The implication of disconnection has urgent existentialist overtones
whenever the individual is aware of his or her impasse. The Iraqi poet Buland
al->aydarl(d. 1997) gives the moment a strong sense, not only of disloca-
tion, but also of total estrangement. The persona expects no connection, no
reference, and no sign of communication. As if foreshadowing later exile, the
disenchanted speaker in “Sm‘lal-barld” (The Mailman) is not ready even to
anticipate communication: “O mailman / what your desire of me is? / I am
far removed from the world, / surely you are mistaken, / for the earth holds
nothing new / For this outcast.”^65 To be uprooted from that intersection, the
meeting point of identity and direction, definitely involves an ardent search
on the writer’s part to relocate himself or herself again in another space, affin-
ity, ethnicity, culture, or language. History tells us how resilient we tend to
be. In this regard, Ovid’s story is no less instructive than Socrates’s. After
being driven to exile at Tomis, on the shores of the Black Sea, banished from
his beloved Rome, and compelled to use the Sarmatian language, his sense of
belonging compelled him to develop the habit of talking to himself, “for fear
of losing the use of the Ausoian tongue”:
Lest my own voice grow dumb in its native sound,
I talk to myself, dealing again with disused words and seeking again the
ill-omened currency of my art.
Thus do I drag out my life and my time,
thus do I withdraw myself from the contemplation of my woes.
(quoted Martz xiv–xv)In another text, Ovid finds himself impelled “to speak Sarmatian—I get
by / with a combination of phrases, gestures, and nods.” On the other hand,
a sense of cultural dislocation not only makes his Latin “rusty and stiff,” but
also contaminates it with “infelicitous phrases, / awkwardness, barbarisms”
because of “this outlandish place” (Slavitt 105–06). Part of the culture of the
elite, Ovid’s poetry, especially the erotic which got him banished, was
avowedly refined and polished. Thus, it was an act of resistance to continue
using Latin, even through a maddening process of self-address:
I walk
on the beach sometimes to declaim the poems I know by heart
to try to keep my tongue and the Latin tongue
Comfortable in my mouth. I talk to myself aloud,
as madmen do in Rome, but here to stay
sane. Sometimes I stop at a word whose precise meaning
escapes me for the moment, and I feel the fear,
the impotence and the rage that the very old feel
when their minds start to go, and the tears come.
(Slavitt 106)ENVISIONING EXILE