Is this my city? Are these the pits,
And these the bones?
The shadows look down from their houses
With their blood dyed somber
To be lost and unnoticed
By the pursuer
Is this my city? With injured domes,
in which red-robed Judas
Set the dogs on the cradles
Of my little brothers...and the houses,
They eat of their flesh
And in the village Ishtar is dying of thirst,
There are no flowers on her forehead
And in her hands there is a basket, its fruit are stones
Which she casts at every woman. And in the palm trees
On the city’s shore there is a wailing.
(Ibid. 103)Words and images that normally denote joy here invoke nothing but
sterility and waste. Opposite connotations emerge from the register, and
stones and wailing are the markers of the new city. The poet, as a “sufferer of
modernity,” universalizes the immediate, presenting thereby a “landscape of
ruins.”^36 The disillusioned voice of the modern Sindbmd invites answers, no
matter how rhetorical the questions sound. The invitation calls myth, satire,
and narrative to a poetic space that is loaded with signs and recollections.
Adonis has nothing to offer, and myth pales in the face of a cruel and sordid
reality. “Is this Adonis, this emptiness? / And this pallor, this dryness?” (Ibid.
95). A transposition of meaning takes place that corresponds to the new site
of loss and destruction. The apocalyptic vision runs counter to the city of
opulence and affluence, and the city has no redeeming marker to change it
into a celestial one. Losing both the material and the celestial, it is one of
death, and the speaker is an outcast, like a raving lunatic. Both share what
Foucault calls, a “... marginal position and a profoundly archaic silhouette—
where their words unceasingly renew the power of their strangeness and the
strength of their contestation.”^37
Sumer retainedA sixth strategy deals with the ancient Mesopotamian past. The use of
Sumerian lore is new in Arabic poetry. Although the mythical element has
been present since the mounting interest of the early 1950s, the Babylonian
has attracted more attention, especially in terms of epical poetics. Even
al-Sayymb’s use of Eliot and the mythical method turns him toward Middle
Eastern myth at large. Eliot’s use of European tradition, with few references
POETIC DIALOGIZATION