Iterations of Loss

Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish

Jeffrey Sacks

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780823264964
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

In a series of exquisite close readings of Arabic and Arab Jewish writing, Jeffrey Sacks considers the relation of poetic statement to individual and collective loss, the dispossession of peoples and languages, and singular events of destruction in the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Addressing the work of Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq, Elias Khoury, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Shimon Ballas, and Taha Husayn, Sacks demonstrates the reiterated incursion of loss into the time of life—losses that language declines to mourn. Language occurs as the iteration of loss, confounding its domestication in the form of the monolingual state in the Arabic nineteenth century's fallout.Reading the late lyric poetry of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in relation to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, Sacks reconsiders the nineteenth century Arabic nahda and its relation to colonialism, philology, and the European Enlightenment. He argues that this event is one of catastrophic loss, wherein the past suddenly appears as if it belonged to another time. Reading al-Shidyaq's al-Saq 'ala al-saq (1855) and the legacies to which it points in post-1948 writing in Arabic, Hebrew, and French, Sacks underlines a displacement and relocation of the Arabic word adab and its practice, offering a novel contribution to Arabic and Middle East Studies, critical theory, poetics, aesthetics, and comparative literature.Drawing on writings of Jacques Derrida, Walter Benjamin, Avital Ronell, Judith Butler, Theodor Adorno, and Edward W. Said, Iterations of Loss shows that language interrupts its pacification as an event of aesthetic coherency, to suggest that literary comparison does not privilege a renewed giving of sense but gives place to a new sense of relation.

Chapter One

Citation

Fa-l-tahfaz layl al-alam hadha ‘an zahri qalb

Mahmoud Darwish, Fi hadrat al-ghiyab

“Retain this night of pain in your memory” (FH, 38), Mahmoud Darwish wrote. But to speak of pain is to speak of the ways in which pain may not be overcome or left behind. The imperative with which this passage opens repeats the pain of which it speaks (“retain this night”), pointing to the singularity of a night and of more than one night, and of more than one event of loss and inscription of pain, in relation to poetic utterance. If the coherency of a poetic subject is promised in reading and in “the ceaseless war against pain,” attention to language, and its imperatives, compels us to remain with the words of the poet, declining to leave them behind.1 To open the reading of Darwish I pursue here, I retain the Arabic of this passage, transliterating it into Latin characters in the epigraph to this chapter. The words tahfaz ‘an zahri qalb, which form a part of this passage, gesture to memory.2 Yet to speak of memory, in Darwish, is to do so in relation to time and the practice of writing. Poetry, in Darwish, is a “literary textual practice,” an event of language that implies the time of writing in relation to poetic statement.3 The poem does not leave the temporal event of writing, its vocation, mihna, behind but is given in an unfinished relation to it.4 The relation of writing to the poem may be compared to the time of the colonization of Palestine and its destruction and loss, from before and in the wake of 1948. Just as the time of the poem does not finish, so too the time of the destruction and loss of Palestine—if also that of the institution of the state of Israel, a state erected through the appropriation and destruction of the homes and lives of others, of more than one place and of the times and places of other’s lives and languages—does not end or close. This is not only because the colonial, military, and juridical practice of that state continues, and it does, but because to consign the loss of Palestine to a past would be to seal it within history, in another time, said to have passed. If the desire of the Israeli state has been to close the past into the past, if only, and not solely, by recognizing it as being no longer, Darwish declines to close the time of loss. He declines to close the time of language, the eventfulness and temporal nonbelonging to which language points, and which is named, in Darwish, poetry.

§

Poetic statement, in Darwish, is an event of form. The passage with which I open this chapter points to the retention of the text of the Qur’an in memory, and this retention becomes a way of reading form, and of reading a relation to loss, death, and tradition, in Darwish. The lexicographer Ibn Manzur (1230–1311) writes in Lisan al-‘arab, “It is said: someone bears the Qur’an on the back of his tongue, as it is said: he preserves it on the back of his heart [hafizahu ‘an zahri qalbihi].”5 “You say,” Ibn Manzur further explains, “I recited the Qur’an from the back of my heart, that is to say, I recited [qara’tuhu] it from memory” (606). The movement of the tongue, and the inscription of language in relation to the time of that movement and its bearing of words (“It is said: someone bears the Qur’an on the back of his tongue [yuqal: hamala fulanun al-qur’ana ‘ala zahri lisanihi]”), has come to be muted through a translation within the Arabic language, one that renders the Arabic words tahfaz ‘an zahri qalb as “you shall learn by heart” or “you shall memorize.” The translation of a textual enactment of memory—of a retention, inscription, and preservation of language upon the tongue—would participate in effacing the act or event of remembering which that translation sought to convey. The reorganization of the tongue of language is the subject of the second chapter of this book, and I underline this event here because if in Darwish language is something new, it is a newness that remarks an older poetic, rhetorical, and linguistic tradition.6 It is not that language in Darwish points to what has been called “the liberation of words from their lexicographical stagnation and their general or stable meaning” but that it teaches a way of remaining with tradition during the time of its loss and devastation.7 This devastation points to the loss and destruction of Palestine in 1948, and it reaches into the nineteenth century, to another place and another time, to gesture to the loss of language and an ode. Such losses are not set aside, transcended, or overcome in poetic statement. Neither are they mourned or left behind, if only, and not solely, because they form a condition for language. What one is given in Darwish is a reflection on a responsibility in reading, a responsibility to loss and death in which one is schooled in poetic utterance.

To consider the relation of poetic utterance to loss in Darwish I turn to a single word as it appears in a volume of poetry titled Limadha tarakta al-hisana wahidan? (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?) (Beirut, 1995), which I read in relation to the epigraph to this chapter and the inheritance to which that epigraph points. The word I read is here (“Here is a present that yesterday doesn’t touch . . . [hahuna hadirun la yulamisuhu al-ams . . . ]” [L, 28/22]), and it forms the occasion, I argue, for an event of citation in relation to the destruction and loss of Palestine.8 If poetry, in Darwish, is an “act of freedom” (FH, 64), this is only insofar as language is already touched upon by another, where “one word rubs against another, and rhythym gives way” (AB, 149), and where language is a name for the interruption of the free act of a poetic subject.9 Najat Rahman has compellingly written that in Darwish poetic statement is a “discontinuity,” where loss guards the poem (“Loss here is protected, guarding the lyric”).10 This discontinuity does not follow upon a continuity, but it points to the bereaved time of poetic statement. Time and homeland, Rahman underlines, are “mediated already through loss” (61). This mediation involves a relation to the force of the imperative: the commanding gesture of the opening words of the jahili ode, a poetic form that preceded the institution of Islam, and the imperatives given in the Qur’an. The qur’anic injunction is an injunction to recite—“Recite: In the Name of thy Lord who created, created Man of a blood clot [iqra’ bi ismi rabbika alladhi khalaka, khalaqa al-insan min ‘alaq]” (Qur’an 96:1–2)—and it already touches upon the tongue of the poet.11 Poetry in Darwish, and as Muhsin J. al-Musawi has underlined, “means recitation.”12 This anteriority teaches an attention to the words Darwish cites and the legacy to which they point, as it gives those words to be read through their iteration in a time of loss. If in the fallout of colonialism and with the formation of literary institutions language is to be recognized historically, in historical, and not solely historicist terms, in Darwish, what is said to belong to the past is already touched upon by language. Poetry is formed and displaced through this anteriority, and it occurs, in Darwish, as something other than itself, where “language doesn’t settle down.”13

Mourning the Poem

Whenever I looked for myself I found others.

Mahmoud Darwish, Jidariyya

In reading the passage in Darwish I have underlined (“Here is a present that yesterday doesn’t touch”), I draw widely upon his poetic and prose writing. Rather than underscore a division of his poetic corpus into phases (early and late, before and after Beirut, the political and the aesthetic), I ask how his poetry confounds these temporal and other forms of designation. I do so because in his poetic text language is already bereaved. “You, from now on, are another” (AF, 275), Darwish writes, suggesting this bereavement in a relation to an alterity which touches upon “you” not only “from now on” but already. “Now,” in Darwish, is already in relation to another time, it speaks to us of a past and of what belongs to a time and a place that are no more. And language holds the words of others to give place to poetic statement, an event that is its own because it repeats and iterates, cites and recites. Darwish’s poetry is said to belong to what Shakir al-Nabulsi has called the “modernity of language.”14 Language is said to occasion a movement “in itself” (607), and this movement is to point to the future. “Whether the verb is perfect, imperfect, or a command, each one bears in its womb a seed of the future” (608). But to read language in genetic terms—in terms of an understanding of language as an entity that grows and develops in time, to give place to a future—is to mute the movement the critic underlines. Movement is not something that comes from itself—language in Darwish is not autonomous and what takes place with it is not a sovereign, anthropocentric event—but something that already takes place in relation to others. “Although the subject surely speaks, and there is no speaking without a subject, the subject does not exercise sovereign power over what it says,” Judith Butler has written.15 Already “the lines and borders that separate life from death” break apart.16 This temporal relation does not impinge upon language but gives place to it, to become a condition for the future. A future is solicited in poetic statement (“What will happen . . . What will happen after the ashes?” [L, 14/6]), but time is not thought based upon a present that grounds a relation to a past and a future. Time is already a mode of division. Like language, it parts from itself to be itself (“We shall only meet parting at the crossroads of speech [lan naltaqiya ila wida‘an ‘inda muftaraq al-hadith],” Darwish writes [80/86]). This event, a coming apart that is immediately a departing, in the offering of a word of farewell, is an event of language which, in Darwish, is what a poem is.

I am you in words. A single book

binds us. I bear the ashes you bear, while

we were, in the shade, two witnesses, two victims

two

short

poems

about nature

waiting for the destruction to end its feast. (L, 56/56)

The passage I cite here appears in a poem titled “Hibr al-ghurab” (The Raven’s Ink). It is the third poem in the second cycle of poems in Limadha tarakta al-hisana wahidan?, and in it the poetic subject, “I” (“I am you in words”), speaks in the first person. The words are addressed to the raven, which in the Qur’an, in Surat al-Ma’ida, had been sent to search for a site so that Cain might bury the body of his brother, Abel. But the voice of the poet is also the voice of the latter. “Be my second brother/ I am Abel, the earth returns me/ to you as a carob tree, so that you may sit on my branch, oh raven” (56/56). The poetic subject is a voice that speaks as the voice of a brother who has died. And it is only later, belatedly, that in reading this poem one must return to its opening lines and read them again. “You find solitude in the desolate carob tree, oh/ dark-voiced bell of sunset! What/ do they demand of you now? You searched in/ the garden of Adam, so that a casual killer could conceal his brother,/ and you locked yourself in your blackness/ when the victim opened onto its expanse,/ and you withdrew into your affairs like absence withdrew/ into its own” (54/54). The movement of reading compelled in this passage—to read the poem one must return to its first words and reread—points to the corpus of texts I have begun to underline. It points to the trope of the return of the poet to a site of loss, to the remains of an encampment and the loss of a beloved, in the opening section of the jahili ode, the nasib.17 In Darwish poetic voice is not given through an unmediated relation to tradition, as if this voice, and if also the past, were “outside of the world, outside of time (AB, 122). Voice is not given in a w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Introduction: Loss
• 1. Citation
• 2. Philologies
• Excursus: Names
• 3. Repetition
• 4. Literature
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index