A Thousand and One Laylas: The Politics of Narrative Embedding in Laila Neffa’s Ais

Abstract

In Montevideo in 1951, the Uruguayan-born Lebanese poet and translator Laila Neffa published the poetry collection Ais. Framed within the semi-historical legendary story of Layla al-ʿAmiriya and Qays ibn al-Mulawwah, two seventh-century Bedouin poets whose forbidden love resulted in madness and death, this was Neffa’s elegiac homage to her brother Ais, who passed away in adolescence. This article reads Ais as a re-appropriation of Jorge Luis Borges’ literary sleight-of-hand, involving mise en abyme, enacted by the Argentine author on the Arabian Nights in his 1949 essay “Magias parciales del Quijote”. I propose that Neffa’s re-appropriative act facilitates a “speaking back to” and an “opening up” of a varied selection of Arab, Arabo-Persian, and Euro- and Spanish-American discursive traditions. These negotiations, translations, and transformations of tradition, I argue, set in motion a recovery of self and others, of Laila and Laylas, in the wake of personal and collective trauma.