Of Lost Cities: The Maghribi Poetic Imagination

In this talk, Nizar F. Hermes will present and read from Of Lost Cities: The Maghribī Poetic Imagination,
which textually, theoretically, and comparatively explores the poetics and politics of elegiac
constructions and nostalgic representations of the premodern and early modern Maghribī city. Focusing
mainly on the significance of Sicily and the Mediterranean Sea in the book, the talk will center on the
eleventh-century exilic Ifrīqiyyan (Tunisian) poets Ibn ʿAbdūn (d. 1010), Ibn Rashīq (d. 1064), Ibn Sharaf
(d. 1067), and the blind al-Ḥuṣrī al-Ḍarīr (d. 1095), bringing their exilic experiences and poetic
productions in Sicily and al-Andalus into comparative conversation with Ibn Ḥamdīs (d. 1133), the
renowned Arabic-Sicilian poet who nostalgically and elegiacally commemorated Sicily in his Ṣiqilliyāt
(Poems on Sicily) while living in exile in al-Andalus and especially in the Maghrib. Additionally, Hermes
will read from his newly published poems, engaging in a poetic dialogue with Ibn Ḥamdīs, Arabo-
Norman Sicily, and the Mediterranean as a liminal (un)poetic site, both past and present.