LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

yasir suleimanhave discussed examples of this above. Repetition delivers a number offunctions in nationalist poetics. It is an aid to memory, particularly in oralperformance which, unlike reading, is a collective and participatory activitythat promotes inter-subjective interaction and, therefore, helps bridge thedistance in socio-psychological terms between members of the nation. As a formof reiteration, repetition offers the nationalist message cyclically to ensure thatit has reached its target audience. And when cleverly executed, repetition canwork subliminally at a variety of levels to infuse urgency and vigour into thenationalist message. Gemination and reduplication, which we have identifiedabove as examples of sub-word repetition, work in this way, as do reiterativesyntactic frames and equative constructions of the kind we have highlighted inour discussion of Nazik’s poem Tahiyya li-l-jumhuriyya al-Æiraqiyya above (‘ASalute to the Iraqi Republic’). It is no coincidence, however, that most of theexamples of gemination and reduplication in Nazik’s nationalist poetry areverbs. For Nazik, verbs are action-full, which explains her reference to them inthe nationalist paradigm as the ‘most honourable part of the [Arabic] language’(1981: 329). Verbs, for Nazik, are the linguistic engines of nationalist mobilisation.Their dynamic force contrasts with the static inertia of the nominals. It istherefore through the ‘verb’ that the nationalist ‘subject’, both as grammaticalentity and human actor, exercises agency and moves to action; hence, therespect which Nazik accords to the verb.In matching ends to means, the poetics of nationalist literature does notclaim the means as its sole preserve. These means exist in other literary genresand are used for other purposes. As far as the ends are concerned, the poetics ofnationalist literature is neutral as to the veracity of the claims this literaturemakes or to the constructions which nationalist historiography places on them.On both fronts, literature may be exploited to package the past or to createmyths, to make claims or to rebut counter-claims. This is part and parcel of thesociology of literature in the nationalist domain. At its worst, nationalist literaturecan descend into crass propaganda, but even this can provide interestingmaterial for the student of nationalism. 39 At its best, nationalist literature canelevate the national to the status of the humanist and universal, but for it to doso it would need to move away from open mobilisation. This is a matter ofcontents and contexts, and of balancing the former against the latter. As a massmovement for nation or state building in the here and now, nationalism cannotalways afford that kind of subtlety in literature which so excessively underminesits populism and ability to mobilise.Dealing with nationalist literature is therefore a precarious scholarly business.As an exercise in hyphenation, it risks alienating the literary critic and thestudent of nationalism at one and the same time. The former may be tempted todiscount the national in the literary as a form of propaganda that downgrades— 228 —www.taq.ir