Palestine, Futurity, and the Rithāʾ: A Poetics of Speculation and Proleptic Mourning

Abstract This paper explores Fadwā Ṭūqān’s and Maḥmūd Darwīsh’s poetry written in the wake of the 1967 June War, the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982, and the Second Intifāḍah (uprising) in 2002. Specifically, the article investigates how the poets mobilize the Arabic elegiac ( rithāʾ ) genre, as well as pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetic traditions, in order to contemplate the future and foster a mode of proleptic mourning. This paper asserts that these two Palestinian poets utilize the longstanding elegiac form in Arabic literary heritage to not only summon and lament past events and atrocities, but to conjecture about the insecurity that they anticipate in the years to come. The poems render both hopeful and pessimistic sentiments and premonitions, demonstrating how the ongoing Israeli occupation and the Palestinians’ resultant losses over time have precipitated increasingly sobering and distressing speculations about the perpetuation of Palestinians’ grief in the future.