Veiled Sentiments by Abu-Lughod Lila;

Author:Abu-Lughod, Lila;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History and Criticism
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2016-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

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HONOR AND POETIC VULNERABILITY

Discourses on Loss

Poetry is not, of course, the only medium in which Awlad ʿAli express sentiment and make statements about their experiences in personal life; they also do so in ordinary language and plain behavior. Yet, as suggested in the introduction, individuals use poetry in their everyday lives in a striking way: to express special sentiments, sentiments radically different from those they express about the same situations using nonpoetic language. Thus, each mode of expression can be considered a distinct discourse on personal life. Discourse here refers not simply to linguistic form, as in the distinction between formalized and everyday speech acts.1 Rather, I use the term more in the sense that Foucault (1972, 1980) uses it, to mean a set of statements, verbal and nonverbal, bound by rules and characterized by regularities, that both constructs and is patterned by social and personal reality.2

This use of the term discourse as a shorthand for a complex of statements made by numerous people in different social contexts is justified by the existence of a pattern in the sentiments expressed in the two media. People often turn to poetry when faced with personal difficulties, but the constellations of sentiments they communicate in response to these difficulties in their poems and in their ordinary verbal and nonverbal statements overlap very little. The discourse of ordinary life for those confronted with loss, poor treatment, or neglect (among the most frequent elicitors of poetry) is one of hostility, bitterness, and anger; in matters of lost love, which will be explored in the next chapter, the discourse is one of militant indifference and denial of concern. Poetry, on the contrary, is a discourse of vulnerability, expressing sentiments of devastating sadness, self-pity, and a sense of betrayal, or, in cases of love, a discourse of attachment and deep feeling.

Before analyzing the intriguing incongruities between the two discourses, I want to lay out the contours of the poetic and mundane discourses by presenting a few cases that illustrate the pattern of individual responses to loss and show how widely the two discourses ramify in social life. It will become clear that the mundane discourse is explicable by reference to the ideology of honor and modesty, whose logic has already been uncovered; the sentiments people express in ordinary life are informed by and consonant with the ideals of this moral code. (Explication of the poetic discourse will be the subject of the final chapter.)

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