War, Poetry, Mourning: Darwish, Adonis, Iraq

Nouri Gana

O my friend,
There’s no room for the poem on this earth,
Is there any room for this earth in the poem, after Iraq?
— Mahmoud Darwish, “Faras li-l-gharīb” (“A Horse for the Stranger”)

To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.
— Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society”

I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature.
— Adorno, “Commitment”

Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems.
— Adorno, Negative Dialectics

Theodor W. Adorno’s by now infamous dictum that “to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” still weighs heavily on various modern and contemporary representations of war and violence, especially in the Arab world, where the legacy of the Holocaust, entangled with differing or dueling national claims to Israel/Palestine, exerts enormous existential pressure.1 The artistry and lyricism of poetry for Adorno reenact and continue the foreclosure of veritable otherness in favor of the variable cults of selfhood (including self-sacrifice), of which Auschwitz is the product. Wittingly or unwittingly, poetry signals a concern for the subjectivity of the living even when (I almost said “precisely when”) it addresses itself to the irreducible singularity of the deceased; by purporting to speak in the name of the victims of atrocity, it threatens to defuse and disperse the specificities of their death along the universal continuum between life and death; thus it not only subtly perpetuates rather than disrupts the rationalizing aims of war and mass slaughter but also, and by the same token, indirectly retards or blocks altogether the very process of apprehending and reckoning with extremity. In short, by offering to represent the unrepresentable and nonsensical nature of military violence and ethnic cleansing, poetry, Adorno cautions us, risks making the unthinkable thinkable.2 Herein becomes starkly discernable the barbarism that clusters thick underneath the act of writing lyric poetry after Auschwitz: while it definitely seeks to fulfill the laudable task of mourning atrocity, poetry seems nonetheless to require atrocity — as its inaugurating principle — for it to fulfill retrospectively the task of mourning of which it becomes simultaneously the product and the vehicle, if not, indeed, la flèche et la cible, the arrow and the target. Obviously, Adorno is not unaware of the equally discomfiting voyeurism of the reverse position — the perplexed resignation to silence — of which the sheer magnitude of his post-Holocaust oeuvre constitutes in and by itself an unequivocal negation.3 Yet since the distrust toward poetry might be in excess of our ability to overcome it, it has never ceased to fuel our contemporary disenchantment with representation, casting under the shadow of the culture industry the countervailing ethical powers and politics of the aesthetic in the wake of catastrophe.4

While the enduring validity of Adorno’s aphoristic indictment of lyric poetry after Auschwitz cannot be overstressed in a world that continues unabashedly to structure itself around the geopolitics of catastrophe, of preemption, and of deterrence, its distinct configurations in contemporary Arabic poetry fall irresistibly less under the shadow of the Holocaust than under the shadow of its proximate historical corollary, the Nakba, or the catastrophe of 1948 — that is, the massacre of Palestinians and the dispossession of their lands, homes, and other properties as well as the illegal military occupation of historical Palestine by Israel, which continues to this day. Like Adorno, many Arab poets have pronounced the impossibility of poetry after every post-Nakba political onslaught on Arab land, from the devastating 1967 Israeli preemptive strike against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria (referred to or sublimated in Arab parlance and imagination as the Naksa, or temporary setback) to the more recent Operation Iraqi Freedom orchestrated by the so-called Coalition of the Willing against Iraq. In the Arab world it has become equally barbaric and therefore tacitly impossible to write lyric poetry after the Nakba; it is as if the lyrical intelligence cannot redeem (itself from) what happened then, much less aspire thereafter to what can no longer be possible. The Nakba brought to a sudden ending the promise of beginning (i.e., Palestinian national self-determination and Arab unity), which lives on as an aftereffect, an afterthought of sorts, or as an ending without end because the moment to realize it was irremissibly missed.5 I argue that most Arab poets have appropriated Adorno’s dictum less as a death certificate meted out to lyric poetry than as a gesture of inconsolability, less as a license to intellectual gloom or cynicism than as an incitement to poetic insurgency.6 Above all, Arab poets have implicitly or explicitly conjured up Adorno’s celebrated axiom to draw attention to the embattled referential differentials of the geopolitical legacy of Auschwitz in Europe and the United States, which constituted the limits if not the confines of Adorno’s thought from 1949 to 1969, and in the Arab world, where the creation of Israel, which came on the heels of the unspeakable crimes committed in Auschwitz, went hand in hand with the Palestinian Nakba and therefore amounted for some to nothing more than a form of expiation of European guilt, especially if judged by the unconditional support that Israel receives from Europe and the United States despite its flagrant and repeated violations of international law and the UN Security Council resolutions.7

Adorno’s ban on lyric poetry after Auschwitz takes on special significance after the Nakba, which preceded the ban by one year. Lifting the ban would mean not only that lyric poetry must have been transformed but that it must have in the process transformed the conditions that made Auschwitz possible. However, one condition, of which the Nakba is a direct result, is the same old “pathological nationalism” that, according to Adorno, led to Auschwitz.8 To speak at all of lyric poetry after the Nakba is precisely to wonder whether anything has been learned from Auschwitz.9 The phrase “lyric poetry after the Nakba” is a deliberate variation on “lyric poetry after Auschwitz,” yet it is also an approximation and a reinstatement of the disaster and, more important by far, a rigorous demand that any discussion of Auschwitz must confront, not defuse, the reality of the Nakba, the coercive dispossession of Palestinians, and the splintering occupation of Palestine.10 Above all, the phrase “lyric poetry after the Nakba” enables the literal recognition of evocations of Auschwitz in the Nakba to heighten the intensity, the ironic shock, and the suddenness of an otherwise unexpected scenario (or l’ironie du sort) of victim-become-perpetrator. While more an instance of comparative development than an absolute frame, the reverberations of Adorno’s dictum in modern Arabic poetry are ultimately a matter less of verifiable influence than of critical analysis. Arab poets retain the monstrosity that Adorno’s master phrase denotes but open it up to the seriality of catastrophes whose disparate monstrosities have yet to penetrate forms of intelligibility and habits of mind alien, if not almost blind, to them.11 This should be seen not as an attempt to chain metonymically or equate tout court one extremity with another but, rather, as a cautionary reminder that the hierarchical perception of injustices (not to mention narcissistic and envy-ridden attachments to competing and politicized histories of victimhood) might make their potential recurrence seem palatable — even permissible. After all, nothing could be gained from the mutually insulated monumentalizations of 1948 as a celebration of independence in Israel and as a commemoration of the Nakba in Palestine.

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Notes

A shorter version of this article was presented at the Modern Language Association’s Arabic Discussion Group panel “War Narratives,” Philadelphia, December 2006. I thank Amal Amireh for organizing and chairing the panel and for acting as a thoughtful discussant. I also thank all the executive members of the Arabic Discussion Group and the audience for their feedback. Particular thanks go to Anouar Majid and Nabil Matar for their encouragement. Last but not least, I am grateful for the constructive commentaries offered by Claudio Lomnitz and by all Public Culture anonymous readers. Transliterations from Arabic and diacritical marks are adapted from the guidelines of the International Journal of Middle East Studies. I also provide transcriptions from the original Arabic. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (New York: Verso, 1980), 189. It will become clear in what follows that even though Adorno revisited and revised his indictment of lyric poetry after Auschwitz, he kept alive the productive tension between aesthetic commitment, which by itself can verge on tendentious propaganda, and aesthetic autonomy, which by itself can boil down to nothing more than the cultivation of art for art’s sake.
2. Adorno’s first mention of “poetry after Auschwitz” occurs rather intrusively in “Cultural Criticism and Society,” an essay that was written in 1949 and published in 1951 and that primarily concerned the unmasking of the dialectic of culture and barbarism (of which Auschwitz is the last installment) and, more specifically, the exposure of the complicity of the former with the latter: “The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation” (Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988], 34). What is important to bear in mind here is that Auschwitz is but one moment, perhaps the most revelatory, in a wide-ranging historical process of “absolute reification” that is about “to absorb the mind entirely.” In this sense, Auschwitz is the agent of the impossibility of poetry only insofar as it is the product of this general historical process from which critical intelligence itself is not exempt even though (indeed, in spite of the fact that) it remains the only means of trespass. As an expression of free human intelligence, poetry threatens, should business continue as usual, to give the semblance of freedom from within a context of uncritical unfreedom (i.e., the open-air prison). For ideology percolates even “the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today,” and its co-optive ruses cannot therefore be intuited and undone unless we remain constantly on the qui vive.
3. Adorno leaves no stone unturned in his attempt to undermine any uncritical way out of our discomfiting complicity in all cultural formations mediated by Auschwitz: “All post-Auschwitz culture, including its urgent critique, is garbage.... Not even silence gets out of the circle. In silence we simply use the state of the objective truth to rationalize our subjective incapacity, once more degrading truth into a lie” (Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [1973; rpt. New York: Continuum, 1995], 367).
4. In A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, Julian Barnes asks, “How do you turn catastrophe into art?” His answer bears witness to what Adorno calls the culture industry and to what Barnes seems to associate with the institutionalization of the atrocity aesthetic and disaster capitalism: “Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We’ll have a play on the London stage within a year. A president is assassinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book or the booked film. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what catastrophe is for” (A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters [Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1989], 125). Barnes’s final verdict that catastrophe is clearly the midwife of art makes Adorno’s ban on poetry after Auschwitz somewhat justifiable. Nevertheless, both Barnes and Adorno are disenchanted with art’s inability to rise to the challenge of proffering a measure of aesthetic justice and a voice to the victims of catastrophe without commoditizing suffering for the benefit of a runaway consumerist and forgetful culture. While ineluctable, art’s failure is perfectible, or so is the fundamental tonality variably audible throughout modern Arabic poetry.
5. In an important essay on Arabic literature after 1948, Edward W. Said drew attention to the significance and magnitude of the Nakba: “After decades of internal struggle against political chaos and foreign domination, a struggle in which politico-national identity was still at its most precarious initial stage — with religion, demography, modernity, language enmeshed confusingly with each other — Arabs everywhere were forced additionally to confront as their own problem, taking an especially provocative form, one of the greatest and still unsolved problems of Western civilization, the Jewish question. To say that 1948 made an extraordinary cultural and historical demand on the Arab is to be guilty of the crassest understatement” (“Arabic Prose and Prose Fiction after 1948,” in Reflections on Exile and Other Essays [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003], 45–46). Drawing on Constantine Zurayk’s provocative book Ma‘nā al-Nakba (The Meaning of the Disaster), Said then demonstrates that 1948 “on the one hand reveals the deviation from what has yet to happen (a unified, collective Arab identity) and on the other reveals the possibility of what may happen (Arab extinction as a cultural or national unit)” (47).
6. Adorno gradually conceded, albeit in a typical admixture of ironic detachment and melancholic disenchantment, that poetry remains necessary: in 1962 he narrowed down his 1949 generic indictment of “poetry after Auschwitz” to “lyric poetry,” arguing that literature “must be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism. Its own situation is one of paradox, not merely the problem of how to react to it.” For Adorno, the abundance of human suffering ought to make us wonder “whether any art now has a right to exist; whether intellectual regression is not inherent in the concept of committed literature because of the regression of society.” Yet precisely because the “abundance of real suffering tolerates no forgetting,” “it is now virtually in art alone that suffering can still find its own voice, consolation, without immediately being betrayed by it” (“Commitment,” 188). Almost three years before his death in 1969, Adorno half admitted art’s inalienable right to exist but then immediately complicated it, if not negated it altogether: “Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living — especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared” (Negative Dialectics, 362–63). Clearly, unless poetry were to desublimate the survivor’s guilt, it may not have been wrong to ban it.
7. The disjunctive temporalities of Auschwitz and the Nakba have to do more with their geopolitically polarized and polarizing reception, manipulation, and dissemination than with their historically relational causality or, for that matter, with the dialectic of nationalism and barbarism, of which they are de facto the product. Be that as it may, it is ironic that Europe, by supporting the creation of Israel, was indeed, as Gil Anidjar suggests, exporting to the Arab world not only the Jewish question but also the Arab/Muslim question, whose history in Christian Europe, particularly during the Holocaust, has been willfully elided. See Nermeen Shaikh, “The Jew, the Arab: An Interview with Gil Anidjar,” www.ciaonet.org/wps/ang02/index.html (accessed July 14, 2009).
8. Theodor W. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 98. Adorno refers mainly to German nationalism here, but his insights could be applied to all forms of nationalism, including Zionism, about which he speaks only indirectly, as when he warns against the internalization and dissemination of the “delusional mania of nationalism”: “To the extent that the delusional mania of nationalism openly manifests itself in the reasonable fear of renewed catastrophes so, too, does it promote its own diffusion” (98). Especially revelatory is Adorno’s condemnation of the Armenian genocide: “Genocide has its roots in this resurrection of aggressive nationalism that has developed in many countries since the end of the nineteenth century” (“Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models, 192). One might think that the “resurrection of aggressive nationalism” in reference to the Young Turk movement is an implicit criticism of Zionism, yet Adorno did not, to the best of my knowledge, openly condemn or unequivocally criticize Zionism. In 1967, following Israel’s preemptive war against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, he condemned the Arab states for posing “a terrible threat to Israel” (quoted in Andrew Robin, “The Adorno Files,” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Robin [Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002], 189). In The Psychological Technique of Thomas’ Radio Addresses, Adorno links the anti-Semitism of the American Christian Right in the 1930s to Nazism by systematically and comparatively unmasking the devices both made use of. However, Adorno remains silent about settler Zionism, even though he denounces Thomas for taking issue with Jewish “settlement” (or “resettlement,” as Adorno sometimes calls it) of Palestine “without making it clear whether he favors this settlement or resents it”: “The weight of the anti-Semitic propaganda within Thomas’ speeches is incomparably greater than the actual amount of his frank anti-Semitic statements” (The Psychological Technique of Thomas’ Radio Addresses [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000], 120–21). Are we not left to wonder, by the same token, whether the weight of Adorno’s silence about Zionism (not to mention his later and weightier silence about the colonial occupation of Palestine) is incomparably greater than the actual amount of his frank critique of anti-Semitism and all forms of fascism and nationalism? In general, I find Christopher Wise’s provocative remarks about Jacques Derrida on Francis Fukuyama almost applicable to Adorno on Thomas: “While no one can deny that certain forms of evangelical Christianity in the United States, whether they are articulated by sophisticated State Department intellectuals like Fukuyama or Bible Belt Protestants, have served to reinforce historically racist policies aimed at Arab Muslims and Christians in Palestine, it may be worse than misleading to aim exclusively at such targets while remaining silent about actual Zionist policies that have been implemented in Jerusalem/Al-Quds, the West Bank, Gaza, Golan Heights, and so on” (“Deconstruction and Zionism: Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx Diacritics 31 [2001]: 62).
9. I would be remiss not to mention Adorno’s pedagogical imperative: “The premier demand upon all education is that Auschwitz not happen again.... Every debate about the ideals of education is trivial and inconsequential compared to this single ideal: never again Auschwitz” (“Education after Auschwitz,” 191). This must be understood as an interdiction not only of any compulsive tendency to repeat the injustices committed in Auschwitz but also of any conscious manipulation of the Holocaust to oppress others. Indeed, according to Noam Chomsky, Nachem Goldman, who is considered one of the most conservative yet most honest Zionist leaders, deemed it a “sacrilege,” if not downright “sick” (as Chomsky himself characterizes it), to use the Holocaust to justify the occupation of Palestine and the dispossession and massacring of Palestinians (Language and Politics, ed. Carlos Otero [Edinburgh: AK Press, 2004], 568). Zionist that he was, Goldman spurned any endeavor that traded on the crimes committed against Jews to warrant the victimization of Palestinians. Yet the visceral denigration and defamation of Goldman (e.g., he was denied a delegation to his burial in 1982) by other Zionists implies that there is more than a Freudian compulsion to repeat at work here. Gilles Deleuze succinctly and acutely parodies and challenges Freud’s well-known formulation of compulsion-repetition by propounding that “we do not repeat because we repress,” but “we repress because we repeat” (Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton [New York: Columbia University Press, 1995], 105). If we bear Deleuze’s dictum in mind, the quelling of Goldman’s voice and legacy becomes revelatory of a deliberate inclination to repeat that is engineered by the cognizance that the dispossession of Palestinians recalls, more than anything else, the dispossession of European Jews — a dispossession that should have been remembered and mourned, not displaced and reenacted.
10. I borrow the expression “splintering occupation” from the masterful analysis of the necropolitics of Israeli occupation in Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15 (2003): 28. See also Nouri Gana, “Reel Violence: Paradise Now and the Collapse of the Spectacle,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28 (2008): 20–37.
11. During the film Notre musique (Our Music), in an interview with Judith Lerner (pseudonym of Sarah Adler), a journalist from Tel Aviv, Mahmoud Darwish speaks of the precarious positioning of Palestinians in their struggle with Israeli Zionism and propaganda: “Do you know why we, Palestinians, are famous? Because you are our enemies! The interest in the Jewish question is at the origin of the interest in us. So it is unlucky for us that Israel is our enemy, because it has an endless number of supporters around the world. Yet we are also lucky that Israel is our enemy, because the Jews are at the center of the attention of the world. Thus we suffered defeat at your hands and reached fame.... we suffered defeat at your hands and reached fame.... Yes, you are our Ministry of Propaganda, because the world has more interest in you than in us, and I have no illusions whatsoever about this.” See Jean-Luc Godard, Notre musique, DVD, 80 min., Fox Lorber, 2005; see also www .youtube.com/watch?v=eTYkPOrXxnA (accessed July 10, 2009). I thank my students in the course The Legacy of Mahmoud Darwish (spring 2009), particularly Shad Naved, for drawing my attention to this segment.