Messages, Texts, and Rhetorical Detachment in Contemporary Mahri Poetry

Abstract

Despite its geographical and linguistic proximity to the Arabic language, the Mahri (or Mehri) language (ISO 639-3: gdq) of Eastern Yemen and Western Oman has remained a non-written language into the present era. While older generations of Mahri speakers never considered the prospect of a written idiom for their language, recent years have witnessed efforts to compose and circulate texts in the Mahri language. These circumstances have yielded a poetic praxis that traverses the domains of orality and literacy; they also enable us to identify lexical and syntactic characteristics that betoken where in the shifting terrain of oral and literary composition a poetic work occurs. I will examine the appearance of one such lexical and structural motif – the dispatched messenger – in a recently composed collection of Mahri language poetry, The Dīwān of Ḥājj Dākōn (2011). Embarking from the notion of textual autonomy developed by Chafe, Olson, and Tannen, I argue that the sudden appearance of the messenger motif in Ḥājj Dākōn’s poetic collection is a by-product of his adoption of a written practice. In this way, we can establish that a stance of rhetorical detachment is a hallmark feature of an emergent written practice, even at its earliest stages.