Huda Fakhreddine

Poets of the twenty-first century: 'moving out' of Arabic

Because this is the last installment in this commentary series, I allowed myself to exceed the word limit to which I held myself in earlier posts. I have shed light on stations in the Arabic prose poem project. Although the imagined thread I’ve been tracing doesn’t end here, this is where I will stop tracing it for now. Poets of earlier phases were more aware of themselves as writing against the grain of Arabic poetry in general and the earlier Arabic modernists in particular. The poets of the later phases do not have to make the same effort to breaking away.

Poets of the nineties: poetry against poetry

Huda Fakhreddine

From left to right: ʿImad Abu Salih, Iman Mirsal and Usama al-Danasuri — From left to right: ʿImad Abu Salih, Iman Mirsal, and Usama al-Danasuri

“Poets of the Nineties” is a phrase used to refer to a generation of Egyptian poets who came to prominence in the mid-1990s. A group of them called themselves al-Jarad (Locust). The nexus of the group was an underground magazine by the same name, founded in 1994 by a few members, most active among them are Ahmad Taha (b. 1950) and Muhammad Mitwalli (b. 1970). These writers intentionally disengaged from the motivations of their modernist predecessors.

Bassam Hajjar: poetry, a reading of silence

Huda Fakhreddine

Magritte’s “Not to Be Reproduced” on the cover of Hajjar’s ‘You Shall Survive Me,’ 2001 (a collection of works).

The Lebanese Bassam Hajjar (1955–2009) is a poet and a translator of silence. His poetry reminds us of George Steiner’s famous statement, “when the poet’s word ceases, a great light begins.” Perhaps because he was a dedicated translator, he hesitated and listened well for the charged silence in what he wrote and what he translated.

Qassim Haddad: poetry in conversation with its others

Huda Fakhreddine

Cover of Haddad’s ‘O Coal, My Master’ (2015).

The Bahraini poet Qassim Haddad’s (b. 1948) first poetry collection The Omen was published in 1970.

Salim Barakat: poetry as linguistic transgression

Huda Fakhreddine

Salim Barakat is a Kurdish-Syrian poet and novelist, born in 1951 in Qamishli, an ethnically, religiously, and linguistically diverse city in northern Syria. He lived in exile for years before settling in Sweden where he has resided since 1999. He has thus far published over forty-six works of poetry and prose, including three autobiographies, a memoir of wartime, and several children’s books. He enjoys a peculiar celebrity and following in the Arab world, among critics, scholars, and other poets.

“Can there be an Arabic prose poem?” is a specific instantiation of the more universal question “Can there be a prose poem?” In the case of Arabic, however, the question takes on a specific character and an added urgency because it threatens to transform the long-standing definition of Arabic poetry in a way that no other poetic form has previously. This is due to the fact that the Arabic notion of the poem is highly formal. Qasida, the only Arabic word for poem, at the same time indicates a specific strict metrical and rhythmic structure. Although the modernist movement launched in the late 1940s (also referred to as the Free Verse Movement) loosened the formal strictures placed on Arabic poems, they continued to be composed within formal, metrical and structural parameters until the emergence of the prose poem in 1960.

Described as an oxymoron, a non-genre, an anti-genre, a miracle, and denigrated as a bastard form, a lack, a gap, a deformation, and even a conspiracy, the Arabic prose poem has persisted. It represents a subversive oppositional and uncompromising strand of the Arabic modernist movement, an “other tradition” as I am calling it here. In this series of commentaries, I will offer some observations on the works of early prose poets who launched this project in the early 1960 as well as contemporary poets writing today. These poets are not a homogenous trend or a movement or a school. They oppose, echo, build on, and converse with each other in a manner that reveals the prose poem to be an experimental critical space in which Arabic poetry and its possibilities are interrogated.

Huda J. Fakhreddine is an assistant professor of Arabic literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and the cotranslator of Lighthouse for the Drowning (BOA editions, 2017). Her translations of modern Arabic poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Banipal, World Literature Today, and Middle Eastern Literatures. She is currently completing a book project tentatively titled, The Edge of Poetry: The Arabic Prose Poem as Theory and Practice.