Dreaming the Kinetic avant-gardist self : Tawfiq Sayigh, John Donne, and Poetry on Horseback

Abstract EN

Upon its publication in 1960,Tawfīq Ṣāyigh’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 Ṣāyigh’s conception of literary avantgardism 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 jahilī poetry, especially the trope of the horseback as a site of poetic composition, and the Book of Jeremiah, Ṣāyigh 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.

Ṣāyigh 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, Ṣāyigh 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.