LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the nation speaksinteresting kind, and (2) she participated in well-publicised debates about Arabnationalism on the pages of the hugely influential monthly al-Adab (al-Mala’ika1960a, 1960b). 16 Second, women poets tend to be under-represented in workson the ‘national in the poetic’ in Arabic literature. The male gendering ofnationalist poetry has its culturally bound reasons, but these do not justifyexcluding women poets. I believe that the dominance of ‘masculinity’ as a tropeof nationalist poetry is responsible for ignoring Nazik’s contribution to thisliterary genre.At the centre of Nazik’s nationalist poetry stands her abiding commitment topan-Arab nationalism as an intuitively conceived and self-evident ideology.Hovering between a perennialism that asserts the antiquity of the Arab nationand a primordiality that assumes its naturalness, 17 Nazik espouses a view of thisideology that conceives of it, to borrow a term from Roland Barthes (1977: 47),as the ‘Voice of Nature’. Although Nazik would accept Ernest Gellner’s (1983:6) formulation that, in today’s world, ‘a man must have a nationality as he musthave a nose and two ears’, she would nevertheless reject his modernist views onthe socio-historical construction of nations, particularly as this applies tonations that are rooted in antiquity, of which the Arab nation is cited as anexample. 18 Nazik set out her views on this issue in her two articles in al-Adab(al-Mala’ika 1960a, 1960b), and she used these views to claim that poetry, beingintuitive and subliminal, is most perfectly suited to comprehending the innernature of the nation and its deepest liminal secrets. Being natural and amenableto comprehension by the most intuitive of means, the nation, Nazik argues, is notin need of deliberate definition. In the 1980 Baghdad conference mentionedabove, SaÆdun Hamadi, one of the nationalist thinkers of the BaÆth party,promoted a similar view of literature in the nationalist enterprise. He believedthat literature is as valid in understanding the nation as the rationalist approachwhich culls its definition out of the careful sifting of historical and social facts.Literature, he says, comprehends through inspiration (ilham). Nazik would agree.The commitment to Arab nationalism characterises the work of two otherIraqi women poets whose poetry had an influence over Nazik in the nationalistliterary domain, as we shall see later. The first is ÆAtika al-Khazraji 19 whosenationalist poetry is full of compositions in support of (1) Arab unity as apolitical ideal that is animated by the ties of culture, history and religionbetween the Arabic-speaking people, (2) the Algerian struggle against Frenchcolonialism in pursuit of independence, and (3) the liberation of Palestine asthe most pressing issue on the Arab political agenda. In all three domains, thepoet believes that Arab political regeneration is dependent on the interweavingof the national and the religious. This double trajectory is particularly apt forthe Algerian context because of the fusion of Arabism with Islam in NorthAfrican expressions of national identity. It is also suitable for the Palestinian— 213 —www.taq.ir