Poetry versus oblivionNo matter how overwhelming such anxieties and fears seem to be, the poet’s
recourse to song counteracts further morbidity and depression. The story is as
old as Ovid. “Through song I seek oblivion from my wretchedness,” Ovid’s
saying goes. It is the more so when a poet knows that homeland is merely a
checkpoint, a police station for interrogation and persecution. Thus, writes
FawzlKarlm, another exiled Iraqi: “Every sail not returning to you, border
check-point, / Not searching, in vain, for meaning / But to escape black
meanings, / is mine.”^72
It is not, thus, merely a homeland that preoccupies the minds, thoughts,
and dreams of poets and writers; neither is it a concern with some cultural
adoption, central as these seem to be to the writings of many. While reader-
ships and audiences are usually placed in one’s homeland, inhabiting one’s
mind as if they were here and now, the ruler and the system work always
as some haunting apparatus, a checkpoint once, but also a ferocious animal
on another occasion, bound to reach you whenever arrangements are
made among states and governments. Indeed, both concerns are so real that
they assume an archetypal presence in writings of exile. While Ovid, for
instance, asks for human communication to escape the impending sense
of “fainting” (Slavitt 215), there was always a fear of death that even praises
to Caesar could not dispel. On the other hand, only his audiences could bring
him solace and comfort upon reading his poetry of exile: “such as fishing out /
from the slosh of surf a glittering bottle, sealed... / and, yes, look, with a
message inside. You open it up / to read the last cry from an old wreck”
(Slavitt 26).
Fear, preoccupation, and concern dwell in exilic writings and give them a
character of their own as they reveal anxieties and troubles in juxtapositions,
parallels, gaps, and abrupt rejoinders. As Aijaz A.mad argues:
Writers-in-exile often write primarily for readerships which are
materially absent from the immediate conditions of their production,
present only in the country from which the writer has been forcibly
exiled, hence all the more vividly and excruciatingly present in the
writer’s imagination because their actuality is deeply intertwined with
the existential suffering of exile and with the act of writing as such.
(Ibid. 131)Torn between a desperate need for an alternative location with adequate
emotional support and a compelling need for return, which is almost impossible
wherever dictators insist on a total “ ‘massification’ of the literary audience”
(Brennan 67), the exiled writer is forced to invent a special mode of writing.
He or she carries not a cross, but a scar, a mark of mutilation by an ongoing
loss for which no gain can ever compensate. Prisoners of conscience have their
ENVISIONING EXILE