LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

the nation speaksinter-textuality to relate the past to the present. In doing this, the poet contraststhe pitiful state of the Arabs in the present with the glorious achievements oftheir forebears in the past. Inter-textuality here performs two contradictoryrhetorical functions. On the one hand, it suggests the existence of rupturebetween the past and the present, between the glories of the golden age and thetraumas of the age of struggle. On the other hand, inter-textuality suggests thepossibility of repair, the potential for the continuity of the past into the future,but it makes that conditional on overcoming the traumas of the present bycleansing the age of struggle from its debilitating failures.To bond the past with the future via the present Nazik creates inter-textuallinks to the canonical texts of the past in poetry and in the Qur’an. These linksare immediately recognised by the reader, and their contents and contexts aspre-texts are read into her compositions in a way that adds meaning, impact andmotivational force to them. The disjunction between these inter-textual links,the poetry and the Qur’an, however, indicates the change in nationalist outlookNazik underwent in her career. Whereas the former links dominate her earlypoetry, which followed the secular nationalist schema, the links to the Qur’anindicate a new phase in her nationalist thinking, in which the national and thespiritual are interwoven together. This change of outlook is further marked in anew lexicon in which religious terminology plays an important part in tying thenational to the spiritual. The combination of the Qur’an-centred inter-textuallinks and religious terminology, when it works well, has the effect of turningNazik’s later poems into devotional ‘hymns’ that work through the power ofsuggestion and spiritual atmosphere to promote their national aims.Inter-textuality serves another aim of nationalist literature: mobilisation.Nazik promotes this by framing her poetic compositions against elements fromthe popular culture at the time of writing. The reference to the popular tune‘the hour of revolutionary work has struck’ in her early nationalist poetry is anexample of this, as is the application of a lexicon of popular struggle, basedaround the Palestinian guerrilla movement, in her later poetry. Mobilisation forthe nationalist poet is of the ‘here and now’, hence Nazik’s utilisation of theculture of the day as a conduit for spreading her nationalist message. In most ofher nationalist poetry, particularly her early compositions, Nazik is moreinterested in resonance than in the longevity and the reception of her poetry byfuture generations, not that this reception is totally immaterial to her. In fact,one of the intended effects of moving the national in the direction of thespiritual in Nazik’s later poetry must have been to create a reception horizonthat loosens the ties of her poetry to the exigencies of the ‘here and now’ andbestows on them greater longevity. Whether Nazik has succeeded in doing thisor not is another matter.Mobilisation as an end of Nazik’s nationalist poetry is tied to repetition. We— 227 —www.taq.ir