Speaking through the dead: the poetic mask (al-qināʿ) as resistance in Nasserist Egypt, 1956–1967

Between the Suez Crisis of 1956 and the June War of 1967, the Nasserist state constructed a cultural apparatus that combined selective patronage with unpredictable repression, compelling Egyptian poets to develop oblique strategies for political speech. This article examines how two poets, Amal Dunqul (1940–1983) and Salah ʿAbd al-Sabur (1931–1981), employed the technique of al-qināʿ (the poetic mask), adopting historical and mythological personae through whom contemporary critique could circulate publicly while retaining plausible deniability. Through close readings of four mask-poems in Arabic, Dunqul’s ‘Spartacus’ (1962) and ‘Zarqaʾ al-Yamama’ (1967), and ʿAbd al-Sabur’s ‘Bishr al-Hafi’ (1962/64) and Maʾsat al-Hallaj (1965), the article demonstrates that the mask functioned not merely as an aesthetic device but as a deliberate strategy of political encoding, calibrated to the poet’s institutional position. Dunqul, the marginal outsider, deployed increasingly transparent masks of resistance while ʿAbd al-Sabur, the compromised insider, moved within the Sufi tradition from withdrawal to confrontation. Drawing on Arabic critical discourse alongside Western theorists of writing under censorship, the article argues that Kamal Abu Dib’s concept of al-fajwa (the gap) constitutes an indigenous Arabic cognate of James C. Scott’s ‘hidden transcript’, reframing the mask as a site where aesthetic condensation and resistance converge.