LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the nation speaksMin matahati landana, haythu al-duja wa-l-dukhanJathimani Æala sadriha jathimanWa-Æala qabriha yanhani kawkabanWa-tariffu Æala huznihi wardatan(From the labyrinths of London,where the darkness and the smokecrouch nightmarishly over her gravewith two stars bendingand two fluttering roses)The above rhyming scheme immediately recalls the assonance scheme in thebulk of Chapter 55 in the Qur’an (Surat al-rahman) where the verse fa-bi-ayyiÆala’i rabbukuma tukadhdhiban (‘Which one of the favours of your Lord will youtwain deny?’) is repeated thirty times. Another example is the use of therhyming scheme –ah in al-Malika wa-l-bustan 35 (ibid.: 80–1), which recalls thesame assonance scheme in Chapters 79, 80 and 90 in the Qur’an. These Qur’anlinkedexamples of inter-texuality inject a religious dimension into thenational. The fact that most of these inter-textual links are located in the earlychapters of the Qur’an, which are characterised by short and sonorous verses,enhances the vigour and impact of Nazik’s compositions. While reading thesecompositions, the reader cannot but hear echoes of the Qur’an in his head,which provide another layer of meaning and musical cadences of a strongspiritual nature.This mixing of the spiritual with the national is found in Nazik’s othercollection, Yughayyiru al-wanahu al-bahru (‘The Sea Changes its Colours’, 1977). 36I will deal with two poems from this collection only to show how this is done.The first is Maraya al-shams (‘Mirrors of the Sun’, ibid.: 95–107), which the poetwrote after her husband, the Iraqi academic ÆAbd al-Hadi Mahbuba, presentedher with a map of Palestine. At the beginning of the poem, Nazik tells herreaders that she had dedicated her life to the mission of liberating Palestine. Thisact of dedication is signalled through the use of the verb Ænadhartu’ (ibid.: 95),which has strong spiritual and devotional meanings, in addition to implyingthat the poet had entered into a covenant with her Lord. The poem thenproceeds by offering a four-stop tour of the map of Palestine which she organisesaround the themes of ‘love’, ‘sadness’, ‘resistance’ and ‘faith’. The poet ends thepoem by telling her readers that, although love and sadness are importantingredients for resistance as the tool for liberating Palestine, these threeelements are bound to fail if they are not bonded together with faith as thesingle most important factor of liberation. The poem is interspersed with intertextualreferences which will not detain us here, 37 except to say that thereference to the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan brings the two most accomplishedmodern female poets together in the nationalist project through the topos ofPalestine.— 225 —www.taq.ir