LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the nation speaksembodied in great literary achievements rather than in feats of political unity.To underpin this message, Nazik connects the present to the past by borrowingimmediately recognisable expressions from some of the best-known odes of pre-Islamic Arabia, namely the muÆallaqas of Imru’ al-Qays (siqt al-liwa), Tarafa Ibnal-ÆAbd (burqat thahmad), Zuhayr Ibn Ibi Sulma (dimna) and Labid Ibn RabiÆa(aramiha), in which the erased encampment is an important poetic motif. Thisnetworking of the present with the past for inspirational purposes deliversanother objective: it serves to signal to the readers that Nazik’s belief in Arabnationalism is rooted in a secularist paradigm. Her point of reference is pre-, notpost-, Islamic Arabia.On a formal level, inter-textuality is a kind of repetition, a topic in whichNazik was interested as a literary and cultural critic, as is clear from her longstudy on the subject in her book Qadaya al-shiÆr al-muÆasir (‘Issues in ModernPoetry’, 1981b: 263–91). In this study, Nazik highlights the role of repetition inachieving what she calls al-handasa al-lafziyya al-daqiqa in poetry (‘preciselinguistic engineering’, ibid.: 278). In addition to this artistic/structural function,repetition is an important tool in nationalist poetry as an aid to memory. Thepoet resorts to it for message and impact reiteration, which are essentialelements in national mobilisation and in contexts of oral public performance.To take one example, in her poem Thalath ughniyat Æarabiyya (‘Three ArabSongs’, 1979: 492–8), the poet exploits repetition at two levels. On the formalinter-textual level, Nazik frames her poem in relation to Nasser’s famous call inthe 1960s – which the Egyptian broadcasting media turned into a well-knownsong and used as the theme tune in some of its daily programmes – ‘the hour ofrevolutionary work has struck’ (Ædaqqat saÆat al-Æamal al-thawri). 28 There is noway that readers at the time could have read Nazik’s poem without being drawninto the popular nationalist culture of the day, or at least were reminded of it.Nazik’s exploitation of inter-textuality in this case is purposeful and mobilisation-oriented.29On another level, Nazik uses sub-word structures, involving gemination andreduplication, to create another layer of communication to boost the aboveeffects. In particular, she uses action verbs exhibiting gemination and reduplication,to convey vigour and urgency, as in daqqat (struck), dajjat (yelled),dawwat (reverberated), talawwat (zigzagged), hazzat (shook), jaljalat (rang out)and ghalghalat (penetrated). In Arabic, the term for ‘verb’ is fiÆl, which lexicallymeans ‘action’. Nazik is aware of this connection between the name of thisgrammatical category and its lexical meaning, and she exploits this deliberatelyfor mobilization purposes in the nationalist enterprise. I believe this explainsher statement in Qadaya al-shiÆr al-muÆasir that ‘the verb is the most honourablepart of the [Arabic] language’ (al-fiÆl ashraf juz’ fi al-lugha, 1981: 329). Nazik isnot alone in holding to this view of the Arabic verb, but she is the only poet I— 219 —www.taq.ir