LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

yasir suleimanknow of who explicitly makes the connection between the verb as a grammaticalcategory, its lexical meaning and the role of poetry in promotingmobilisation in the nationalist project. 30In view of the importance of repetition for Nazik as a literary critic and poet,it would be useful to dwell a little further on this phenomenon in her poetry byhighlighting three other types. The first consists of placing a repeated item inpatterned slots within the same poetic frame. This creates balance and rhythm,which are important as aids to memory retention and recall in nationalistliterature owing to its interest in mobilisation and its reliance on oral publicperformance. We have observed this earlier in the use of jumhuriyyatuna (ourrepublic) in Nazik’s poem Tahiyya li-l-jumhuriyya al-Æiraqiyya (‘A Salute to theIraqi Republic’) in such frames as jumhuriyyatuna, farhatuna (Our Republic, Ourjoy), jumhuriyyatuna, tiflatuna (Our Republic, Our child) and jumhuriyyatuna,wardatuna (Our Republic, Our flower/rose). This item is repeated six times inthe poem. The second type is used for closure. It typically consists of repeating anitem at the end of a poem to add emphasis to closure. To use a commonexpression, the poet applies this style of repetition to ‘go out with bang ratherthan a whimper’. An example of this occurs in Thalath ughniyat Æarabiyyaa, towhich we have referred earlier. The last two stanzas of this poem end with theword Æarabiyy (Arab). However, there is a subtle difference between these twotokens in that the former functions as an agent and the latter as a patient ingrammatical terms. The poet uses this grammatical difference to signal thedistinction between the active and the passive in the nationalist narrative,between the ‘doer of the action’ and its ‘receiver’. The third type involves theuse of an item, typically a function word (for example, a preposition) or amorpheme, to draw attention to a set of adjacent items (preceding or following),thus highlighting their meaning through semantic layering. An example of thisis the repetition of the preposition Æan (‘for’) in the poem Hudud al-raja’ (‘TheLimits of Hope’, ibid.: 513–17), whose subject is Arab unity: nahnu Æabarna kullaufqin maÆa: nabhathu Æanha, Æan shadhaha al-jamil, Æan lawniha, Æan ruhiha, Æansada … (‘We roamed the distant horizon together looking for it, for its sweetscent, for its colour, for its soul, for its echo …’, ibid.: 516). Nazik considers thisto be one of the most subtle types of repetition and, in her critical study Qadayaal-shiÆr al-muÆasir (1981: 273), she highlights the following example from a poemby the well-known Tunisian Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi (1909–34) as a particularlysuccessful one: Æadhbatun anti ka-l-tufulati, ka-l-ahlami, ka-l-lahni, ka-l-sabahi aljadidi… (‘You are sweet like childhood, like dreams, like musical tunes, like thenew morning’).In her last two collections, li-l-Sala wa-l-thawra (‘For Prayer and the Revolution’,1978) and Yughayyiru al-wanahu al-bahru (‘The Sea Changes its Colours’,1977), particularly the former, Nazik moves in a new direction: the mixing of— 220 —www.taq.ir