Singing with Severed Tongues: On Nadim Choufi's In the Face of the Dragon

A love story before, during, and after the end of language. The narrative of Nadim Choufi’s poem, In the Face of the Dragon (2025), is as simple and impossible as that.

The poem’s narrative is deceptively simple in its progression and framing: two protestors meet in a city aflame and proceed to spend 24 hours together. One of them steps into the vaunted turret of the speaking ‘I’, announcing the beginning of their tale.

This is an impossible beginning, because the turret begins to fall apart as soon as the lover steps into it. This too is announced:

Before songs collapse and lyrics implode
I will tell you of my existence
with love, love, love …

Gathering materials that are quickly turning to ash, the lyric narrator endeavours to cobble together an identity renewed by love in conditions of death, and to transform readers into its witnesses. ‘Why, for the thousandth time, are we being annihilated?’ opens Choufi’s poem; a question that hovers between the rhetorical and the numinous. What follows is not an answer but an exploration of how the horror of relentless death alters our relationship to language and its world-historical possibilities – among them, the supposedly stable ground of self-narration.

The lover’s survival strategy (the moving and ingenious scheme to tell us of their existence) could only be improvised by someone whose language has been annihilated once, twice, or a thousand times before: a game of concealment inside the words of other poets. Never let the enemy see you coming; never stay inside one turret for too long.

Throughout Choufi’s In the Face of the Dragon, the lover leaps into the voices of over 90 Arabic poets, sheltering in one verse line (it has often been pointed out that the Arabic term for verse line, bayt, also means house or place of dwelling) long enough to advance the telling of their story of love and struggle, and fleeing before the song collapses and the lyrics implode.

These leaps are carried by the cento, a literary form stretching back to Greek antiquity, which Choufi draws into the present and Suneela Mubayi's translation carries into English. While the cento – a poetic collage that repurposes verses from other authors – was never quite brought into the Arabic literary tradition, it bears a resemblance to one of the most significant experiments undertaken by Arabic poets in the 20th century: the use of masks, or aqniʿa.

During the age of 20th-century monsters – colonialism, Zionism, and global imperialism, the ‘dragon’ stalking the Samih al-Qasim poem from which Choufi takes his title – poets like ʿAbd al-Wahab al-Bayyati and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab experimented with a variety of personas. The masks of figures like al-Hallaj and al-Mutanabbi allowed them to stand outside their historical moment and adopt the perspective of a necessary leader, deemed absent in the present and so summoned from the annals of history and myth. Like the cento, the mask poem complicates the relationship between authorship, the singular self, and poetic discourse. 

But the crucial difference between the mask poem and the cento lies in each genre’s approach to voice. The mask poem fully inhabits a historical or fictional persona to speak as that figure, appropriating not their speech but the authoritative position from which they spoke: their platforms as prophets, visionaries, and leaders of the tribe. The cento, on the other hand, assembles fragments from existing texts, creating meaning through juxtaposition without assuming the identity or authority of the original authors. Citation, which is missing in the mask poem, is essential to the cento. And one thing citation does away with is the edifice of spokesmanship, the representational structure through which the mask poem maintains the distinction between powerful and powerless speech. This has important consequences for the question of who is allowed to lay claim to language.

As the lovers travel across the formally diverse landscape of modern Arabic poetry, pausing briefly in the free-verse poems of Nazik Al-Malaika, the neoclassical panegyrics of Abdullah al-Baradouni, and the prose poems of Riyad al-Saleh al-Hussein, among many others, they are also moving through the urban space of Beirut, the 20th-century capital of death and resurrection. But perhaps most significantly, the lovers flit between human and animal imagery as demanded by each poet’s choice of metaphor.

At times, the stitched-together narrator has fangs; at other moments, he has claws. He howls and pants. His lover’s tail ‘wag[s] behind his enormous back’, borrowing the words of Huda Hussein. Near the very end of the poem comes a poignant self-referential admission, ‘I have become a hybrid body’, and a plea for acceptance.

The polarity between speech and its others – nonsense, noise, and the howls of non-human animals – cannot account for the poetics of Choufi’s text, nor can the antagonism between an ‘ordinary man’ and a monster. Efforts to entrench these oppositions have always gone hand in hand with the ugliest forms of barbarism, which is to say the most cynical of humanisms, ‘narrow and fragmentary’, as Aimé Césaire described them, ‘incomplete and biased, and, all things considered, sordidly racist’.1

What is at stake in Choufi’s poetics is the possibility of dethroning the logic that dictates the limits of the sensible and the human in our brutalising world. Immanent to the form of Choufi’s poem is the recognition that, in the face of the ongoing genocide in Palestine, we no longer know what it means to be human, or alive. We can no longer accept that the dead do not find a way to speak, that death means silence – a fiction that mollifies the guilt about our silence. ‘To speak any other language than the language of the dead today is to participate in the ongoing crime’, wrote Haytham el-Wardany in a recent essay. ‘The dead. They sing with severed tongues’, and with their simple and impossible stories, they conjure up a world that has yet to be constructed.2