The poems of Al Abnoudy and Amel Donkol |
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Collection title
Cultural evening
First broadcast date
1991
Abstract
Interview with the Egyptian poet Abnoudy and the Sudanese poet Amal Donkol. They talk about their work.
Broadcaster
ERTU - Channel 2
Audiovisual form
Interview
Personalities
- Donkol Amal
- El-Abnoude Abdel-Rahman
Primary theme
Art, Culture and Knowledge
Secondary themes
- Art, Culture and Knowledge / Languages and literatures
Credits / Cast
- Abnoudi Abderrahmane - Participant
- Donkol Amal - Participant
Map locations
- Egypt - Lower Egypt - Cairo
Context
The poems of Al-Abnudi and Amal Dunqul
Richard Jacquemond
Broadcast shortly after the death of Amal Dunqul (1940-1983), this programme was recorded a year earlier, while the poet was already weakened by the cancer which killed him. He is accompanied here by another major voice of Egyptian poetry, 'Abd al-Rahman al-Abnudi (b. 1938). All their lives they were very close: they began their careers as poets in Qena, a region of Upper Egypt, where both their fathers, scholars and poets themselves, already knew each other. Once he had his baccalaureat, Dunqul “went up” to Cairo in 1958, where Abnudi joined him four years later. With Yahya al-Tahir Abdullah (1938-1981), another major figure of that literary generation and also from Qena, they shared the bohemian lifestyle of Egypt's young politico-literary avant-garde. Dunqul and Abnudi were both poets and rebels, though each in a different way, and both were opposed to the regime, particularly under President Anwar Sadat. This programme, recorded in 1982 when Sadat's successor Hosni Mubarak was trying to resolve the conflicts between the regime and the Egyptian intelligentsia, is probably their first appearance on Egyptian public television – and unfortunately the last for Dunqul.
In Egypt, Dunqul and Abnudi are both major players in the modernist revolution in poetry, but in different ways and different areas: Dunqul wrote in literary Arabic (fusha), while Abnudi used the vernacular, more precisely the spoken dialect of Upper Egypt. “Free poetry” (al-al-hurr shi'r), which appeared in Iraq during late the 1940's, broke with traditional Arab poetry's reliance on cadence, metre and phonetics – and was quickly taken up by Egyptian poets. Among them, Amal Dunqul was noticed with a series of books published from 1969. They were marked by his political commitment and original work on language, considered very modern though at the same time loaded with references to Egypt's past. This duality appealed both to reviewers and a wider, general public, despite the difficulties of getting the books distributed because of the obstacles placed in the way by Sadat's system. Abnudi on the other hand was a major voice in “vernacular poetry” (shi'r al-ammiyya), the equivalent in the political domain of what “free poetry” was for literary Arabic: in their own way each represented an aesthetic and a political revolution against traditional poetry (shi'r 'amudi for literary Arabic, zajal for colloquial or dialect-based Arabic).
Even more than free poetry, vernacular poetry was disdained by the Arab literary establishment because it is written like spoken Egyptian, extremely unfashionable in official culture. As we see here, however, it is a sophisticated version of the dialect, faithful to its syntax and phonetics, but with a very rich vocabulary, making it accessible to a much wider audience than the spoken language of southern Egypt in which it is expressed. Later Abnudi extended his audience even further by writing the lyrics for many songs, and making known, through Egyptian radio, the sirat Bani Hilal, one of the masterpieces of oral epic poetry (declared a UNESCO Heritage of Humanity in 2003) in southern Egypt and, beyond, across all North Africa.
Bibliography:
‘Abla al-Ruwaynî, Amal Dunqul, al-Janûbî (A.D., le Méridional), Le Caire et Koweït, Dâr Su‘âd al-Sabbâh, 1992
Richard Jacquemond, Entre scribes et écrivains. Le champ littéraire dans l’Egypte contemporaine, Arles, Actes Sud/Sindbad, 2003
There appear to be a few books by Amal Dunqul translated in English, but none were available when this background piece was written. Amazon UK gives a list. There are also books about Dunqul by Arab authors, and since none are available it is hard to know whether these books about Dunqul are in English or Arabic.
