distant and the unseen to map out the mapless and traverse the future. The
Qur’mnic hoopoe is entreated to lead them into the vast and the boundless:
O hoopoe of mysteries, take us to our endless tomorrow!
Hitch ourtime to the horizon of this vastness and soar with us.
Nature is nothing but spirit, and the earth seems, from here,
A breast aroused by that sublime coming.
(Ibid. 43)Exile as such is whatever disorients and uproots and whatever, intentionally
or unconsciously, takes the person away from his or her homeland. It has psy-
chological, social, political, and textual dimensions. In a neat interweaving of
classical images of location and dislocation, of homecoming and departure,
the poet disorients a neocolonialist discourse of occupation and unmasks its
claims of origins. Expelled from his land, the poet finds everything else a
place of exile, carrying scars and reminders. Everything evolves as exile for the
uprooted, the pursued, the hunted out, and the tracked down. In this sense,
no other location offers comfort, and earth only closes in on people. In a poem
titled “The Earth is Closing on Us,” the Palestinian poet enumerates the
wishes and desires that are made impossible in an apocalyptic scene without
a human touch or a heavenly promise, “Where should we go after the last
frontiers? Where should the birds fly after the last sky?”^44 In the same poem,
the poet sets the stage for these culminating agonies, for the “belongings” as
celebrated by some postmodernist trends have no place in real life, unless the
individual is an actor and culprit in this nightmarish production:
The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage, and we
tear off our limbs to pass through.
The earth is squeezing us. I wish we were its wheat so we could die and
live again. I wish the earth were our mother
So she’d be kind to us. I wish we were pictures on the rocks for our
dreams to carry
as mirrors.^45These issues involve more complexity than migration, expatriation, and
cultural dislocation alone. Moreover, exile within an empire has a different
register from deportations outside it. To move to the metropolis is different
from banishment into a peripheral or isolated region. Ovid’s plea for a place
“a little less remote” (Slavitt 32) than that “brink of the world” (Ibid. 33)
does not merely betray a sense of geographical dislocation. There is a division
between the two worlds, where “There’s no literate talk but only the rattle /
of men in armor” (Ibid. 68–69). To be deprived of Rome toward “a worse
fate, / a long slow dwindle in Tomis,” is to be thrown into “that huddle of
mean / hovels in the chill wind” (Ibid. 24). Tomis is no more to him than
ENVISIONING EXILE