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The paper asks how Somalis perceived their ‘national’ identity in relation to clan-based society in the context of European colonial and Ethiopian imperial domination in the first half of the twentieth century. The paper uses Somali oral poetry as historical source since poetry is widely acknowledged as the most profound expression of cultural and political discourse in (northern) Somali society. This paper argues that one of the most famous and enduring examples of ‘classical’ Somali poetry – a series of linked poems known as Gubo – sheds light on an important but neglected period of Somali history, the aftermath of the Dervish wars. The Gubo poems map the experience of three clans who are situated along the eastern Ethiopian border with the colonial Somali-lands during the period in which the Ethiopian and the colonial administrations (British and Italian) pacified Somali resistance and demarcated the borders between their Somali-inhabited territories (circa 1920–1950). The poems also form a link between the poetic discourse of the Dervish leader, proto-nationalist and famed poet Sayyid Maxamad Cabdille Xasan, and the first modern Somali nationalists. The Gubo poems comment on two issues that continue to preoccupy Somali politics and history today, namely the division of the Somali peoples into different ‘national’ territories, and the primacy of ‘clan’ in Somali political life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Poetry Research Project 1998 continues work begun in 1982 which analysed the practice of secondary school teachers when teaching poetry and their attitudes towards it. Then some 170 teachers in a single Local Education Authority (LEA) completed a lengthy questionnaire and a number were interviewed. The information gained by this means highlighted both good practice and a number of problem areas which teachers encountered. Sixteen years after that first survey, and following considerable change in the teaching of English and of poetry as a result of such initiatives as the National Curriculum, the survey was repeated with a group of over one hundred teachers from the same LEA. This, the first of two papers, reports mainly on teachers' attitudes to poetry, particularly the reading, writing and discussion of poetry and upon their concerns. The second paper, to be published in the Oxford Review of Education, March 2000, considers the effects of the National Curriculum, of SATs and of changes in examinations at 16+. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undermining the narrow critical approaches which neglect the potential intersection between modernism and postcolonialism, this paper explores the attempt by contemporary Arab poets to engage Western modernist heritage in order to articulate domestic narratives integral to the geopolitics of the Arab region in the postcolonial era. In an attempt to redefine tradition and deviate from fossilised inherited legacies and tyrannical regimes, postcolonial Arab writers, led by the Iraqi poet, Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati, pursue solace and redemption in Western modernism, developing Western forms into a poetics of resistance and protest. Through textual apprenticeship, assimilated from Western literature and culture, they combine modernism and postcolonialism into a nexus incorporating Western techniques while emphasising variants and displacements between their nationalist perspective and that of their Western forebears. Convinced of the role played by the West in the shaping of modern Arabic cultural traditions, Al-Bayati reconstructs colonial modernism as a narrative of liberation, engaging in dialogues with Western pioneering writers and masterpieces. Transforming Western modernist strategies into a revolutionary construct, Al-Bayati aims to challenge internal oppression and external hegemony. Through tran-cultural entanglement and textual appropriation of Western narratives he provides diversity and insight into postcolonial Arabic poetry, intensifying the awareness of other traditions and reconstructing his own heritage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a literary critic's attempt to complement the historian's, the political scientist's, and the Islamist's accounts of the Islamic reform spirit in the dynamic Muslim community of Northern Nigeria. Consequently a thematic analysis of the religio-political reform poetry genre is put forth to illustrate the phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT In a previous article (Benton, 1999) which focused on the teaching of poetry in secondary schools, teachers' responses to a survey undertaken in 1998 were compared with those of a similar survey in 1982. It was suggested that a major change was that where the teachers registered concern it was a concern for poetry itself rather than a concern about poetry teaching. By and large they were much more confident in handling the reading and writing of poetry in class than formerly: what appears to exercise them most now are the effects of the National Curriculum and of SATs on their teaching and of changes in the way poetry is examined. These, taken together, are seen by some as having a detrimental effect on the students' experience of poetry. Others, however, see positive advantage in some of the changes. It is these concerns which are the focus of the present paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]