Of Lost Cities: The Maghribi Poetic Imagination

The poetic memorialization of the Maghribi city illuminates the ways in which exilic Maghribi poets constructed idealized images of their native cities from the ninth to nineteenth centuries CE. The first work of its kind in English, Of Lost Cities explores the poetics and politics of elegiac and nostalgic representations of the Maghribi city and sheds light on the ingeniously indigenous and indigenously ingenious manipulation of the classical Arabic subgenres of city elegy and nostalgia for one’s homeland. Often overlooked, these poems – distinctively Maghribi, both classical and vernacular, and written in Arabic and Tamazight – deserve wider recognition in the broader tradition and canon of (post)classical Arabic poetry. Alongside close readings of Maghribi poets such as Ibn Rashi¯q, Ibn Sharaf, al-H?us?ri¯ al-?arir, Ibn ?ammad al-S?anhaji¯, Ibn Khami¯s, Abu al-Fat? al-Tunisi¯, al-Tuhami¯ Amghar, and Ibn al-Sha¯hid, Nizar Hermes provides a comparative analysis using Western theories of place, memory, and nostalgia. Containing the first translations into English of many poetic gems of premodern and precolonial Maghribi poetry, Of Lost Cities reveals the enduring power of poetry in capturing the essence of lost cities and the complex interplay of loss, remembrance, and longing.