LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

nadia yaqubthanks to the memory and voice of the poet. Thus the heroes of the Roland, like thoseof the Iliad and the Odyssey, speak in the same metrical formulas as the poet; theyemploy the same epithets, the same lists, and they even share the same foreknowledgeof events. The fact that these heroes live only by the memory and thevoice of the poet ensures, in other words, a strong cognitive identification betweenthem, and this is evident in the motivation imputed by the poet to the heroesthemselves. For if it is the antique glory of the hero that animates the voice of thepoet, inversely, it is the commemorative posterity of the singer that inspires the epicblows of the hero. (1993: 380)Vance describes not merely the expression of the poet’s identity through thesong, but the possession of his identity by the actions of the heroes about whomhe sings (1993: 380). The operative factor for Vance is commemoration, whichhe describes as:any gesture, ritualised or not, whose end is to recover, in the name of a collectivity,some being or event either anterior in time or outside of time in order to fecundate,animate or make meaningful a moment in the present. Commemoration is theconquest of whatever in society or in the self is perceived as habitual, factual, static,mechanical, corporeal, inert, worldly, vacant, and so forth. (1993: 374–5)I would like to argue that, like the Chansons de Roland of France in theMiddle Ages, the Palestinian poetry is commemorative of an anterior timeinvested with a ‘Truth’ that is absent from the present (Vance 1993: 375).Vance quotes Vernant on this point:The activity of the poet is oriented almost exclusively toward the past. Not hisindividual past, nor a past generalized as if it were an empty framework independentof the events that have occurred there, but ‘ancient times’ with its own contents andqualities: a heroic age, or still further, a primordial age, the origin of time. (1993:377) 11The poetry not only reflects or relates the events, characters and characteristicsof ‘ancient times’, but has a transforming, revitalising effect on thepresent, the moment of performance, which is characterised by deficiency andlack (1993: 382).How is this transformation realised in the Palestinian context? We havealready seen how the poetic performance is characterised by an overarchingheroic construct. We note that the heroic construct created in the performanceis defined as explicitly Arab and bedouin, harking back to an age in whichwarfare was conducted with horses, swords and lances, when battles occurred onthe more human level of single combat, when heroism was clearly defined andhence attainable. An idealised ‘ancient time’, whether it be the semi-historicaltimes of the pre-Islamic hero-poet ÆAntara, that of the Bani Hilal of the Arabconquests in Africa, or a more generic, mythical past is clearly evoked throughthe performance.— 24 —www.taq.ir