LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

j. kristen urbanattack on front-line Arab states (which brought about the acquisition andoccupation of Gaza, the West Bank and the Golan Heights); and the doublestandard evidenced in the West’s position towards Iraq and Israel in the 1990s.Repetition, utilised frequently in ‘Indian Speech’ as it is in the oral traditiongenerally, serves both for emphasis and to move the poem forward. 9 These linesare from Section 2:1 Take what you need of night2 but leave us a couple of stars to bury3 our celestial dead.4 Take what you want of the sea5 but leave us a few waves to catch some fish.6 Take all the gold of earth and sun7 but leave us the land of our names.8 Then go back, stranger, to resume your search9 for India once more.The repetition in the first seven lines establishes the motion with amomentum that is continued through line 7; but the motion stops with line 8 (afulcrum is positioned here), and reverses itself in the resolution of this section.Repetition also takes a more elaborate form, as in Section 3:You may sleep in the shade of our willowsand like a dove begin to fly:this is what our forbearers did after allwhen they flew away in peace, when theyreturned in peace. You will lack the memoryof leaving the Mediterranean, eternity’s solitudein a forest, not on the edge of a cliff;the wisdom of defeat, losing at war, a rock unbendingto the rush of time’s fast river – an hour of reveriefor a necessary sky of dust to ripen inside:an hour of hesitationbetween one path and another,this is what you lack.Here we find the repetition and interplay of both images and ideas in acontrapuntal form that not only moves forward but in its enhanced complexitydevelops the intensity of the poem emotionally. The momentum and energybuild as the passage continues with, ‘You will lack the memory’ and a series ofphrases are appended, one against the next, and so on, until the motion stopsabruptly (a fulcrum) and a prophetic voice intones:an hour of hesitationbetween one path and another,this is what you lack.— 86 —www.taq.ir