Presenting the Unpresentable – Understanding of Death and Mourning in the Elegies of Al-Ma‛arī Cover Image

Prikazivanje neprikazivog – poimanje smrti i tuge u al-Ma‘arrījevim elegijama
Presenting the Unpresentable – Understanding of Death and Mourning in the Elegies of Al-Ma‛arī

Author(s): Munir Mujić
Subject(s): Literary Texts
Published by: Bosansko filološko društvo
Keywords: al-Ma‛arī; elegies; relativism; individualism; Qasida; Arabic poetry

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the deconstruction and ironizing of established representations of death and grief in the poetic work of renowned classical Arabic poet al-Ma‛arī. It includes his individualistic and relativistic views on perceptions of life and death as well as the unmasking and ironizing of “conservatism of sensibility”. Al-Ma‛arī opposes false objectivism reliant on the personal perception of reality. This paper discusses “anti-elegaic” issues in al-Ma‛arī’s elegies, as well as the noticeable presence of an “uncured outcome” due to bereavement and similar miseries. His poems demonstrate the ability to read an elegy as a sequential narrative, and the possibility of narrative syntagms which allow its re-figuration, to create new and different “stories” about the deceased. These possibilities represent the poet’s struggle against “the anonymity of death”. The blind poet al-Ma‛arī skilfully ironizes “visualistic dogmatism” in his elegies: the understanding of the world in visual terms.

  • Issue Year: 2013
  • Issue No: 11
  • Page Range: 100-118
  • Page Count: 19
  • Language: Bosnian