A Study of Banausic Crafts
in Early Arabic Poetry
Yemen, 9th-10th centuries CE. Metropolitan Museum of Art
The dream of getting work done without conscious effort is widespread in world folklore, and in the lives of writers everywhere, which is what makes Hey, Wait a Minute (I Wrote a Book!) such a lovable title. To discover oneself in the act of writing is more common than discovering one's text complete, and that's what happened at a conference in 2021 when I said, "I think I'm writing a book" before saying so inwardly.
Up to that point, what was I was doing? Following my nose, gathering materials, and pondering a bottomless question on which every writer is entitled to an opinion: In what way are texts like textiles? The metaphor seems universal, especially in the Islamic world where the analogy between poetic and textile craft is a dominant trope. When we find it at the dawn of Islamic literature, it is therefore unsurprising. Perhaps that lack of surprise explains why scholars have not caught onto the conventional occasions for textile simile in early Arabic poetry, its determinant grounds of likeness, and its historical milieu of origin in which nomadic poets and sedentary weavers were separate orders of people. The sociopoetic conditions of this tradition and its representations of verse, through verse, are the main concerns of the book I'm now telling everyone I'm writing.
There's a lot to say about the project, and a lot to keep back. For publishers, I have sample chapters and a prospectus just about ready to go. Here, I would like to narrativize it, and indicate points of interest to readers of this weblog, who now know the reason for the Fiber arts tag. Using the new tag Hands at Work, it will operate as a sort of blog within the blog, subject to irregular updates and periods of silence, whose contents are linked below:
