LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

And (ibid.: 61):yasir suleimanThe echo of your poetry will wake the slain.It will challenge [the enemy’s] rocketsAnd it will challenge their guillotines.The echo of your poetry will make the streams flow.In this poem, Nazik deploys a religion-soaked lexicon, including such termsas: shahid (martyr, ibid.: 62), dima’ al-Æaqida (the blood of faith, ibid.), tasabihana(our hymns, ibid.: 63), ma’adhin (minarets, ibid.: 64), Æatabat (holy shrines,ibid.) with its strong Iraqi ShiÆa associations, qara’in (texts of the Qur’an, ibid.)and takbira (glorification of God using the formula Allahu akbar, ibid.: 65). Butshe also uses expressions with a clear Arab nationalist flavour of the old kind:qabraki al-Æarabiyy al-hazin (your sad Arab grave, ibid.: 65) and Æarabiyyata aljada’il(your Arab tresses, ibid.: 67). In the same poem, Nazik uses a militarylexicon culled from terms that were fashionable in the armed struggle forPalestine in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including: lughm (explosive mine,ibid.: 65), qanabil (bombs, ibid.), sarukh (rocket, ibid.), midfaÆ (artillery gun,ibid.: 66), lahab (fire, ibid.), khanjar (dagger, ibid.) and sikkin (knife, ibid.: 65).Underpinning this are her references to filastin (Palestine, ibid: 59 and 60), alquds(Jerusalem, ibid.: 60 and 65), jalil (Galilee, ibid.: 65) and Æasifa (the militarywing of Fatah in pre-Oslo days).To strengthen the association of the national with the spiritual Nazik resortsto inter-textuality, using the Qur’an as her anaphoric reference. She does this intwo ways. First, she encodes fragments from the Qur’an in her poetry to extendits meaning and to lock the national into the spiritual and vice versa. There aremany examples of this kind in her poetry, but the following two, which she usesto talk about God’s enemies, will suffice: 341. Nazik (ibid.: 164): wa-yamkuruna makrahum wa-yamkuru al-rahman(They make their plans, and God makes His)Qur’an (30:8): wa-yamkuruna wa-yamkura Allahu wa-Allahu khayru al-makirin(They plan and God plans, and God is the best planner)2. Nazik (ibid.): wa-yazahaqu al-batilu wa-l-buhtan(Deception and slander have come to nothing)Qur’an (81:17) wa-qul ja’a al-haqqu wa-zahaqa al-batilu inna al-batila kana zahuqa(And say: Truth has come and falsehood has disappeared, falsehood is bound to perish)The second type of inter-textuality consists of using rhyming schemes whichevoke similar assonance schemes in the Qur’an. One such example occurs inNazik’s poem Aqwa min al-qabr (‘Stronger than the grave’) which, as we haveseen above, fuses the spiritual and the personal with the national via the toposof Palestine. This example of inter-textuality ‘bonds’ all these interests with theQur’an to generate a holistic unit of signification which ‘spiritualises thenational’ while ‘nationalising the spiritual’. Nazik writes (ibid.: 59):— 224 —www.taq.ir