Abstract:

Drawing on Albert Arazi’s analysis of time motifs in pre-Islamic poetry, this essay will demonstrate how notions of time and temporality borrowed from ancient Arabic poetry are re-configured in the texts of 20th-century poets such as Maḥmūd Darwīsh, Sarkūn Būluṣ, ʿAbbās Bayḍūn, and Muḥammad al-Thubaytī. The figures of time generated by pre-Islamic poetry, I claim, are more compelling to the modern (agnostic) poetic imagination than ideas of a “fullness of time” in the afterlife as presented by Christian and Muslim doctrines. I will show how images gleaned and interpreted by Arazi and Georges Tamer actively function in modern Arabic poetry. Even when ironized and subverted, these intertextual references give density and depth structure to the surface prosaicness of the modern lyric. Rather than waging a mighty battle with the natural cycles and setting glorious deeds against the inevitable vicissitudes of time, modern poets court the graces of the passing moment and switch to strategies of tentative alignment with the meaningless chronicity of time, pure duration in Bergsonian philosophy, as a source of ibdāʿ, creativity. The de-escalation of the fight with the destructive element of time – the pre-Islamic dahr – involved making concessions in terms of the extreme dynamism of figurative language as represented in classical qaṣīda poetics. I argue that poets are then urged to find compensations for the loss of figurative mutability in intertextual practices that reinforce the descent to the mundane and the attention to lowercase truths rescued from ordinary passing time.