One of the most ancient yet persistent motifs of Arabic poetry is “crying over the ruins,” or al-bukaʾ ʿala al-atlal. A poet traveling through the desert notices traces in the sand: ashes, animal dung, pottery shards, peg marks. He calls upon his companions to stop and weep with him over the departure of his beloved’s tribe, as well as his own lost youth. While this description summarizes much of what happens in the nasib or “amatory prelude” of many premodern Arabic poems, poets throughout the fifteen hundred years of Arabic literary history have persistently played on and reworked the foundational scene of the Arabic poet “crying over the ruins,” alternately amplifying its romantic, existential, or philosophical elements. The nasib is thus, in theory, saturated both with the sweetness of love’s memory and with the bitterness of its loss.

This panel will examine the lives and afterlives of the pre-Islamic nasib’s “joys and sorrows” in several historical and linguistic contexts, moving from medieval North Africa, Iraq, and Iran, to modern-day Palestine and Morocco.

Our first two papers will deal with premodern Arabic literature. Nizar Hermes starts off with “Mourning Over Palatial Ruins,” which examines three odes composed by the 13C historian-poet al-Sanhaji for Qalʿat Bani Hammad, an 11C fortress built by the Hammadids in the Hudnah highlands of present-day northeast Algeria. For many, Qalʿat Bani Hammad would have been doomed to oblivion had it not been for 19C French colonial archaeologists, but as Hermes shows, the fortress’ treasures and gems had been poetically preserved by al-Sanhaji. The paper illustrates how al-Sanhaji swaps out the conventional horizontality of ruins encountered in most pre-Islamic Arabic odes—on a flat desert landscape—for the verticality of Qalʿat Bani Hammad’s impressive towers and the monumentality of its mountain landscape. The paper thus highlights the context and history of the Arab Maghreb, frequently marginalized in Arabic literary scholarship.

Allison Kanner-Botan continues our discussion of premodern works with “Engendering Lament in the Legend of Layla and Majnun.” The paper analyzes how lament and gender work together in premodern Arabic and Persian versions of the legend of Layla and Majnun, tracing how motifs from the genre of elegy (rithaʾ) make their way into the love ghazals of the protagonists, a transference that plays with the classical association of the elegy with femininity. Locating and comparing elegiac motifs in four versions of the story, the paper argues that public lament feminizes Majnun and becomes a way for Layla to covertly expresses masculine desire, ultimately arguing that the association of lament with femininity opens up possibilities for thinking gender beyond embodiment.

The second half of the panel will focus on the modern period, and the late 20C in particular. Lubna Safi’s paper, “Writing Fluidity: Erasure and the Contemporary in Muhammad Bennis’ Kitabat al-Mahw,” shows how this Moroccan literary theorist's concept of “erasure writing” explicitly and implicitly borrows from the language of the nasib. Bennis, Safi shows, writes of the beloved’s “traces” (rusum) as a hinge between past and present, orienting the poet between here and elsewhere; of the beloved’s “tattoo” (washm) as the first instance of graphic writing; and of the “question” (suʾal) that propels the opening of the traditional ode and sustains its poetics. Bennis' re-theorization of the nasib offers a poetics that resists linear historicity and thus problematizes the distinction between the traditional and the modern.

Our final paper, “Elegizing the City: Mahmud Darwish’s Eleven Planets,” from Ahmad Abu Ahmad, examines this 1992 collection by the famed Palestinian poet in the context of the Arabic poetic tradition of “city elegies” (rithaʾ al-mudun), while taking al-Andalus as a setting and a reference point. In conversation with several medieval Andalusian poets, as well as the pre-Islamic muʿallaqat (“hanging odes”), Darwish embarks on a journey to lament his lost Palestinian abode by conjuring the 1492 fall of Granada. After establishing Darwish’s collectivization of the loss and grief over the lost abode, Abu Ahmad proceeds to illustrate Darwish’s idealization and immortalization of the fallen city, in line with the Andalusian elegies, and, subsequently, the impact this has on his state of liminality as a departing, expelled poet.

Collectively, these papers rethink and rework much of the standard scholarship on this persistent and surprisingly durable element of Arabic poetic aesthetics, much of which focuses exclusively on the premodern period. Moving through several historical, linguistic, and geographical contexts, this panel illustrates how the nasib continues to haunt Arabic literature, as many writers seem to be “crying over the ruins” of this literary form itself.