A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature by David Tresilian

renovation of Arab societies, leading to political change in many of them and a new conception of prose literature in the vanguard of that change, such demands were perhaps all the more keenly felt in poetry. Whereas prose literature had at best a limited rhetorical role, poetry could be used to address mass audiences directly (though novels, suitably adapted, could still reach large audiences when adapted for films). Partly as a result of this, post-war Arabic poetry saw innovation both in formal terms, leading to the eclipse of traditional metres and verse forms, and in terms of diction, which now became less elaborate and closer to the language that people actually spoke, if still not identical with it. Both these changes reflected changing conceptions of the role of the poet in society and the nature of the poet’s audience. Moreover, they reflected, too, a greater openness to European poetry and particularly to the kind of innovations that had earlier been made in it, some Arabic poetry from the 1950sonwards being influenced either by the fragmentation and wide-ranging cultural reference to be found in the works of T. S. Eliot, or by the dislocations of language – Rimbaud’s
dérèglement de tous les sens
– familiar from modern French poetry.
    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 linguisticingenuity, 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