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Placing the Poet: Badr Shakir al-Sayyab and Postcolonial Iraq, by Terri DeYoung. New York: State University of New York Press, 1998. x + 264 pages. Notes to p. 314. Bibl. to p. 325. Index to p. 333. $24.95.
Reviewed by Wail Hassan
That much Arabic literature of the l9th and 20th centuries is written in direct response to European civilization hardly needs proof-from Rifa'a alTahtawi's Takhlis al-ibriz fi talkhis Paris (1834) to the anti-colonial "poetry of occasion" by Ahmad Shawqi, Hafiz Ibrahim, Muhammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri and others, to the fiction of Tawfiq al-Hakim, Taha Husayn, Yahya Haqqi, Suhayl Idris, and Tayeb Salih. Terri DeYoung's study of the major Iraqi poet, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab demonstrates the extent to which anti-colonial struggle informs the practice of scores of poets, even the formation of the various "movements" in modern Arabic poetry-those that revived the classical aesthetic, those that rebelled against it (poets associated with the Diwan and Apollo groups and other Arab romantics), and those "modernists" who have revolutionized the timehonored conventions of prosody. DeYoung not only situates Sayyab's poetry in the colonial context to which it properly belongs, but also rereads and reassesses, from comparative and post-colonial perspectives, the poetic tradition in which Sayyab occupies a central "place." This important book is the most...