Figuration and Disfiguration in The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene

Abstract

Among all the figures produced by the Arab modernists, it is Mihyar, the gloomy, many-sided hero of Adonis's Aghani Mihyar al-Dimashqi (The Songs of Mihyar the Damascene, 1961], who most powerfully represents the Shi'r poets' conception of man. This chapter tries to explain how collective defeat and the subsequent renunciation of political activity left its mark on a poetics that is avowedly “nonpartisan,” abstract, and universal. It argues that Mihyar's “turn” is not to be conceived of as a turn inward but rather as a series of turns away—first of all, from the commitment to nationalism. It further suggests that the figure of apostrophe or the Arabic iltifat, both words meaning “a turn away,” is the central trope in Adonis's canonical collection.