Third: the school of Mahjar and the new Realist school (the poetry of the tafʿīlah)

05Third: the school of Mahjar and the new Realist school (the poetry of the tafʿīlah)

• Mahjar: Syrian and Lebanese Arab poets who emigrated to the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries because of political oppression, sectarian conflict, poverty and the search for freedom. They split into two groups — (a) the Pencil League (Northern Mahjar, New York, 1920), led by Gibrán Khalil Gibrán, Mikhail Nuayma and Elia Abu Madi, marked by a sweeping revolt against the old rules of poetry, latitude in metrics, and the call for total renewal; and (b) the Andalusian League (Southern Mahjar, Brazil, 1932), headed by Michel Mualif and Rachid Khoury, more careful to keep the sound Arabic heritage. The traits of Mahjar writing: the human and spiritual bent and the spreading of the values of good and beauty; introspection and contemplation of the universe, life and death; violent, surging longing for their homelands in the East; and reliance on symbol, the poetic tale, and a living smooth language close to everyday speech.
• The Realist school (the new poetry / the poetry of the tafʿīlah): it arose in Egypt, Iraq and Syria after the end of the Second World War (1945), as the features of political and social life changed and liberation revolutions took place. The Iraqi poetess Nazik al-Malaika led it with Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Salah Abdel-Sabour, Abdel-Rahman al-Sharqawi and Amal Dunqul — a poetic revolt against the system of the two symmetrical halves and the single rhyme. They invented the poetry of the tafʿīlah: the poetic line becomes the unit of build, the number of feet in each line changes with the poet's emotional bursts with no fixed limit, and the rhyme is freed into varied rhymes; the poem keeps to depicting reality with its contradictions, the worries of the masses, and the questions of justice and freedom, using symbol, myth and folk heritage in a living language close to the pulse of the street.