INTRODUCTION

In November 1988 I attended the Mirbad Festival of Poetry in Iraq. On one of the evenings the attendees were all gathered in the town hall of al-Baṣrah in Southern Iraq, a city renowned in earlier times for the Mirbad Square where, as we will see below, poets (such as the redoubtable lampoonists, al-Farazdaq (d. c. 729) and Jarīr (d. 732)) would gather and more recently for the statue of one of Southern Iraq's most illustrious modern poetic sons, Badr Shākir al-Sayyāb (d. 1964). Sitting next to me on this occasion was another invited guest, the French novelist, Alain Robbe-Grillet. After listening patiently for a while to the ringing tones of several poets, he asked me if any of them had changed the theme from the predominant topic of the last several days, the successful conclusion of a prolonged conflict with Iran. I responded in the negative and went on to point out that these poets were all faithfully replicating the role of their predecessors, eulogising the ruler and celebrating his glorious victories. The opening ceremonies in Baghdād had produced new odes from Nizār Qabbānī from Syria, Muḥammad Faytūrī from the Sudan, and Suʿād al-Ṣabāḥ from Kuwait, and on this particular evening in al-Baṣrah the theme was being re-echoed in a welter of imagery and bombast.

Just two years later, the army of Iraq invaded Suʿād al-Ṣabāḥ's homeland of Kuwait, and Arabic poetry was again called upon to fulfil one of its traditional roles.