The Shudder Remains: Voice, Body, and Affect in Contemporary Palestinian Poetry
This project traces a shift in Palestinian Arabic-language poetry from the Oslo Accords to the present away from modes of collective remembrance and resistance and toward what might be called a corporeal lyricism: an embodied, affective search for poetic truth. The project proposes that sensation, vibration, and somatic cognition function in these poems not as rhetorical effects but as visceral epistemologies, ways of knowing wrested from within the impasse Elias Khoury calls “the continuous Nakba.” This epistemological wager has both Western and Arabic-language theoretical genealogies: Adorno’s Schauer, Massumi’s pre-cognitive intensity, and Merleau-Ponty’s intercorporeality, but equally the Sufi concepts of dhawq (ذوق) — pre-discursive knowing through “taste,” theorized by Ibn ʿArabi — and wajd (وجد), the ecstatic somatic state in which the body is seized by truth before the mind can name it. Politics and memory are not evacuated but relocated into the flesh, the breath, the shudder of the lyric body/voice itself. The research will focus on approximately sixteen collections by Maya Abu al-Hayyat, Ghayath al-Madhoun, Najwan Darwish, and Ghassan Zaqtan.