Angela Giordani MESA 2013 Talk

POETIC DISSENT: SHIRS CHALLENGE TO THE POST-COLONIAL ARAB STATE

For those of you familiar with the journal that Im speaking about todaythe Beiruti Shir, or Poetry, of Yusuf al-Khal and his circle known as tajammu shirthe title of my paper may seem odd or even misrepresentative of this journal and the poetic movement to which it gave expression. Contrary to the overtly political motives suggested by my description of Shir as posing a challenge to the post-colonial Arab state, this journal was founded in 1957 precisely with the mission to save poetry from politics, as put by Badr Shakir al-Sayyab.1 Indeed, one of Shirs most marked peculiarities was its revulsion against the very fifties and sixties notion of committed literature (al-adab al-multazim), which the journals poetic vanguard saw as a prostitution of art to political causes and ideologies. In light of all this, what am I doing by ascribing to this literary journal a political position, and a serious one, at that, contra- the Arab nationalist project? First of all, Shir was and still is perceived as a platform for a deeply subversive cultural movement with serious political implications. It has been accused of treasonous activities namely, acting as a front for a culture-war conspiracy funded by various enemies of Arab nationalism, like Antun Saadehs Syrian Social-Nationalist Party, as well as the CIA, French intelligencethe list goes on. I begin my presentation by alluding to these conspiracy theories not because Im going to refute or prove their accusations, as I lack the empirical evidence necessary to do this. Rather, I mention them because they indicate that the Shir project of modern poetry was widely perceivedand I argue rightly soas aiming to revolutionize far more than the qasidah and poetic theory. What this paper does offer against the logic of these conspiracy theories and the numerous national bans on Shirs circulation is the claim that these

Majid al-Samari, Rasa'il as-Sayyab (Beirut: Dar al-Tali'ah, 1975), 130-1.

Angela Giordani MESA 2013 Talk perceptions of Shir are based on a misunderstanding of the intent, nature and scope of the particular challenge posed by this poetic project to the standing order. As these avant-garde poets saw it, reforming or toppling a national regime was too vulgar a task for any real poet. Their revolution aimed deeper. We might say that the Shir poets real concern was not the postcolonial Arab nation-state, but the post-colonial Arab state of being. The formula offered by Shir for ontological revolution that I will discuss in this paper certainly had political resonances, but politics and ideology were decidedly not the objects of this avant-gardes efforts or the focus of its resistance. Rather, I argue that what the Shir poets took issue with was the scientific mode of thought, al-ilm, at the philosophical core of the Arab nationalist enterprise and the Nahda legacy as a whole. The Shir poets claimed that their project of al-shir al-hadith (modern poetry) answered to a more profound and truthful mode of thought than al-ilm that they called ruiya, or vision. This was a mystical, intuitive form of knowing or seeing the world and its beyond as a poet. The revolution informed by such a knowledge, it follows, would necessarily look very different from that which the Arab state aimed to engineer through its scientific-socialist planning and sweeping modernization projects. In contrast to the sky-high dams and empowered workforces of the Nahda of al-ilm achieved in the 1950s, the achievements sought by Shirs Nahda of ruiya were a liberated Arab consciousness and its poetic form, the qasidah, which would serve as the medium for rendering a new, revolutionary human universality in the Arabic language. The ruiya concept was first theorized in 1959 by the Shir groups youngest member, the gifted Ali Ahmad Said, who we all know better as Adunis. My presentation will lead up to this article by Adunis and, on the way there, look at some other key theoretical texts from the journals formative years in the late fifties. My goal is to foreground some important philosophical valences of the Shir movement that have not been acknowledged as such (by scholarship). What Im arguing is that Shirs theorists forged Arabic 2

Angela Giordani MESA 2013 Talk poetics into a matrix for thinking and deriving a new breed of solutions to the same post-colonial crises of liberation and authentic renaissance that concerned Arab thinkers of all intellectual and ideological shades during the fifties and sixties. Ill begin by briefly setting the literary scene in and against which the Shir poets founded their journal. In doing so, I hope to convey how radically different and yet also embedded Shirs avant-gardeist philosophy of poetry was in its milieu. As Ive mentioned, it was the Syrian poet Yusuf al-Khalalso a very experienced, traveled journalist and editorwho founded Shir in January of 1957. At this time, the Beiruti scene of majallat was under the reign of a new, politically committed model of Arab literary journal pioneered by the weekly al-Adab. This literature review was established in 1953 by the Lebanese Existentialist novelist and critic, Suhayl Idris, on the Sartrean creed of engagement, or committed writing for the sake of larger social and political causes. Al-Adab considered itself a beacon for a literature of commitment which issues from Arab society and pours back into it,2 so it quickly became the literary platform for the Arab Nationalist and Marxist Left(s) along with the various forms of engaged modes of writing associated with these ideologies. Socialist Realism emerged as the most prominent of these committed literary traditions by the late fifties when Shir came onto the scene. As Yoav Di-Capua (who has laid all of this out) has recently argued, the rise of al-Adab and Suhayl Idriss generation of writers under the banner of iltizam marked the fall of Taha Husseins generation of udaba and their traditional view of art for arts sake. We must not mistake or misread Shirs call to save poetry from politics as a reactionary gesture of return to this older generations felled model. Rather, the Shir movements assertion of the autonomy of
2

This is from Al-Adabs mission statement, written by Idris and published in the journals first issue. Quoted in Yoav Di-Capua. Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization. The American Historical Review 117, no. 4 (October 2012):

Angela Giordani MESA 2013 Talk art was actually a radicalization or move beyond the iltizam movement in that the Shir poets took for granted something that the committed types were very self-conscious about. This is the idea that literature is in fact capable of changing the world. While the adab al-iltizam writers were busy arguing this and debating about which kind of literaturethe realist or the absurdist, the novel or the short storywas truly committed and capable of making change, the Shir poets were saying, look: all poetry is committed poetry. This was, significantly, the thesis of the single theoretical piece published in Shirs first issue.3 This concept of poetry as inherently committed, as action in the world, is quite radical theoreticallypushing towards (proto) post-modernismin that it conflates the real with the literary to the point where writing poetry is understood not as writing for the sake of the real, but as writing the real, itself. Aesthetic theory from Peter Burger to Andrew Hewett tells us that it is precisely this full reconciliation of art and life with its insistenceupon the reality of the text rather than the textuality of the real as in modernism that marks the avant-gardes rebellious move beyond modernism as such.4 This exact inversion, in fact, was stated by one of Shirs founders, Nadhir al-Azmeh, when he described his circle of poets as preoccupied with (quote) the transformation of politics to poetry, and not poetry to politics like those modernist adab aliltizam writers. Nevertheless, al-Azmeh continues, this poetic politics envisioned by Shir was, he says, a poetic politics of liberation like everyone elses politics.5 This designation tells us that however avant-gardeist or different Shir was in its time, this poetic enterprise was preoccupied with the same basic set of post-colonial issuessummed up as the question of liberationas its committed counterparts.

3 4

Reena Habashi, Al-Shir fi Marakat al-Wujud, Shi'r 1 (Summer 1957): 89. Andrew Hewitt, Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1993) 21, 39. 5 Nadhir al-'Uzma, Ana wa-l-hadatha wa majallat shi'r (Beirut: Dar Nelson, 2011), 19. 4

Angela Giordani MESA 2013 Talk With that orientation, Ill try to lay out poetic framework developed by the Shir poets for addressing the problem of liberation, which, as well see, is inextricably tied to the problem of authenticity, or authentic renaissance. Yusuf al-Khal gave what I think is the earliest articulation of this in his lecture at the 1957 annual Lebanese culture conference. As al-Khal told his audience, the poetic politics of liberation alluded to by al-Azmeh begins by demolishing the inherited structures and rules that dictate the Arab poets composition of the qasidah. The speaker frames the poetic texts release from the shackles of the qawalib, awzan, qafiyah etc. as one and the same with the liberation of the poets consciousness. (So we see here how the text of the qasidah is read not only a mirror or projection of consciousness, but is, rather, portrayed as constitutive of consciousness, itself). AlKhal tells us that the Arab poets consciousness is shackled by three main restraints: These are, first, a reliance on nature for inspiration, and, second (more importantly) an uncritical deference to rationality and logical reasoning, and, finally, a self-imposed bondage to the Arabic poetic heritage, or turath. Im going to take a moment now to focus on thisthe turath issue, but Ill come back later to discuss at length Shirs attack of rationality and logical reasoning. In the lecture were looking at,6 and in other writings, Yusuf al-Khal positions the project of modern poetry in a complex relationship with the turath. He describes the Arabs poetic heritage as comprising two elements: one, a deadweight body of taqlid, or imitative, traditional custom, and, two, a timeless spirit of iconoclasm and innovation that he calls al-hadatha. As we know, al-hadatha is the term used in Arabic to refer to modernityas in the modernity imported from the West. Al-Khal, however, locates the spirit of hadatha squarely in the Arabs own poetic

Yusuf al-Khal, Mustaqbal al-Shir fi Lubnan, Muhadarat al-Nadwa, (May, 1957): 367-84. This lecture was reproduced in Amin Sulayman Seedu, "Seerat Yusuf al-Khal," in Al-Dabt al-Bibliografi wa-l-tahlil al-bibliomitri fi 'ilm al-maktabat wa-l-ma'lumant: dirasa tatbiqiyya 'ala majallat shi'r (Riyad: Muassasat al-Yamamah al-Suhafiyah, 1996).

Angela Giordani MESA 2013 Talk heritage and thus conflates it with the very concepts of authenticity (asala) and turath that are typically posed as the antithesis of hadatha. Hes grounding this important move by harkening back to the radically innovative Abbasid school of poets known as al-muhdithun, who include the famed Abu Nuwwas and Abu Tammam. It is after these muhdithun poets and not the Wests hadatha that al-Khal claims to be naming his project al-shir al-hadith, which in this light now appears as a project of authentic modernity. (As many of you are probably thinking, al-Khal is indeed anticipating Aduniss later dissertation work in al-thabit wa-l mutahawwil by invoking the turath against itself in this way and locating in it a spirit of renewal). The poets revolutionary vocation, as al-Khal tells us, is the exorcism of this spirit from the turaths dead body and re-embodiment of it in the modern qasidah. This poetic act for al-Khal is the catalyst for the liberation of collective Arab consciousness from the ossified traditions imprisoning it. Al-Khal presents the liberation achieved through this selective relationship with the turath as this sort of Hegelian moment of the Arab subjects entrance into the universal through immersion in the specificity of subjective experience. The idea here is that once the poet is liberated from the traditions that dictated his craft, hes left with nothing other than the truth of lived experience (haqiqat al-tajribiyah al-hayatiyah) from which to forge his qasidah. This lived experience is, for al-Khal, to be the modern poets framework for discovering and articulating the universal truth of what it is to be human. Against the social realists, nationalists and romantics alike, al-Khal insists that it is not the masses or a particular national collective or nature that should be the modern poets primary subject, but, rather, that the universal category of human, al-insan should be his first and last subject. We should note here al-Khals choice of the word haqiqah to describe poetrys humanist truth-content, because this is the Shir poets substitute for the reality (al-waqi) championed by their social realist rivals as the content that

Angela Giordani MESA 2013 Talk literature must strive to represent.7 The Marxist literary critic Mahmud Amin al-Alim, for example, insisted that artists must depict lived realities like the class struggle from a rational perspective that speaks objectively for the masses experience rather than expressing their own experience. In contrast, the haqiqah, that al-Khal calls for is a truth accessible only through the poets subjective emotional perspective, which acts as a window to the universal human register of existence beyond the artifice of al-waqi veiling the metaphysical truths to which poets, specifically, must speak. Its here is where vision, or ruiya, comes into play as a form of knowing that can actually pierce through reality into a beyond where al-ilm is unequipped to go. With this, we can finally turn to the theoretical work of young Adunis, whose article humbly entitled An Attempt to Define Modern Poetry starts where his mentor left off in defining Shirs project of modern poetry in terms of ruiya. The article begins, If we add an intellectual humanist dimension to the spiritual dimension of the word ruiya, then we can define modern poetry as ruiya. In its very nature, ruiya is a leap beyond the standing conceptual order. It is change in the system of things and a system of looking at them (end quote). Put otherwise, the poetics of ruiya exist in tension with and transform the ontology and an epistemology of the privileged conceptual order of modernity ruled by empiricism and science, or al-ilm. For this reason, Adunis insists, modern poetry actually exists as an independent trajectory of overcoming that runs parallel to modernitys teleology of progress. Here of course the author is re-asserting al-Khals framing of Arab poetic modernity as its own authentic movement of hadatha that originates with the muhdithun poets. The hadatha of modern poetry is separate, Adunis adds, because it (quote) contains its own particular truth (haqiqa)a truth of a world that our present society does not know how to

See the review of al-Khals lecture published in the news (akhbar) section of Shir, No. 2, (Spring, 1957), 96-7. 7

Angela Giordani MESA 2013 Talk see, but that the poet learns and teaches how to see. The poets job is therefore not only to see this haqiqa in a spiritual moment of prophetic vision (this is the original meaning of ruiya), but also to render it through his qasidah into a systematic vision for reality. The qasidah he offers, in turn, is a kind of knowledge (marifa) that has its own rules, in isolation of al-ilm. This is such a crucial point in Aduniss essay because it means that modern poetry is not reflective or depictive in function, but actually productive of knowledge and meaning in the same capacity of modern scientific inquiry. With this, we can see what Adunis and Shir were really concerned about challenging. Their final target is not the socialist realists or Al-Adab, but, rather, scientific thought and the modern hierarchy of knowledge that privileges it.8 I think in this light its clearer why the Shir project was perceived as so threatening in its time. The concept of modern poetry that al-Khal and Adunis worked so hard to theorize cannot, as Ive argued, be categorized as simply an alternative literary model. It was this, but it was also an alternative formula for Arab modernity, one that philosophically re-conceptualized its goals as human and poetic rather than scientific and technological, and in doing so challenged the central premise of the post-colonial Arab states ideologies of modernization. One of the conclusions Ive come to through my preliminary research and thinking about Shir is that this particular poetic project encapsulates intimate relationships between the literary and the political, and the poetic and the philosophical in twentieth century Arab letters that our field has yet to theorize or discuss in depth. While what Ive just presented highlights how the Shir groups poetic theory functioned as a crucible for theories of being and knowledge that are politically engaged, notice that I didnt touch the poetry, itself. My intuitive fear or hesitation to take this plunge is not based only how incredibly difficult this avant-gardeist poetry is to read, but more on the fact that subjecting poetry to the intellectual historians reading Ive done here would
8

Adunis, "Muhawala fi ta'rif al-shi'r al-hadith." Shi'r 11 (Summer 1959): 79-81. 8

Angela Giordani MESA 2013 Talk entail making a case for reading literature as systematic thought. Dominick La-Capra has done important work making a case like this for reading European intellectual history. But considering that modern Arab intellectual culture is one where most every major thinker is also a playwright, poet or novelist, or where the terms mufakkir and adib are often interchangeable, I think that this is a very important case for scholars in our field, specifically, to makeone that requires serious collaboration between our literary critics and intellectual historians.