Inscribing the muse: Political poetry and the discourse of circulation in the Yemeni cassette industry.

Abstract

My dissertation examines transformations in political poetry that accompany the expansion of writing and recording technologies in Yemen. Although Yemeni poets have long been political spokespersons for local communities, they have begun in recent decades to use audiocassette technologies, in particular, to reach national and transnational audiences. Through a project of historical poetics, I explore how poets, singers, and other participants in the cassette industry are re-tailoring representations of community, place, and person for popular audiences. I argue that discourse about the problematic of circulating poems and poets becomes an especially powerful means of enabling cultural and political change. Fieldwork material is gathered largely from Yafi`, a region of Southern Yemen located northeast of Aden. Initial chapters focus on how circulating cassette-poems provide Yafi` is with resources for managing interpersonal relations, resolving local disputes, and discussing social collectivities. Cassette-poems are especially productive representational media, however, insofar as they are viewed as instable inscriptions that need metacommentary on the poetic message and its articulating agents. In order to examine the structures of such meta-discourse, I focus on the vernacular <italic>qas&dotbelow;idah </italic>, the most prestigious genre of political poetry in the Arab world. By placing <italic>qas&dotbelow;idah</italic> inscriptive practices within a broader sociolinguistic framework, I suggest that writing and hierarchies of literate knowledge have long provided poets with means to reflect on the problematic of circulation. An industry of musical, aural cassette-inscription, however, has introduced new terms to this metadiscourse. When a poet designs oral verses for inscription onto a material medium, such as cassettes, acts of composing poetry often become subject to the demands of new patterns of text-circulation, larger and more diverse audiences, more centralized institutions of production and consumption, and new forms of authorship. Discussions between cassette producers and consumers about such demands provide a means to reflect on the incorporation of poetic subjects into broader circuits of capital. Moreover, poets and singers re-cast local topographies in terms of region, and tribesmen in terms of merchants, as they seek mediating grounds for instable, circulating words. Ultimately, I argue that a discourse of circulation enables the articulation of new and ambivalent habits of metropolitan valuation.