Abstract
This thesis demonstrates that modern Arab poetry of resistance by Adunis, Al-Bayyati, Darwish, and Qabbani moves beyond state politics through the poetics of imperfection and incompleteness. These four poets belonged to marginalised ethnicities within their homelands and felt exiled while living in the country of their birth. This thesis explores how their refusal to conform to the authority of state politics and social structure, which led to their lifetime exile, not only exacerbated their feelings of alienation but allowed them to develop alternative forms of expressing resistance. It also argues that these poets resisted the authority of culture, accusing their literary and cultural heritage of being a hidden power that deprives Arab culture of progress and change. As the thesis reveals, the selected poets accused the Arab state – its politics, social structures, and culture – of depriving the Arab, individually and collectively, of dignity, justice, and security. As I demonstrate, their work presents the homeland as a fatal environment that kills its own people. Even more radically, for Adunis, the homeland, as a state that accommodates diversity, does not exist in the Arab world at all. These poets’ resistance became a primary cultural intervention that questions heritage through their refusal of the Arab state as a set of power dynamics and cultural authority. Through the poets’ confrontational writing, the thesis reveals that colonialist intrusions beset the Arab homeland; more significantly, the Arab homeland disallows freedom and individuality but is rather a culture that sustains orthodoxies. In order to express their resistance to conformist cultures and state politics, the selected poets devised alternative articulations and definitions of exile, belonging, and homeland. Therefore, this thesis maintains that their poetry gave voice to the marginalised and questioned authority, seeking to re-create the Arab identity by moving away from the borders of nationalism to the metaphysical and transnational.