War Songs. 'Antarah ibn Shaddad
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and inherited (nasab).28 They cherished their vehicles of war, the she-camel and the horse, as well as their weaponry and armaments, and perfected the raid and the hunt. War was often retributive, driven by the need for vengeance, although it was also hazarded to win spoils: women, camels, livestock, and slaves. War was how a man preserved, acquired, and displayed honor and glory. It was the ultimate realization of risk and chance. For these warriors, war was effectively a religion.29
The cosmos of the pre-Islamic qasida poets is stark. Everything is governed by Time (or Fate) and its avatar, Death. At the heart of the cosmos stands man, either alone, or with his family and/or his kin group. The cosmos was unpredictable: a man knew that it could and would inevitably infect him, his honor, and his society with a most terrifying disease: disunity and disintegration. What he did not know was when this would happen. The events of this cosmos play out in the desert, the landscape where a man on camelback pits himself against Time and risks his all, in a series of actions whose outcomes are determined solely by chance.
The poet-warriors were unanimous in their celebration of and devotion to the majesty of the qasida and the ʿarabiyyah. Poetry as memorialization offered man a victory over Time: if his feats were immortalized in verse, and his descendants and kin group perpetuated his memory, man would thus vanquish Time. Therefore, memory and kin group solidarity were central to the perpetuation of an individual’s glory, an all too fragile and ephemeral possession unless reinforced by constant and repeated efforts to acquire more glory.
Poetry existed to celebrate the winners in the deadly game of war or to commemorate the valiant losers who died on the battlefield. In their commemoration of glorious ancestors, the masters of qasida poetry sought, through the perpetuation of genealogy and the memorization of poetry, to preserve this glory against the depredations of Time.30 They did not do this through, say, a cult of heroes, but by positioning the last living member of a line of glorious ancestors as the guarantor of the perpetuation of glory. It was this elite warrior’s heroic duty to embody and consolidate former glory, but also to build upon it and surpass the deeds of his forbears.31
THE QASIDA
Pre-Islamic qasida poetry is a public art form and is in a profound way theatrical: it cannot function without an audience. In its orality, it is addressed to, and entirely dependent upon, a group of listeners; it appeals to others and voices challenges to them; it cries defiance against Time; it trumpets the triumph of man; it memorializes his afterlife. It is the poetry of performance, and its soundscapes are performed on the stage of the cosmos.32
Out of this simple set of elements (Time, man, and the sweltering heat of the desert), a profound and imaginative poetic tradition was fashioned. Its themes were as simple as its elements: ruins and abandoned encampments, lost loves, arduous desert crossings, honor and glory, battles and raids.
Thus, many qasidas explore variations on the following narrative pattern: while on a desert journey, a poet comes across some ruins. His discovery forces him to stop and determine whether this is the site where he once enjoyed happiness with a woman who was subsequently either lost or denied to him. He explores his memories of their time together, but then resumes his journey on camelback, possibly comparing his camel to some other animal of the desert, such as an oryx, a wild ass, or an ostrich. His journey brings him to a destination: this destination can be physical, such as a patron or chieftain, or metaphysical, such as a celebration of honor, nobility, and glory, perhaps through acts of communal generosity by feeding the needy in times of famine and drought, perhaps through the provision of wine for others, perhaps through military exploits in the battlefield, or through the righting of a wrong.
Not all qasida poems fit this simplistic and generalized characterization: there are many variations on the pattern, across time, region, lineage, and kin group. But what is typical of all of this poetry is its economy—it fashions complex and profound works of art out of a simple set of components.
ʿANTARAH’S “GOLDEN ODE” AND THE UNDOING OF THE QASIDA
The poems ascribed to ʿAntarah belong to a number of distinct genres: there are personal and tribal vaunts, war chants, full-blown qasidas, threats, and vituperation. His fame and reputation as a poet, however, are entirely dependent upon his most important composition, known both as his Muʿallaqah, “Suspended Ode,” and as his “Golden Ode” (Poem 1). This is a difficult poem, one dominated by grotesquery, where meaning and established order are in flux. It is a poem that pushes the qasida as art form to the very edge of signification and derives its meaning from the obliteration of existence in death.
The occasion of its composition is roughly the last decade of the sixth century, a time before the first truce in the War of Dāḥis and al-Ghabrāʾ. The concluding verses refer to both sons of Ḍamḍam as alive: Harim ibn Ḍamḍam died after the first truce of the war, at the hands of Ward ibn Ḥābis, a kinsman of ʿAntarah. The poem begins with a desolation so extreme that it defies recognition. The poet is on a journey, on camelback. He comes across an area that he thinks was once inhabited by ʿAblah, the woman he loves. But so much time has passed, so much has happened to the poet, that he cannot at first be sure. The despair and sadness that overcome him, and his inability to move on, gradually convince him that this is in fact the place. He pleads with the ruins, trying to conjure up the time when they were full of life, in an attempt to revivify not only the ruins but poetry itself, slaughtered by earlier poets and left unburied on the battlefield.
The poet’s identification of the desolate site brings home to him the emptiness of the present: ʿAblah is beyond the poet’s reach, physically (i.e., geographically) and temporally (because the past is irrecoverable). It awakens memories of the epiphany of the beloved on the night of the departure of her tribe, memories that now engulf the poem, in a comparison between the strong perfumed scent that accompanies the vision of the beloved and a musk pouch, a heady wine, and flowers growing in a lush meadow, a remote and sacred enclosure rarely visited even by the animals of the desert. But in this terrestrial paradise, beauty is sullied—the screeching insect is intoxicated and out of control, its actions like a one-armed amputee trying to light a fire with two fire sticks. Under the surface of this apparent plenty, then, lurk pain and grotesquery. Such memories accentuate the desolation of the poem's opening and intensify the poet’s sense of his loss, for he is denied the luxuries his beloved enjoys: she sleeps in comfort, while he, true to his bellicosity, passes the night on his horse, poised to launch a dawn raid, which as poet he will soon turn to.
In a good number of pre-Islamic odes, the poet effects a transition (known in Arabic criticism as takhalluṣ, literally “setting oneself free” or “being rid of”) from the first movements of the ode (frequently referred to in Arabic poetic criticism as dhikr al-aṭlāl, evocation of ruins, and nasīb, the amatory episode) to the desert adventure (raḥīl) and description of the camel (waṣf al-nāqah). Most odes conclude their desert adventures and descriptive scenes with an incantation of the exploits of poet or tribe (mufākharah). In some odes, such as the Muʿallaqah of Zuhayr, the destination of the desert adventure is a warlord or a regent (this is typical of panegyric poems, known as madīḥ), and the poem’s conclusion marks a return to civilization from the desolation of the ruins and the desert.
In ʿAntarah’s poem, the destination is ʿAblah, the beloved, and not a patron. The shape of the qasida is thus temporarily destabilized, because the transition does not mark a progression but rather signals a return to the beginning, to the nasīb. This destabilization is conveyed syntactically through the fact that the question posed with the phrase “Can I reach her” concludes with the final verse of the movement (with the phrase “big as a bite-scarred stud”).
Shape-shifting dominates the description: the camel resembles an ostrich that in turns resembles a funeral bier, an incomprehensible foreigner, and a slave wearing a fur cloak; the ostrich’s flock resembles Yemeni camels; when the poet’s camel runs she seems to be attacked by a cat tied to her side; the journey converts her into a brick fortress, supported on tentpoles. Her legs are like fifes, and she sweats tar. After her metamorphosis from ostrich to human-made structure, her final act of shape-shifting