Mourning Women

This article examines two modern women poets’ ambivalent engagements with Arabic elegy: the Iraqi Nazik al-Malaʾikah and the Egyptian Iman Mersal. Although they wrote in different national contexts and historical eras, with utterly distinct political and aesthetic projects, a close look at their verse reveals a specter of the bereft-yet-eloquent “ancient Arab woman” haunting their respective poetic voices. Looking in particular at a conventionally metered and rhymed ode like al-Malaʾikah’s “To My Late Aunt” (Ila ʿAmmati al-Rahilah) and at the quasi-elegiac threads woven through the prose poems in Mersal’s 1992 collection, A Dark Corridor Suitable for Learning How to Dance (Mamarr Muʾtam Yuslah Li-Taʿallum al-Raqs) allows us to see how durable and omnipresent the woman-elegy association is in Arabic – surfacing everywhere from the heyday of Iraqi modernism, with its revaluation of conventional metrical forms, all the way through the unmetered, unrhymed experimentations of the “nineties generation” in Egypt.