Modern Arabic poetry was broken open in Manhattan

The Pen League, 1920, and the renewal of a language carried out by emigrants.

In 1920 a group of Lebanese and Syrian writers living in New York founded al-Rabita al-Qalamiyya, the Pen League. Gibran was its president. Mikhail Naimy was its secretary. Ameen Rihani and Elia Abu Madi were part of that circle.

They were emigrants, most of them working ordinary jobs, writing in Arabic in a city that neither knew nor cared what they were doing. And from there they did something the literary establishments of Cairo and Beirut had not managed. They took Arabic poetry off its classical rails. Looser forms, plainer language, the individual voice instead of the inherited one.

Read that sequence again. The renewal of a language carrying centuries of formal tradition was driven, substantially, by a handful of Levantine immigrants in Lower Manhattan.

It happened because of the distance rather than despite it. They were far enough from the institutions to ignore them, and too far away to be punished for it.

There is something in that for anyone building from outside. Distance gets described as the diaspora’s disadvantage, usually by people in the diaspora. It is at least as often the reason the work was possible at all.