Exploring a New Methodological Approach to the Rhetorical and Metrical Analysis of Contemporary Arabic poetry: Naǧīb Surūr’s Love Words

Modern linguistics theoretical works on al-balāgha [Fehri1982; Moutaouakil1982] rarely acknowledges how deeper inquiries on al-balāgha and the Arabic metrical forms might be essential in exploring the essence and expressive qualities of Arabic poetics, along with its evolution and ontological framework over the millennia. Najīb Surūr (1932–1978) was an Egyptian poet, dramatist and literary critic of the 60s and 70s’ generation, whose unconventional and eclectic production was both appreciated and neglected by the critics of his time. Being gifted in his ability to bridge both classic and modern genres and compositional techniques, Surūr was far-reaching in his literary explorations, alternating between courage, humor and childlike wonder, reminiscent of a modern-day Don Quixote. Largely due to his criticism of the Egyptian regime’s policies and cultural elites, however, Surūr’s enchanting literary production has faced censorship and has remained silent from the 70s up to the present day. Particularly, since 2011 – he has frequently been misread as a hyper-politicized rebel genius as opposed to an extraordinary author and intellectual [Abū al-ʻAlā1989; Fontana2018]. Applying endogenous analytical tools from the Arabic literary, metrical and rhetorical tradition, this paper argues that the perennial continuity/estrangement relationship reflected in the aesthetic experimentation of Najīb Surūr can in fact be tied to his ancient cultural (literary) background. In order to illustrate these linkages, we pursue a culturally embedded approach to ‛ilm al-‛arūḍ and al-balāgha, investigating the metrical and rhetorical forms that occur in Najīb Surūr’s experimental poem Love Words (1966), according to the canonical tripartition of Arabic rhetoric set-out by al-Qazwīnī and as-Sakkākī (fl. XII-XIII). In doing so we uncover the possible experimentation and interplay that takes place between ancient references and innovation in Surur’s Love Words as a revisited prosodic free-verse poem inspired by both Nāzik al-Malā’ika’s compositional techniques and classical Arabic poetry’s ones, enabling us to reconstruct a more organic criticism of the author’s work in a contextual framework. Drawing upon several in-depth analytical examples, we would like to argue that a culturally embedded, formal and rhetorical methodology not only allows us to observe experimental aspects of contemporary literature from a cross-temporal perspective but may also contribute to a paradigm shift (away from Eurocentric analyses) in literary theory, allowing for a deeper exploration of the structure, substance and evolution of both classical and contemporary Arabic poetics.