LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the nation speaksIslamist nationalist orientation, ‘Peace upon the one who listens, heeds, andsucceeds in serving his country, and who strives; for his effort will be observedand his recompense will be of the highest’ (ibid.).Ali al-Ghayati’s collection was special not because he was an accomplishedauthor, but because he culled it from poetry that was published in the Egyptianpress by obscure or aspiring poets who responded to the national crises of theirtime, hence Muhammad Farid’s reference to the ‘awakening’ of his own people.This awareness of the role of literature, particularly poetry, in resisting occupationand in nation building is symptomatic of the discourse of nationalism tothis day. Spontaneous expressions of this kind can be found in compositions inthe pages of the Arabic daily newspapers, especially at times of crisis such as, inrecent years, the war against Iraq or, even, the death of President Arafat. In2004, I collected over thirty such compositions, over a period of two months,from one paper only, the London-based Al-Quds Al-Arabi. This numberindicates the scale of this phenomenon.The importance of literature in nation building relates to its ability tofunction as a channel of communication through which a national consciousness,a national sentiment, a shared cultural inheritance and a shared destinycan be fashioned in a shared idiom. In nation building, a national literature is asimportant in articulating ‘nationhood’ as the national broadcasting media, thenational orchestra, the national museum or the national gallery. In the theoriesof nationalism, literature shares this communicative function with othersemiologies of signification which, typically, include rituals (for example, parades,marches, processions, funerals and inauguration ceremonials) and objects ofsymbolic representation (for example, flags, anthems, monuments, postage stampsand coins). In fact, literature has a greater semiotic reach because it can be usedto talk about these rituals and objects of representation, but not vice versa. Andfor nations in the diaspora, literature is a particularly potent force because of itsability to link the members of a refugee nation across state borders and toencode their ‘exilic’ experience in different linguistic idioms.In the West, the novel is considered as the primary vehicle for delivering thisnationalist function. 3 In the Arab context, this function is allocated to poetrywhich has a long and highly respected position in Arab culture and which, byvirtue of its compact expression, sonorous cadences and implicit orality is bettersuited than the novel to deliver an immediate and memorable impact onaudiences, typically through shared public performances. Arab nationalists havebeen quick to exploit these qualities of poetry, particularly its diachronic depth,by assimilating it into their constructed nationalist historiographies. To takeone example, in April 1980 a conference was held in Baghdad to discuss the roleof literature in forming and sustaining the Arab national consciousness (Dawral-adab fi al-waÆy al-qawmi al-ÆArabi, 1980). In a mode typical of Arab— 209 —www.taq.ir