The poetics of postcolonialism: Two qasīdahs by Ahmad Shawqī

Journal of Arabic Literature

Volumn 28, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 179-215

  Kadhim, Hussein N ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 77951654804     PISSN: 00852376     EISSN: 1570064X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/157006497X00010     Document Type: Review

References (55)

1. The word "Arab" is used throughout this study to refer to the inhabitants of the geographic region known today as "the Arab World" who speak Arabic and most of whom subscribe to the ethos of either Christianity or Islam. Some scholars have maintained that Egyptians did not identify themselves as Arabs at the turn of the century. Yet here is Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, the pro-British Egyptian nationalist, writing in his newspaper, Al-Jarīdah, as early as 1907 in support of the efforts to hold a farewell ceremony for the retiring Lord Cromer: "But the character of Lord Cromer, the position he holds, the tie that exists between the Egyptian nation and his nation, and the need for harmony in the relations between the two nations in the interest of both, all of this should dissuade us from obstructing [the holding of] a farewell ceremony for him, from obstructing the honoring of his having been a guest [sic], and sending him off as required by national amicability and Arab generosity" (Al-Jarīdah, No. 44, April 30, 1907). Lutfī al-Sayyid's invoking the concept of Arab generosity indicates that his readers, the Egyptian reading public, identified themselves, at least to a certain extent, as Arabs and that the terms "Egyptian" and "Arab" were not mutually exclusive. See Ahmad Lutfī al-Sayyid, Safahāt Matwiyyah min Tārīkh al-Harakah al-Istiqlāliyyah fi Misr (Cairo: n.p., 1946) 79.
2. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson, eds., introduction, De-Scribing Empire: Post-colonialism and Textuality (London: Routledge, 1994) 1-11.
3. Of the various definitions of the term Postcolonial I have for the purposes of this study adopted the one proposed by Stephen Slemon. Slemon writes that "the concept proves most useful not when it is used synonymously with a post-independence historical period in once-colonised nations, but rather when it locates a specifically anti- or post-colonial discursive purchase in culture, one which begins in the moment that the colonising power inscribes itself onto the body and space of its others and which continues as an often occluded tradition into the modern theatre of neo-colonialist international relations." See Stephen Slemon, "Modernism's Last Post," in Ian Adam and Helen Tiffin, eds., Past the Last Post: Theorizing Post-Colonialism and Post-Modernism (Calgary: U of Calgary Press, 1990) 3.
4. One of the earliest treatments of these two poems is in Ahmad Muhammad al-Hūfī, Wataniyyat Shawqī (Cairo: Al-Hay'ah al-Misriyyah al-'Āmmah li I-Kitāb, 1960). The work is a broad historical survey of the major political and social events of the period punctuated with quotations of poems on these events by Shawqī as well as by other Egyptian poets, especially Hāfiz Ibrāhīm. Subsequent treatments have tended to rehash al-Hūfi's survey and have made no attempt to engage these texts analytically. See, for example, Mounah A. Khouri, Poetry and the Making of Modern Egypt, Studies in Arabic Literature, vol. 1 (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1977) especially pp. 37-102.
5. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993) 200.
6. Ahmad Muhammad al-Hūfī, Dīwān Shawqī, vol. 1 (Cairo: Dār Nahdat Misr, 1979) 369-74. For the original, see Appendix 3. All translations from the Arabic are my own unless otherwise noted.
7. Times [London] 6 May, 1907.
8. Times [London] 6 May, 1907.
9. An Arabic translation of Cromer's speech was published by El-Muqattam, a pro-British Cairo newspaper and, according to The Times' Cairo correspondentt was sold "by the thousands," Times [London] 6 May, 1907.
10. This translation is reproduced in Ahmad Lutfī al-Sayyid, Safahāt Matwiyyah 85-95.
11. Al-'Aqqād suggests an earlier date. He maintains mat Shawqi published the poem a few hours after the ceremony at the Opera House. Al-Hūfī, Dīwān Shawqī 1: 369 fn.
12. Albert Howard, "The Decline of the West in the Middle East - I," International Affairs (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs) 29 (1953) 29.
13. Times [London] 6 May, 1907.
14. In this context the term adab denotes a set of rules which define "proper" conduct which had become associated in the Arabo-Islamic collective memory with the upper echelons of society. For a study of the evolution of the term adab and its various meanings, see S.A. Bonebakker, "Adab and the Concept of Belles-Lettres," in 'Abbasid Belles-Lettres, ed. Julia Ashtiany et al., The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990) 16-30.
15. Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, "The Politics and Poetics of Ceremony: Al-Mutanabbī's 'Īd-poem to Sayf al-Dawlah," in Tradition and Modernity in Arabic Language and Literature, ed. J.R. Smart (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 1996) 133.
16. Times [London] 6 May, 1907.
17. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, Constance Farrington, trans. (New York: Grove Press, 1968) 43.
18. Peter Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995) 192.
19. Times [London] 6 May, 1907.
20. M.M. Badawi, ed., Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992) 6-11.
21. Peter Mansfield, The British in Egypt (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971) 140-41.
22. Elleke Boehmer, Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995) 24.
23. As Edward Said has shown in his landmark study, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979),
24. Cromer's views of the Oriental are informed to a great extent by Orientalist "scholarship." In his delineation of "the mental and moral attributes" of the Oriental, Cromer relies heavily on Alfred Lyall, Edward William Lane, Ernest Renan, as well as on the Napoleonic Description de l'Egypte. See The Earl of Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. II (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1908) especially pp. 123-200.
25. Times [London] 6 May, 1907.
26. Times [London] 6 May, 1907. 3z Tifffn and Lawson 10.
27. Times [London] 6 May, 1907.
28. Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid notes that "Under the protective mantle of the Capitulations, and often with the complicity of their Consuls, aliens could commit any form of crime with impunity; for they could be arrested only with the consent of their Consuls, and were tried in Consular courts where, more often than not, they were released without proper trial." Afaf Lutfi Al-Sayyid, Egypt and Cromer: A Study in Anglo-Egypttan Relations (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1969) 6.
29. A reference to Cromer's alleged encouragement of Christian missionary activity in Egypt during his tenure. See al-Hūfi, Dīwān Shawqi 1: 373 fn.
30. Ahmad Shawqī, Al-Shawqiyyāt, vol. I (Cairo: Al-Istiqāmah, 1961) 244-45. The poem is in kaāmil meter. For the original, see Appendix 4.
31. Muhammad Jamāl al-Din 'Alī al-Masadī, Dinshawāy (Cairo: Al-Hay'ah al-Misriyyah al-'Āmmah li I-Kitāb, 1974) 71-81.
32. The tribunal was composed of the following: Colonel Ludlow, representing the army of occupation; W. Bond, Vice-President of the Courts;
33. Fathi Bey Zaghlul, President of the Native Courts;
34. W. Hayter, acting Judicial Advisor;
35. and Butrus Ghali, the interim Minister of Justice. Lutfi Al-Sayyid 171.
36. Times [London] 28 July, 1906.
37. Telegram dated July 5,1906 to Sir Edward Grey, the then Foreign Secretary. Times [London] 28 July, 1906.
38. Viscount Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years: 1892-1916, vol. 1 (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1925) 130.
39. Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914 (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1988) 8.
40. Times [London] 28 July, 1906.
41. See Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, Abū Tammaām and the Poetics of the 'Ahhāsid Age, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1991) 113.
42. Also see Al-Sūlī, Sharh al-Sūlī li Dīwān Abi Tammām, ed. Khalaf Rashīd Nu'mān, vol. 2 (Beirut: Dār al-Talī'ah, 1978) 372-80.
43. Shawqī's accomplishment is in many respects similar to that of Abū Tammām. On the latter's transforming of the classical elements of the qasīdah to articulate (Abbāsid concerns see Stetkevych, Abū Tammam 110-34.
44. For a discussion of the aesthetics of resistance poetry, see Barbara Harlow, Resistance Literature (New York: Methuen, 1987) 31-74.
45. The use by poets of certain syntactic structures to underscore the subjugation of human beings is the subject of a number of works. For critical works that deal specifically with Arabic literature see, for example, Marilyn Booth, "Force and Transitivity: Bayram al-Tunisi and a Poetics of Anticoloniallsm," in The View from Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic Literature, ed., Ferial J. Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow (Cairo: The American U in Cairo P, 1994) 149-76.
46. Stetkevych, Abū Tammām 115.
47. "Qafr," Lisān al-'Arab.
48. Stetkevych, Abu Tammām 114.
49. Stetkevych, Abu Tammām 124-25.
50. Al-Khansā ', Diw̄n al-Khansā' (Beirut: Dār Sādir, 1963) 34.
51. Al-Sukkarī, Kitāb Sharh Ash'ār al-Hudhaliyyīn, ed. 'Abd al-Sattār Ahmad Farrāj, vol. I (Cairo: Dār al-'Ur̄bah, n.d.) 148.
52. For a discussion of pre-Islamic elegiac verse see Suzanne Pinckney Stetkevych, The Mute Immortals Speak: Pre-Islamic Poetry and the Poetics of Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1993) 161-238.
53. Stetkevych, Abū Tammdm 115.
54. Stetkevych, Abū Tammām 129.
55. Bernard Shaw, John Bull's Other Island (Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1907) 48-49.