Nazik al-Mala'ika's poetry and its critical reception in the West - Modern Iraqi Literature in English Translation

Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), Fall, 1997 by Salih J. Altoma

We find the image of the old and rotting city in the poetry and stories of some of our youth, because they draw their knowledge from the literature of old Europe where the cities grew old and became an abyss of crime, disease, darkness and nausea and where contemporary literature only reflects this dark and contaminated environment.... We [the Arabs] who are rich with life, spirits, firmness[asala] and morality, leave our fertile talents and sources [yanabi'], and strive, begging from the writers of Europe, whose civilization is decaying, dying, and crawling to its ordained end; we whom fortune smiles upon, and to whom the world looks to rebuild [it], we ourselves disparage our intellectual and cultural treasures and stand contemptuous of [sic, i.e. servile to] the vile [munhatta] tables of the West which spread crime, terror, desperation and sickness in readers.... Arab youth is awakening today and approaching intoxicated and active.... This youth burst forth with enthusiasm and exaltation to spend its intellectual and physical energies in building a nation which is active from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Gulf.

Moreh seems to treat in detail al-Mala'ika's views in order to present a general view of the nationalistic trend in Arabic literature as it is represented by al-Mala'ika and other Arab writers.

Undoubtedly, Western literatures constitute one of the important sources in al-Mala'ika's education; they left their mark in some of her works as is evident in her uses of borrowed images and symbols, her allusions to John Keats and other Western poets, and her translation of poems by Byron, Thomas Gray, and Rupert Brooke and others. Yet, in all the writings on al-Mala'ika in the West, we often encounter passing remarks to these interactions between her poetry and Western poets. For example, S. Moreh refers to her adoption of the Keatsian stanza repeating in a sense Jabra Ibrahim Jabra's observation published earlier in the journal Shi'r (Poetry) in 1957. Badawi notes her allusions to Greek mythology and her use of Hiawatha from "The Song of Hiawatha," a work by the 19th-Century American poet Henry W. Longfellow (30:230). As we mentioned earlier, Khulusi (42:43) noted likewise such uses in al-Mala'ika's poetry. AbdulHai refers in his Tradition and English and American Influence in Arabic Romantic Poetry (1982) to the impact of Romantic English poets and Apollo Group poets on her poetry, illustrating especially her use of the "pigeon" image in a manner reminiscent of Keats's "Nightingale." And finally, Vincent Monteil briefly refers to the similarity between al-Mala'ika's poem "Five Songs to Pain" and aspects of Gabriela Mistral's poetry (67:100) - a similarity noticed also by Juan Vernet in his 1968 book, Literature arabe (77:212).

Unfortunately, all these instances provide us with preliminary or general impressions of Western influences on al-Mala'ika's poetry. We are still in need of methodical studies that reveal and document in detail both the nature and the extent of these influences, whether in relation to al-Mala'ika's stylistic usages or imageries, themes, and other aspects which are evident in both her poetry and her critical writings.