TY - JOUR
AU - Drumsta, Emily
AB - AbstractThis 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.
TI - Mourning Women
JF - Journal of World Literature
DO - 10.1163/24056480-00801002
DA - 2023-04-21
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/brill/mourning-women-iaD1RA00eE
SP - 123
EP - 144
VL - 8
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -