12 Feb 08

Professor Clive Holes talking to an Arab poet about his work

Traditional-style Bedouin poetry distributed hand-to-hand by unofficial means provides an outlet for popular political dissent in the Arab world, according to new research at Oxford University.

Popular poetry is thriving in the Arab world and is shifting to a younger generation through the use of electronic communication such as cassettes, faxes and text messaging. The content of the poetry is often political, usually about local politics but also international issues, although lyrical and love poetry is not unknown.

‘Galloway’s Victory’ and ‘Hey Condoleezza Rice!’, a poem put in the mouth of George Bush, express popular sentiment often excluded from the official, government controlled media.

This division between official media and popular culture reflects more ancient differences: modern Arab Bedouin poetry in colloquial Arabic goes back 1400 years to traditional desert poetry as an oral art form. This desert poetry was red-in-tooth-and-claw – in contrast to the urbane, flowery versifying of royal court poets. The tradition is carried on today, and represents not only a division between official and unofficial culture but also the tensions between modern urban living and the traditional Bedouin lifestyle.

The Oxford project has involved recording, transcribing, annotating and translating into English verse a selection of over 40 poems composed by five different poets between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the on-going occupation of Iraq.

Clive Holes, Professor for the Study of the Contemporary Arab world at Oxford, who is leading the research, said: ‘Poetry is the supreme art form amongst the Arabs, and this work reflects a tradition that goes back fourteen centuries. Modern popular poetry is the voice of the little people, critical of the powers that be, often bitingly satirical in tone. Over time popular poetry diverged from over-stylised official court poetry. That same division can be seen today between the tame official media and this poetry with its pungent content which is scurrilous, libelous and often painfully funny.

‘This is verse that comes from largely unpaid poets who take pride in their Bedouin roots. Their work reflects a poetic version of colloquial language. It is poetry that respects traditional styles and forms but has been updated for present times – when composing an ode for example a modern poet will no longer lovingly describe the physique of the camel on which the bearer of the poem will be carried to the recipients but instead the four-wheel-drive vehicle, with its power steering, smooth gear change and quick acceleration.'

Alongside the Bedouin tradition, there is also an urban one. A ‘star’ of this urban tradition is Ahmed Fu'ad Nigm, whose poetry provided a subversive commentary on the wars, sit-ins and food riots that characterised Egyptian politics and society in the 1960s and 70s.

In some of the less urbanised Arab societies such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan popular poetry is regarded with pride as part of the "Bedouin heritage", but it sometimes looks backward to past eras of tribal conflict that the governments would rather forget. During a Bedouin dispute on the Saudi-Jordanian border in the 1960s, for example, poetry was used as a weapon, and means of expressing grievances between the Huwaytat and Bani ‘Atiyya tribes with tit-for-tat poems of vituperation. The governments concerned had to step in and call a ‘poetic truce’, since had the exchange continued, it would almost certainly have led to real fighting between the tribes.