History and Literature Conjoined

The other day, I was teaching some poetry from Baghdad and Damascus to my freshman history class, and I started with a question: “Are history and literature more alike or more different?”

The awkward wording mirrors some of my own confusion—I’m not sure I really understand how to answer the question myself. Though I’ve taught English for over twenty-five years, I’d never taught history until two years ago. Though I loved history in school and took every history class my schedule allowed, I don’t call myself a historian.

Being an English teacher, I can see how history is literature. The way a historian shapes his or her impression of events extends to word choice, imagery, metaphor, and syntax. Historians are—as much as other authors—seeking particular and vivid impressions, and their prose can be quite beautiful.

My trouble lies in the other direction. Can literature—which I’ve always seen as universal and timeless—be subsumed by history?

I don’t have an answer, but that’s never disqualified me from asking before, so we plunged into the poem, “To My Father” by the Caliph Yazid:

Must then my failings from the shaft
Of anger ne’er escape?
And dost thou storm because I quaff’d
The water from the grape?

That I can thus from wine be driv’n
Thou surely ne’er canst think—
Another reason thou hast giv’n
Why I resolve to drink.

‘Twas sweet the flowing cup to seize,
‘Tis sweet thy rage to see;
And first I drink myself to please;
And next—to anger thee.

After the usual first question—”What is this poem saying?”—and a digression—is ‘quaff’ an onomatopoeia?”—I asked them to consider what in the poem’s subject matter might be anchored in this place—The Umayyad Islamic Caliphate—and in this time—circa 660 C. E.

That part was easy. Islamic law forbids consuming “water from the grape.” As caliph, Yazid might be expected to uphold that law particularly, not just by his father but also by his people. If my class had known more, they might have also said some historians regard Yazid as particularly dissolute, a possible spur to the reactive formation of the Abbasid Caliphate centered in Baghdad and the split between Sunnis and Shi’as.

One particularly astute student did compare him to the Abbasid caliph Al-Amin who became prey to his brother’s invasion when he drank and caroused his way to oblivion.

As Yazid was historical, a real person, you could say this poem is history, but I wonder if it has to be. You can never ask a class to un-know what they’ve just discussed, but I did ask my class to consider what they might have said if we’d encountered this poem as a work by the prolific author Anonymous?

Students are quick to apply their own experience to poetry, much quicker than applying their knowledge of historical context. No one in my class, thankfully, said he or she drank to annoy parents—they are no older than fifteen—but the class could identify with the poem’s fundamental sentiment, that sometimes children oppose parents out of a pure orneriness.

In that sense, this poem needn’t have been written thirteen and a half centuries ago. So, I asked them, “Is this poem history because it’s peculiar to a time and place or is it literature because it describes a universal, timeless human experience?”

One student was onto me immediately, observing that, if I was going to rely on those definitions then what would history be? History is full of universal experience, he said, or we wouldn’t study it. He asked what could be peculiar to a particular time and place, whether there was such a thing.

“The internet,” someone said, and he replied that the internet is just the latest in people’s efforts to communicate faster and farther, hardly unique. History repeats itself, someone else said, human beings do what human beings do, always.

Though we read two other poems from the same era and asked the same sorts of questions, I’m not sure we traveled much further than that. When I went around the room to get students’ final judgment on my first question, the responses were evenly split—just as many people answered “more similar” as “more different.”

The question I didn’t ask, but wanted to, was whether history and literature can be taught entirely separately. I see that the two academic subjects have different methodologies worth developing, and I suspect my colleagues in the English department would say they ought to be separate, asserting the “New” Criticism edict that context distracts a reader from what’s in the work and what means the author finds to express it. In the past, English teachers at my school have sometimes been skeptical of literature in history class because, by regarding fiction and poetry as cultural artifacts or primary documents, history teachers might bypass aesthetics in favor of a culture’s beliefs and values. The individual, human perspective gets lost.

I can see that point of view. I’m sometimes wonder if my history colleagues entirely appreciate the beauty in literature, the individual genius in authors that transcends time. Yet, as both a literature and history teacher, I’m sure I don’t want to separate the two sisters. Most days, I’m not sure which subject I’m in…and happy I don’t know.