The amount of exilic anxiety and concern that constitutes the many
intersections of al-Baymtl’s poetic matrix is the most distinctive feature of his
poetry. Indeed, issues of Sufism, love, political opposition, and poetic
positions on tradition and language are subsumed in the larger context of
exile. The sense of exile drives him to interrogate memory and self, to search
for alternative choices, and to commune with other identities and positions.
His poetics of exile grows and develops in an increasingly intricate pattern
whereby some of his early poems give vent to sorrowful interrogations of
memory in order to face up to new challenges and priorities. Such a start
requires another vision, a different linguistic tool with clear positions on
tradition, poetry, and poets, ancient and modern.
In his exiles, al-Baymtldevelops “guerilla” rhetoric to displace clichés and
overworked metaphors. Only through such a remedial act can he negotiate
the development of paradoxical paradigms to accommodate his readings, life
commitments, and disillusionment: a textual homeland, among a community
of exiles, their figures, experiences, and texts. Al-Baymtl’s poem is soon to
grow into a single trope for home that gains substantiation through further
self-effacement. The latter is his only outlet to isolate memory and restrict its
movement and pressures. As self-effacement is almost impossible in lyrical
poetry, al-Baymtlmoves in the direction of both Sufism and myth. Both bring
about self-effacement through identification and rapture. Paradoxically,
al-Baymtl’s poetry achieves a great deal of its lyricism in this textual liminality
where the poet fuses into the rest. Yet, despite all this effort, a sense of
loneliness, tinged with agony and longing, remains as the ultimate note in
his poetry of exile, a mark that sets him apart from his friend the Turkish poet
Nazim Hikmet with his unfailing stand for both resistance and joy.
Memory dislodgedTo understand al-Baymtl’s endeavor to achieve release from memory, we have
to see his poetics in the larger context of differentiation between exiles proper
and expatriates or émigrés. In this respect, Bettina L. Knapp’s distinction
between exoteric and esoteric exile may prove helpful, although it downplays
the significant features of exile at large. Her analysis of the esoteric and its
activation of the creative impulse is worth attention, as Halim Barakat
rightly notes,^86 but voyaging in the deep recesses of the mind is only one
form of exilic poetics, as al-Baymtl’s experience illustrates.
It should not be surprising that al-Baymtl’s “Al-Jur.” (The Wound 1964),
dedicated to the Egyptian poet and cartoonist Xalmh Jmhln, is a focal point in
his poetics of exile. The poem, the second of two dedications to Jmhln in his
Al-Nmr wa al-kalimmtcollection, builds on a juxtaposition of the past and
present, the preexiled self, and the present one in its hesitations and anxieties.
The wound stands for the memories and recollections that usually invade
exilic space, involving the speaker in a state of limbo, inertia, and despair.
ENVISIONING EXILE