Agitated Layers of Air: Third-Worldism and the “Voice of the People” across Palestine, Cuba and Algeria
Date of Award
Spring 2024
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Comparative Literature
First Advisor
Creswell, Robyn
Abstract
“Agitated Layers of Air” is a study of the Third-Worldist desire to construct the “voice of the people” in Palestinian, Cuban, and Algerian poetry during the long 60s (1955-1973). Focusing primarily on the works of Mahmoud Darwish, Fayad Jamís, and Jean Sénac, the project sheds light on the diverse poetic genres, styles, and theories of translation that were mobilized for this purpose. Across these three distinct revolutionary contexts, and across a variety of political scales, poetry came to be imagined as a weapon if it was seen to capture the freedom inherent in the “voice of the people.” This shared understanding of poetry as a weapon in turn provided an important principle of translatability between the voices of far-flung revolutionary actors.Chapter 1, “Writing the Qaṣidat al-amal: Mahmoud Darwish’s Poetic Realism and its Genres” turns to Palestine and to the concept of genre. In particular, I examine two poetic genres that the poet Mahmoud Darwish innovated in the early 60s as part of his quest to construct the “voice” of the Palestinian people, and to put that voice in conversation with revolutionary actors elsewhere: the “call to poetic arms,” an emergent form of metapoetry, and the qiṣṣa shiʿrīyya (poetic story). Drawing on Darwish’s poems and critical essays for al-Jadid, the journal of the Israeli Communist Party, I shed light on why these two genres, rather than a poetic diction that reproduced the Palestinian vernacular, were central to his attempts to cultivate a form of poetic realism (al-shiʿr al-waqiʿi). Chapter 2, “Word as Action, Immediacy as Style: Fayad Jamís’s Bridges of Communication” examines the emergence of Cuban conversational poetry, and coloquialismo as a poetic style, through the 60s oeuvre of Fayad Jamís. Arising at a moment in postrevolutionary political life marked by a push for the democratization of culture and the positioning of Cuba as a revolutionary leader within the emergent Third World, I argue that Jamís’s poetry allows us to see how the colloquial style of conversational poetry partook of the broader societal effort to figure the means of expression of “the people” as a form of social material creation. Chapter 3, “Transitional Transcription: The Representational Tasks of the Poet selon Jean Sénac,” focuses on the relationship between the concepts of “transcription” and “transition” in Jean Sénac’s 1957 resistance poetry manifesto and subsequent two collections of poetry. As he upheld the poet’s mission to “bring the people into the poem,” Sénac abstracted transcription, an ethnographic practice with considerable colonial roots in Algeria, into a translational paradigm that allowed him to maintain his authority as a Francophone Algerian poet––an authority whose ultimate purpose was to negate itself. “Agitated Layers of Air” concludes with a coda that situates the reconfiguration of the Third-Worldist poetics of the “voice of the people” around 1973: a period of disillusionment in the Arab world following the 1967 Six-Day War, the beginning of the “quinquenio gris” (“the five grey years”) in Cuba, and of Algeria’s break with socialist humanism. The fiction of the “voice of the people” did not wither away over the course of the 70s, however, but the particular fantasy of unmediation that had structured Third-Worldist literary production did. The writer no longer had immediate access to it, nor was it his duty to unquestioningly reproduce it. The social function of the author was restructured as a result: he became an archivist, a compiler, a researcher––leading to the privileging of prose genres like testimonio (testimonial narrative) in Latin America. This reconfiguration of the function of the author in relation to the “voice of the people,” and the emergence of new generic, stylistic and formal ways of addressing it, shows precisely how the legacy of Third-Worldism continued to shape literary production in Latin America and the Arab world throughout the twentieth century.
Recommended Citation
Pabón, Maru, "Agitated Layers of Air: Third-Worldism and the “Voice of the People” across Palestine, Cuba and Algeria" (2024). Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Dissertations. 1286.
https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/gsas_dissertations/1286
