Anatomy of melancholy

Youssef Rakha enumerates the distress signals
Last month actress Soad Hosni's death cut short a week-old debate about the viability of prose as an appropriate poetic medium for the present. Writing against prose poetry and the Generation of the Nineties in Al-Ahram, the well-known poet and literary authority Ahmed Abdel-Moeti Hegazi -- once a pioneer of "free poetry," now a staunch classicist -- had prompted a number of writers and critics to respond variously to both his censure of the poems in question and his problematic claim that Arabic poetry must remain tied to the rules of rhyme and metre known as Aroud Al- Khalil (Ibn Ahmed), after the eighth-century scholar who set them down.
As they prodded the implications of both points, notably in Akhbar Al-Adab, Hegazi's detractors in particular seemed to be spraying vitality into the cultural ether. For them the articles in question highlighted a myriad nodal points about the politics of creativity and the meaning of Arab identity at the present historical juncture. For a moment the interfaces of literature and life enjoyed a direct connectivity, with aspects of the latter (e.g., the tendency to promulgate fundamentalism) reflected in the dynamics of the former (e.g., the discourse of an allegedly liberal "establishment poet"). In the political context, the critic Mohamed Badawi wrote, Hegazi "refuses to concede the claim made by others that there is a linguistic discourse that holds for every time and place -- otherwise he would not have differed with the proponents of political Islam -- yet when it comes to poetry Hegazi forgets liberalism, abandoning the call for intellectual multiplicity."
Many contended that the adjuncts with which the prose poem is negated -- imported, subversive, abortive -- are based on an ideological prejudice that arbitrarily judges the authenticity and credibility of a work of art by whether or not it abides by the rules of the past. Confronted by the death of a celebrity of Hosni's stature, alas, the spirited campaign in defence of prose poetry retreated after only a few exploratory operations. The link between the claim that a rhythmic basis in the Aroud is the most essential attribute of the Arabic poem irrespective of time and place, on the one hand, and the principles of "political Islam," on the other, was not sufficiently pursued. And while the campaign died out, grief for Hosni gave way to sensationalism, conspiracy theory and obsession. At a time when the debate could have evolved into a many-sided dialogue, lesser issues like the criteria by which state-award winners were designated this year overwhelmed the literary press as poetics were firmly elbowed out of the scene.
Should poetry (shi'r) be written in prose (nathr)? The question has bobbed on the surface of literary life since the Seventies, generating debate but no dialogue, scaling hefty philosophical questions -- e.g., what is poetry? -- down to the level of semantics. And at this level, at least, it is a question that seems to beg itself, as it were. If one defined poetry simply as that which is written in verse (nazm, the antonym of nathr), it would be nonsensical to ask whether it should be written in prose too. That the 18th-century literary renaissance conceived of poetry as something other or at least more than the correct application of the rules of the Aroud, on the other hand, makes the question largely irrelevant. As the critic Gaber Asfour noted, the scuffle over prose poetry is "an issue that no longer has any justification at all, whether from the viewpoint of history or of reason... The battle against prose," Asfour added, "is a meaningless battle."
"Free poetry," a project that budded in the Forties and came into its own contemporaneously with national independence in the Fifties, initially employed two methods of composition that had the same goal: a more accessible, more expressive and often more lyrical poem, liberated in terms of both sound and format. One method -- the taf'ila -- concentrated on format, applying traditional rhymed metres to lines of indeterminate length rather than contriving to fill the predetermined metric grid of a traditional poem, often switching from one metre to another in the same poem or abandoning rhyme altogether. The other method tackled rhythm head on, championing the search for previously undiscovered sounds in place of the rigid, monotonous beats of the Aroud.
Somewhat ironically it was the former, less radical method that, in the Fifties and Sixties, most beautifully embodied the revolutionary project of national independence and the search for a new, liberated Arab identity. Poets who belong to the famous Generation of the Sixties (Salah Abdel- Sabour, Amal Donqol and Hegazi, to mention but three) almost invariably used the taf'ila, while with a few notable exceptions (Mohamed El- Maghout and Onsi El-Hajj), the latter method -- composition in prose -- lurked in the background until the Seventies, a time of social and political disillusion that the taf'ila, some felt, could no longer adequately accommodate. Yet many continued to uphold the taf'ila, dismissing the prose alternative as ideologically suspect, too easy or simply second-rate. In the Nineties the advent of alternative fora like Al-Kitaba Al-Okhra and the short-lived Al-Garad acted not only to confirm the critics' suspicions but confused prose poetry with the overabundance of self-centred, body- oriented angst and the absence of historical perspective in much of what these two publications showcased. The majority of those responding to Hegazi acknowledged at least this much: that a lot of what has passed for prose poetry since the Nineties is inferior.
Hosni's death also obscured the memory of Olfat El-Rubi, a young scholar who died a year before at about the same time, and to whom the exiled scholar Nasr Hamed Abu Zeid paid tribute in Akhbar Al-Adab. Reviewing her work on narrative (qasas), Abu-Zeid made a relevant observation about the history of Arabic criticism. In comparing narrative to poetry, the philosopher Averro�s asserted that the narrative function operates independently of metre even if the text is written in verse, whereas the poet's objective is never fully realised without metre.
It was this argument, in a nutshell, that the taf'ila poet Hassan Teleb relied on in his self- consciously affirmative response to Hegazi's articles. Prose is presented as poetry, Teleb wrote, because "metre is seen... as a superfluous ornament," a claim that betrays "ignorance of psychological and linguistic research that proved metre... to be essential to the embodiment of the emotional dimension of poetry." But Teleb did not conclude that poetry in prose is a philosophical impossibility. Rather, he pointed up the most convincing part of Hegazi's argument: where composition in verse has produced the most cherished and best remembered Arabic poems down to the present day, composition in prose has seldom yielded anything of much value; the individualistic, transgressive poems of the Nineties served only to "induce the disgust of poetry lovers."
Notwithstanding El-Maghout's exquisite constructions, which benefit indirectly from the rhythms of the Aroud, enough beautiful prose poems have been written to indicate that the medium is practicable, at least. As Asfour notes, part of the reason prose is so staunchly rejected is that Egyptians have conservative literary tastes. The poet Abdel-Moneim Ramadan, too, pointed out that however many inferior prose poems are being written, the large-scale adoption of the genre promises a positive transformation. And in the same way as the bulk of taf'ila poetry in the Fifties was inferior, it is only to be expected that the bulk of prose poetry now should solicit the distaste of taf'ila readers. Yet without "the inferior majority," the minority would not survive.
Sadly, the debate largely ignored individual poems and poets, concentrating instead on the dynamics of metaphor and sound. In much the same way as metre was said to be indispensable, Teleb and others insisted that metaphor, too (according to Averro�s, a discourse that, unlike the false inventions of narrative, employs mimesis to tackle the truth) is indispensable to poetry, declaring the "liberation from metaphor" posited by such poets as Mohamed Saleh -- whose work, incidentally, bears testimony to the viability of prose poetry -- to be nihilistic nonsense. Be that as it may, the poetic charge has been known to emanate from even the most prosaic of compositions, and writing that seeks to straddle two or more of the three most popular canonical categories -- poetry- verse, rhetoric and letters -- has many illustrious antecedents through history. Surely part of the mystery of poetry in any language is in the diversity of its forms.
The greatest and perhaps the saddest irony concerns Hegazi's historical shift of perspective. Once the victim, along with Abdel-Sabour, of the kind of censure he now practices -- in the Fifties the taf'ila was rejected in Egypt as an attempt to pass prose for poetry -- Hegazi has now assumed the position of the interrogator.
"It is not simply that the man is defending his golden poetic moment in the face of the sweeping spread of the prose poem throughout the Arab world," wrote the poet Refaat Sallam. "Rather, it is the ceaseless attempt to recreate the golden past in the corrupt and nihilistic present. Time and its transformations are the greatest foe of the formerly established poet," who no longer produces poetry, "dissolving his freshness and his magic, and removing the many masks to reveal a skeleton or rubble... This is why the movement is one of regress, of placing the past ahead of the present to eliminate the effects of time."
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