LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

yasir suleimanthan Jamila’s sword. Under this interpretation, the title yields another interestinglayer of meaning. Instead of expressing togetherness and concomitance(maÆiyya), the wa- (and) that conjoins nahnu and Jamila in the title in factexpresses disjunction and opposition. As such the dictionary meaning of ‘wa-’ as‘and’ is at odds with its rhetorical force as ‘versus’. A more appropriatetranslation of the title therefore is not ‘Jamila and Us’, as I have suggestedabove, but ‘Jamila versus Us’. Better still, ‘Us versus Jamila’ to underlinethrough the grammatical fronting of ‘Us’ the Arab readers’ complicit agency inher suffering. Either way, Nazik is part of this ‘Us’ and, therefore, is on the otherside of ‘versus’ from Jamila.Nazik believes that by failing to help Jamila the Arabs were guilty ofcomplicity in her suffering and oppression. In expressing this and other themes,Nazik resorts to inter-textuality to underpin what she says. Inter-textuality is aneffective tool for this purpose: it acts as a ‘bonding agent’ by helping to satellitea text in the orbit of those canonical texts which it unambiguously recalls, thusgiving the text in question historical depth and a validating authenticity. Thismay be done, mutatis mutandis, by the direct quotation of an expression or aword, by paraphrasing an idea or exploiting an image or, in poetry, by exploitingrhyme schemes. In the domain of nationalist literature, inter-textuality isperfectly suited to relating the past to the present, to connecting the age ofstruggle to the golden age or to the peaks of the literary canon for, as has beensaid above, validating, reinforcing and inspirational purposes. In Nahnu waJamila, Nazik links the Arabs’ failure in the age of struggle to a poetic aphorismfrom the literary canon. Thus, when she says that the ‘wound inflicted by arelative is the deepest and hardest to bear’ (wa-jurhu al-qarabati aÆmaqu min kullijurhin wa-aqsa, 1979: 508) she deliberately invokes al-Mutannabi’s (AD 915–65)famous line of poetry, immediately recognised by most educated Arabs, inwhich he says ‘the injustice committed by a relative is more painful than thewounds inflicted by a sword made of Indian steel’ (wa-Zulmu dhawi al-qurbaashaddu maDaDatan, Æala al-fata min waqÆ al-husami al-muhannadi). Nazik usesinter-texuality to support her case in Nahnu wa Jamila by ranging the weight oftradition and the force of the literary canon against her rivals.Nazik exploits inter-textuality to full nationalist effect in her poem Ughniyali-l-atlal al-Æarabiyya (‘A Song for the Erased Arab Encampments’, ibid.: 465–9)which she wrote in 1963 after the dissolution of the Union between Egypt andSyria at the hands of the BaÆthists a year earlier. This was a cataclysmic event forthe Arabs. It shook their confidence in Arab unity as a political objective, asNazik acknowledges. The ‘erased encampments’ that Nazik has in mind,therefore, are the political ruins of the failed Union. However, Nazik’s messageis an optimistic one. She tells her readers that unity would be well within theirgrasp if they re-enacted the glories of the past which, in this particular case, are— 218 —www.taq.ir