The Prometheus Myth in the Sculptures of Sami Mohammad and the Plays of Aeschylus and Shelley

Abstract

Speculations on the human quest for freedom and the necessity of flinging open the floodgates of oppositional discourse have long been privileged themes in art and literature. Among Arab sculptors, no artist has taken up more seriously than Sami Mohammad the mission to perturb us with his reflections on these issues, and no artist has centered his aesthetics more resolutely on the task of thematizing them in order to unmask the dystopic conditions engendered by a floundering modernity.1 The nature of the bleak reality that his visual art addresses is political and ethical; yet it underlies the linguistic as well. With a Bakhtinian spirit, Mohammad places the signs of his visual discourse in a historical and cultural context. He neither separates the social from the individual, nor the civic from the spiritual, nor yet language from speech To interrogate, to chastise, and to allude to redemption, Mohammad, like some canonical figures of Western literature who have written politically motivated works, carries on a fervid dialogue with Greek mythology. In my view, during the years 1980 to 1990, which coincided with, among other climactic tragic events (the massacres at Halabja, the eight-year Iraq-Iran war), the consolidation of power of several authoritarian regimes, his dialogue seems to be concentrated around the figure of Prometheus. The perspective of this study is biaxial: contextual and comparative. As a comparative study it postulates that aesthetically, Mohammad’s concept