Poetics of the Familiar in the History of Sorrow by Talib Abdul Aziz

Abstract

This article analyzes poetics of the familiar in Talib Abdul Aziz’s The History of Sorrow (1994). Aziz uses familiar and tired objects: dust, rust, cracks, old clothes, abandoned thresholds, and unwashed cups to modernize the elegy form. Unlike classical Arabic elegy, which uses mythological reference to grand loss, Aziz uses everyday text to show loss as a slow, cumulative, and gradual process. The close reading of several of the poems show the functioning of poetics of the familiar in relation to three interlinked zones: temporal disconnection, spatial closeness, and the reminiscence of the senses/tactile memory. Aziz’s familiar objects and the familiar itself create his elegy form. The familiar, as I like to call it, the anti-sublime, transforms the ordinary into a site of ontological rupture. Relocating loss from the heroic to the ordinary (everyday), Aziz transforms modern Arabic elegy. Loss becomes personally complex and deeply resonant and beyond singular. In the poetry of late twentieth-century Iraq, the familiar found a place to testify honest loss in the style of wounded history and the failed grand narratives.