LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

j. kristen urbanBut there is an inversion in the final chapter of this story. Section 7 stands asan Epitaph, reflecting a present beyond time. The poet, ‘venerated as the protectorand guarantor of honour of the tribe and a potent weapon against its enemies’ (Gibb:29), is left – finally, it would seem – with nothing to defend. In its entirety, thissection reads:In rooms you will build, the deadalready sleep. Over bridges you shall construct,the dead are already passing. There are thosedead who light up the nightof butterflies, the deadwho come at dawn to drink your tea, tranquilas on the day they were mowed downby your guns.You who are guestsin this place, leave a few chairsfor your hosts to read you the conditions for peacein a treaty with … the dead.A paradox exists in this time beyond being, for it is the dead who are the onlybeings retaining an ontological integrity – the only beings to re-emerge from thecelestial sphere, the synchronic dimension. The survivors in the diachronicdimension, lost spiritually (as in Section 2), and ‘in the shadow’s reign’,condemned to life without meaning across ‘sterile winter nights [highlighted by]a less bright sun, less full moon’ (Section 3), theirs is an existence withoutmeaning.So in what respect is the poet here, the ‘protector and guarantor of honour ofthe tribe’? This performance turns on a second inversion – a fulcrum at the endof line 8 splits the final section abruptly. What follows, the final four lines, laysout what can be understood as a bleak agenda:You who are guestsin this place, leave a few chairsfor your hosts to read you their conditions for peacein a treaty with … the dead.In the final scene of this historic drama, the guests are the acting hosts; butthese new hosts were never guests, coming as horse-masters to command and tosubdue. Caught in their Lethean slumber – a slumber from which they will neverawaken – these acting hosts will have no ‘memory’, leave no trace of meaningattached to their existence. It is here, then, that the poet offers resurrection,acts as guarantor of the honour of the tribe, for by ritualising the drama in hisperformance, he has posited within the sacred space meaning for his tribe: ‘Ourdays are buried in ashes of legend,’ he says in Section 4. Theirs has been anexistence that will continue to elicit meaning throughout the millennia ahead.— 90 —www.taq.ir