to friendships or intellectual solidarity. Dissenting from party politics
may lead to repression equal to the one exercised by the modern state.
Nevertheless, let us expound on Ynsuf’s predicament. He is an Iraqi poet who
has lived in exile since the mid-1970s. A Communist, he was obliged to
follow party regulations. Hence, he was reluctant to write in support of his
friend, the dissenter ‘Azlz al-Sayyid Jmsim, lest there be a breach of Party
regulations. His poetry, however, reveals enormous oscillation, division, and
anxiety. In an earlier poem, “Al-Muhmjir” (“The Émigré”),^61 he addresses a
comrade, a “migrating bird” who has been singing of his new settlement in
exile and its sea, horizons, flowering songs, jeweled doors, and minarets. The
poet intimates that he is no less attracted to these, but, he asks, does not the
migrating bird ever feel the taste of these as “a branch of misery between [his]
lips?” Is the land not “ephemeral” there, and are the seas not “salty”? The
speaker shares the longing for adventure, dream, and variety, as he is no less
prone to joy and rapture, but, does not he maintain an ideology of opposition,
revolt, and change? (I: 496–97). Ironically, Ynsuf was driven into exile when
the Soviet Union mediated with Saddam to let Communist intellectuals leave
Iraq. To remain as Communists in Iraq could have entailed death. Like many
intellectuals, the poet was unhappy with this choice, but he was forced to
make it, carrying thereafter the scars of memory as he admits in “Kalimmt
shubh khmxxah” (Words Semiprivate). In a moment of stress, he is to face up
to the reproachful addressee:
Let me tell you tonight
In the grip of memory
I am a prisoner without a jailer
And when the hill seems like the clouds,
and the clouds seem as near as the hill
When colors and flocks feed on a song,
for palms and cones in wet grass and vine,
I regress in memory, and iron-bars
extend over my forehead
(1: 331)In other words, the poet of commitment who at first resists exile may
eventually accept it, only to pass later through other agonies of self-doubt and
guilt. In Gass’s words, “For its victim, exile has two halves like a loaf cut by a
knife. Heart, home, and hearth fill one side—the land the exile loses; while for-
eignness, strangeness, the condition of the alien, occupy the other—the strand
on which the cast away is washed” (Ibid. 125). In the words of SacdlYnsuf:
Exile includes the idea of annulment, the elimination of the
individual’s relation to heavens, land, and community, for there is a
vertical line connecting heavens where the worshipped, with earthENVISIONING EXILE