Mourning Women: Two Modern Takes on Arabic Elegy

Emily Drumsta

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Chapter 10 Mourning Women

Two Modern Takes on Arabic Elegy

In: The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

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Emily Drumsta

Emily Drumsta
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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 202–223

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004723603_012

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Abstract

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.

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The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

Series: DQR Studies in Literature Online, Volume: 66/1, DQR Studies in the Lyric, Volume: 66/1, and DQR Studies in Literature, Volume: 66/1

E-Book ISBN:: 9789004723603

Publisher:: Brill

Print Publication Date:: 14 Jan 2025

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African Studies	Education	Media Studies
American Studies	History	Middle East and Islamic Studies
Ancient Near East and Egypt	Human Rights and Humanitarian Law	Musicology
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Asian Studies	International Relations	Religious Studies
Biblical Studies	Jewish Studies	Slavic and Eurasian Studies
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Chapter 10 Mourning Women

Two Modern Takes on Arabic Elegy

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The Contemporary Elegy in World Literature

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