Chapter 5 - Honoring Commitments

Summary

This chapter examines the courses modernist Arabic poetry took in Iraq following Sayyāb’s premature death in 1964. ʿAbd al-Wahhāb al-Bayātī (d. 1999) was a well-known poetic rival of Sayyāb who remained affiliated with the Communist Party even after the difficulties Communists grappled with during the 1950s. As the decade went on, fallout from the Iranian coup was compounded by nearly-simultaneous revelations about the realities of Joseph Stalin’s authoritarian rule following his death in 1953. I focus on the existential crisis Bayātī faced when the hopeful possibilities of 1950s decolonization efforts became more and more limited in the face of rising totalitarianism in the Middle East. Despite the changing political situation in the region manifested in, for instance, the rise of the Iraqi Baath and the increasing authoritarianism of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s regime in Egypt, modernists continued to use the same techniques in the 1960s that their predecessors had employed two decades earlier. Specifically, like Nīmā before him, Bayātī uses another premodern Arabic poetic device – taḍmīn or “poetic quoting”– to sublate premodern traditions into modernist poetry.