The Stunning Vistas of Funambolic Art
The poets at the center of this study write from multiple geographical locations, perform provocative changes in perspective, and reconfigure conventions of scale, shifting the reader’s attention from spectacular events and major global actors to everyday occurrences and minor agents. These poets juxtapose, bind together, and contrapuntally read divergent histories without ever falling victim to generalizations or to the danger of erasing crucial differences. As Susan Stanford Friedman writes with reference to the nature and methods of a comparative approach based on juxtaposition: “Juxtaposition can potentially avoid the categorical violence of comparison within the framework of dominance. The distinctiveness of each is maintained, while the dialogue of voices that ensues brings commonalities into focus.”1
The everyday as a heterogeneous common ground emerges as versatile and enchanting in the case of Nye; it is, however, also stale and monotonous in the poetry of Mersal and al-Massri. Disturbing repetitions, cold observations, and compressed sentences with no punctuation, together with the evocation of enclosed spaces and spectral objects, are the aesthetic strategies through which these two poets convey the atmosphere of apprehension, tedium, and weariness that pervades a socially and politically oppressive milieu. I claim that such an aesthetics of defamiliarization, which reveals the familiar either as uncanny or, alternatively, as enchanting, provokes a revision of habitual looks and attitudes and propels a desire for political change. Nye’s poetry, for instance, which pays attention to the marginal and the overlooked and celebrates queer assemblages that defy rigid compartmentalizations and bring the “odd one out” in again, offers readers the opportunity to see neglected things as relevant and to reencounter Others as significant and charming again. Nadine Ltaif, on the other hand, crosses temporal and geographical boundaries and combines objective and phantasmagorical reconstruction to unearth a traumatic history marked by religious strive, gender oppression, and collective amnesia, so that the resurgent specters of the past do not find us unprepared.
The poets included in this book liberate poetry from traditional aesthetic constraints, such as rigid rules of versification, fixed thematic motifs, predetermined structures, as well as from the impressive yet often vain linguistic virtuosism of their classical and neoclassical male predecessors. All of them unanimously refuse to “go . . . back to an old, venerable model, and to relive the glorious experience of ancient poets,” preferring instead to adopt free verse (shi‘r ḥurr) as their means of poetic expression.2 Unlike their Modernist predecessors, however, they do not use “referents and shared codes [that] target the more educated public” and succeed in reaching a wider, more popular audience.3 Nye, for instance, employs a spontaneous tone and a language that is fresh and easily understandable. Al-Massri’s style too is crystalline and unaffected; her tone is frank and straightforward, while the images she selects are easily recognizable. By embracing a conversational format and colloquial tone, moreover, Nye structures her poems on a form that is clearly antihierarchical and bears the influence of Mahmoud Darwish’s cadenced and dialogical compositions. Hammad’s choice to abolish capital letters is equally guided by democratic principles and calls to mind the radical linguistic experimentations of an antiwar poet like e. e. cummings, bell hooks’s attempts to deemphasize the self as well as the experience of the bauhaus at the end of 1925, whose founder Walter Gropius wanted to remake the world from the bottom up, saw no essential difference between a prototype for industrial production and a unique artisanal piece, and practiced a teaching that was not modeled on predetermined results.4
Multiple artistic traditions and literary sources play off one another within each single collection. In Nye’s case, the US tradition of travel writing is interwoven with the typical anecdotes and framed tales of popular Arabic literature and folklore. The influence of surrealism, as a local as well as a regional and global avant-garde movement that rejected art for art’s sake and used surprise and shock to upset and reverse old habits and preconceived ideas, is evident both in Nye and Mersal.
Regional literary motifs, such as the Maghrebi trope of al-ghurba, are engraved in Mina Boulhanna’s poems, while ancient Greek and Roman myths and symbols mark Ltaif’s poetic oeuvre together with typical, though twisted, Québécois themes. Classical Arabic tropes and genres, such as the “standing at the ruin” trope (or aṭlāl motif), the great ghazal (love poetry) tradition, and the elegiac genre (marthiya), which have been part of the Arabic literary tradition since the pre-Islamic era, are reworked and updated to the needs of the present time. Even sacred texts, such as the Qur’an and the Bible, and ancient tragedies and epics, such as Medea and the Odyssey, are a source of inspiration for the poets included in this book. Al-Massri employs images, rhetorical turns, and lexical terms drawn from the Qur’an to challenge traditional gender roles and conservative views of love in society, while Mersal plays around with Pharaonic vestiges and purposefully blocks the sentimentality mobilized by Egyptian melodramas, refusing to cultivate heated patriots and overemotional women. The Arab singing diva Umm Kulthum is a clear source of inspiration for Hammad; her poetry further bears the influence of the astonishing wordplay and syncopated rhythms of Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Jean “Binta” Breeze’s spoken word poetry.
All the funambulists considered here execute their remarkable leaps with extreme precision and rare agility. They have indeed learnt to accord their steps to the vibration and mood of the distinctive wires on which they walk. Ltaif, for instance, treads on a rope vibrating with grief and loss, while Mersal’s cable oscillates with nervousness and impatience. Affects are therefore ubiquitous yet distinctive. Hammad, for instance, uses minimal expression and the short line to communicate urgency, rage, and indignation, while al-Massri mobilizes tedium, unease, and fatigue to pinpoint, amplify, and possibly alter (affective) inequalities in the private as well as in the public domain. Patriarchs and political leaders may indeed change over time, with one bloody ruler being followed by a more “enlightened” one. What does not change, however, are the affects of deferent fear, blind attachment, and extorted loyalty that these male guardians and national guides command.
Still, the funambulists discussed in this book walk high above the heads of frightening patriarchs and tyrannical religious and political authorities, performing stunning acrobatic moves—jumps, glissades, and balancing acts—that leave the viewers spellbound. Their art is radically imaginative but also deeply grounded, and meant for an alert, reclined, and responsive viewer—one whose gaze is not fixed on the ground but whose eyes look up towards the sky.
Recurrent literary motifs such as the home, and, by extension, the nation, are rewritten in unexpected ways. In al-Massri’s poetry, for instance, the home metamorphoses into a nightmarish site: it is burdensome, dull, and flavorless. The intimate is indeed hooked into the national and the global dimensions, which exert an inescapable pressure on it. Mobility, another recurrent theme, is invoked when it is a free choice; when it is the only available option to find relief from an oppressive political that blocks one’s self-realization, it is cursed. Immobility, on the other hand, is presented only in dark light, as the product of despotic obstruction or neoliberal securitization, which increasingly cast the public space as dangerous and insecure and gradually encroach on basic civic liberties such as walking, traversing, and occupying public space.5
Overall, the poets considered in this book sabotage a unified narrative of fixed identities, mythic origins, and a univocal sense of belonging by showing instead that life trajectories are, as Ella Shoat argues, always “situated and conjunctural, shifting and transmuting across histories and geographies.”6 Since they all have good reasons to distrust filial forms of kinship, such as blood and sectarian ties, affiliation is what these poets emphasize throughout. Hammad, for instance, reinforces Afro-Arab cultural ties and political alliances and digs up the intercultural substratum from which monotheistic faiths originate, while Ltaif sympathizes with a remote and secluded group of twelfth-century maharanis as a symbolic act of sisterhood. The one performed by these funambulists is a form of “minority cosmopolitanism,” to borrow a term coined by Susan Koshy. Theirs is a cosmopolitanism that rests on “translocal affiliations that are grounded in the experience of minority subjects and are marked by a critical awareness of the constraints of primary attachments such as family, religion, race, and nation and by an ethical or imaginative receptivity, orientation, or aspiration to an interconnected or shared world.”7 I see Nye’s careful observation of the everyday, which captures unforeseen affinities between apparently distant things, as a clear participation in this project and a stimulus to seek forms of kinship outside the biological or sectarian framework.
Language, too, emerges from their collections as heterogeneous and mixed. Hammad, for instance, subjects English to incursions of Arabic words, while the Arabic in Mersal is interspersed with untranslated or transliterated English words to express typical North American experiences, such as buying organic food or using the remote control to open and close an automatic gate. This linguistic mix contributes to inflect what Werner Sollors has called with reference to the United States the “monolingual ideal” on which the nation-state is based.8 Still, the rather timid openings performed by Hammad and Mersal toward bilingualism do not lead to the radical and at times barely intelligible transformation of the dominant language that one finds, for instance, in the vernacular literatures of Zora Neale Hurston or M. NourbeSe Philip, as documented by Ahmad Dohra in Rotten English. Nor is their linguistic manipulation comparable to the weirding of English performed by bicultural writers such as Maxine Hong Kingston and Junot Díaz in prose, as shown by Evelyn Nien-Ming Ch’ien in Weird English.
And yet, as historian María Rosa Menocal and literary critic Karla Mallette have shown, multilingual writing is not a new phenomenon; in al-Andalus and the Kingdom of Sicily under Norman rule, to name just two examples discussed in this book, Arabic coexisted with Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and the local vernaculars.9 Rather, what has changed through time are the reasons that have pushed writers to borrow from and adopt other languages. As Khaled Mattawa has shown, in the first half of the twentieth century, poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound borrowed Greek and Latin words to situate themselves in a direct line of descent with canonical figures and great literary geniuses such as Homer and Dante.10 By contrast, the linguistic experimentations carried out by poets in the United States since the 1960s and 1970s were meant, in Mattawa’s own words, “to express the poet’s identity and perhaps aid the poet’s struggling subculture from being subsumed.”11 A similar intent, I suggest, animates also the writing of the poets considered here.
As funambulists who try the impossible, the poets discussed in this volume write against normative masculinities and femininities, emphasizing desire, self-determination, and personal fulfillment. By representing their female speakers as traveling alone, having an authoritative voice, and openly confronting tyrannical patriarchs, these poets write against the appropriation of the female body and the cooptation of feminist claims by ruling men and the political ideologies they support (nationalism, Marxism, neoliberalism, and Islamism).12 They further expose the silent connivance between authoritarianism, religious conservatism, and patriarchy, thereby confirming poetically what sociologist Nadje al-Ali has called “the centrality of woman and gender when it comes to constructing but also controlling an entire community.”13
What type of feminism, then, do the poets discussed in this book embrace? I think we should not speak of one unitary or overarching feminism, but of a plurality of feminisms. Mersal, for instance, is suspicious of the state as champion and supporter of gender equality, while Ltaif is still imbricated in the old diatribe dividing first world and third world feminism. All of them, however, seem to agree with al-Ali’s claim that “sisterhood is not global,” and that women must actively come together, gather forces, and build local, regional, and global alliances to combat gender oppression and violence worldwide.14 Together with Lila Abu-Lughod, the poets considered here are indeed skeptical about a single formula or solution that works for all women across the planet.15 They are convinced that the hardships that women face, both in the here and in the elsewhere, are disparate and discrete. Al-Massri’s feminism, among others, refuses to rescue women; hers is a feminism that, by blurring the figure of the patriarch with that of the authoritarian leader, inspires a desire for liberation capable of overcoming dichotomous and hierarchical gender divisions.
Since human bodies are at the center of the political order, the poets addressed include questions of embodiment into their analysis of politics. The body emerges from their collections as the site on which patriarchs, authoritarian leaders, and religious extremists extend their grip. It is, however, also one of the few available tools that individuals have at hand to express their discontent and rebel against a hegemonic power meant to crush them. The image of Mersal’s speaker biting her nails, while observing a disgusting army and a grotesque head (of state) is a good case in point. Her bodily affliction immediately communicates her refusal to let the importunate political figure go without saying.
Since high-wire walking is not only about clandestine acts but also about movements in space, the funambulists included in this study break the myth of universal mobility and of the arrival of the migrant in the new country as essentially good and thriving. They further oppose an almost purely academic version of nomadism, which refuses to see the innumerable barriers, obstructions, and blockades that many people in the real world encounter, as soon as they decide to leave their home. Since they promote both a radical re-vision and a political change, these poets-funambulists develop a new aesthetics aimed at changing standardized views and global imaginaries. From the heights of their wire, the Mediterranean Sea is not the sun-drenched and clear blue water advertised in touristic depliants but the burning front line of an undeclared global war, while Europe’s southern border has stretched into the Sahara, a desert that has been forcefully pushed into the line of fire. Not only the Mediterranean basin but also the planet at large look from the standpoint of these funambulists unfamiliar and bizarre: Egypt and Alberta have become adjacent lands, while “Europe’s veritable centre,” to borrow Menocal’s expression, has shifted from Mittleuropa to the peripheral province of al-Andalus and even to that burdening South so often blamed by Europe’s northern countries.16 From Hammad’s wire, in particular, America comes into view as an annex of the West Bank, while the Gaza Strip with the refugee camp of Khan Younis rubs shoulders with the similarly populous yet otherwise largely opulent cities of New York and Houston. If Mersal bemoans Europe’s recent metamorphosis into an entrenched citadel, she simultaneously bows her head to, salutes, and rejoices at the survival of a tiny village that has the size of a dot.
In Globalectics, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o underlines the crucial role played by orality in anticolonial struggle, explaining the following: “In the anticolonial resistance, song and dance played a pivotal role in recruiting, rallying, and cooling the social vision. The colonial authorities feared orature more than they did literature.”17 By being receptive to and giving prominence to the oral tales that a bunch of foreigners tell each other in a tiny map store in the heart of Manhattan, Mersal joins their struggle for recognition, self-determination, and liberation, implicating readers in her own anticolonial and decolonial practice.
In opposition to the exclusionary policies and violent acts carried out by neocolonial and neoliberal powers, who have erected walls, set up detention camps, and adopted deportation policies aimed at keeping out “undesirables,” these funambulists take illegal walks and voluntarily depart from the familiar to reach its far end. With their trespassing, they circulate and endorse a vision of the world based on love for (absolute) alterity, thereby performing a public, nonviolent breach of the law that prescribes separation, confinement, and isolation.
One finds a harsh critique of the proliferation of walled states and of surveillance measures in Mersal. Her poetry exposes international airports as high-security incarceration systems, while also turning the “official” spying of dictators on its head. After all, as Nanni Moretti’s documentary on General Pinochet’s coup d’état Santiago, Italia (2018) clearly shows, whenever a civil right is violated and a wall is erected, there will always be people ready to fight against those violations and to jump over those walls, trying the impossible. This is also what Emanuele Gerosa corroborates in One More Jump, a documentary on the Gaza Parkour Team founded in 2005 by Abdallah Inshasi and Mohammed Aljakhbir.
Far from feeding fantasies of self-sufficiency, complacency, and insularity, the poets discussed in this book emphasize human precariousness and interdependence, advocate shared actions in the name of individual and collective well-being, demand accountability for the material destructions, human rights violations, and horrible atrocities carried out by political authorities who most of the time reject responsibility. They also illuminate the privileges of the few and the frustrations of the many, warning readers against the violent reactions of those who feel dispossessed.
Through their unlicensed art, the poets-funambulists included in this book develop a harsh critique of apparatuses of the state, particularly of ruling elites, armed forces, and authoritarian leaders. They further invoke a renewal of existing democracies, showing, for instance, that neoliberal democracies have failed to live up to the expectations of the people they rule, since the lures of finance capitalism and the erosion of public goods, spaces, and services together with the encroachment of fundamental democratic principles such as equality, solidarity, nondiscrimination, and justice have almost neutralized not only the state’s commitment to the people’s welfare but also the citizens’ belief that politics serves precisely to improve individual and collective lives.
These funambulists do not simply hold up the mirror to reflect a political in crisis but poetically imagine an alternative political, inclusive, just, and participatory, in order for readers not to lose sight of the possibilities that are at hand. Theirs is a political that passionately engages in a set of considerate actions inspired by the principles of equality, justice, and sustainability; a political that does not monopolize the scene and darken the street, but patiently prepares the ground so that citizens can trustfully walk towards personal fulfillment and collective amelioration. The one imagined by these poets-funambulists is a “democracy to come,” in Derrida’s famous formulation—one that takes on responsibility for the actions it adopts and is not immune from prosecution; a political that foresees, anticipates, and cleverly governs the negative consequences of neoliberalism, globalization, climate change, global pandemics and wars, not one that is taken by surprise, held hostage, and runs at its best after them. Ltaif, among others, invokes a political that, instead of commodifying and marketing a people’s historical and cultural heritage, cares for and safeguards it, considering it a fundamental brick to build a constructive sense of “we.” The one imagined by Ltaif is, moreover, a political that engages in urban planning choices that do not exacerbate preexisting divisions increasing social tensions, but one that collaborates with the civil society to realize more sustainable and livable urban environments. Overall, the political imagined by the selected poets envisages future scenarios and, quoting Mahmoud Darwish’s famous lines, “invent[s] a hope, invent[s] a direction, a mirage to extend hope.”18
Since they have witnessed a series of historical and political failures that have frustrated their belief and trust in salvific figures, the poets addressed in these pages do not fuel the romantic phantasy of the intellectual as prophet, so in vogue in the nahḍa period. As Rasheed El-Enany underlines: “From the very beginning of the nahda, the Arab intellectual has borne the burden of the educator, the moderniser, the connector between East and West, the importer and adaptor of foreign thought and values, the very prophet of a brave new world.”19
Voluntarily breaking the relation between intellectual work and prophecy, the poets included in this book engage wholeheartedly in historical excavation and genealogy to understand the root causes behind apparently obscure events. The insights they gain are worth considering. First, colonization for these poets is not a thing of the “past,” and anticolonial and decolonial work is more necessary today than ever before. This implies not only decentering Europe and criticizing a knowledge and an education still permeated by a colonial outlook, but generating countermaps and counterhistories that offer, in Claire Gallien’s words, “alternative ways to conceptualize and experience the world.”20 This is work that one does not find in textbooks or anthologies and that remains to be done. Engaging in decolonial work also implies listening to and learning from “homegrown,” autochthonous, and therefore potentially different and disorienting views; it means being prepared to accept that antitheses, contradictions, and paradoxes are natural and productive and may not be easily diluted into a synthetizing whole. In Franco Cassano’s own words: “Every tradition remains and cannot but remain itself, but if it is pushed into a journey, it can come home having learned much and thus re-read its own history in a new way, valorizing something that it once knew but has since forgotten. Differences remain but can now host other points of view and all have taken a step not toward a unilateral universalism but rather a complex one traversed by a multiplicity of paths.”21
Even though “scholars of the new generation,” as Edward Said notes in his 2001 article “Globalizing Literary Studies,” “are much more attuned to the non-European, genderdized, decolonized, and decentered energies and currents of our time,” the structures in which these scholars operate—syllaba, curricula, canons, department organizations—are rather impermeable to change.22 According to Said: “Two aspects seem more in need of revision than others—first, the idea that literature exists within a national framework, and, second, the assumption that a literary object exists in some sort of stable or at least consistently identifiable form.”23
Let me take up Said’s challenge and provocatively ask: How does the study of literature and the evolution of literary genres and forms change in an increasingly globalized and interconnected world marked by international migration, global economic crises, environmental risks, and pandemic diseases? Are national curricula and syllaba offering the necessary tools to our students and to ourselves to understand the huge transformations we are currently witnessing? In Donatella Izzo’s compelling words, how can we “redeem . . . the humanities—and in particular literary studies—from charges of irrelevance?”24
In this book, I have favored a wide-ranging yet also close reading of literary texts to highlight their permeability and instability. Whereas Nye and Mersal experiment with the “slippery” genre of prose poetry, which, as Peter Johnson explains, “plants one foot in prose, the other in poetry, both heels resting precariously on banana peels,” Hammad’s poetic performances blur the boundaries separating performance art, music, and poetry, while also disrupting the traditional antagonism between literature and orature.25 Indeed, as Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o writes with reference to the hierarchical order in which writing and orality are normally placed: “The problem has not been the fact of the oral or the written, but their placement in a hierarchy. Network, not hierarchy, will free the richness of the aesthetic, oral or literary.”26 For her part, Al-Massri adopts and deviates from classical love tropes that abound in both secular and religious writings, while the epic genre is disliked by all the poets because burdened by a nationalistic mythology that rests on the us vs. them binarism. Finally, Mersal’s black humor confounds the fine line separating tragedy from comedy, showing that even humor, when it travels to new locations, takes an unexpected guise.
The controversial rubric of world literature, as a field that either pretends to study the literatures of the world by reading a strict selection of masterworks in translation or engages in distant reading practices that privilege “the system in its entirety” and accepts losing the text with its singularity, is put in question in this study.27 How can Weltliteratur in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s eighteenth-century Mittleuropean formulation be revised so that our students today may find it still interesting and helpful rather than obsolete and elitarian? To what extent would the practice of looking at literary texts as unruly and animated entities, which refuse to stand still, be generative and valuable? I agree with Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o when he notes:
Works of imagination refuse to be bound within national geographies; they leap out of nationalist prisons and find welcoming fans outside the geographic walls. But they can also encounter others who want to put them back within the walls, as if they were criminals on the loose.
Equally important, if not more so, are approaches to the text, how we read it. Do we want to welcome it or do we want to put it back into prison—or even a new prison? One can read a literary text with a narrow, short, or wide angle of view. It makes a difference whether one’s view is through a concave or convex lens.28
In my reading of these poetry collections I have attempted to adopt a “convex lens.” In order to do so, I have followed Erich Auerbach’s methodological approach as theorized in “Philology and Weltliteratur,” particularly his invitation to locate a circumscribed “point of departure (Ansatzpunkt),” from where it is possible to radiate outward.29 I see the poetry collections discussed in each chapter of this book as representing a good Ansatzpunkt, a concrete and precise point of departure with a “potential for centrifugal radiation.”30
I hope my still limited study of these texts will work as a stimulus for further developments and be taken on, deepened, and refined by colleagues working in the neighboring disciplines of gender studies, Arabic language and literature, Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, postcolonial and decolonial studies, philosophy, and Romance languages and literatures, as well as in the more distant fields of sociology, urban studies, political theory, history, geography, and religious studies. In a time marked by lockdowns, restricted mobility, social distancing and polarization, the need for proximity, connection, and trustful overtures is particularly pressing. This is why I have taken the liberty and also the risk to connect distant fields of knowledge and wander off in territories that exceed my immediate disciplinary expertise. I agree with James T. Monroe when he writes that professional insularity and specialism in a particular subject can sometimes work against ourselves, as in the case of the study of the tangled muwashshaḥ, a circled and strophic poetic form, whose origin dates back to the eleventh- and twelfth-century al-Andalus. This is Monroe’s valuable reflection, which we find in Mallette’s European Modernity and the Arab World:
There is no room in this difficult field for simplistic or one-sided solutions, nor for narrow appeals to professional insularity. Little can be gained from putting Arabists against Romanists. A serious study of muwashshah poetry requires that one be an Arabist, a Hebraist, a Romanist, and much else beside (musical expertise and literary competence are essentials), yet since it would be unrealistic to expect all of these areas of knowledge from a single individual, modesty and a spirit of collaboration are the least that may be expected.31
This reflection can also be ascribed to the literary works analyzed in these pages. In line with the poets-funambulists celebrated in this book, I am deeply suspicious of categories and organizing principles based on practices of demarcation, partition, and separation. These divisions have historically circulated the myth of homogeneous and impermeable identities, literary cultures, and nations. I see the authors included in this book as sabotaging with their intrinsically mixed and far-flung poetic projects these narrow and exclusionary narratives. Hammad, for instance, connects the Arab icon Umm Kulthum, who trained in religious singing and captivated her public with her vocal virtuousism, with radical Black spoken word poets and political activists Audre Lorde and June Jordan, a poetic move that complicates national, linguistic, cultural, and racial divisions together with the religious and secular divide.
The funambulists considered here have indeed situated their high wire far above the national, reattuning their walks to the vibrations and telluric undercurrents currently shaking the global world. As they get hold of these shocks, they urge us to change not only our societies but also our personal and collective libraries.
Comparing the occupation movement at Gezi Park in Istanbul, Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, and Syntagma Square in Athens, and the assembling in those squares of an alternative “people’s library,” Aamir R. Mufti notes: “The people’s library embodies the desire not just for different books—than those enshrined in national curricula or literary cultures or in globalized commercial publishing, for instance—but for different ways of reading, circulating, valuing and evaluating them.”32 I believe that this is also the demand that the poets included in this book make: to diversify canons, include new voices, circulate less-known books, especially those that are receptive to local tensions, regional changes, and global shocks as well as to minorities, noncanonical literary figures, and forms of expression belonging to popular traditions.
I see in the vision endorsed by Rabih Alameddine in An Unnecessary Woman (2013) of world literature as an intimate and yet cosmopolitan reading practice that contests colonial hierarchies, historical periodizations, and the logic of national and linguistic purity a valid antidote to abstract conceptualizations of world literature, which, as Rajagopalan Radhakrishnan claims, is primarily “a metropolitan and academic” preoccupation.33 I share Jane Hiddleston’s conviction that the grounded Saidian definition “worldly literature” is far more apt than the standard terms of Weltliteratur or “world literature” to keep critics, readers, and students down-to-earth, since it “suggests a way of thinking, an alertness to different cultures but also a worldly wisdom about the text’s limits that attenuates the utopianism of some theories of world literature.”34
The poets included in this book write “worldly texts”—that is, literary works that respond to concrete, mundane happenings, are created at a particular temporal juncture and in a specific geographical location, yet are deeply entangled in the world’s global net. These works, I claim, are inclined toward, listen to, speak together with, and respond to a variety of audiences, simultaneously local, regional, and global. Since they write in Arabic, al-Massri and Mersal’s primary interlocutor is clearly an Arabophone reader, yet one that lives either in an Arab country or in the Arab diaspora. These texts, which were originally conceived with an Arabophone reader in mind, become global, once they start to travel abroad and are translated into foreign languages and especially into English as the global language par excellence. While al-Massri and Mersal’s Arabophone readers may be more able to see through the density of their writing and manage to catch the nuances, double entendre, and innuendos enmeshed in their complex poetic creations, global readers may not always be able to find their way through that thickness and crowdedness, ending up feeling frustrated and disoriented. These poets-funambulists, however, are not interested in easying our way through the process of reading; on the contrary, they require serious engagement on the part of their readers as well as a willingness to leave the familiar and experience some level of estrangement. In Vilashini Cooppan’s words: “This is an ethics of reading whose goal cannot be conversion of otherness to sameness, an ethics of reading that must instead choose to stay blocked from the final assimilative moment, at home in the very moment of nonrecognition.”35
As Brian T. Edwards has shown regarding the strange ways in which US culture travels today to the Middle East-North African region collecting new and unexpected meanings, the cultural production of contemporary artists from the Arab region (and, I would add, also from artists living in the Arab diaspora) follow strange routes and get enriched with original imports. As Edwards has shown, these worldly wise cultural producers willfully refuse to adhere and respond to the expectations of what they perceive as distant and often unresponsive global readerships and at times even “jump publics,” refusing to take those publics seriously into consideration.36 It is precisely in their capacity to be so self-reliant and fierce and to dodge a global audience pretentiously convinced that it can do without them, that their irreverence and independence becomes more manifest.
Despite their initial intractability though, all the poets-funambulists included in this book offer stunningly broad vistas to those willing to follow them, which are worth the journey and the effort. Places as peripheral as the Texan countryside, the green fields of Oklahoma, the empty streets of Tyre or of an anonymous provincial town in Italy are reconfigured here as nodal points—sometimes even as “end points,” as Edwards would have it—in which the tensions and moods of the contemporary age are felt most powerfully.37 I claim that only by paying attention and listening to the marvelous views and frightful cries but also to the imperceptible shivers and intimate desires captured and put down in words by these poets-funambulists will we be able to forge a more accurate, nuanced, and perhaps also less catastrophic vision of our time. These funambulists have indeed learnt at their expenses how to move upwind, to conquer their fears, and to cultivate the patience of those who have fallen once. As we move forward and follow their steps to achieve a much needed balance and a long-expected opening of horizons, Darwish’s hopeful words may encourage us one final time:
Let us go,
Let us go into tomorrow trusting
the candor of the imagination and the miracle of the grass/38