LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

introductionreadings. Shai Ginsburg does that in his interrogation of Moshe Shamir’s novelHe Walked in the Fields, which is often read as a founding expression of thestruggle of the native Hebrew youth in Palestine to ‘realise Jewish nationality’through the creation of the state of Israel. This consecrated reading of the novelwas in fact read into it by overriding the history of the events that unfold in thenarrative in favour of a defining historical moment – the creation of Israel in1948 – that postdates the events in question. In addition, the consecratedmeaning of the novel and its canonical status do override the mixed reception ithad when it was first published in 1948. Shai Ginsburg’s exploration of these‘infringements’ in the history and reception of the text shows the constructednature of the nation and how literature can be pressed to serve in thisconstruction. By ignoring these ‘infringements’ and by going back to the textitself, Shai Ginsburg reassesses the ascribed heroism of the protagonist and showsit to be bogus. The protagonist does not die in action and he does not sacrificehimself in the defence of his nation. Rather, his death seems like a ‘wish fulfilmentdesigned to overcome personal distress and [not] an outcome of ideologicalconviction or [an] altruistic act of bravery’ (p. 116). Nation building invites‘mythification’ in the literary arena, and the hegemonic reading of He Walked inthe Fields is an element in this mythification.We have pointed out above that, in the Arab milieu, poetry is an importantinstrument in nation building, and that the popularity of poetry in this projectcalls for revising the assumption in nationalism studies that favours the novel asthat literary instrument par excellence. The contribution of literature in thearticulation of national identity varies from context to context and from periodto period within the same context. In Sudan at the beginning of the twentiethcentury, poetry was the main carrier of national meanings in the literary arena.More precisely, this task was in fact the domain of poetry in its oral, not written,mode owing to the low level of literacy in the country. The oral nature of thispoetry meant that both men and women were able to contribute to it and thatthe promulgation of this poetry in public performance was instrumental inenhancing the feeling of ‘unisonality’ between members of the putative nation.During this period, poetry was used for educational purposes, for spreading thenotions of material progress and social development, for helping to imagineSudan in its colonial borders as a free and independent nation, for cleansing theterm ‘Sudanese’ as a national appellation from some of its most negativeconnotations, for making the concept of the Sudanese nation the subject ofpride and heroism, for spreading anti-colonial feeling and, finally, for gettingaround the censorship imposed by the colonial authority. In addition, being themost venerable of all verbal art forms in Arabic, poetry was instrumental incasting an identity for Sudan that was Arab, although the non-Arab among theSudanese population later challenged this Arab hegemony. The musicality and— 11 —www.taq.ir