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Style as Politics in the Poems and Novels of Rashīd al-Ḍaʿīf

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 April 2009

Mona Takieddine Amyuni
Mona Takieddine Amyuni
Affiliation:
Assistant Professor at American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon.
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Extract

The Lebanese war revealed man to me. It revealed to me that there was no end to evil. Man's capacity to suffer and cause suffering is endless too. War is the cloth which weaves relationships amongst men and nations. When I write, “From your absence comes the evening,” I express the anguish of losing my beloved. This anguish is similar to that caused by war. Fear and anguish provoked by war have also at their root jealousy, desire, ambition, money, success. What is specific about war is that it strips down man and shows him in his absolute nakedness.

When Rashīd al-Daʿīf (henceforth, plain text) expressed himself in this fashion in an interview in 1989, several of his novels and poems had already appeared in Beirut. His original voice had started to spread in the intellectual circles of Lebanon and abroad. Al-Daʿif's originality lies precisely in this stripping of human beings, feelings, and things down to absolute nakedness in the midst of a war that tore apart the artist'snation. He expresses himself in a language stripped to its bare essentials, as well, breaking away from the traditional Arabic mode, in which rhetoric and lyricism dominated.

Type
Articles
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 28 , Issue 2 , May 1996 , pp. 177 - 192
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

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References

NOTES

Author's note: An expanded version of a paper delivered at the twenty-seventh annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of NorthAmerica in North Carolina (11–14 November 1993). Excerpts from al-Daʿif's works are in my translation from the Arabic.

1 Les Cahiers de l'Orient; Revue d'Étude et de Réflexion sur le Liban et le Monde Arabe, III, 15, 1989: 147–69Google Scholar (a special file on al-Daʿif comprising an interview with al-Daʿif; J. E. Bensheikh's introduction in French to al-Daʿif's first collection of poetry, which Bensheikh has translated; and other excerpts from al-Daʿif's fiction, also in a French translation, mainly a tale from his delightful collection of tales for children, Unsī yalhū maʿ Rita. Excerpts from this file and from al-Daʿif's works are in my translation).

2 The details about al-Ḍaʿīf's, Rashīd life come from his autobiography ʿAzīzī Sayyid Kawabāta (My Dear Mr. Kawabāta) (Beirut: Mukhtārāt, 1995).Google Scholar

3 Awwād, Tawfīq Yūsuf, Ṭawaḥīn Bayrūt (Beirut: Maktabat Lubnān, 1972Google Scholar); the English translation of the work by McLoughlin, Leslie is published as Death in Beirut, (London: Heinemann, Arab Authors Series, 1976), 66.Google Scholar

4 See the survey conducted by the literary critic Khater, Nazih titled, “The Poisonous Lure of Beirut,” al-Nahar (8 08 1990–25 10 1990), in which he asks many artists to explain why they live in Beirut and what Beirut means to them.Google Scholar

5 Cooke, Miriam, War's Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3.Google Scholar See also Amyuni, Mona Takieddine, “A Panorama of Women–s Writings in War-Torn Beirut,” in The Role of Women During the Lebanese War, ed.Shehadeh, Lamia RustumGoogle Scholar, a collection of essays now in preparation.

6 Makdisi, Jean Said, Beirut Fragments: A War Memoir (New York: Persean Books, 1990), 252–53.Google Scholar

7 The excerpts from Adonis's well-known and manifesto-like book, Zaman al-Shiʿr (The Age of Poetry) (Beirut: Dar al-ʿAwda, 1972)Google Scholar, come from a translated part of it titled “Language, Culture, and Reality,” in The View from Within: Writers and Critics in Contemporary Arabic Literature, ed. Ghazoul, Ferial and Harlow, Barbara (Cairo: The American University in Cairo, 1994), 27–33Google Scholar; see also Amyuni's, Mona Takieddine essay in the same volume, “The Image of the City: Wounded Beirut,” 53–76.Google Scholar In a forthcoming book, in French, some contemporary Arab authors living in Beirut, I devote two chapters to their fiction and poetry; idem, “Wounded Beirut, ” in La ville source d'inspiration (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, BTS 63, in press).Google Scholar

8 Iskandar Habash, Yusuf Bazzi, and Yahya Jabir are poets and journalists in their mid-thirties who live and write in Beirut. These excerpts come from their collections of poems, all published in Beirut in the last few years. (The translation is mine.) A score of other contemporary poets, men and women, emerged on the Beiruti scene during the war. See, for example, “Bearing Witness: Recent Literature from Lebanon,” The Literary Review, 37, 3 (Spring 1994).Google Scholar

9 al-Daʿif, , Ghaflat, 99.Google Scholar

10 al-Daʿif, , Lā Shayʾa, 43, 48, 51.Google Scholar

11 Adonis, , Age of Poetry, 28.Google Scholar He also adds that he does not intend to differentiate between politics and writing: “Every great piece of writing, in my opinion, is political writing in one form or another…. The creative writer…. cannot but turn the life of words into his primary obsession.” Al-Daʿif would fully agree with Adonis's argument in this essay.

12 Khūrī, Ilyās (Elias Khoury) Abwāb al-madīnah (Beirut: Dār Ibn Rushd, 1981), 7.Google Scholar (The translation is mine.) I have not had access to the English translation by Haydar, Paula, Gates of the City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).Google Scholar

13 Idem, Mamlakat al-ghurabāʾ (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1993), 64Google Scholar; my translation. I have not had access to the English translation by Haydar, Paula, The Kingdom of Strangers (Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1995)Google Scholar, which recently received the University of Arkansas's award for the best-translated novel of the year.

14 Interview in Les Cahiers de I'Orient, 150.Google Scholar

15 Ibid.

16 Barakāt, Hudā, Ḥajar al-ḍuḥk (The Laughing Stone) (London: Riad el-Rayyes lil-Kutub wal-Nashr, 1990).Google Scholar

17 ʾWāZin, Abdo, ḤAdīQat Al-ḣAwāSs (Garden of the senses), my translation (Beirut: Dār al-Jadīd, 1993).Google ScholarThe book was banned in Beirut and provoked a violent reaction by the Lebanese and Arab intelligentsia against a new policy of censorship in Beirut, which has always taken pride in freedom of speech and action.See my article on this naṣṣ (a text) in The Beirut Review: A Journal on Lebanon and the Middle East 7 (Spring 1994): 145–52.Google Scholar

18 Ibid., 63.

19 al-Shaykh, Ḥanān, Ḥikāyat Zahra (Beirut: n.p., 1980)Google Scholar; translated into English as The Story of Zahra by Ford, Peter (London: Quartet Books Ltd., 1986), 126, 128, and 182.Google Scholar

20 Bensheikh, J. E., “Introduction,” in L'Été au Tranchant de l'Epée (Paris: Le Sycamore, 1979), I–V.Google Scholar