The Literature of the Old and the Literature of the New

If we set out to apply a simile to literature, to what should we liken it?

As for me, I believe that literature is exactly like dress.

Dress is subject to the developments of the age and the demands of life, and so must literature be subject to development, ever renewed and ever springing forward.

Literature is not, as the "ancients" understand it, the explication of the Mu'allaqat, the digging for the tent-peg and the traces of the camel's footprints, and for Abla and Hind... or the study of al-Shanfara and the standing of his odes in Arabic poetry. Then carousing with Abu Nuwas in his dark, stifling hut.

It is not the pouring forth of the torments of a soul burning in the fires of love — the love of woman only — in tightly packed words, fanciful at one moment and dry at another.

Rather, literature is life. The life we live, with its colors and its movements, its pus and its splendor. Its foulness and its purity. With all the realism that is in it, and all the truths.

For this reason, when life develops, literature develops. And then writers must renew themselves in their turn — that is, put on a new "literary dress" in its style, its ideas, and its aims.

And the writers of yesterday stand up in objection, because they will never admit that the literary garment that hangs down over their figures is a worn-out garment, on which the years have left the traces of colonialism, wars, fanaticism, and feudalism... the garment of the literature of a quarter century gone by.

That time has passed, and the features of our life have changed; but literature has stayed rigid, stubborn — its masters do not want it to change in its turn, as though it were an ornament the writer owns and carries with him from palace to palace and from hermitage to hermitage. Until his wanderings set him down on the mountaintop, looking down from its height upon the course of the people's life.

And we cried out, "Literature is in an ordeal," because it has drawn away from going deep into the understanding of the ancients' production and from following the artistic methods they invented.

Because our literary journals have set themselves to refining the human soul, not the literary faculty alone; to reforming reality, not to cultivating the perceptions.

And because at last there have been born those who feel this deficiency of which our literature today complains, and the importance of the direction it is taking. So we have called these "the little newborns."

The problem, then, is "the problem of the writers," not the problem of literature — or, to put it more clearly, it is the problem of "dress in literature." The problem of the old and its clinging to life, and of the birth of the new with its ferment and its search for nourishment and light...

I do not know how the image of my grandmother presented itself before me as I was speaking of literature — the image of my grandmother as a young girl, wearing loose, dark clothes, coiling her long hair on the top of her head, shod in closed shoes with heels of middling height... And my grandmother has lived to this day. She has lived alongside us, her grandchildren. And I wondered at first how she could look at me with vexation and mockery. She would always stare at my clothes. I wear modern cuts, with their colors and their movements, after having bobbed my hair. I used deliberately to study my grandmother's mind, taking care to appear before her on purpose in every modern fashion I follow; she would stare long and mutter vague words I could not hear, then grow vexed and restless, and with evident nervousness explain to me the benefits of the "dress" she herself follows, pointing out the secrets of beauty in it; then she would attack "our own" new fashions and press me to tear up my clothes and destroy them and give up following their principles. Then she would feel my hair, asking God's forgiveness, taking refuge from the devils that had transformed me into a male.

And I would try in vain, in my turn, to show her that the life of the rising generation today is other than it was yesterday, and that we are compelled to follow these fashions by force of our being compelled to work, to speed, to continuous movement. My grandmother taught me many lessons, once I had succeeded in penetrating into her soul and had seen what stirs in the soul of the old — the fear, the anxiety, and the struggle — when it lives alongside the new. And then when the old rises up, clinging to life, and the new rebels, demanding its share of life.

A similar incident happened to me some months ago, with one of our women story writers — although I was wearing a dress that she herself wears. But the essence of the difference between us was the "literary dress."

I entered her office; she drew back a little when she saw me, and fell silent... as though her lips were too sacred to argue with "a fledgling like me." The atmosphere of silence weighed heavy around us, and soon she grew vexed — exactly like my grandmother — and began to defend the old dress, and presented me with a great deal of advice...

Among it: that I withdraw from writing, because in literature there are barriers hard to cross... and however much "we little ones" try to create and to originate, we shall remain in the depths, our cries and the scratching of our pens fading away amid the chasms of darkness and emptiness...

And "the little fledgling" is a callow child who tries to imitate, and will be good at nothing but imitation, and then believes that he is truly a writer. And she gave me an example of this:

If he wants to describe nature, he uses the phrases he finds in his book:

"The sun rose in its heights and sent down its golden threads upon a green carpet of brocade."

If he sings of the emotion of motherhood, he cries out: "She who rocks the cradle with her right hand rocks the world with her left?"

And if patriotic zeal seizes him, he shouts with all the life that is in him: "I would ransom you with my soul, O my homeland!"

And she went on — the new writer does not succeed, and may not even understand, the presentation of social problems, and then the criticism and analysis of the old literary heritage, or the world's.

Is this truly the new young writer?

The writer may pass, at the beginning of his literary life, through a period in which he imitates what the great thinkers have produced; and this stage — the stage of imitation — is the period in which he gathers his strength so as to create afterwards, and to be original in his creation. It is the stage of his formation and the beginning of his taking flight.

The young fledgling writer, at the beginning of his literary life, is an echo of divergent intellectual notes and a meeting place of artistic models which he himself polishes; his is the merit of adapting and coloring them according to the reality of his society and the demands of his life. And the great writers — all writers — cannot but submit to those influences: "Shakespeare," at the beginning of his writing for the stage, went along with the artistic conceptions current in his age.

And "Shaw" bowed for a time under the influence of Shakespeare.

As for "Beethoven," he set out to imitate Mozart in his first symphony.

We conclude from this that the young writer cannot but submit to the law of development. He cannot but pass through the successive stages of growth, in order to grow up and for his stem to harden.

He passes through emotional agitations in which he sees, in the dirty water running down the middle of the street, a limpid, sweet river; in the scolding of the winds and the pouring of the rain, melodies that lull his feelings and quiet them; and in the color red, blood and revolution and revenge.

Then, after this ferment, he pauses a little, to live for a short while still — neither thinking, nor producing, nor reading; and this stage is the turning point in his literary life.

In some of the advanced countries of the world there are "special editorial desks of great writers," whose function is to study the production of the new writers, so that if they detect genius or innovation in the writing of one of them, they help him materially and morally, that he may emerge and soar in his emergence.

For literature is the effective instrument in the building of man's life and in the forming of his individual and social self. And literature performs this grave mission of its only if it keeps pace with the dress of the age and the customs of society — completing the deficiency of which the nation complains, healing the disease that gnaws at the being of the state, and slipping into the unexplored regions of human thought, searching for the secrets of the soul and for new artistic methods, for life and for art, more splendid and loftier than the known and current methods.

And the reality of today is the reality of the rising generation — now that individual freedom has completed its growth in the nation, now that colonialism and oppression have passed away, and social consciousness has at last spread between the two sexes. It is necessary, then, to open the field to the rising generation to voice its opinion. It is necessary to encourage all their production, be it literary or artistic; and it is necessary to criticize this production, following in this modern foundations in method and in aim, taking into account the time and the atmosphere in which the writer lives. For every age has its writers, just as every age has its dress. If we wish to make certain of this, we observe that the writer who visited Lebanon a quarter century ago and wanted to write memoirs — what might he set down? What might he write in his notebook? What — other than phrases like these:

"The roads are rugged in most of Lebanon's summer resorts — oh, this donkey! It truly annoys me with its continual braying, and distracts me from enjoying the splendor of the still nature before my eyes."

"Today I went down to Beirut, the capital, and moved about its narrow streets in one of the carro carts."

"No trace of woman in the streets — I shall return to my room in the 'hantour,' for I am tired."

As for the writer of today — what do you suppose he sets down in his diary?

Does he mention the stillness in our famous summer resorts—?

Does he dare name the "Cadillac" and the "tram" and the "carro" or the "hantour"? And if we asked the old its opinion of woman, what would it answer, and what might it write? How would it try to accept the revolution of the new woman, when until the recent past she was well-nigh nonexistent — were it not for the increase of offspring in our Arab countries?

And of love we find in Arabic literature only one kind — the love of woman, as I said before — and the fault is not the writer's, for social consciousness had not completed its growth. But now this word has branched out in its meanings, and behold, we feel — love of the family — love of children — love of the homeland — and love of humanity entire.

Just as the old literature did not know — or, more correctly, did not "dare" — to show the truth naked. Whether from political pressure, or from a deficiency of refinement in the mentality of the people, or from weakness in the personality of the writer himself.

When it spoke of sin, it portrayed it alluringly and dressed it in a white garment, trying to silence a sobbing voice; to smother the last breaths of one wrestling with death; to screen a bestial hideousness; and to hide a putrid smell — the smell of bodies fighting to the death, or begging for life.

And since every individual worships whoever justifies his errors, the "strait-laced" literature flourished for a time and volumes of it were sold — and no wonder in that, either. For our life was obscure, folded in upon itself, wrapped about with fear.

As for the new writer, he has been freed with the freeing of the thought and the personality of "the individual being" in the Arab nation. And behold, the new writer represents a new reality in his upbringing, his garment, and his mentality. Upon him alone falls the responsibility, and the consequences, of the intellectual and political battles to come; and in his hand alone is the spark of the social renaissance and the course of the new, free life — with its garment, its colors, and its aims.