titled “A Bird in the Cage,” Jmsim impersonates the bird dying but explaining
to his comrades and companions that they have lost him unnecessarily for
petty considerations and concerns.^56 With so much sacrifice and resignation
to dire circumstance, he leaves those of us in exile, in “fear of personal anni-
hilation” (Ahmad 85). So disquieting is the nagging presence of Socrates and
his numerous followers that we are rather prone to cite Aristotle’s acceptance
of banishment as the inevitable choice to secure philosophy and thought
against further losses. Yet, Jmsim cites these, too, in his book, as if to leave us
naked and unprotected in facing an encroaching sense of guilt that continues
to torment exiles even when joining the Arab poet Adnnls in saying: “How
to be united with you, my friend homeland / When only the dead there are
in the right.”^57
Certainly, the poet Adnnls here does not identify every homeland with
confinement, but he looks upon the speaker’s dilemma from a number of per-
spectives: there is exile from homeland whenever it turns into a repressive
state; there is exile from oneself whenever the poet suffers alienation in its
many ramifications; and there is also exile from one’s culture whenever it
evolves into a hegemonic discourse. In any case, the sense of loss may well
mingle with a larger disappointment concerning the present situation in its
immediate and universal dimensions. At these intersections, the speaker in
“Marthiyyat al-ayymm al-.m,irah” (“Elegy for the Time at Hand” 1958)
admits a semblance of loss in his poetry that makes it difficult to draw a line
between outside reality and his poetry:
Chanting of banishment,
Exhaling the flame,
The carriages of exile
Breach the walls.
Or are these carriages
The battering sighs of my verses?^58The speaker’s words to the rest, “my boys,” parody the optimistic discourse
of nationalism and religion, its faith in “the greener leaves,” and its attach-
ment to anchors of faith: “We still have verse among us. / We have the sea. /
We have our dreams” (Ibid. 50). Indeed, hope becomes an inevitable prospect
in the face of the other alternative of suicide or death:
Under the exile’s moon
tremble the first wings.
Boats begin adrift
on a dead sea, and siroccos
rustle the gates of the city.
Tomorrow the gates will open.
We’ll burn the locusts in the desert,ENVISIONING EXILE