The Shape-Shifting Margin: Patterns of Change in Arabic Modernism Past Beirut

Abstract

This essay presents an initial foray into the rich field of modern Arabic poetry after the canonization phase of modernism in midcentury Beirut. Though by no means offering an exhaustive account, the chosen case studies are claimed to cover major orientations in forms of second-wave modernism that swept across poetic writing in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As Beirut became the prestigious metropolitan center for modernist poetics, shifts of sensibility are viewed in relation to its dominant modes and in terms of an altered imagining of the center-periphery duality. I follow two trajectories: a mode of exile, for which the Iraqi poet Sargon Boulus is representative, and a mode of domestic development. For the latter, I look to the cultural fringes of the Arab world—the Gulf and the Maghrib—to analyze how the Beiruti paradigm moves into new territories of culture, society, and politics. Even within a monolingual transregional literature, I argue, setting a dialectic in motion with a centralized tradition generates in each reiteration unique patterns of continuity and change. Ideological faults are redressed and, by consciously forming fissures, Arab peripheries propose a reintegration of poetic modernity into a more historically grounded, inclusive, and synchronized project.