Melancholic Loss: Reading Bedouin Women's Elegiac Poetry

Melancholy from Europe to Arabia and Back

Arabic poetry scholarship in English has always acknowledged and examined elegiac poetry but failed to give not only Bedouin poetry from the Arabian Peninsula but also Arab women's writing the recognition it deserves for contributing to the feminine lament, an old concern of women since the Greeks, and for thereby offering a unique articulation of melancholy and loss.¹ This lacuna in the theoretical and psychoanalytical discourse on melancholy and loss is quite striking. To date, there has not been a single theoretical analysis of the profound significance of these tropes in Arab women's laments and loss lyrics. Lila Abu-Lughod accurately observes, "Lamentation by women is common across Egypt and other parts of the Arab world but the genre has received little scholarly attention" ("Islam" 188). And I would inquire: What motivates the suppression of melancholy in the studies of Arabic letters? And from where shall we begin the discussion of melancholy in the nomadic context? Without going into the intertextual crossing that links the Greco-Arabic tradition and medieval European discourse on medicine and philosophy, I need simply to highlight the cultural and philosophical displacement and/or exchange of the writings on melancholy. And I will suggest that the lack of theoretical analyses of melancholy in relation to Arabic literature seemingly signifies an unwillingness to recognize this long comparative history of melancholia. More significantly, it may well indicate an anxiety of influence that is sometimes accompanied by an antagonistic and reductive reaction to anything related to literary theory or, in this case, Freudian texts.² However, I argue that the failure of Arabic studies to think critically about mourning is symptomatic of a recurring ambivalence in these projects, namely, resistance to the theoretical in relation to its perceived foreign origin, whether that foreign, historically, be Western philosophy, psychoanalysis, or feminine writing. This perception, therefore, limits Arabic literary studies in English to treating death and mourning empirically and creating a conflation of the symbolic with the pragmatic aspects of politics and culture. It also, in an uncomplicated way, attempts to mark territories, delimiting knowledge by imposing linguistic and cultural borderlines in a moment of globalization. To be sure, a desire for anthropocentrism and empiricism circulates in certain Middle Eastern literary studies. Thus, this essay offers a counter analysis, opening Bedouin women's poetry to contemporary theory and criticism.

Ironically, many scholars have characterized the medieval Arab philosopher and physician Avicenna (Ibn Sina) as one of the earliest thinkers after the Greeks to offer an illustration and diagnosis of melancholy or suwaida, which literally means blackness in Arabic. In his masterpiece, Canon of Medicine, Avicenna demonstrates his humoral theory, akhlat in Arabic, which in many ways resonates with the ideas presented in Greek scientific and philosophical texts. This corresponding approach can be read as a result of the many translations and borrowings from Greek tradition during two historical periods: the Abbasid period in the nineteenth century and the Umayyad period in twelveth-century Spain.³ Al-Mansur, the 'Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, was the first caliph to encourage translating medical scientific and philosophical books from Greek into Arabic. In al-Muqaddimah, Ibn KhaldÛn underscores this historical point.⁴ Subsequently, his brother, al Ma'mun, went further in fostering translation projects in 830. He was associated with the foundation of Bayt al-Hikma, a word that signifies library in Sasanian and designates the house of wisdom in Arabic, in which translation was encouraged and demanded.⁵ Philip Hitti summarizes these efforts: "The 'Abbasid era of translation lasted about a century after 750. Since most of the translators were Aramaic-speaking, many of the Greek works were first done into Aramaic (Syriac) before their rendition into Arabic" (310-11).

Subsequently, this intellectual influence returned to medieval Europe, where many medical and philosophical texts were translated from Arabic into Latin. This double trajectory of an intellectual debt, so to speak, marks the articulation of melancholy. A few centuries later, we will see the transmission of Arabic texts to medieval Europe. Hitti encapsulates this intellectual exchange...