The Poetics of Disclosure Narrating the Six-Day War in the Poetry of Nizar Qabbani

Abstract

Within defined political and aesthetic contexts, the 1967 war poetry was an attempt to re-describe and re-constitute projections of the war in Arab media and popular culture. Repudiating war and its diabolical motives, several Arab poets question and subvert a complex pattern of nationalist myths that gave rise to the 1967 war and sustained it. In this context, the paper explores the provocative war poetry of the great Arab poet, Nizar Qabbani , written in the aftermath of the 1967 war between Israel and three Arab armies. In his denial of the process that aims to obscure the war and bury its atrocities beneath cultural amnesia, Qabbanireveals narratives of trauma and pain demystifying a phenomenon that centuries of history have glorified. Within the parameters of contemporary critical theory, the central argument, in the paper, aims to interrogate the war narratives purveyed by Arab politicians and official state media and their destructive impact on collective Arab memory. The poems, investigated in the paper, aim to engage the politics and the language of war questioning the myths and the monolithic political discourse that triggered the war and paved the way for the defeat.