However, to go back to Kristeva, these appeals to the general, the universal,
and the global involve a great deal of mystification, despite their pertinence
to the issue of spiritual or psychological exile as a state of alienation prior to
banishment. They are certainly valid whenever we set them into a historical
context of compulsory exile as less harrowing than imprisonment or murder.
In other words, exile is a privilege compared to imprisonment or murder. The
dictators of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as well as the despots of Afro-Asian
countries tend to identify writing and speech in general as potential acts of
subversion and sabotage. Ignorant to the end and afraid of the power
of thought, they seek words, as monopolies seek money and action. In
Gass’s pertinent summation, “what is exiled is nearly always someone’s word”
(Ibid. 129). Silencing writers “who speak out or up” (Ibid.) is the preferred
solution for rulers. Especially against thinkers, philosophers, and writers
who do not fit into power politics, rulers use the most atrocious methods of
containment and revenge.
The record of these writers sets things right for any discussion of belong-
ing. Making the most daring choice of resistance or social hermetic alienation
without giving up writing, they continue defying hegemony, manipulation,
and despotism. The writings of the Iraqi prisoner of conscience ‘Azlz al-Sayyid
Jmsim on elitism and culture, civilization and alienation, and vagrancy and
foreignness along with his stand for the rights of minorities place him within
a line of thought that has been enlisting philosophers and poets as martyrs
since Socrates.^53 His navigation between tradition and modernity, and his
reliance on a rich repository of classical heritage and modern thought should
make his writings effectively present in any discussion of modern Arabic
poetics. It is not surprising that his writings never lose sight of Socrates,
despite the attention usually paid to Aristotle’s choice of exile. As the late
Lebanese novelist and artist Fmrnq al-Buqayll(d. 2001) informed us, he
asked Jmsim to escape possible imprisonment or murder when meeting him
at al-Naxr Coffee-House in Baghdad (1985). Jmsim’s answer only repeats that
of Socrates, “For my homeland is to pass through difficult times. I cannot
leave.”^54 Repeating the Socratic stance, on which he has dwelt in his book
Al-.a,arah wa-al-’ightirmb (Civilization and Alienation), ‘Azlz al-Sayyid
Jmsim obviously opts for resistance and inevitable imprisonment and death
inside rather than life outside.^55 To Socrates, as it is to him, “exile is ampu-
tation, a mutilation of the self, because the society Socrates lives in is an
essential part of his nature, a nature he cannot now divide” (Gass 123). Gass
explains further, “Socratically, [...]the community is an essential organ of
the self” (Ibid.). Nevertheless, for Jmsim and many intellectuals of similar
concerns, escape is out of question; thus he was, to use Gass’s words on
Socrates, “nettlesome to the last, claiming, among other things, to be a son of
the State, and unable to renounce his parentage” (Ibid.).
Yet, ‘Azlz al-Sayyid Jmsim cites the very passages of Socrates that happily
welcome death, as a sacrificial act for one’s own ideas. In a short story of 1986
ENVISIONING EXILE