LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

yasir suleimanpoints of contact and interaction. This anti-generalising attitude must also beextended to the work of individual writers. Recognising variation, dissonance orcontradiction in a writer’s nationalist oeuvre is often closer to the truth thanestablishing a counterfeit or bland uniformity. The Egyptian poet AhmadShawqi (1868–1932), the Iraqi poet MaÆruf al-Rusafi (1877–1947) and theJordanian poet Mustafa Wahbi al-Tal (1897–1949) spoke in myriad voices on ahost of nationalist issues. 10 Finally, studies of the national in the literary canserve both enterprises – the national and the literary – by concentrating on‘content’ and ‘form’, on what is of immediate interest to the nationalist thinkerand that which is highly valued by the literary critic respectively. The followingstudy of the poetics of the national in the literary in Nazik al-Mala’ika’s poetryaims to follow this approach. 11 It will pay attention to ‘content’ and to ‘form’,that is, issues of style. 12 It will also avoid the generalising pitfalls of nationalistliterary historiographies.Western studies of Arabic poetry pay little attention to its rich nationalcontent, with the exception of Palestinian poetry in which the national isregarded as an inescapable part of the literary. 13 By contrast, the ‘national in thepoetic’ is the subject of great interest in the Arab literary polysystem. 14 It is notmy intention to deal with the causes of this difference in orientation here.Suffice it to say that ignoring the ‘national in the poetic’ in studying Arabicliterature provides a truncated view of this component of Arab culture toWestern audiences and that, in an age of inter-disciplinarity in research, itdeprives the students of nationalism in the West of a rich source of informationabout the construction of national consciousness in the Arabic-speaking world,the channels of communication that are used to foster this consciousness andabout nation building generally.Surveying Arabic works about the ‘national in the poetic’ in Arabicliterature provides interesting insights into the ‘manipulation’ of literary fame.First of all, one notices how much these works are subject to the generalisingtendency mentioned earlier. In one respect, these works are canon-driven inthat they reproduce the dominant classificatory schemas as to who is counted asa ‘nationalist’ poet and who is not. Thus, instead of looking for expressions ofnationalism in the poetry of a particular poet, and treating these accordingly –particularly when they are of a substantial kind – these works tend to start withpreconceived notions of who belongs to the category of ‘nationalist’ poets anduse these as a blueprint for inclusion and exclusion. I believe this is responsiblefor ignoring the nationalist component of Nazik’s poetry in the historiographyof the ‘national in the poetic’ in the Arabic polysystem. 15 For most critics andhistorians of literature, Nazik has not been associated with the nationalist trendin Arab culture, in spite of the fact that (1) her last three collections inparticular, as I shall show below, are devoted to nationalist themes of an— 212 —www.taq.ir