Majallat Shir Talk-MESA 2013

8/13/2019 Majallat Shir Talk-MESA 2013

1/9

Angela GiordaniMESA 2013 Talk

1

POETIC DISSENT: SHIRSCHALLENGE 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, Shirwas 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 Shirproject of

modern poetry was widely perceivedand I argue rightly soas aiming to revolutionize far

more than the qasidahand 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

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


2/9


2

perceptions of Shirare 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 Shirpoets real concern was not the post-

colonial Arab nation-state, but the post-colonial Arab state of being.

The formula offered by Shirfor 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 Shirpoets 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 Shirpoets claimed that their project

of al-shir al-hadith(modern poetry) answered to a more profound and truthful mode of thought

than al-ilmthat 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-ilmachieved in the 1950s, the

achievements sought by Shirs Nahda of ruiyawere 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 ruiyaconcept was first theorized in 1959 by the

Shirgroups 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 Shirmovement that have not been

acknowledged as such (by scholarship). What Im arguing is that Shirs theorists forged Arabic


3/9


3

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 Shirpoets 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 majallatwas under the reign of a new, politically committed model of Arab literary

journal pioneered by the weekly al-Adab. Thisliterature 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-Adabconsidered 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 Shircame 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 iltizammarked 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 Shirmovements assertion of the autonomy of

2This is fromAl-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 Review117, no. 4 (October 2012):


4/9


4

art was actually a radicalization or move beyond the iltizammovement in that the Shirpoets

took for granted something that the committed types were very self-conscious about. This is

the idea that literature is in factcapable of changing the world. While the adab al-iltizamwriters

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

ratherthanthe textuality of the real as in modernism that marks the avant-gardes rebellious

move beyond modernism as such.4This 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 notpoetry to politics like those modernist adab al-

iltizamwriters. Nevertheless, al-Azmeh continues, this poetic politics envisioned by Shir

was, he says, a poetic politics ofliberation like everyone elses politics.5 This designation tells

us that however avant-gardeist or different Shirwas 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.

3Reena Habashi, Al-Shir fi Marakat al-Wujud, Shi'r1 (Summer 1957): 89.

4Andrew Hewitt,Fascist Modernism: Aesthetics, Politics and the Avant-Garde(Stanford:

Stanford UP, 1993) 21, 39.5Nadhir al-'Uzma,Ana wa-l-hadatha wa majallat shi'r(Beirut: Dar Nelson, 2011), 19.


5/9


5

With that orientation, Ill try to lay out poetic framework developed by the Shirpoets 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,qafiyahetc. as one and the same with the liberation of

the poets consciousness. (So we see here how the text of the qasidahis read not only a mirror or

projection of consciousness, but is, rather, portrayed as constitutive of consciousness, itself). Al-

Khal 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 turathissue, but Ill

come back later to discuss at length Shirs attack of rationality and logical reasoning.

In the lecture were looking at,6and 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-hadathais the term used in Arabic to refer to modernityas in the modernity imported

from the West. Al-Khal, however, locates the spirit of hadathasquarely in the Arabs own poetic

6Yusuf al-Khal, Mustaqbal al-Shir fi Lubnan,Muhadarat al-Nadwa, (May, 1957): 367-84. This lecture wasreproduced in Amin Sulayman Seedu, "Seerat Yusuf al-Khal," inAl-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).


6/9


7/9


7

literature must strive to represent.7The 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-waqiveiling 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-ilmis 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 ofruiya.

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,

ruiyais 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 ruiyaexist 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 hadathathat originates with the muhdithunpoets.

The hadathaof 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

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

(Spring, 1957), 96-7.


8/9


8

see, but that the poet learns and teaches how to see. The poets job is therefore not only to see

this haqiqain a spiritual moment of prophetic vision (this is the original meaning of ruiya), but

also to render it through his qasidahinto a systematic visionforreality. The qasidahhe 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 Shirwere really concerned

about challenging. Their final target is not the socialist realists orAl-Adab,but, rather, scientific

thought and the modern hierarchy of knowledge that privileges it.

8

I think in this light its clearer why the Shirproject 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 Shiris 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 whatIvejust presented highlights how theShirgroups

poetictheoryfunctioned 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

8Adunis, "Muhawala fi ta'rif al-shi'r al-hadith." Shi'r11 (Summer 1959): 79-81.


9/9


9

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 mufakkirand adibare 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.

Documents

Majallat Shir Talk-MESA 2013