Journal Article

Dreaming the Kinetic Avant-gardist Self

Ali, Zahra A. Hussein

2016

Overview

Upon its publication in 1960,TawfTq Sayigh's paradigmatic prose poem \"Out of the Depths I Cry Unto You, O Death\" caused a sensation in Arab literary circles. Nevertheless, owing to its abstruse nature, neither its meaning nor its conception of avant-gardism received due scholarly analysis. This study explores Sayigh's conception of literary avant- gardism and three interrelated strategies that underwrite that avant-gardism in the poem \"Out of the Depths I Cry.\" The first strategy is the text's multifarious and intertwined range of biblical and literary intertextualities. Aside from drawing on the poetics of jahili poetry, especially the trope of the horseback as a site of poetic composition, and the Book of Jeremiah, Sayigh employs two Biblical metaphysical conceits: that of a galloping white horse from the Book of Revelation, and that of a millennium-old unsettling locality in Jerusalem-the Hinnom Valley. A second strategy is the cultivation of aesthetic connections with western literature. Sayigh integrates aspects of John Donne's poetic art; it could be argued that \"Out of the Depths I Cry\" shares thematic and aesthetic affinities with Donne's \"Good Friday: Riding Westward 1613.\" A third strategy is foregrounding, by means of the seventeenth-century's tradition of the conceit, the secular value of kinesis, a term which connotes the initiation of transformative cultural dynamics. In employing these three compositional strategies, Sayigh aims to subvert bardic attitudes and obscurantism in an Arabic literature that aligns itself with official and mainstream ideology, and concoct a new dialectics between the aesthetic and the axiological.

• Publisher: جامعة الكويت - مجلس النشر العلمي
• Subject: الأدب العربى / التناص الشعرى / الشعر العربى / صايغ، توفيق (1923-1971) / قصائد ودواوين