City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut by Robyn Creswell

Author:Robyn Creswell [Creswell, Robyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literary Criticism, Poetry, Comparative Literature, Middle Eastern, Modern, 20th Century, History, Middle East, General
ISBN: 9780691182186
Google: 43OYDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0691182183
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2019-01-08T00:00:00+00:00

Heretical Origins

These questions can helpfully illuminate what is al-Hajj’s most memorable and puzzling qasidat al-nathr, “The Bubble of Origin, or the Heretical Poem” (see the English translation at the end of this chapter).51 The poem was initially notorious for its sexual content. “The Bubble” is a masturbator’s confession, a “story” [hikaya] that revolves around the adolescent speaker’s sexual shame. But its narrative moves quickly past this risqué premise into properly surrealist territory: a dramatic confrontation, alternately comic and violent, between the poet and his seed—the “bubble” of the title, the personified object of shame, whose name is Charlotte. Al-Hajj’s interest in tabooed forms of sexual experience is a distinguishing feature of his poetry, and the coupling of impotence and sexuality—“A real man has no sex,” Artaud writes—sets him apart from his modernist peers, whose poetry is chaste by comparison.52 Another characteristic of al-Hajj’s prose poetry is its reliance on anecdotal narratives, as opposed to the work of Adonis, for example, structured by more conventionally lyrical tropes such as the apostrophe. I suggest that “The Bubble” is ultimately a narrative about the origins of the prose poem itself, a parable or parody of genesis. In her critique of the qasidat al-nathr, Nazik al-Malaʾika called the form “a strange and heretical innovation.” Al-Hajj welcomes this censure, flaunting it in the title of his poem, and asks us to consider what sort of heresy the text represents as well as what sort of legitimacy it might thereby claim.

To speak of heresy implies a standard of orthodoxy. For al-Hajj’s poem, this is the Bible and in particular the books of the evangelists.53 The most explicit indication of the religious intertext is Charlotte’s initial stammering, “Verily verily I say I say unto you unto you,” as though the Christly idiom had caught in her throat, or as if she were struggling to remember her lines. The poems of Lan feature a number of such citations or mistranslations. “Al-Ghazw” [The Conquest], for example, features the speech of a phallus, a “qutb” or “pole,” who declares, in a parody of the Sermon on the Mount, “Whosoever shall smite my right testicle hits the mark, for I have lost the left. And whosoever shall find me my left testicle let him eat it, for I shall lose my right.” This parody is equivocal between Christ’s teaching about when to pluck out one’s eye and when to turn the other cheek. Probably both are being mocked, as though virtuousness leads to castration. Another target is the sacrament of the host (“let him eat it”), as we are asked to consider what organ or body part is incarnated in the ingested wafer. This is a literalist’s question, and many of al-Hajj’s parodies are motivated by this mode of skepticism—one with a long history in the dissident Catholic tradition, including the Maronite branch—that interprets sacred texts according to the letter rather than the spirit. In “A Scream That Stops and Starts,” the savior’s commandment, “That ye love one another,” is placed in the mouth of a seducer.

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