LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the nation speaksagreements between Israel and the surrounding Arab countries in 1949 becausethese agreements consecrated the status quo and deprived the Palestinians oftheir rights. In fact, Umm Nizar reserves her most biting poetry to deliver bitterattacks against the Security Council, which she calls Majlis al-Ifk (‘The Councilof Falsehood’), and the United Nations, which she calls ÆUsbat al-Dhull (‘TheLeague/Gang of Disgraceful Humiliation’). This list of poems shows the degreeto which Umm Nizar was involved in the events of the day.Two facts are interesting about Unshudat al-majd. First, the title. The termunshuda conveys the meaning of ‘song’, ‘hymn’ and ‘anthem’ in one; the termthus conflates the lyrical, the sacred and the national respectively as importantaspects of mobilisation and activism in the political struggle of the nation. Theterm al-majd (glory) has a Janus-like function. On the one side, al-majd looksback to the ‘golden age’ of the Arab nation and seeks to locate it, through thepoems in the collection, in two historical epochs: the rise and expansion ofIslam and the victories over Franks in the Crusades. On the other side, al-majdlooks forward to the destiny of the nation, to what awaits it if it heeds themessage of the poet and acts in a way that is true to its self, as this self wasmanifested through the glories of the ‘golden age’. As an operative term, al-majdties the future to the past via the present and through the inspirational functionof literature as a nationalist means of expression.Second, it is most likely that Nazik chose this title, as she was responsible forpreparing the collection for publication which, as has been pointed out above,was published posthumously. If so, Nazik can claim a share of authorship overUnshudat al-majd. This claim to authorship extends to the way Nazik arrangedthe poems in her mother’s collection. It is therefore a matter of great interestthat Nazik placed the poems on Palestine at the beginning of the collection. Byfront-loading these poems and giving them textual visibility in the collection,Nazik reflects the symbolic weight her mother accorded the Palestine cause inthe nationalist enterprise and in her poetry. 23 It is therefore no accident thatNazik followed in her mother’s footsteps in her last two collections, as I shallexplain below.In 1968, Nazik published her fifth collection, Shajarat al-qamar (‘The MoonTree’), in which she incorporated poems she had written over a decade earlier. 24Many of the poems in this collection deal with Arab nationalist issues, thetrigger for which seems to have been the ‘revolution’ of 14 July 1958, which putan end to the British-backed Iraqi monarchy and replaced it by a republicansystem of government. 25 Nazik celebrated the institution of this new form ofgovernment in her poem Tahiyya li-l-jumhuriyya al-Æiraqiyya (‘A Salute to theIraqi Republic’, 1968: 445–50), in which she welcomed ‘the republic’ as an‘orphan welcomes a fatherly embrace’ or a ‘thirsty man welcomes a drink of water’(1979: 445). In a series of syntactic equative frames, the poet concatenates the— 215 —www.taq.ir