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Abstract
This chapter presents and contextualizes a poem written in the sixteenth century in Aljamiado (Spanish of the sixteenth century rendered with the Arabic alphabet). In this text, written in Spanish coplas, the author describes different aspects of a hajj pilgrimage—likely undertaken at the beginning of the sixteenth century by a Mudejar from Aragon, who travelled from Spain to Mecca. The poem is a statement of the hybrid identity of its author (a traditional Spanish poetic form to express a Muslim message), and a testament to the poet’s (and his community of coreligionists’) resilience, because he remained and sustained his Muslim identity in the face of an administrative policy that had forbidden any and all expressions of Islam in Spain. As such, this was an act of counter hegemony that defied the persecution of Moriscos and Islam in Habsburg Spain. For all Muslims, performing the pilgrimage to Mecca is an achievement, for a Mudejar it was more than that, given the difficulties the Spanish authorities imposed on such travels. And for a Morisco, copying and keeping a manuscript version of this poem hidden at home, was an act of defiance and a form of jihad.
Abstract
Many García Lorca scholars have focused on the surrealist imagery in his "Romance sonámbulo" ("Sleepwalking Ballad"), one of his finest poems. This article focuses on the classical Arabic poetic resonance in the following verse: "Yo ya no soy yo, ni mi casa es ya mi casa" ("I am no longer I, my house no longer my house"). The verse echoes the opening line of Abū Tammām's (9th century) panegyric qasīdah to Abū Sa'īd al-Thaghrī: "You are not you, the abodes are not the abodes." The verse in turn was later quoted by Ibn Khafāja (12th century) in his elegiac ode to the fall of Valencia when the Çid conquered it. By calling upon the Arabic tradition behind this verse, the author wishes to shed some light on the poetical force that allows García Lorca's rendering to be effective in much the same way as the verse was in its Arabic original context. The verse in question may be seen as the culmination of a very old Arabic literary topos known as the atlāl-nasīb. The ruins of the abandoned encampment (the abodes of the poet's beloved) become a leitmotif of the awareness of lost happiness. Such a profound realization provides the elegiac mood that characterizes the nasīb or love prelude that opens the typical tripartite qasīdah. The ruined abode (or the abandoned encampment) allows the poet to establish a mnemonic and metonymic relationship with its former inhabitants, thus stirring the poet's memory. The physical place, then, becomes a poetic locus. What is noteworthy in Lorca's appropriation is the fact that he understood the meaning of Abū Tammām's verse at the archetypal level.
Abstract
The mostly clandestine nature of Morisco literature both in Spanish and Aljamiado has prompted critics to inquire to what extent and how it was influenced by the canonical literature of the Golden Age. Indeed, there are many interesting examples of how the literary trends of the times influenced the Moriscos. The question of whether Morisco literature influenced the more canonical tradition, on the other hand, is especially interesting if one considers a work such as Agonía del tránsito de la muerte (1537) by the Toledan Alejo de Venegas (1498/99-1562) as a Morisco text. Álvaro Galmés de Fuentes proposed just such a reading, but I argue that the evidence does not fully support his hypothesis, which must be revised along the lines I propose.