The nation speaks: On the poetics of nationalist literature

The title page of George Antonius' classic study The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, published in London in 1938, carries as an epigraph in beautiful Arabic calligraphy the first hemistich of Ibrahim al-Yaziji's (1847–1906) famous ode: tanabbahu wa-stafiqu ayyuha al-‘arabu (‘Arise, ye Arabs and Awake!’). As I have argued elsewhere (Suleiman 2003: 96), this choice was not fortuitous: it was ‘intended to highlight the cultural nature of this nationalism in its initial stages’ in the nineteenth century; in addition, it was meant to draw attention to the fact that the nationalist idea was, as Antonius expresses it, ‘borne slowly towards its destiny on the wings of a nascent literature’, in which, it may be added, poetry played a leading role (Antonius 1936: 60). This reference to literature is echoed in the metaphorical use of the term ‘story’ in the subtitle of Antonius's book and in the ‘poetic’ flavour of his prose, of which the preceding quotation is an example. Although one may disagree with Antonius's narrative on periodisation and agency in the evolution of Arab nationalism, his views on culture and literature as sources of this nationalism are still as valid today as they were at the time of writing. In fact, I would go further and say that no account of Arab nationalism would be complete without understanding the contribution literature made, and still makes, to its articulation or to its role in group mobilisation.