\"My Body is My Language\": A Selective Study of the Traces of Imruʾ al-Qays in Modern Arabic...

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“My Body is My Language”: A Selective Study of the Traces of Imruʾ al-Qays in Modern Arabic Poetry

Suneela Mubayi*

* A Ph.D. Candidate in Arabic Literature in the Dept. of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University

I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers of the journal and Professor Khairallah for their very helpful comments on an earlier draft of the paper, as well as Profs. Sinan Antoon and Maurice Pomerantz, who originally supervised this paper in partial fulfillment of the M.A. requirement atNYU.

Abstract: It is said that Imruʾ al-Qays, among the earliest pre-Islamic Arab poets, is present in the consciousness of every poet composing in Arabic. This paper explores his enduring presence in selected poems of three prominent modern Arabic poets – Maḥmūd Darwīsh, Saʿdī Yūsuf, and Sargon Būluṣ – as part of an e�ort to demonstrate the engagement of modernArabic poets with the classical tradition. It examines the presence of Imruʾ al-Qays as a persona and literary �gure constructed through the various akhbār (reports) by medieval scholars and grammarians. It helps us understand how Imruʾ al-Qays’s death in exile and the loss of political purpose that his poetry and life story portray are remembered poignantly by these twentieth-century poets, especially through the motifs of the horror of war and the problematic of dedication and “borrowing”. Furthermore, I explore the self-image of the Arab poet in modern times in contrast to the individuality of the pre-Islamic Arab poet as expressed by Imruʾ al-Qays. Through this case study of the in�uence of a major classical poet on three prominentmodern poets, we see that contemporary poets both engage with and challenge their classical ancestors, just as the latter did to communicate e�ectively with their audience.Keywords: Imruʾ al-Qays, Maḥmūd Darwīsh, Saʿdī Yūsuf, Sargon Būluṣ, pre-Islamic poetry, modern Arabic poetry, Palestinian poetry, Iraqi poetry, intertextuality, literary in�uence

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1 Adonis, Introduction to Kalām al-bidāyāt (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1989), 1–23.

Introduction

In the study of Arabic literature, there is often a dichotomy created between the disciplines of “modern” and “classical” literature that tends to ignore the intertextuality of modern Arabic literature, especially poetry, with the classical tradition. Chronological compartmentalization can be useful in studying historical epochs in literature, but may tend to obscure important connections between poets belonging to different eras. The Syrian poet-critic Adonis (1930–) has remarked thatthe chronological division of classical Arabic poetry into the pre-Islamic (jāhilī), Umayyad, and Abbasid periods is not always meaningful, as Imruʾ al-Qays may have more in common with Abū Tammām than with his own contemporaries.1 In this study, I attempt to show that this insight also holds true to some extent for the broader segmentation of poetry into classical and modern categories.

This paper attempts to explore the presence of one of the earliest pre-Islamic poets, Imruʾ al-Qays (c. 526–565 A.D.), and his poetry in the works of three modern Arab poets. In the first section, I examine the construction of the literary persona ofImruʾ al-Qays in the reports (akhbār) related by Abbasid philologists and litterateurs, as well as the interpretations and elaborations offered by contemporary critics. Inthe later sections, I consider the ways in which Maḥmūd Darwīsh (1942–2008), Saʿdī Yūsuf (1934–), and Sargon Būluṣ (1943–2007) recall Imruʾ al-Qays’s poetic persona, and most notably his wandering and death in exile in his futile quest to recover his lost kingdom. The incorporation of Imruʾ al-Qays’s literary persona brings to the fore

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2 According to Muḥsin al-Mūsawī, “modern Arabic poetry since the 1940s has manifested an intricate and deep engagement with Arab-Islamic tradition.” Muḥsin al-Mūsawī, Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2006), 30.

3 Ibid., 82.4 For a broader analysis of the mask in modern Arabic poetry until the 1970s, see Iḥsān ʿ Abbās, Ittijāhāt

al-shiʿr al-ʿArabī al-muʿāṣir (Kuwait: al-Majlis al-Waṭanī li-l-Thaqāfa wa-l-Funūn wa-l-Ādāb, 1978).5 Ibid., 154 (my translation; unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent translations in this article are

mine).6 Ezra Pound, “The Tradition,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1968), 91.7 T. S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in The Sacred Wood and Major Early Essays (New York:

Dover, 1998), 27–33.8 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 5.

the “dynamic engagement with tradition ”2 of these poets with Imruʾ al-Qays’s poetry through such motifs as dedication and “borrowing.”

Engagement with tradition can connect the poet to his audience by facilitating affiliation or help the poet embark on a poetic dialogue in which the “classicalpoet is present, not for the sake of identification or fusion, but for the purpose ofcomparison.”3 Tradition also has functioned as a mask for the modern Arab poets of the 1950s.4 Iḥsān ʿAbbās explains: “The mask is usually a historical personality that the poet hides behind to express a certain position or to put on trial the shortcomings of the age.”5

In the context of Western literature, Ezra Pound emphasized that tradition is the beauty that we preserve and not a set of fetters to bind us, 6 while T. S. Eliot, in a seminal essay, wrote that:

Tradition is a matter of … wider significance … It involves, in the firstplace, the historical sense, … a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence; the historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.7

Harold Bloom, on the other hand, emphasizes that “strong” precursor poets exist inside and generate anxiety in contemporary living poets who want to write poetry that will survive after them.8

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Modern Arabic poetry has of course been influenced by a number of sources,including Western poets (specifically Eliot9 and Ezra Pound), but it has been shaped equally by the classical Arabic tradition from which it arose. Adonis raises a number of important issues that are relevant to the discussion of how and why modern poets invoke jāhilī poets, and in particular Imruʾ al-Qays, and engage in a form of poetic dialogue with them, whether to facilitate identification, present a comparison, orsuggest a fusion.10

Modern Arabic poets have creatively engaged with tradition in a variety of ways. One common mode of engagement is textual apprenticeship. For modern poets, the prototype of this is Abū al-ʿAlāʾ al-Maʿarrī’s (c. 973–1057 A.D.) poetic career. After being attached early in his career to his predecessor al-Mutanabbī (c. 915–65 A.D.), al-Maʿarrī later grew away from this attachment through redefining traditionin terms of morality and reason. I show below how Saʿdī Yūsuf engages in a similar apprenticeship with Imruʾ al-Qays. Another mode of engagement with tradition is the inclusion of dedications as “presents” and “gifts,” where a poet views poetic predecessors through an intertextual lineage, as I demonstrate in the case of Darwīsh and Būluṣ with Imruʾ al-Qays.

The literature of exile, with its metaphors of dislocation and loss, is deeply established in Arabic poetic culture. The classical poetry that speaks of exile and alienation often lends itself so easily to memory that modern poets may at times borrow spontaneously from its repository.11 We see below how Darwīsh and Būluṣ

9 Eliot’s poetry, specifically The Wasteland (1922), was received by Arab poets in the 1940s and 1950s as not only an expression of the decaying spirit of the West, but also as a beacon to illuminate the decay of their own. For a more in-depth discussion of the influence of Eliot on modern Arab poets,see Nazeer el-Azma, “The Tammūzī Movement and the Influence of T. S. Eliot on Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 88, no. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1968): 671–678; Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Modern Arabic Literature and the West, in Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Issa Boullata (Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1980), 7–22; Terri DeYoung, Placing the Poet: Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb and Postcolonial Iraq (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998); Muḥammad Shāhīn, Eliot wa-atharuhu ʿalā ʿAbd al-Ṣabūr wa-l-Sayyāb (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Dirāsāt wal-Nashr, 1992).

10 Kalām al-bidāyāt, 41–85. Adonis is one of the most prominent modern Arab critics to make this point. Centuries earlier, Ibn Rashīq al-Qayrawānī (ca. 1000–63) indicated how and why the muḥdath poets had engaged with the qudamāʾ, especially jāhilī poets such as Imruʾ al-Qays, and why Imruʾ al-Qays was considered by his successors to be the first of the most famous poets. See al-ʿUmda fī maḥāsin al-shiʿr (Beirut: Dār al Jīl, 1982), especially “Bāb fil-qudamāʾ wal-muḥdathīn” and “Bāb al-mashahīrmin al-shuʿarāʾ,” 90–98, where Imruʾ al-Qays is given first place among the mashāhīr.

11 al-Mūsawī, Arabic Poetry, 84.


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engage with Imruʾ al-Qays through the distinctive language of wandering and exile, and through an invocation of the past with the poetics of loss, memory, and trace.

Notwithstanding the intertextuality between modern and classical Arabic poetry and the engagement of modern poets with the classical tradition (turāth), we must keep in mind the many changes that have occurred in the structure and language of Arabic poetry over the last century. Sabry Hafez explains that modern Arabic poetry has adapted the qaṣīda to contemporary concerns; the use of the word “qaṣīda” itself has been transformed and broadened in modern times to go beyond the metered, monorhymed ode (qaṣīda) with the structure of the amatory prelude (nasīb) and journey (raḥīl) to becoming the generic word for “poem.”12

I attempt to keep these changes in modern Arabic poetry in mind when analyzing how the modern poets I have selected attempt to engage with their ancestor, Imruʾ al-Qays, in their poetic creations.

The persona of Imruʾ al-QaysFor modern poets, reflection upon the persona of Imruʾ al-Qays has been just as

influential as their textual engagements with his poetry.13 The literary persona of Imruʾ al-Qays has been constructed both through his poetry and through the sayings and biographical details attributed to him by Abbasid medieval grammarians, compilers and philologists in their compendia of akhbār on poets.

In her incisive study of the imagery of Imruʾ al-Qays’s poetry, Rita ʿAwaḍ14 stresses the need to separate the poetry from the accounts of the poet’s life and his environment, unlike some prominent traditional critics15 who have tended to merge Imruʾ al-Qays’s poetry with his biography and the conflicting narratives of the events

12 Sabry Hafez, “The Transformation of the Qaṣīda Form in Modern Arabic Poetry,” in Qasida Poetry in Islamic Asia and Africa, ed. Stefan Sperl and Christopher Shackle, (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), 1:98–120.

13 This is more so the case for Saʿdī Yūsuf ’s poem than that of Sargon Būluṣ, which, as will be explained below, engages with his predecessor’s persona as well as textually with the muʿallaqa.

14 Rita ʿAwaḍ, Bunyat al-qaṣīda al-jāhilīyya: al-ṣūra al-shiʿrīyya ladā Imriʾ al-Qays (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1992).

15 Some prominent critics who have examined Imruʾ al-Qays’ life and poetry and have been reviewed for this section are: al-Ṭāhir Aḥmad Makkī, Imruʾ al-Qays: amīr shuʿarāʾ al-jāhiliyya (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1968) and “Imru’ al-Qays,” in Arabic Literary Culture: 500–925 (Dictionary of Literary Biography, 311; henceforth DLB), ed. M. Cooperson and S. Toorawa (Detroit: Thomson Gale, 2005), 212–224; S. Boustany, “Imruʾ al-Ḳays b. Ḥud̲jr̲,” Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd edition, vol. 3 (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1176; Shawqī Ḍayf, Tārīkh al-adab al-ʿArabī 1: al-ʿaṣr al-jāhilī (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1960); Īliyyā Ḥāwī, Imruʾ al-Qays: shāʿir al-marʾa wa-l-ṭabīʿa (Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfa, 1970); Muḥammad Ṣāliḥ Samak, Amīr al-shiʿr fī l-ʿaṣr al-qadīm Imruʾ al-Qays (Cairo: Dār Nahḍat Miṣr, 1974).

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in his life.16 For the limited purposes of this paper, which is focused on the manner in which selected modern poets have invoked Imruʾ al-Qays in their own oeuvres, it is pertinent to focus on certain aspects of Imruʾ al-Qays’s poetic persona, constructed on the basis of Abbasid-era narratives (or akhbār) of the pre-Islamic period.

The construction of Imruʾ al-Qays’s historical and poetic persona is provided by the major medieval akhbār compendia of poets, namely Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī’s (d. 967 A.D.) Kitāb al-aghānī,17 and the accounts presented in Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī’s (d. 846 A.D.) Ṭabaqāt fuḥūl al-shuʿarāʾ18 and Ibn Qutayba’s (d. 889 A.D.) al-Shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ.19 It is usually composed of three elements: the first is Imruʾ al-Qays’s royal Kinditelineage and the assassination of his father Ḥujr; the second is his rebellious youth shown by his penchant for amorous and hedonistic exploits and composing poetry in open defiance of his father’s wishes; and the third is his fateful quest to avenge hisfather’s death and regain his lost kingdom. After he was banished by his father, Imruʾ al-Qays spent his time gaming, hunting, drinking, and gambling with his companions and being entertained by the music of slave girls. According to Ibn Qutayba, he was banished because of poetry he had composed about his cousin Fāṭima, of whom he was enamored and was always trying to catch off guard, which he finally did atthe pool of Dārat Juljul, as related in his muʿallaqa.20 In Ibn al-Kalbī’s account in the Kitāb al-aghānī, the news of Ḥujr’s death reached him when he was in an area called Dammūn,21 still estranged from his father, and making merry with his companions. In this account, he is reported to have said: “He neglected me in my youth and has

16 ʿAwaḍ points out, however, that this separation can only be relative, and criticizes structuralist approaches such as that of Kamal Abu Deeb that strip the qaṣīda completely from its context and study it in a historical vacuum. See Abu Deeb, “Towards a Structural Analysis of Pre-Islamic Poetry II: The Eros Vision,” Edebiyat 1, no. 1 (1976): 3–69 and his subsequent book al-Ruʾā al-muqannaʿa: naḥwa manhaj bunyawī fī dirāsat al-shiʿr al-jāhilī (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-ʿĀmma lil-Kitāb, 1986).

17 Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī, Kitāb al-aghānī, ed. I. ʿAbbās, B. ʿAbbās and I. al-Saʿāfīn (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 2002), 9:59–77.

18 Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī, Ṭabaqāt fuḥūl al-shuʿarāʾ, ed. M. Shākir (Jeddah: Maṭbaʿat al-Madanī, 1974), 51-63.

19 Ibn Qutayba al-Dīnawarī, al-Shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ aw Ṭabaqāt al-shuʿarāʾ, eds. M. Qamīḥa and M. Ḍinnāwī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 2000), 41–60.

20 According to Makkī (DLB, 215), “the sources agree that he and his father were constantly at odds. Among the explanations given is that Imruʾ al-Qays fell in love with his cousin ʿUnayza, pursued her without success, and finally managed to enjoy her affections in secret.” For a more detailed analysisalong the same lines, see his book in Arabic (Makkī, Imruʾ al-Qays: amīr shuʿarāʾ al-jāhiliyya).

21 Reportedly in a mountainous region of Yemen corresponding to today’s Ḥaḍramawt province. See the entry on Dammūn in Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Muʿjam al-Buldān, ed. ʿA. al-Jundī (Beirut: Dār al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiyya, 1990), 2:537.


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burdened me [with avenging him] now that I am grown. I will neither be sober today nor drunk tomorrow” as well as the dictum that became proverbial: “wine today and business tomorrow (al-yawma khamr wa ghadan amr).”22 This quote became important in the formation of his literary persona; Suzanne Stetkevych tells us that after saying it, the formerly hedonistic, pleasure-seeking, profligate youth who cared fornothing except gambling, wine, and women “went on a seven day drinking binge” after which he swore not to drink wine, eat meat, or touch a woman until he had avenged his father.23 This episode marks the beginning of the construction of Imruʾ al-Qays’s image as the tragic hero that wandered all over the Arabian peninsula in an ultimately failed quest to regain his lost kingdom.24 This image of Imruʾ al-Qays is the one that occupies the imaginations of the modern poets whom I examine in this paper and who chose to engage with him primarily on the basis of his representation as the tragic figure of a wandering exile.

It is related in Kitāb al-aghānī that Imruʾ al-Qays’s battle against his father’s slayers, the Banū Asad, exceeded the bounds of Arab tribal norms in the pursuit of vengeance. Makkī relates that the Banū Asad had offered several choices to Imruʾ al-Qays, but hechose the option of war and the clash “continued without clear advantage to either side. Imruʾ al-Qays’s allies grew weary of fighting and began to desert him.”25 Makkī writes:

The mournful, resigned poem 11 [Here we are, speeding towards a fate hidden from us]26 of the dīwān appears to refer to the events of this time. The poet describes his wanderings among the tribes of the peninsula. He is forced to seek refuge from ignoble folk and to take shelter among those who hate him. His requests for help are sometimes met and sometimes refused, but the only result of his efforts is more bloodshed

22 As translated by Suzanne Stetkevych, “Regicide and Retribution: The Muʿallaqah of Imruʾ al-Qays,” in The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 245.

23 Ibid.24 It should be noted, however, that this account is contradicted by the other accounts in Kitāb

al-Aghānī, notably that of Haytham ibn ʿAdī, in which Imruʾ al-Qays was with his father when the latter was assassinated by the Banū Asad, and Imruʾ al-Qays was able to escape from the clutches of his assassins on a golden steed. Ḍayf (Tārīkh al-adab al-ʿArabī 1: al-ʿaṣr al-jāhilī, 235) supports this narrative as the most verifiable.

25 Makkī, DLB, 220. According to Stetkevych (“Regicide and Retribution,” 247), he was pursued by al-Mundhir IV of al-Ḥīra and sought assistance from various tribal overlords and brigands.

26 Arānā mūḍiʿīna li-amri ghaybin in Dīwān Imriʾ al-Qays poem 11, 97-100.

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and despair. He has renounced frivolity and adventure; now he pursues only nobility of spirit.27

To regain his lost kingdom, Imruʾ al-Qays traveled to Constantinople to seek help from Byzantine Emperor Justinian.28 On the way, he left his weapons and armor with al-Samawʾal, the Jewish overlord of Taymāʾ and an ally of his father, Ḥujr.29 In Justinian’s court, according to al-Kalbī’s account, Imruʾ al-Qays was initially welcomed and supplied with troops. However, al-Ṭammāḥ (literally “the ambitious one”), an intriguer from the Banū Asad whose brother Imruʾ al-Qays had killed during the course of his revenge campaign, who had infiltrated the Byzantine court andconvinced the emperor that Imruʾ al-Qays had been consorting with his daughter.30 In revenge for this insult, Justinian sent Imruʾ al-Qays a robe interwoven with gold and poison which caused his death by slow poisoning as soon as he wore it.31

According to Stetkevych, the abandonment of the ancestral Kindite coat of arms for Caesar’s (the emperor’s) poisoned royal robe

symbolizes Imruʾ al-Qays’s loss of patrimony. Entrusting the ancestral arms to al-Samawʾal and abandoning the Arab homeland for the land of the Byzantines, Imruʾ al-Qays is, in symbolic as well as political terms, naked and defenseless. Not only is he without the armor itself, he is stripped of all that the ancestral armor represents: his royal lineage and his inherited identity, the tribal allegiances that attend his inherited position, “Arabness” itself. For the Arab poet-prince who has abandoned the armor and land of his ancestors to make his way unaided through the maze of the Byzantine court, even the honors of the emperor prove lethal. To the loss of kingdom and patrimony is added, as the sloughing of his skin so powerfully expresses, the loss of self. The Kindite prince and poet dies in exile, unavenged.32

27 Makkī, DLB, 220.28 “In the course of his life, Imruʾ al-Qays wandered over practically the entire Arabian Peninsula,”

Makkī (DLB, 219).29 Ibn Qutayba and al-Iṣfahānī, and then later Darwīsh, all refer to Justinian as Caesar (Qayṣar).30 Stetkevych (“Regicide and Retribution,” 248). Ibn Qutayba (al-Shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ aw Ṭabaqāt al-shuʿarāʾ,

43–44), on the other hand, maintains that Imruʾ al-Qays had killed al-Ṭammāḥ’s father.31 Ibid.32 Stetkevych, “Regicide and Retribution,” 249.


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Makkī accepts that Imruʾ al-Qays reached Constantinople and met the emperor, but discounts the tale of intrigue and the poisoned robe completely, attributing it to being “embroidered by the imagination of biographers.”33

While dying, Imruʾ al-Qays is reported to have found himself in a campsite next to the grave of a foreign princess, where he recited poetry in which he affiliates himselfto every other exile that has died in a foreign land: “O my neighbor, indeed we are strangers in this very place / and every stranger to a stranger is kin [a-jāratanā innā gharībāni hāhunā / wa kullu gharībin lil-gharībi nasību].”34

Imruʾ al-Qays’s act of weeping over the campsite reveals his “longing for the past and a plea for its return”;35 despite the specificity of their original context, thecampsite passages are profound in their evocation of the universal experience of separation. Furthermore, his status as the “first” and foremost faḥl [stallion]36 – in a sense, as the “beginning” of Arabic poetry – gives him a certain standing that makes him present in the consciousness of all subsequent Arab poets. More specifically, itmakes it easier for the contemporary poets to invoke him when dealing with the existential issues he poses outside of a specifically “Islamic” context. The liminalstation he occupies between a firm tribal belonging, as an heir who could neverrealize his birthright as ruler-king, and a wandering hedonistic poet who cared only for women, wine, and verse, is an interesting one that is crucial when looking at his presence in modern poetry, especially in the poems we shall examine here. The image of a wanderer is important to establish a link between the vagabond Imruʾ al-Qays in search of adventure, the exiled Imruʾ al-Qays wanting to reclaim a usurped kingdom, and the modern exile-poet seeking to re-establish his roots. Commenting poignantly on his ill-fated trip to the Byzantine emperor, Palestinian poet Maḥmūd Darwīsh (1942–2008) sheds light on why Imruʾ al-Qays, as an emblem of the Arab

33 Makkī, DLB, 221. Ḍayf concurs with this assessment when he remarks that there is a lot of fabrication in all the akhbār, especially the narrative of Ibn al-Kalbī (Tārīkh al-adab al-ʿArabī 1: al-ʿaṣr al-jāhilī 235). Ḥāwī (Imruʾ al-Qays: shāʿir al-marʾa wa-l-ṭabīʿa, 5–6, 22–23) claims that while some of the anecdotes have a grain of truth to them, narrators quoted in the medieval compendia exaggerated the stories about Imruʾ al-Qays to fantastical/mythical proportions instead of historicizing them, thus not doing justice to his literary value as a poet.

34 Imruʾ al-Qays, Dīwān Imri’ al-Qays, ed. M. F. Ibrahīm (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, 1958), poem 97, 357. 35 Makkī, DLB, 217.36 The Basran philologist and critic Ibn Sallām al-Jumaḥī, in his seminal treatise on the classification

of pre-Islamic and early Islamic poets, Ṭabaqāt fuḥūl al-shuʿarāʾ, chose the poets that he considered to be accepted widely as the best of their time and called them the fuḥūl (pl. of faḥl, or stallion, used here in the sense of prize breed) divided them into ṭabaqāt (grades or levels). Imruʾ al-Qays is the first poet in the first ṭabaqa.

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poetic tradition, may be pressingly relevant to contemporary Arab poets in the more immediate historical context:

Imruʾ al-Qays is an important event that stands at the beginning of Arabic poetic memory, i.e., the defeated Arab seeking the help of the foreign empire. From his going to Rome (i.e., Constantinople, the capital city of Byzantium) to the current Arabs today going to Britain or France or America, we find a constant line of alliance between the vanquishedand the empire.37

In examining the engagement of the poets Yūsuf and Būluṣ with Imruʾ al-Qays , we will see that the latter’s wandering, exile, and failure to regain his father’s kingdom (read: lost homeland) predominates over the hedonistic wine-drinking, gambling, and womanizing figure that occupies a significant portion of his akhbār.

Maḥmūd Darwīsh and Imruʾ al-Qays – über-poet or tragic prince?Maḥmūd Darwīsh, the poet, was frequently equated with Darwīsh, the political

symbol, often against his will; this tension between the poetic and political remained present throughout his career. In an interview, Darwīsh explains his engagement with tradition:

We always try to leave and rebel against our authoritative sources and then go back to them, because they are all we have … The oldest text in the turāth can be a very modern text.38

For this reason, the tragic story of Imruʾ al-Qays becomes important for Darwīsh, both on the specific plane of the post-Oslo Palestinian struggle (post-1993) and forembodying the dilemma of a poet who is thrust into the center of a political struggle. As Sinan Antoon argues, Imruʾ al-Qays, as the poet-king, was the most privileged vehicle for Darwīsh to invoke from the Arab poetic past to create an allegory that would encapsulate the tension he felt between the political and the poetic.39 Just as Imruʾ al-Qays was the first faḥl of classical Arabic poetry in the poetic consciousness of

37 Ḥusayn Barghūthī, “Maghnāṭīs al-huwiyya al-shakhṣīyya ʿinda Maḥmūd Darwīsh,” in Maḥmūd Darwīsh: al-mukhtalif al-ḥaqīqī, Dirāsāt wa Shahādāt, ed. S. Qāsim (Amman: Dār al-Shurūq, 1999), 224–241.

38 Ghassān Zaqṭān, “Maḥmūd Darwīsh: Lā aḥad yaṣil, hiwār ajrāhu Ghassān Zaqṭān,” in Maḥmūd Darwīsh: al-mukhtalif al-ḥaqīqī, dirāsāt washahādāt, 13–46.

39 Sinan Antoon, “Mahmūd Darwīsh’s Allegorical Critique of Oslo,” Journal of Palestine Studies 31, no. 2 (2002): 66–77.


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every poet writing in Arabic, Darwīsh holds a similar status as the faḥl of Palestinian poetry, who towers in the consciousness of every Palestinian poet.40

The Syrian critic, Ṣubḥī Ḥadīdī, likens Darwīsh’s cultural and political influence,especially over the last two decades, to that of the great poets of ancient times:

… when the poet was the nation’s prophet and a spokesperson for its being … in the cultures of nations, there was always that exceptional moment when a major visionary task was placed upon the shoulders of one poet to capture the collective feelings of a nation and transform poetry into national and cultural power.41

Imruʾ al-Qays appears in several poems in Darwīsh’s collection, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? [Limādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣāna waḥīdan?] (1995).42 This work marks a turning point in Darwīsh’s trajectory, where the personal and biographical take precedence over the collective. The centrality of the horse to this collection, noted in the title and in the seemingly constant invocation of the horse throughout the poems, evokes the importance of the horse in Classical Arabic poetry as a symbol of pride, power, and sheer brilliance, including in Imruʾ al-Qays’ muʿallaqa, making it “a heraldic emblem of potent masculinity tamed to the service of tribal society.”43 However, for Darwīsh, the horse represents something quite different, as shown by the following lines in thepoem “The Eternity of Cactus” [Abad al-ṣubbār] that echo the title of the collection:

Why did you leave the horse alone?To keep the house company, my sonHouses die when their inhabitants are gone …44

Rather than being separate from and a recompense for the loss evoked by pausing at and weeping over the aṭlāl, as is the case with Imruʾ al-Qays, Darwīsh incorporates the horse into the abandoned ruin, or ṭalal (here, the home forcibly emptied of its native inhabitants), making it the living element of the ruin that keeps it from being effaced forever. As Darwīsh says, “We live in a historical situation that presents us as

40 See footnote 27.41 Ṣubḥī Ḥadīdī, “Mādhā yafʿal al-ʿāshiq min dūn manfā?,” in Mahmūd Darwīsh: al-mukhtalif al-ḥaqīqī,

47–73, as quoted in Antoon, “Mahmūd Darwīsh’s Allegorical Critique of Oslo,” 67.42 Maḥmūd Darwīsh, Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? trans. J. Sacks (New York: Archipelago Books,

2007).43 Stetkevych, “Regicide and Retribution,” 278.44 Darwīsh, “The Eternity of Cactus,” in Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? 30.

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if we did not possess a past.”45 Thus, one of the reasons for using mythic symbols is to keep memory alive as part of the historical process. But just as Darwīsh uses the symbol of the horse in a different way from Imruʾ al-Qays, we will see that he summonsthe figure of Imruʾ al-Qays not as the heroic symbol of a mythic age, but rather asa tragic one that speaks to the realities of the present. Therefore, any similarities between the biographies of the poetic personas of Imruʾ al-Qays and Darwīsh are less crucial for us than the decision by Darwīsh to invoke the figure of Imruʾ al-Qays fromthe pre-Islamic Arab past to express reservations about the PLO’s signing of the Oslo Accords with Israel in 1993.46

The poem that concerns us here – “A Non-Linguistic Dispute with Imruʾ al-Qays” [Khilāf, ghayr lughawī, maʿ Imriʾ al-Qays] – addresses Imruʾ al-Qays’s journey to Constantinople to meet the Byzantine emperor to seek help in what ultimately is a failed attempt to recover his father’s kingdom.47 Imruʾ al-Qays’s status as the firstfaḥl of Arabic poetry in tandem with his own failed political project makes him the archetypal father figure through which Darwīsh constructs his own political allegory.By invoking Imruʾ al-Qays, Darwīsh can critique Oslo and bring to the fore the devastating political defeats and decades of exile of the Palestinian people and the demands imposed on him of being the spirit of a nation and the voice of its people.

In this poem, Imruʾ al-Qays appeals to Darwīsh more as a mythical persona than a poet through the akhbār that provide biographical details. Darwīsh’s engagement with Imruʾ al-Qays is primarily on the issue of poetry and art versus politics. The poem can be read as an expression of Darwīsh’s resignation from the Executive Committee of the PLO following his refusal to support Oslo. He makes this clear in the poem when he says: “they were victorious . . . they forgave / the victim for his sins when he apologized in advance for whatever came to mind,”48 expressing his bitterness at what he perceived as the fruits of Oslo: the PLO’s abject sell-out of the Palestinians to the Israeli occupiers under the aegis of America.

45 Interview with ʿAbbās Bayḍūn, quoted by Sulaiman Jubran, “The Image of the Father in the Poetry of Mahmoud Darwish,” in Mahmoud Darwish: Exile’s Poet, ed. Hala Khamis Nassar and Najat Rahman (Northampton: Interlink Books, 2008), 91.

46 For a critical analysis of the Oslo Accords, see Edward Said, The End of the Peace Process (New York: Vintage/Random House, 2000).

47 Darwīsh, “A Non-Linguistic Dispute with Imruʾ al-Qays,” in Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? 180–185.

48 Ibid., 180.


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In his interview with Darwīsh, Barghūthī commented upon Darwīsh’s opinion about the difference between Imruʾ al-Qays’s journey to Constantinople49 and the PLO’s trip to Oslo:

Imruʾ al-Qays’s going to Rome was natural in his time and was not looked at as “betrayal” then … he [Darwīsh] is saying to Imruʾ al-Qays in Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? to go to Rome alone and leave us here his language, and it seems that the Oslo agreement was a kind of going to Rome … despite this, Darwīsh said that this is a recent reading of the experience, which does not come from Imruʾ al-Qays’s age itself. Thus, Darwīsh reads history in his own individual way and vision and forms poetic images that are tangible and historicized and particular to him.50

Even though Darwīsh knows the historical specificities differentiating Imruʾal-Qays’s failed attempt at an alliance with the emperor from the Oslo Accords, one may also infer that, according to him, Imruʾ al-Qays did not grasp the longevity of poetic power over political power in the way that his successor al-Mutanabbī (c. 915–965 A.D.) did, even if the latter also failed in his political ambitions.

In his analysis, Sinan Antoon provides three possible readings of this poem:51

1) it is an allegory on the signing of the Oslo accord (staged as a cinema production in the poem). Imruʾ al-Qays, as the wandering king, is faulted and separated from Imruʾ al-Qays, the poet, which is why the dispute is a non-linguistic one – Imruʾ al-Qays is a failed politician who chooses a tragic path that spells his own death and that of his people; 2) Imruʾ al-Qays is the locus where the poetic and political are joined, thus Darwīsh could be performing his own resignation and saying goodbye to his past involvement with the PLO, separating poetry from politics; 3) the split caused by “taking Caesar’s path” in representing one’s past (PLO), one’s people (Palestinian), and one’s self (Darwīsh himself) concerns the text in all three.

Darwīsh identifies himself as belonging to the language of Imruʾ al-Qays butdistances himself from his unholy political alliance. He tries to see Imruʾ al-Qays through his own poetic language and invokes Imruʾ al-Qays’s words in order to “push

49 Darwīsh calls it “Rome” in the poem, and Barghūthī refers to it as such, even though it is understood as the Byzantine Constantinople.

50 Barghūthī, “Maghnāṭīs al-huwiyya al-shakhṣīyya ʿinda Maḥmūd Darwīsh.”51 Sinan Antoon, “Mahmoud Darwish’s Allegorical Critique of Oslo.”

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them away.” When Darwīsh asks Imruʾ al-Qays to “take Caesar’s path alone alone, alone/ and leave your language here for us,”52 he affirms that is possible to retainthe “language” of the poet and reject his politics and life story. Antoon makes the point that Imruʾ al-Qays’s rā’iyya on his trip to meet Caesar in Constantinople has many parallels with Darwīsh’s poem as well as its context. Ḥujr and Imruʾ al-Qays’s weak kingdom was forced to make unholy alliances that were ultimately betrayed. Darwīsh’s poem provides a direct parallel with Palestine and Oslo, an unholy alliance of the PLO with Israel. Darwīsh seems to want to separate Imruʾ al-Qays’s poetry from his life story. While Adonis claims that the literary persona of Imruʾ al-Qays exists solely through his language and his words, Darwīsh stresses the need to separate Imruʾ al-Qays’s words from his political actions and the mistakes he made in his worldly affairs.53

Darwīsh’s clarification, during his interview with Barghūthī, that he does notreproach Imruʾ al-Qays for his actions, does not necessarily contradict his feelings expressed in the poem. It suggests that when he asks “what have you done to us?” the question is directed at Arafat and the PLO, who believed in America’s promise of a “Palestinian state” after Oslo, just as Caesar in the apocryphal story had promised to make Imruʾ al-Qays the prince of Palestine.54 The question Darwīsh poses is a message to the PLO to read the history of the Arabs better, even if it is a pseudo-literary history. Moreover, what may have been acceptable in Imruʾ al-Qays’s time is no longer acceptable, and the PLO must let the Palestinian people fight their ownstruggle. Darwīsh’s phrase about the “worn-out vocabulary”55 is bitter sarcasm on the lack of freedom offered to the Palestinians – The description of freedom that didn’t find itsbread. A bread / without the salt of freedom…56 – especially when he praises the free doves “flying away from the market”57 that shamefully symbolizes the Oslo Accords.

From the beginning, the poem is dramatized as the narrator of the poem partners himself with Imruʾ al-Qays and moves through the poem along with him. Indeed, Darwīsh places the poem in the last section of the collection, which he titles “The Curtain Fell” (aghlaqū al-mashhad). The same phrase is used in this poem as if to tell us that a certain performance or an act within a long drama is over. In the first stanza,

52 Darwīsh, “A Non-Linguistic Dispute,” 185.53 Adonis comments: “The life of jāhilī poets, like Imruʾ al-Qays, swayed between materiality and an

existence above everything worldly – where language became a way [ṭarīqa] of existing and a means of its expression.” Kalām al-Bidāyāt, 77.

54 S. Boustany, “Imruʾ al-Ḳays b. Ḥud̲jr̲,” Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 3:1176.55 “al-mufradāt allatī ihtaraʾat…”; Darwīsh, “A Non-Linguistic Dispute,” 182.56 “waṣfu ḥurriyyatin lam tajid khubzahā. waṣfu/ khubzin bilā milḥi ḥurriyyatin…”; Ibid.57 “madīḥu ḥamāmin/ yaṭīru baʿīdan ʿan al-sūq…”; Ibid.


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the crucial word is “incomplete” (nāqiṣīn); they leave the space of return to others, coming back incomplete, and return to their tomorrow, incomplete. Darwīsh reaches into the past to find the future lacking, and he talks of the future in the past tense– “we returned to our tomorrow, incomplete.” He seems to be saying that this poorly rehearsed show – i.e., Oslo – will detract from the future of the Palestinians, which will remain incomplete and unfulfilled.

We may read this poem as an allegory, where Caesar represents America, but we may also ask why cinema, theater, and other modern metaphors of drama are invoked when disputing a pre-Islamic poet to whom these motifs would be foreign? Using these motifs with the story of Imruʾ al-Qays may make the allegorical connection with the ill-fated Oslo agreement a little easier for the modern audience to grasp without having to mention it directly. The fanfare around Oslo and all the false hopes that accompanied it are seen here more as a performance staged by an emperor (America) directing the PLO and Israel, neither of whom were even able to perform their prescribed roles properly; thus the “improvis[ation]” of the “words that were prepared for us.”58 Moreover, the images most associated with pre-Islamic poetry – the ruins of deserted campsite [aṭlāl], the desert, even the horse, present in other poems – are absent. Here, the narrator and Imruʾ al-Qays together enact a reality that is scripted for them, but they cannot even follow the script prepared for them. The smoke that rises later from Time is white, as if it were theatrical smoke. Time is the audience watching the scene from the balcony.

All three of Antoon’s readings stand on firm ground; however, we may also addto them another reading that more closely follows the centrality of language and its imagery to Darwīsh’s project, the common ground he finds with Imruʾ al-Qays inthis poem. In the same collection, in his poem “A Rhyme for the Odes” [Qāfiya min ajlal-muʿallaqāt], he reaffirms what he credits Imruʾ al-Qays and al-Mutanabbī as havingrealized – words outlasting political power – saying:

I was born of my language … Who am I? I am my languageI am a muʿallaqa … two muʿallaqas, tenThis is my languageI am my language […] My language will triumph over timethe enemy, over my progenyover me, over my father, and over an end that doesn’t end … 59

58 Ibid. 18059 Darwīsh, “A Rhyme for the Odes,” in Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? 130–134.

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Imruʾ al-Qays is also mentioned in “Ismail’s Oud” [ʿŪd Ismāʿīl] – yet another poem in this collection that precedes “A Non-Linguistic Dispute” – as sad or “mourning” along with the great philosophers passing:

The masters of timeand the philosophers and Imruʾ al-Qays, mourning a tomorrowtossed upon the gates of Caesar, pass. They all pass beneaththe Poem [al-qaṣīda]. The contemporary past, like Tamerlane, passesbeneath it … 60

Imruʾ al-Qays, the philosophers, and the wise men are all under the influence ofthe Poem, which is expressed here with a capital P to highlight his use of qaṣīda as an independent abstract entity. We have seen Imruʾ al-Qays’s tragic end, as he entrusted his fate to the hands of Caesar and was betrayed, hinted at in “A Non-Linguistic Dispute”. But the images presented are to be understood through the permanence of the Poem, which is contrasted to the impermanence of existence, whether of Caesar or of the masters of time and the philosophers and conquerors; the Poem records everyone’s passing – the philosophers, Imruʾ al-Qays, Tamerlane – as it outlasts them all.

The polarity of poetics and language for Darwīsh are demonstrated in his epic poem Mural [Jidāriyya], which was published after Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone? and his near-death experience during bypass surgery.61 In this poem, Darwīsh seems to cast some doubt on his previous faith in language, and says: “I have wearied of my language” [taʿibtu min lughatī]. He then states that Imruʾ al-Qays is “torn” [muwazzaʿ] between Caesar and a rhyme, although he then modifies this, saying that it is language– not Imruʾ al-Qays – that is riding the horse.62 The earlier line in the same poem – “the stranger is the stranger’s brother” [al-gharību akhu l-gharībi]63 – reminds us of the last line of poetry that Imruʾ al-Qays is believed to have uttered as he was dying from wounds sustained by wearing the poisoned robe of Caesar, when he saw the grave of a foreign princess: “and every stranger to a stranger is kin” [wa-kullu gharībin li-l-gharībi nasībū].64 Darwīsh first wants to take the language and leave Imruʾ al-Qays the failed

60 Darwīsh, “Ismail’s Oud,” ibid., 42–47. Darwish addressed Imruʾ al-Qays much earlier in his career in a poem that he later removed from his collected early works (Al-Aʿmāl al-Ūlā, Beirut: Riyad al-Rayyis, 2005): “Imruʾ al-Qays,” in Yawmiyyāt jurḥ filasṭīnī (Beirut: Dār al-ʿawda, 1969), 59–62. The poem was translated by Abdullah al-Udhari in Jacques Berque, ed., Arab Rebirth: Pain and Ecstasy (London: al-Saqi, 1983), 79–80.

61 Sinan Antoon, “Farewell Mahmoud Darwish,” Al-Ahram Weekly, no. 910 (Aug. 2008). http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2008/910/fr1.htm (accessed August 16, 2015)

62 Darwīsh, Jidāriyya (Beirut: Riyāḍ al-Rayyis, 2000), 71–72.63 Ibid., 16. 64 Dīwān Imriʾ al-Qays, Poem 97, 357.


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king; he then tires of the language and sympathizes with the torn Imruʾ al-Qays. It is as if Darwīsh is acknowledging the vicissitudes of fate and the inability of the poet to do much about altering history.

Saʿdī Yūsuf and Imruʾ al-Qays – Dedication and AffiliationIt was reading the complete dīwān of Imruʾ al-Qays that first sparked an interest

in poetry for Saʿdī Yūsuf (1934–).65 His relation to the pre-Islamic poets is highlighted by his assertion:

I blindly trust the poet of the Jāhiliyya. I trust his relationship with nature and society. I trust his hard work and his humility. For instance even in the description of a stone lies both a great artistic value and, surely, a well-respected effort. Here, there is no room for excess, deceitor lies … it is man versus stone.66

In fact, Yūsuf goes further to claim that,Certain words crop up now and again from pre-Islamic poetry and I keep them in because I can’t help it; there’s nothing wrong with that, it’s my heritage …67

Yūsuf ’s engagement with Imruʾ al-Qays is different from the mask of al-Akhḍaribn Yūsuf that he adopted during his time in Algeria.68 Imruʾ al-Qays is not a mask or an extension of the self, but a comrade and later a forefather in exile with whom to affiliate. According to the Iraqi critic Samīr Khūrānī, Yūsuf considers Imruʾ al-Qayshis highest ideal in poetry; the ustādh (mentor) with whom he trained and obtained his poetic knowledge. 69 What impresses Yūsuf most in Imruʾ al-Qays is his love of freedom, nature, and place – essential artistic and aesthetic elements that are also characteristic of his own poetry. Yūsuf ’s involvement with Imruʾ al-Qays raises issues of dedication, borrowing, and engagement through the different stages of his poeticcareer.

65 Fatima al-Muḥsin, Saʿdī Yūsuf: al-Nabra al-khāfita fi-l-shi’r al-arabī al-ḥadīth (Damascus: Dār al-Madā, 2000), 54.

66 Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Creative Mythology 4 (New York: Penguin, 1991), 1393–1394, as quoted in Yair Huri, The Poetry of Saʿdī Yūsuf: Between Homeland and Exile (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), 80.

67 “I Have Trained Myself Hard To Be Free: Saadi Youssef in Conversation with Banipal,” Banipal, no. 20 (Summer 2004),13–14.

68 For example, see Yūsuf, al-Akhḍar bin Yūsuf wa-mashāghiluh (Baghdad: al-Adīb, 1972).69 Samīr Khūrānī, al-Mirʾāt wa-l-nāfidha: dirāsa fī shiʿr Saʿdī Yūsuf (Beirut: Dār al-Fārābī, 2007), 25–27.

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I choose to focus here on three poems that invoke Imruʾ al-Qays, specifically,which Yūsuf wrote over a time span of almost a quarter of a century. The first poem,“Tarīm,” was written during a solidarity visit to socialist South Yemen in 1981.70 The poet visited an area called Tarīm that is supposed to correspond to the Dammūn of Imruʾ al-Qays.71 To mark this visit, Yūsuf wrote a poem in which he evokes Imruʾ al-Qays and reconnects Tarīm to Dammūn, as if to tell us that Imruʾ al-Qays is alive. The second poem, “Thanks to Imruʾ al-Qays” [Shukran li-Imriʾ al-Qays], was written in Nicosia, Cyprus in 1986,72 and the third, “Grandson of Imruʾ al-Qays” [Ḥafīd Imriʾ al-Qays],73 which tellingly carries the same name as the collection title, was written in 2005. There appears to be a trajectory of an increasingly closer emotional and poetic association with Imruʾ al-Qays experienced by Yūsuf in going from 1982, when he was just visiting a site that Imruʾ al-Qays had immortalized in poetry, to 1986, when he is “thanking” Imruʾ al-Qays, and finally to 2005, when he is claiming a directfilial relationship as a descendant or heir, given the poem’s title. However, in thistrajectory he is also moving both further away from the Arab world of the present into the past and also from the Arab environment into something more personal, solitary, and isolated from people, with more focus on humanizing nature and objects around him.

The short occasion poem on Dammūn carries an echo of Yūsuf ’s sense of exile as if the poet was born again in the time of Imruʾ al-Qays and was sharing the sense of exile suffered by his poetic predecessor. It also carries an evocation of Imruʾ al-Qays’sfamous lines when, while in Dammūn, he was informed of his father’s death: “The night grew long in Dammūn / O Dammūn, we are a tribe of Yemenites.”74 While the opening lines of Yūsuf ’s poem refer to the specific locale, Dammūn, the closing lines of thepoem indicate that exile has no particular location; it has taken on a universal quality where the whole world has been sanctified by becoming a mosque:

Dammūn is herenearer than the house’s graveyardand Dammūn is far,faraway, almost as if Imruʾ al-Qays

70 Yūsuf, “Tarīm,” in al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya (Beirut: Dār al-ʿAwda, 1988), 1:170, translated by Yair Huri in The Poetry of Saʿdī Yūsuf: Between Homeland and Exile (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), 241.

71 See footnote 21 on Dammūn.72 Yūsuf, “Shukran li-Imriʾ al-Qays,” in al-Aʿmāl al-shiʿriyya, 2:405–409.73 Yūsuf, “Ḥafīd Imriʾ al-Qays,” in Ḥafīd Imriʾ al-Qays (Damascus: Dār al-Madā, 2006), 97–98.74 Taṭāwala al-laylu ʿalā Dammūn / Dammūn, innā miʿsharun yamānūn; see Kitāb al-aghānī, 9:66.


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will never reach it. . . /. . . /. . .The whole world is a mosque,so have you taken off your shoes?75

In his analysis of the poem, Yair Huri remarks: This structure with its emblematic and epigrammatic elements largely accounts for the distilled effect of the poem and its blending of thevisual with the meditative or expository. The foreignness of the land drives Yūsuf to postulate a deeper region, where he feels connected to his exiled forebears … Yūsuf ’s highly developed sense of place … is characteristic of the poem and of Yūsuf ’s exilic verse in general … The famous Imruʾ al-Qays died a long time ago; nevertheless his message and the message of the place still live.76

Yūsuf wrote “Thanks to Imruʾ al-Qays” in 1986 while he was in Nicosia, Cyprus, about five years after his visit to Dammūn and his short reflection on being in thepresence of Imruʾ al-Qays. In the opening of the poem, he directly addresses Imruʾ al-Qays:

Finallyin a semi-furnished roomnear Nicosiayou came to give greetings with your own lips.77

The focus shifts to Imruʾ al-Qays’s journey, which the poet sees as a silent one. The poet has been waiting for a long time for Imruʾ al-Qays to come in person and greet him. He then asks him:

Is it after five thousand milesthat you found speech?78

The question posed above (… wajadta al-kalām?) can also be read as “did you findsomething to say?” The poet has been waiting for Imruʾ al-Qays to say something to him after this long silence – to inspire, to advise, or do something else that is left unrevealed to the reader. However, this silence is not measured temporally by the centuries that have passed since Imruʾ al-Qays’s death, but rather spatially, by the

75 Yūsuf, “Tarīm,” Translation from Huri, The Poetry of Saʿdī Yūsuf, 241–242.76 Huri, The Poetry of Saʿdī Yūsuf, 242.77 Yūsuf, “Shukran li-Imriʾ al-Qays,” 405.78 Ibid.

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distance of five thousand miles, evoking his wandering after his father’s murder andjourney to Byzantium (which is not far from present-day Nicosia) seeking imperial help to regain his kingdom. The poet then specifies the question by further askinghim:

was it after dead moss inhabited your houseand the arrows were scattered in the sea?79

It is as if Yūsuf is asking the dead poet whether his journey was sparked by an image of ruined abode [aṭlāl] and desolation that Imruʾ al-Qays wanted to leave and not cry over, instead of carrying with him; the scattered arrows in the sea give the impression of defeat and a loss of purpose and aim. The aṭlāl as seen here and in the next poem are not something to be cried over, but rather to be left behind. He concludes this section by turning to a description of nature and a complex, if somewhat obscure, image:

Greetings to a lofty fig treegreetings to this darknessgreetings to a shell that hid its blood in a drowsiness at nightgreetings to this destruction.80

The greetings of the poet are not directed back at Imruʾ al-Qays, but rather at elements of nature, to the darkness that Imruʾ al-Qays feels weighing down upon him, and to “this destruction.” The only meeting point that seems to be found with Imruʾ al-Qays is in the fourth section, through the image of the “spinning of the top” [dawrat al-khudhrūf], evoking a children’s toy that Imruʾ al-Qays mentions in his verse when describing the power of his horse to turn and maneuver during a hunt scene.81

And yet, this poem does not simply thank Imruʾ al-Qays, but rather thanks “the murdered Imruʾ al-Qays” in this section after musing,

The days when crisscrossed the roadswe imagined the night shorter than Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima … maybe we were youngmaybe we went back to eating the unripened grapes [ḥiṣrim] left behind by the forefathers82

79 Ibid., 405.80 Ibid.81 Yamurru ka-khudhrūfi al-waladi al-muthaqqabī (line 40) in Poem 3, Dīwān Imriʾ al-Qays, 40–55.82 Yūsuf, “Shukran li-Imriʾ al-Qays,” 407. This phrase refers to the popular saying al-ābāʾ yaʾkulūna al-

ḥuṣrum wa-l-abnāʾ yaḍrasūn (literally “the forefathers eat unripened grapes and the sons suffer fromthe sour aftertaste”), i.e., the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.


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after which he goes on to ask,What wisdom is there in the spinning of the top [dawrat al-khudhrūf]?Which part of death is easier to bear?We did not say even in secret which part of death is more beautiful … and thus we go on as we wereWe have learnt – and yet, the spinning of the top –Thanks to the murdered Imruʾ al-Qays [shukran l-Imriʾ al-Qays al-qatīl].83

After this, Imruʾ al-Qays is not addressed or alluded to in the rest of the poem. Makkī highlights poems 9 and 13 in Imruʾ al-Qays’s dīwān in which he expresses

the feelings of a traveler far from home, telling his travelling companions of his oscillation between hope and despair, and of the reasons that compelled him to journey to Byzantium and the cities he passed on the way.84 According to Makkī, “No other poet in [classical] Arabic has described a voyage so completely, while abiding by the constraints of the poetic medium.”85

Yūsuf identifies with Imruʾ al-Qays’s murder by viewing him as a comrade in along, tiring, and thankless journey, using the first person plural (“we crisscrossed theroads … we go on as we were / we have learnt”), and he is haunted by the image of the spinning of the top. Is he thanking Imruʾ al-Qays as a martyr? Is he thankful that Imruʾ al-Qays is dead? Is he thankful that Imruʾ al-Qays has taken the trouble to visit him so long after being dead and buried? Since the visit to Dammūn, Yūsuf ’s identificationwith Imruʾ al-Qays’s as a poetic comrade seems to have grown, even though the entire poem is not a complete engagement with Imruʾ al-Qays. In this poem and his exilic trajectory, Yūsuf pays more attention to his relationship to nature and solitude and less to his relation to people. He appears to have entered a zone of isolation bounded by his own poetic vision.

In the title poem of his more recent collection, “Ḥafīd Imriʾ al-Qays,” the poet assumes the role of Imruʾ al-Qays’s grandson. In a review of the dīwān, Mājid al-Sāmarrāʾī points out that the collection and its title poem pose more than one

83 Ibid., 407–408. 84 Qifā nabkī min dhikrā ḥabībin wa-ʿirfāni in the Diwān, poem 9, 89–93; Alimmā ʿalā l-rabʿi al-qadīmi bi-

ʿasʿasā, poem 13, 105–108. The second poem is cited in the akhbār as an accusation that al-Ṭammāḥ of the Banū Asad deceived Justinian into sending him the poisoned robe that reportedly killed him.

85 Makkī, (DLB, 221). In his prior book-length study in Arabic (Imruʾ al-Qays: Amīr shuʿarāʾ al-jāhiliyya, 148–149), he expands further on this, saying that no poet has written so sensitively about the hardships of a journey in which he is torn between hope and despair, especially given that a large portion of his work has not reached us.

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question.86 Why does the poet invoke Imruʾ al-Qays at this stage in his career, after more than fifty years of writing poetry, to make himself his grandson? Does he wishto empathize with his ancestor in choosing a family name, or is the choice of a family link an attempt to bring back the spirit of Imruʾ al-Qays? Yūsuf opens the poem by asking:

Is it your fault that one day you were born in that land [tilka al-bilād]?Three-quarters of a century and you are still paying that tax from your meager blood [min damika al-nazr](that you were one day born in that land)87

But what is the tax he has to pay? The poet asks himself this question again – “and what is that?” [“wa-mā tilka?”] – as he tries to find common ground in experienceswith Imruʾ al-Qays despite a gap in time of a millennium and a half. In one reading of the poem, Yūsuf may be seen as addressing himself. The tax is imposed on him from having been born there, “in that country”, i.e., Iraq, in Yūsuf ’s case. Yūsuf is poor and does not have much left to start with (dam nazr). He has bled, or suffered, frombeing poor and constantly alienated, and the tax is paid in blood. The poet knows the landscape of Iraq just as his noble ancestor, the wandering king, knew the terrain of his native land, intimately. He is also familiar with its histories of lies [“tawārīkhihā al-kādhiba”]; similarly, Imruʾ al-Qays was also lied to by his enemies in his quest to reclaim his realm. On the other hand, we see the poet as drawing a distinction between his exile from his homeland and Imruʾ al-Qays’s deprivation or loss of his kingdom. Imruʾ al-Qays was a wanderer of royal origin [al-malik al-ḍillīl] who wanted to reclaim his father’s usurped kingdom, while Yūsuf, the poet, has always been poor, and what little he has is being exhausted by his attachment to a land that does not deserve him – the cities with no urbanity [“al-mudun al-fāqidāt al-madīna”], the villages that have nothing in them [“tilka al-qurā haythu lā shayʾ”], and finally, most damningly, anall-encompassing darkness [“dhāka al-ẓalām al-ʿamīm”]. The message conveyed by the concluding lines of this compact yet dense poem is that even when the country is no more, one still suffers its trauma and is burdened by its heavy taxes:

86 Mājid al-Sāmarrāʾī, “Dīwān yaṭraḥ asʾila . . . Saʿdī Yūsuf mutaqammiṣan shakhṣiyyat Imriʾ al-Qays,” al-Ḥayāt, no. 15990, January 14, 2007, http://daharchives.alhayat.com/issue_archive/Hayat%20INT/القيس/2007/1/14 امرئ حفيد شخصية متقمصاً يوسف سعدي أسئلة يطرح ,html. (accessed August 16.ديوان2015)

87 Yūsuf, “Ḥafīd Imriʾ al-Qays,” 97.


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What does it concern you now when you demand the impossibleThe problem is that you carry its burdens [awzāraha] in the annulment of the land [fi intifāʾ al-bilād]88

This repetition of al-bilād completes the refrain and brings home the point of the poem. For both Imruʾ al-Qays and Yūsuf, there is a burden of belonging that becomes an inescapable curse. For Imruʾ al-Qays, it was the legacy left by his father and the loss of his kingdom; for Yūsuf, it is having been born in a country whose political tragedy continues to haunt him wherever he goes. The repetition suggests that Iraq retains a powerful emotional hold on Yūsuf that he cannot jettison, despite having spent most of his adult life in exile. In an interview, speaking of his painful yet unceasing ties to his origins, Yūsuf acknowledges that, expressed in this poem:

The horror of exile is in the uprooting of the individual … and transplanting him in another spot … where there are no homes, no memories. What is left is hardship only: toil and pain in order to preserve the primordial composition, the stock that is threatened by extinction, the root that is drying up. But the rules of the artistic process make such preservation an extremely laborious task.89

Khūrānī contends that the image of Baṣra never leaves Yūsuf ’s imagination; he has carried its imagery with him all over the world.90 While Iraq remains a powerful love, exile forms a dialectic of presence and absence that surpasses space to include an element of time. The sense of loss, dispossession, dislocation, and persecution engendered by exile in Yūsuf is invoked through a creative engagement with identity and linguistic tradition. Yūsuf ’s invocation of Imruʾ al-Qays exemplifies Adonis’sclaim that language is Imruʾ al-Qays’s homeland [waṭan] by itself, where he resides and does not leave – it is his glory and his intoxication.91

Yūsuf ’s notion of exile, however, excludes sentimentality and nostalgia: “Exile includes the idea of annulment, the elimination of the individual’s relation to heavens, land, and community …”92 In a recent documentary on Yūsuf, 93 we hear him

88 Ibid., 98.89 Yūsuf, “On Reading the Earth,” in The View from Within: Writers and Critics on Modern Arabic Literature,

ed. Ferial Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow, as quoted in Huri, The Poetry of Saʿdī Yūsuf, 57.90 Khūrānī, al-Mirʾāt wa-l-nāfidha, 25.91 Adonis, Kalām al-bidāyāt, 48–49.92 As quoted in al-Mūsawī, Arabic Poetry, 181.93 Al-Akhḍar ibn Yūsuf (documentary film). Dirs. Jūdī al-Kinānī and Bāsil ʿAlī ʿUmrān. Slowmotion FX,

2009. http://vimeo.com/19536508. (accessed August 16, 2015)

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reciting “Grandson” as he looks into a wall mirror. The recitation of the poem is then supplemented by him commenting: “I have always written to obliterate exile and consider nostalgia as an enemy; most of my life has been outside the country, I don’t consider this raḥīl as travel; I call it becoming ‘naturalized’ [tawaṭṭun].” In a profile inthe Beirut-based newspaper al-Akhbār, he says that nostalgia is “retarding; it makes an artist lose the balance necessary for to maintain control over his material”, and he vows never to return to Iraq in his lifetime because it will not be rebuilt on a sound foundation for at least a century, if at all.94 As he says in the documentary, it will take at least a century to recover from the damage that has been done to his homeland, transforming it into cities lacking an urban life and villages with nothing, covered by an all-encompassing darkness.

In the other part of Yūsuf ’s exilic trajectory, he moves away physically from Dammūn as well as from the Arab world, even as his relationship to the first faḥl of Arabic poetry becomes expressed increasingly in terms of a filial relationship.Attempting to explain his choice to settle in the U.K., far from the Arab world, he says in an interview with the Lebanese poet and critic, ʿAbbās Bayḍūn:

… my body is safe [here] whereas over there, the body is exposed to a quick or brutal extinction … The longer I live in an Arab country the more I lose my rights.… This has always been difficult and complex [for me], and demandedgreat sacrifice. In order for me to express life’s conflicts in the poetictext, I had to leave my homeland, my family and my wife and to be imprisoned and tortured. All of this created in me a simple desire for freedom of expression. Now, I truly find myself absolutely free.95

Yūsuf also acknowledges the painful experience of exile and its effects on thepoetic relationship to ancestors and places of origin:

There is a vertical line connecting heaven, where the worshipped is, with earth, where the ancestors lie in the long repose of death. And there is a horizontal line ordering the village or the town, where homes, memories, and childhood playgrounds are. At the point of intersection between these two lines stands the individual.96

One may question whether, for Yūsuf, Imruʾ al-Qays lies “in the long repose of death.” As the aṭlāl lived in Imruʾ al-Qays wherever he went, so too does Imruʾ al-Qays

94 Muḥammad Shuʿayr, “Saʿdī Yūsuf: ‘al-Shuyūʿī al-akhīr’,” Al-Akhbār 669, November 5, 2008. http://www.al-akhbar.com/node/102502. (accessed August 16, 2015) 95 Interview in al-Safīr (14 Sep. 2001), as quoted in Huri, The Poetry of Saʿdī Yūsuf, 67.96 Yūsuf, “On Reading the Earth,” 15.


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live inside Yūsuf as an ancestor to be summoned back to life wherever he may be. Mahmūd Darwīsh wrote that Yūsuf

became addicted to exile; it became an integral part of both his life and language – exile not only in the sense of a geographical place at odds with the homeland, but rather in the sense of a vital space in which the self, in order to discover itself in the “other,” looks at the primary things from afar, and in a sense bears a literary value that expresses an existential alienation.97

Thus, even as the trajectory of Yūsuf ’s exile makes him more distant from Iraq and the Arab world, he attempts to deal with the burden with the greatest possible integrity and simplicity. He embodies a humbler notion of Imruʾ al-Qays’s claim to language as both his identity and main source of strength and nourishment for survival.

Būluṣ and Imruʾ al-Qays – Displacement and IsolationThe Iraqi-Assyrian, Sargon Būluṣ (1944–2007), who emigrated to the U.S. in 1969,

like Saʿdī Yūsuf, engages with Imruʾ al-Qays at a mature stage in his career. However, unlike Yūsuf, who establishes a filial bond with Imruʾ al-Qays as a forefather of exile,Būluṣ charts a different path. In the poem examined here, “To Imruʾ al-Qays on HisWay to the Inferno” [“Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays fī tarīqihi ilā l-Jaḥīm”],98 Bulus’s engages with Imruʾ al-Qays through a hadīth attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad, which has him calling Imruʾ al-Qays “the best [ashʿar] of poets and their leader to the [Hell] fire”.99

Būluṣ titles his poem as a dedication or a gift to Imruʾ al-Qays, as if its words are something for Imruʾ al-Qays to carry with him to Hell. Commenting on the politics of dedication, al-Mūsawī remarks: “dedications among poets … may well be signs of homage, allegiance and self-identification …”100 In this poem, Būluṣ engages with Imruʾ al-Qays, the individual against the forces of nature and the treachery of other humans, through what is both a dedication and an upholding of Imruʾ al-Qays as a fragile human being like himself.

97 Darwīsh, “Saʿdī Yūsuf fī l-sabʿīn,” al-Karmil, no. 81 (Fall 2004): 1. http://www.alkarmel.org/prenumber/issue81/intro.pdf. (accessed August 16, 2015) 98 Sargon Būluṣ, “Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays fī Ṭarīqihi ila-l-Jaḥīm,” in Ḥāmil al-fānūs fī Layl al-dhiʾāb: shiʿr (Cologne:

Manshūrāt al-Jamal, 1996), 50–52.99 Ibn Qutayba, al-Shiʿr wa-l-shuʿarāʾ , 55. Ibn Rashīq (al-ʿUmda, 94) also furnishes the same ḥadīth when

speaking of the mashāhīr.100 al-Mūsawī, Arabic Poetry, 135.

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Būluṣ opens the poem with what Iraqi critic Ṣādiq Ṣāyigh describes as a mundane event – a man sitting at night in front of a heater in America – that then was expanded into the poet searching for an invisible life in the glow of the heater to invoke his and Imruʾ al-Qays’s inferno.101 Būluṣ wants to hear the desert, and not the sounds of the American urban jungle, the “ever louder neighing of America,” from which he feels disconnected and alienated:

I listen closely to hear the desert singAnd not the ever louder neighing of America, as if it were a thousand wounded horses102

In a piece that appeared online after the September 11 attacks, Būluṣ wrote that he left America for the first time following the first Gulf War and stayed away for fiveyears: “Anywhere but here, I told myself.”103 Būluṣ, isolated and alienated in his own “exile” in America, yearns for the desert of Imruʾ al-Qays as a beacon on the journey that he faces as a poet, while the tragic hero Imruʾ al-Qays, in his own wanderings, traversed the desert on a perilous journey that promised all or nothing.

The heater represents both a small inferno and a kind of time machine that lets Būluṣ reconnect to Imruʾ al-Qays. He stretches his hands towards the heater as if to invoke the atmosphere of Imruʾ al-Qays’s desert from which he is both spatially and temporally separated. The imagery developed in this poem equally emphasizes both space and time. And the spatial dimension takes on an abstract expanse when Būluṣ conjures up the desert night, invoked in Imruʾ al-Qays’s muʿallaqa thousands of miles away and over a thousand years ago removed from him, to invoke Imruʾ al-Qays, the individual. However, for Būluṣ, the primary category in the image remains time; zaman is dominant over makān, as Būluṣ evokes Time with a capital T – the personifiedpre-Islamic dahr – in his use of zaman:

… to another age, blown away by a powerful hand made of sand into that gaping jaws of Time [al-zaman] where the ruinsare always lying in waiting104

101 Ṣādiq al-Ṣāʾigh, “Qaṣīda wa-shāʿir: azāʾa ukhuwwa mujḥifa,” al-Madā, January 25, 2012. http://www.almadasupplements.net/news.php?action=view&id=3911. (accessed August 16, 2015)

102 Būluṣ, “Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays,” in Ḥāmil al-fānūs fī layl al-dhiʾāb, 50.103 Būluṣ, “Ithaka Gave You the Journey” (undated), http://www.jehat.com/Jehaat/en/Poets/

SargonBoulus.htm. (accessed August 16, 2015)104 Būluṣ, “Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays,” 50. I translate time here with a capital T, as Būluṣ personifies the word

zaman as a creature that has its jaws wide open.


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Thus, the stage is set for the emergence of Imruʾ al-Qays by evoking a differenttime and the aṭlāl. Būluṣ’s journey in America is akin to the poet’s raḥīl through the desert. With the establishment of these tropes, the first line of the muʿallaqa is evoked here, and he travels back to Imruʾ al-Qays’s space-time:

at the edge of the sand dunebetween al-Dakhūl and ḤawmalThey are always there.105

In his analysis of Imruʾ al-Qays’s muʿallaqa, Adnan Ḥaydar observes that the north wind is symbolic of the hand of death, which is balanced by the south wind, the giver of life.106 The ruins are dead, but have faint signs of life for Būluṣ, even though they have been swept by the ravages of time. For Būluṣ, Imruʾ al-Qays is still alive if we go seek him out.

Būluṣ then quotes directly from Imruʾ al-Qays’s sayings as narrated in the akhbār: “my father lost me as a child,” when Imruʾ al-Qays was drinking and gambling with his friends in Dammūn, and goes on to write:

“al-yawma khamr wa-ghadan amr,” (wine today and business tomorrow) says the wind107

However, in Būluṣ’s poetic imagination, these words are re-attributed to the wind, which brings a message from Imruʾ al-Qays across space and time; Būluṣ uses the jamr, khamr, and muʿallaqa to overcome the demon that visits the poet at night:

And I have wine, embers and a muʿallaqaWith them, I may defeat a jinn that visits me at this hourAlways at this hour, as if we have a fixed appointmentBurdened with all my deep-seated rancor, he does not accept latenessTo teach me the secrets of darkness in the labyrinth of my melancholy [asrār al-sawād fī sarādīb suwaydāʾī]108

The pre-Islamic Arabs believed that each poet was in communication with his own special demon or shayṭān that inspired him to compose poetry, or sometimes composed it for him.109 Būluṣ invokes the power of this image to renew and refashion

105 Ibid.106 Adnan Ḥaydar, “The Muʿallaqa of Imru’ al-Qays: Its Structure and Meaning I,” Edebiyat 2, no. 2 (1977):

227.107 Būluṣ, “Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays,” 51.108 Ibid.109 See Iḥsān ʿAbbās, Tārīkh al-Naqd al-Adabī ʿind al-ʿArab, 5th ed. (Amman: Dār al-Shurūq, 2011), 16–22.

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his bond with an unbroken tradition. The exiled poet in the wasteland of America, stranded far away from his desert homeland, is confronting the demon that visits him at a fixed hour. For Būluṣ the demon is internalized, and knows the poet’s deepestsecrets because it lives inside of them; as Būluṣ says, it exists “to teach me the secrets of darkness in the labyrinth of my melancholy.”

Imruʾ al-Qays portrays the night in the muʿallaqa as follows: “And many a night, like the waves of the sea, has loosened its curtains on meWith all kinds of worries, in order to test my patience.”110

For Imruʾ al-Qays, the night brings on a dream, which evokes the cares dripping from its curtains along with the sands, but also with “you”, i.e., Imruʾ al-Qays himself and with destiny:

And this accursed dusk, ever-thickening with shadow after shadowI dream of the last drop to drip from its curtainsWith all kinds of worries, with all kinds of worriesWith sands, with the barren expanse of my imagination, and with you as well, with youAnd with Destiny111

Būluṣ comments on his summoning and manipulation of elements from the muʿallaqa:

Time after time we make the discovery that when we are writing we are actually remembering, not the past itself, not a person or place, a scene or sound or song, but first and foremost we are remembering words …that reside in a certain memory, that carry the echoes of a certain place and time … The problem is how to take the old vocabulary and put it in new settings … that will speak of our present. So the function of memory is not simple: one needs to know the words and what they mean, but one needs also to forget the settings in which they are found.112

Būluṣ seems to evoke the grief and loneliness of the night, which reminds him of the barren expanse of his imagination. The water that makes up the sea of the night is not only dripping with worries and with the sand of the desert from which Būluṣ is

110 As translated by Ḥaydar in “The Muʿallaqa of Imruʾ al-Qays,” 232.111 Būluṣ, “Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays,” 51.112 Būluṣ, “Ithaka Gave You the Journey.”


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exiled, but is dripping with Imruʾ al-Qays himself and his destiny, again transporting him to the poet as he stares into the dark abyss of the heater in his American wasteland. Before emigrating to the U.S., Būluṣ first crossed the Syrian desert by footto reach Beirut via Damascus in 1967 to work with the avant-garde magazine Shiʿr. In describing the journey he took to reach Beirut from Baghdad in his youth without any identity papers, he relates:

I crossed the desert to al-Ḥasaka and then to Ḥimṣ and then to Damascus and then to Beirut and that’s a tremendous adventure in my life. I’m still writing about it. It’s a very symbolic thing in the life of all prophets and poets – what they call the dark night of the soul … the desert you cross is like another world!113

These words appear to echo the journey of Imruʾ al-Qays in the night that loosened itself with all its burdens. Looking into the mouth of the heater, Būluṣ realizes that he too confronted the unknown, embodied by his crossing the desert. This may symbolically stand for the journey that all poets, including Imruʾ al-Qays, have to undertake when they begin to write poetry and embark on discovering their poetic voice and persona. Būluṣ calls the lifelong dedication to poetry “a beautiful concern” (“hamm jamīl”),114 echoing the use of concerns (humūm) first as used by Imruʾ al-Qaysin his muʿallaqa and then by Būluṣ himself in this poem when he dreams “of the last drop to drip from its curtains with all kinds of concerns.”115 In his muʿallaqa, Imruʾ al-Qays’s concerns (humūm) remain unvoiced. In other poems, he refers to the turbulent events of the latter part of his life.116

Būluṣ then summons al-Mundhir ibn Māʾ al-Samāʾ,117 the principal adversary of Imruʾ al-Qays, who pursued and repeatedly tried to slay him:

O King escaping from that brute Al-Mundhir ibn Māʾ al-SamāʾThat brute who is nothing but a name that pursues us till the gate of the Inferno

113 Interview with Margaret Obank, Banipal, no. 1 (February 1998), http://www.banipal.co.uk/selections/15/167/sargon-boulus/. (accessed August 16, 2015)

114 This is the expression he uses in an interview with ʿ Adnān Ḥusayn Aḥmad in al-Ḥiwār al-mutamaddin, no. 687 (Dec. 12, 2003). http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=12732. (accessed August 16, 2015)

115 Būluṣ, “Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays,” 51.116 Most notably, poem 11 in the Dīwān [arānā mūḍiʿīna li-amri ghaybin], 97–100, as discussed here on pg.

149.117 Stetkevych (“Regicide and Retribution,” 247) identifies him as the Himyarite king al-Mundhir IV of

al-Ḥīra.

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That name, hollow like a drum. That tyrant. ThatSlaveThat brute, he is always there.That shadow, which occupies a corner in the heart and will not be budgedJust like your poisoned robe (a “present” from “your friend” the Byzantine emperor)He is there.118

Instead of viewing al-Mundhir simply as an external enemy and political adversary, Būluṣ portrays him as a demon living inside the poet, an inexorable and inescapable companion that one cannot and should not try to overcome. For Būluṣ, the torture of being a poet is the long years one spends in penetrating the secrets of writing, for which one is ready to sacrifice everything.119 Perhaps, for Būluṣ, al-Mundhir the political tyrant signifies the suffering one has to go through to become and remain a poet in the modern era.

As the poet’s demon, al-Mundhir is also:that worm hanging from the bottom of the pear in the garden of our isolation verdant and luscious till the end that claw buried in the flesh of the rhymes and it will not, will never bedislodged120

Like the ruins whose memories Imruʾ al-Qays carries inside him wherever he wanders, al-Mundhir occupies and haunts Būluṣ. Būluṣ seems to be telling himself, through Imruʾ al-Qays, that one cannot escape facing the enemy inside oneself just as Imruʾ al-Qays too cannot shed the memory of the aṭlāl; one has to endure them till the very end. Whether one’s destiny is victory or non-victory is immaterial, it is inexorably bound to be there right until the very end.

The Iraqi poet Ṣādiq al-Ṣāyigh remarks that in this poem, Imruʾ al-Qays and Būluṣ, both as individuals and along with society as a whole, face the same inferno of non-victory, waiting, impotence, and Time with its jaws wide open.121 al-Ṣāyigh’s analysis focuses on drawing similarities between the struggles of Imruʾ al-Qays and Būluṣ that are highlighted in this poem. He remarks that the two poets’ spiritual aṭlāl are united by the actions of the wind – “wine today and business tomorrow,” says the wind – and

118 Būluṣ, “Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays,” 51.119 ʿAdnān Ḥusayn Aḥmad, interview with Sargon Būluṣ.120 Būluṣ, “Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays,” 52.121 al-Ṣāyigh, “Qaṣīda wa-shāʿir …”


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in the desert, at the edge of the sand dune, between al-Dakhūl and Ḥawmal, is where their Infernos lie. The ages change and the image of the Inferno pursues the two poets like a fire that rages on and does not stop spreading.

However, Ṣāyigh does not consider the socio-historical differences between thesixth-century tribal Arabia that Imruʾ al-Qays lived in and the modern reality of the twentieth-century Arab world with its nation-states and borders, which makes Būluṣ’s journey of exile and wandering radically different from that of Imruʾ al-Qays;nor does he consider the many differences of Būluṣ’s poem from a traditional qaṣīda or Imruʾ al-Qays’s muʿallaqa. Apart from the obvious structural difference betweenunrhymed, unmetered verse and monorhyme meter, the ending of Būluṣ’s poem is very different from the praise [madīḥ] or vaunting [fakhr] ending of a traditional qaṣīda. The storm section that concludes the muʿallaqa is a “poetic description of purificationand revitalization of nature.”122 In Būluṣ’s poem, on the other hand, the storm “stirs” at the beginning of the poem and its sound is song to Būluṣ’s ears. Emanating through the heater, it is a small opening through which he can evoke Imruʾ al-Qays, not as a person but as a poetic persona, in spite of the overwhelming noise of America around him. Moreover, the internal demon of the poet has a different meaning for Būluṣ thanwhat al-Mundhir represents for Imruʾ al-Qays:

It will not be dislodgedO Imruʾ al-Qays, neither by victory, nor non-victoryA man might be dispossessedof everythinguntil he ends up on the matno embersno winenothing [wa-lā amr].123

For Būluṣ, victory or non-victory over the internal demon is not only immaterial, it is non-existent, since the demon is indestructible. The internal demon is the one the modern poet has to confront each time he embarks upon crafting a poem.

The distinguishing feature of Būluṣ’s poetry is its unconventional voice that he wishes to integrate with the broader Arabic poetic tradition, as he says when he quotes the end of this poem in another interview:

I want to delve deep into the depths of Arab poetic consciousness with a voice that the reader of what we call Arabic poetry is unused to;

122 Stetkevych, “Regicide and Retribution,” 281.123 Būluṣ, “Ilā Imriʾ al-Qays,” 52.

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despite this, I think that I am fulfilling a call that lies in the poems ofthe greatest poets of Arabic, [such as] Imruʾ al-Qays, they all wanted to change consciousness through the meaning of poetry, each in his own way.124

Būluṣ further remarks during his interview with Aḥmad on the way poets inhabit one another:

Poets’ lives are intertwined with each other. A poet like Imruʾ al-Qays who died more than a thousand years ago is still very influential … a truepoet who believes in poetry must consider himself having a mission in history and dedicate his whole life to poetry.125

Asked specifically about the poem under discussion, Būluṣ describes his feelingsand the thought-images that underlie his treatment of Imruʾ al-Qays:

This poem is one in which I conduct a dialogue with Imruʾ al-Qays in America in a condition similar to his when he was escaping from al-Mundhir… One night as I was reading his story and his muʿallaqa, I suddenly felt him alive within a framework that surpassed the ages, and found myself speaking with him not as a person but through that small opening of the poetic shadow that we call ‘Imruʾ al-Qays the poet’. Don’t forget that even if poets live at the end of the twentieth century they are possessed by poetic and historical phantoms and ancestors … 126

He also goes on to say that Imruʾ al-Qays is not the only classical poet he has engaged with:

Sometimes I find myself experiencing an atmosphere that links meto a specific poet whom I may have once read and some of whoselines remained with me, nourishing me in the present [he mentions specifically al-Nābigha al-Dhubyānī and ʿUmar b. Abī Rabīʿa] … differenttimes and ages all overlap...this relationship with turāth sometimes is characterized by playfulness and a live human connection, not just one of writing.127

124 Interview with Hādī al-Ḥusaynī, “al-Shiʿr fī al-istiʿāda: ḥiwār maʿ al-shāʿir al-ʿIrāqī Sargūn Būluṣ, Amman 1998” al-Ḥiwār al-Mutamaddin no. 2078, October 23, 2007. http://www.ahewar.org/debat/show.art.asp?aid=113177. (accessed August 16, 2015)

125 ʿAdnān Sayyid ʿAḥmad, interview with Sargon Būluṣ.126 Ṣalāḥ ʿAwwād, “Ḥiwār Maʿ al-Shāʿir Sarkūn Būluṣ”, Nizwā 6 (April 1996), 191–192.127 Ibid.


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Even though Būluṣ calls Imruʾ al-Qays a “poetic shadow,” what distinguishes his poetic encounter with Imruʾ al-Qays in this poem is his engagement with him through an interaction that takes place at a personal, visceral level, stripped of the larger symbolism that Būluṣ sees as unnecessary.

Subḥī Ḥadīdī rates this as one of the fifty best poems of the twentieth century inArabic, because through its engagement with the muʿallaqa, it has a potential to effecta change in the poetic tastes and habits of the average reader.128 Ḥadīdī hopes that introducing this poem will bridge the gap between a reading of poetry that starts from the contents of the poem itself, inspired by the varied aesthetics that it achieves (pedagogical, artistic, mental, critical, spiritual, etc.) and a reading that is conscious of what is before and above and in front of the poem. Būluṣ prompts us to remember the best of what is in our poetic memory, and reminds us that this innovative, expansive language is the same one that allowed Imruʾ al-Qays to say what he said about the desert, the ruins, and about Siqṭ al-Liwā, al-Dakhūl, and Ḥawmal; by referring to the topoi of the pre-Islamic ode, Būluṣ allows himself to summon up and delve even deeper into the elements of his poetic ancestor.

ConclusionEach of the three modern poets presented here invoke their poetic ancestor in

a unique way to illuminate a particular element of their own creations, but they do so as poets living with the issues, developments, and concerns particular to the Arab condition in the contemporary era.

For Maḥmūd Darwīsh, Imruʾ al-Qays represents a failed marriage of poetry and linguistic power to political symbolism; an expression of a long-standing Arab political impotence and failure in the face of their superior enemies. By invoking Imruʾ al-Qays’s failed attempt to ally with Byzantium, the empire of his time, in a futile and tragic effort to recover his kingdom from his enemies, and comparing that withthe failure of the Palestinians in Oslo, Darwīsh powerfully focused on Imruʾ al-Qays as the symbol of political disaster and ignominy. However, Darwīsh acknowledges Imruʾ al-Qays’s immortal contribution to him personally and to all poets in “leaving us our language,” as he says in “A Non-Linguistic Dispute”.

Saʿdī Yūsuf ’s invocation of Imruʾ al-Qays is complex, a trajectory lasting more than a quarter century that evolves from a visit to Dammūn to a dedication that eventually becomes a filial affiliation. It is an engagement that grows and developsalong with the poet.

128 Ṣubḥī Ḥadīdī, “Ḥāmil al-fānūs,” al-Quds al-ʿArabī, no. 19, Oct. 22, 2007, 5720.

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Sargon Būluṣ, on the other hand, invokes a very different Imruʾ al-Qays – atortured and isolated individual making a futile bid to escape from an enemy that lies ultimately within himself. While the historical Imruʾ al-Qays wandered in the desert of his time, Būluṣ summons him in the context of the modern wasteland of America to highlight the internal psychological dilemmas that confront the contemporary poet, tormented by the demon who lives inside him.

In his analysis of Imruʾ al-Qays, Adonis writes: “Imruʾ al-Qays did not have a weapon; language was his knightsmanship (furūsiyya).”129 Through the three modern poets examined here, one can discern the truth of this statement. Language, indeed, is the inheritance left by Imruʾ al-Qays. Each of the poets we have analyzed uses this precious legacy of their ancestor to bring to the fore concerns of the contemporary age. The focus of these concerns spans a wide range, from socio-political issues to more psychological and personal ones, to the role of the poet and the meaning of poetry in the modern age. As Abdelfattah Kilito emphasizes, “Every poem has a memory.”130 The gift of language bequeathed by Imruʾ al-Qays helps these poets to fashion their own poetics of memory, loss, and exile and powerfully illustrates how the pre-modern tradition continues to play a creative role in modern Arabic poetry.

129 Adonis, Kalām al-Bidāyāt, 77.130 Abdelfattah Kilito, The Author and His Doubles: Essays on Classical Arab Culture, trans. M. Cooperson

(Syracuse: Syracuse Univ. Press, 2001), 15.

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\"My Body is My Language\": A Selective Study of the Traces of Imruʾ al-Qays in Modern Arabic...

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