ABSTRACT
Born on 23 April 1905, Jawdat Haydar lived 101 years witnessing two world wars, Arab nationalist uprisings, wars of independence and civil wars, and wars of occupation in the name of independence. Anglo-Saxon in education and Lebanese Arab in nationality, Haydar stands out among the array of Lebanese American writers who achieved international fame and won worldwide respect, such as Amin Al-Rihany and Gibran Khalil Gibran. At the turn of the 20th century, these writers calibrated what is now called ‘Immigrant Literature’ that is rife with East-West reconciliations and contestations. Enmeshed with the political upheavals of the Lebanon of independence and civil war and Arab nationalist movements, yet enamoured with poetry, be it English or Arabic, Haydar's poetry exemplifies a hybrid consciousness that is engaged in continuous negotiations with the Other: negotiations that involve self-interrogation and cultural contestations of symbolic constructs that often beleaguer writers whose native language is not English. These negotiations become quite complex and controversial when such a writer witnesses and suffers colonization, occupation, and a pyrrhic, gruesome civil war of fifteen years. A veteran freedom fighter, pacifist yet aggressive with respect to humanitarian concerns, liberal yet fundamentalist concerning nationalist issues, stoic yet epicurean in philosophical views, Aristotelian yet absurdist in individual potentialities, Haydar's poetry is exemplary of a poet fighting all forms of sieges, be they political, literary, cultural, or otherwise. The Evangelical School in Baalbeck and the Syrian Protestant College in Lebanon; the Lycée du Parc in Lyon, France; the AM&C College in Texas, United States; and the El Najah College, in Nablus, Palestine, constructed the cultural spaces Haydar interacted with, imbibing him with the different facets of the ‘Other’ and creating a ‘Self’ that is dialogic in its poetic encounters.
