‘locusts’),
al-Kitaba al-Ukhra
(‘alternative writing’) and
al-Khitab al-Hamishy
(‘marginal discourse’), in which they publish material that marks out new territory in the manner of any avant-garde. Enani’s introduction to this material is perhaps more eloquent than any statement by a foreign writer: these poets’ ‘modes of statement’,
he says, ‘are deliberately anti-Arabic’, indicating a desire to break with certain ideas of tradition. Their poems, ‘anti-cooperative’ and written in a ‘private language’, can leave their readers at sea.
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All these qualities are shared with parallel developments in prose writing, as we shall see in the next chapter.

This chapter would not be complete without some account of the drama, which now began to build upon the traditions established by al-Hakim. Whatever other qualities the latter may have had, modesty seems not to have been one of them. He was given, for example, to pointing out that the lack of a tradition of dramatic writing in Arabic presented Arab dramatists with special difficulties, obliging him ‘to undertake in thirty years a trip on which the dramatic literature of other languages had spent about two thousand years.’
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Al-Hakim’s play
People of the Cave
, a version of the Qur’anic story of the Sleepers of Ephesus, was greeted on its publication in 1933 as ‘the first work in Arabic literature that may be properly called drama’ by no less a critic than Taha Hussein, and it bears witness to al-Hakim’s determination to make drama into a ‘serious branch of literature’ and not just a form of entertainment. Yet, while al-Hakim was perhaps almost alone in his endeavours until the 1950s, from this decade on striking developments in drama began to take place across the Arab world, a particularly talented new generation of playwrights emerging in Egypt and swiftly followed by developments in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine.

Theatre, unlike other forms of literature, depends upon the work of other people besides the author. It also depends upon suitable institutions. When al-Hakim started writing plays, there were few suitably trained actors, directors or theatre staff, and there was no state support for the theatre. This gave rise to the myth that his plays were part of a ‘theatre of the mind’, being unsuitable, or not meant, for acting, whereas in fact the plays could not be acted because the infrastructure was not in place to stage them. From the 1950s onwards,
however, the state both in Egypt and in other Arab countries began to play a role in supporting ‘serious’ theatre, and by 1966 there were ten state companies working out of nine theatres in Cairo alone. These addressed an audience that had got used to viewing theatre as a form of ‘ersatz parliament’, in other words as a place for the ventilation of social and political ideas.
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M. M. Badawi, from whose
Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt
the above statistics are taken, notes that the new generation of dramatists that emerged to serve this new theatre included some of the most important writers of the time, among them al-Hakim. While the latter’s theatrical odyssey took him from realist ‘plays on social themes’, as a 1950 collection of plays put it, to the introduction of the ‘theatre of the Absurd’ to Arab audiences through plays such as
The Tree Climber
and
Fate of a Cockroach
,
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other dramatists such as Nu’man Ashur were experimenting with ‘a new note of harsh realism, of urgency and commitment’ in plays such as
The People Downstairs
and
The Dughri Family
. Alfred Farag was writing plays influenced by Brecht’s epic theatre, such as
Sulayman of Aleppo
and
Ali Jinah of Tabriz
, while Yusuf Idris wrote a landmark play in
al-Farafir
, variously translated as ‘The Underlings’, or ‘Small Fry’, which represented an attempt to invent an ‘indigenous tradition’ for Arab theatre out of pre-modern literary materials like the village
samir
, described by Badawi as ‘a popular type of social get-together’. (Farag also drew on materials from
The Arabian Nights
and other pre-modern narratives.) The poet Salah Abd al-Sabur wrote a verse play,
The Tragedy of al-Hallaj
, in 1965 that betrayed the influence of experiments carried out by T. S. Eliot. Arabic drama in the 1960s saw no shortage of experiment.

Aside from the formal qualities of the plays, and the state funds on hand to support them, the drama also had an important social role to play. As noted above, much of the period’s prose writing, both before and after the 1967 war, was at least implicitly critical of the regime, a
posture of alienation and the making of veiled criticisms being typical of the work of the ‘generation of the 1960s’. This was also true of the dramatists, whose work performed a ‘cathartic’ function: the performance of work that was even indirectly critical of the regime helped to give the impression of public debate, real possibilities for which were curtailed. Thus, al-Hakim’s
The Sultan’s Dilemma
and
Anxiety Bank
, among other plays, are sometimes read as criticisms of the regime in the same way that Mahfouz’s presentation of alienation in his novels from the 1960s, Ibrahim’s writing about paralysis, and al-Ghitany’s dramatization of blanket fear and censorship have all been seen as the symptoms of a system that, did it but know it, was in a deep state of crisis.
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In an environment where everyone was being watched, avant-garde experiment, even the apparent avoidance of political themes in the theatre of the Absurd, could be seen as a political act.

While Egyptian theatre went into decline in the 1970s, many dramatists of the sixties generation either going abroad or ceasing to write, increased resources elsewhere led to the foundation of various public and private-sector theatre companies and to the inauguration of international arts events that served to showcase their work, among them the Baalbek (Lebanon) and Jerash (Jordan) festivals. Cairo itself has hosted an annual Experimental Theatre Festival over the past two decades, serving as a venue for contemporary Arab and international drama.
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Probably the best-known Arab dramatist of recent decades is the Syrian Saadallah Wannous, an author who, in plays such as
The King is the King,
used traditional stories (in this case from
The Arabian Nights
) to make criticisms of Arab regimes, while at the same time presenting the material in a way that shows his indebtedness both to the dramatists of the Absurd and to Brecht, as mediated by the Egyptian playwrights of the 1960s. Wannous died of cancer in 1997. Before doing so, he published a short ‘memoir’ of time
spent in hospital that mixes present circumstances with memories, fantasies and fragments of unwritten plays.
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In this memoir, Wannous writes that ‘memories accompany death like voice recordings’, and in the drama of his own death he remembers the young man who ‘had to speak out against the environment in which I was living … who looked for the existentialism, the freedom and the beauty that other countries enjoyed. I had to express my irritation at the complications and outworn traditions that obliged us to live poverty-stricken lives. I had to write tracts calling for revolt and liberation and stick them up on people’s doors after midnight.’ All this once again shows the important ‘cathartic’ role taken on by modern Arab theatre.

While it is impossible to be certain about the permanent standing of individual authors, it is perhaps easier to be confident about trends, and three main trends in contemporary Arabic literature will be discussed in this final chapter, various works being considered in relation to them. Most, though by no means all, of the writers mentioned are Egyptian, which suggests that Egypt has managed to retain its leadership of the Arab world in literary matters, for the time being at least. Naturally, many writers of the senior generation continue to be active, including many of those described earlier: Edwar al-Kharrat, Gamal al-Ghitany and Sonallah Ibrahim are all still writing, and to their names can be added those of a host of others, many of them ‘sixties writers’. Such names include those of Ibrahim Aslan, Baha Tahir, Mohamed el-Bisatie, Gamal Attia Ibrahim, Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid, Mohamed al-Makhzangi and others. While each of these established authors deserves consideration, this chapter by necessity confines itself to developing trends.