City of Beginnings

Robyn Creswell's City of Beginnings takes its title seriously: it explores the novel poetics of a 1950s group of poets in Beirut—the title's metaphoric city—known for their magazine Shiʿr [Poetry]. The group represents one of “the deepest fault lines in the cultural Cold War,” which Creswell attributes to “the issue of literary autonomy” (8). The founding poets Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, and Unsi al-Hajj adopted literary autonomy from late modernist culture. Late modernism, unlike its early twentieth-century counterpart, professionalized literary forms by establishing standards of competence to oppose Communist approaches to art. In the Arab Cold War context, the self-anointed modernists made good use of late modernism's claims of autonomy: often unintentionally, they used the global movement to revise the world of world literature.Creswell's narrative accomplishes three things: first, it introduces the English-speaking reader to the Shiʿr group; second, it historicizes their espousal of Cold War liberal aesthetics through their exchanges with both the Central Intelligence Agency's Council for Cultural Freedom (CCF) and indigenous mentors; and finally, it shows how in rejecting nationalism, “Arab modernism throws a light on the recent history of the concept of world literature” (16). To be seen as part of world literature, the poets translated modernist poets like Ezra Pound, Saint-John Perse, and Antonin Artaud. Placing his work in line with other criticism that reads more than defeat in Cold War aesthetics, Creswell's book highlights the “newness” of the modernists' poetry precisely in how they translate their own tradition and other forms. The book declares itself “the first study” of this period that combines archival research with close formalist reading to show how literature itself was affected by the historical context (10).His book is thus divided into eight chapters: the first three narrate the historical conversations that frame Arab modernism. The next four chapters challenge the straightforward historical narrative by reading two definitive anthologies: Adonis's 1961 Songs of Mehyar the Damascene and Unsi al-Hajj's Lan (1960), the first collection of Arabic prose poetry. The final two chapters are dedicated to Adonis's work, which is representative of the group's legacy despite the poet's departure in 1963. Through a combination of historical grounding and creative close reading, Creswell's book brings much needed attention to the indigenous background of Arab poetic modernism.While their modernist contemporaries were already putting their works in museums, the Beiruti poets approached modernist thought as “an adventure” (44). Their project is “outlandish,” Creswell suggests, because of “unfaithful and extreme translation” of modernist literature (50). The poets were extreme because they refused to identify as nationalist poets: they insisted that producing world literature or al-adab al-ʿalami demanded “apoliticism” and “deprovincialization” (46). Creswell puts it baldly, “the Arab poets wanted to write in the international style while the CCF wanted them to write something authentic” (46). Ironically, both the CCF and the Arab Marxists attacked the modernists on the same grounds: for the CCF, the modernists' disconnection from their tradition alienated them from other intellectuals. For the Marxists and nationalists, Arabic literature must relate to its heritage or it would become rhetorical play. For the modernists, however, doing away with local color would establish Arabic literature in the international scene. All these battling discourses turned on a presumed contradiction between the nation or watan and “worldiness.” The Marxists and pan-Arab writers could not see why one would exclude the other. The Beiruti modernists made that the condition of their poetry.One of the movement's key concepts was introduced surprisingly and demonstrates the complexity of Creswell's story. In another attempt to join a global intellectual culture, the Shiʿr group adopted the “category of man” as person or al-shakhs (19). It was not, however, international poetry that produced al-shakhs. Rather, Charles Malik, Yusuf al-Khal's philosophy professor at the American University of Beirut who helped draft the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, mediated this shift from the collective to the person “as an abstraction that stands above any collective” (75). Malik bequeaths this essentially Christian doctrine to his student al-Khal, who espouses this philosophy in line with the Cold War critiques of communist collectivism. While the nation concerns the collective, al-shakhs represents not an individual subject but the integrity of the human. The focus on man replaces “political struggle with poetic heroism” (77) and enables the Shiʿr poets “to turn away from political militancy towards a heroized notion of cultural struggle, a shift with consequences that have lasted into the present” (58). By embracing what Creswell names “personalism,” the modernists present poets as a “professional intellectual class,” specialists as opposed to the generalist litterateurs of previous decades (69).To illustrate this philosophy unique to the Shiʿr group, Creswell reads Adonis's The Song of Mihyar (1961). He shows through the “logic of literary forms and figures” that the supposedly modernist turn “inward” is in fact “a series of turns away” that perform “a drama of displacement and disfiguration.” Creswell attributes this turning away to Adonis's form of the prose poem that he “borrows” from Perse. If inheriting the prose poem from Perse represents a turning away, his work's debt to the Arabic qasida represents a turning back. The turn away is from a nationalist politics toward what Creswell names a repression of the political. It is unclear if the repression is conscious, but it enables Creswell to argue for “a turn away” from as opposed to an absolute rejection of the political. Creswell convincingly shows how late modernism's “project of aesthetic autonomy and cultural apoliticism” produced “another, often unwitting form of political commitment” (43). Al-Shakhs then mobilizes the Shiʿr poets' political mission: to safeguard the autonomy of literature and integrity of the poet.Personalism also unfolds through the poets' translations and records their journey from political commitment to a nationalist collective to quite separate, isolated poets. Creswell demonstrates how Yusuf al-Khal's inaccurate translation or “virtuosic misreading” of American poet Robinson Jeffers's “Night” renders it “a parable of humanist fortitude set in a specifically Lebanese seascape” (83). Al-Khal uses translation as naql or copying that goes out to other sources only to come back to a “local imaginary.” It is this style of translation that determines the group's mission to be “authorized by acts of importation.” For Adonis, translation must accommodate the local literary register at the expense of al-Khal's “professionalist ideal of naql ‘without any liberties’” but both agree that “the plunge into the foreign is simultaneously an act of self-legitimation, an assertion of one's citizenship in the republic of man” (111). Reading Adonis's poetry, Creswell locates his repetitive turning away as definitive of “the modernist movement in general, whose literary project stems from its unacknowledged loss of political agency” (114). Creswell repeatedly identifies the lost object as “nationalist politics” not in a redemptive gesture but in an attempt to historicize the lyric genre against popular critical efforts to dehistoricize it. Throughout, Creswell smoothly fleshes out Shiʿr's philosophy with close readings. For example, he reads Unsi al-Hajj's Lan (1960) as an Arab record of the disintegration of the concept of man before its continental dissolution with 1960s poststructuralism. In another failed translation, al-Hajj rereads Antonin Artaud to question “the transmissibility of humanism” and critique “the modernist project of Shiʿr” (133).Adonis, Creswell continues, embarks on another form of undoing when he produces a countercanon based on “the heritage in fragments” (149), opposing the Leftists' efforts to reclaim the heritage for an Arab nationalist identity. Adonis also feared the state's increasing encroachment on cultural institutions. Literary autonomy—emancipatory more than utopian—becomes “autonomy from the state” (167), and renders the modernists a “persecuted sect” held together by a “common experience of marginality and specifically literary ‘commitment’” (174). As such, Creswell contests Adonis's supposed radicalization post-1967 when he championed the Iranian revolution for Adonis was already radical when he embraced literary autonomy (180). Adonis remains true throughout to Arab modernism's “globalist ambition” (186): namely, its skepticism of all political affiliation, refusal of leftism and “insistence on autonomy as the condition for literary ‘revolution’” (192). Creswell explains Adonis's swift turn away from equating political and cultural revolution in 1979: in his 1980 manifesto of modernism, Adonis reaffirms “the split between literary and political history” as again the “language of revolution is reserved for literature” (199). Creswell focuses on Adonis to argue that the modernists never abandoned their original “fantasy of escaping the coils of ideology into the open waters of world literature” (201).Creswell's book brilliantly traces how Arab modernist poetry reconfigures literary autonomy and political commitment. It appeals to scholars of Arabic, translation studies, comparative and world literature, and those interested more generally in reading a non-Western literary tradition in its own historical context. Occasionally, I wanted the book to read this tradition in relation to other contemporaneous Arabic poetic forms and more broadly within a South–South comparative paradigm. Such comparisons would go a long way toward further populating the worlds of world literature

Art · Literature · Modernism (music · Poetry · History · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Middle East Politics and Society

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