The Social Roots of the Arabic Free Verse Movement

Abstract

On 27 October 1947, the Iraqi poet Nazik al-Malaʾika (1923–2007) wrote “ ا ل ك و ل ي ر ا ” (“al-Kulira”; “Cholera”), an experimental poem that defied the traditional rules of Arabic prosody. Al-Malaʾika wanted to write a poem in response to the outbreak of the cholera epidemic in Egypt and felt that the traditional forms restrained her ability to express the intensity of her feelings about the tragedy. Al-Malaʾika’s father, himself a man of letters, rejected the poem as “ ا خ ف ا ق ك ا م ل ” (“a total failure”), warning her that she could not transgress the boundaries of Arab taste with a poem defying deep-rooted and time-tested conventions (qtd. in al-Malaʾika, “al-Shiʿr” 92; my trans.). But the ambitious poet persisted, betting her father that the experimental poem “ س ت غ ي ر خ ر ي ط ة ا ل ش ع ر ا ل ع ر ب ي ” (“would change the map of Arabic poetry”; “Al-Shiʿr” 93). And she was right. The publication of “al-Kulira” represents a turning point in modern Arabic literature, as the poem is “recognized as the first example of its kind, a dramatic break with fourteen centuries of metrical orthodoxy” (Creswell 72). Al-Mala iʾka called the new form of poetry ا ل ش ع ر ا ل ح ر (al-shiʿ r al-hụrr; “free verse”), which allowed for breaking the monorhyme and varying the number of feet in each line of verse. The new formwas an immediate success, and although it was hardly the only mid-century experimentation with form, al-shiʿ r al-hụrr proved “the most successful metrical experiment in twentieth-century Arabic poetry” (DeYoung). Al-Malaʾika, one of the Arab world’s most famous poets, was born in Baghdad on 23 August 1923 to a well-educated family. After graduating from the famed Iraqi Teachers’ Training College in 1944, she received a Rockefeller Scholarship to study literary criticism at Princeton University, before earning a master’s degree in comparative literature from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Afterward, she returned to Iraq and held teaching positions at the Universities of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul until 1970, when she moved to Kuwait to work at Kuwait University. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990, al-Malaʾika moved to Cairo, where she lived until her death, on 20 June 2007.