Novelists in many literary traditions have come to terms with the distinctiveness of
their art form by thinking about poets and poetry. The need to differentiate the novel
from poetry is especially pressing for Arab prose writers because of poetry’s preemi-
nent status in that literary corpus. Many twentieth-century Arab intellectuals have
valorized the novel as the representative genre of modernity–whether conceived as
an absent ideal or the epoch of consumerist capitalism–while situating poetry as
a backward element of contemporary life. But poetry has also offered prose writers
such as Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, in A Period of Time, and novelists such as
Tayeb Salih, in Season of Migration to the North, a way to reflect on the ambiv-
alences engendered by modernity and the experience of colonialism. This tradition
of using the novel to meditate on historical rupture and the fate of poetry continues
into the present, even as poetry’s relation to political and intellectual life becomes
increasingly tenuous