(Broken Pitchers 1954), he is so powerless that he asks the addressee back
home to pray for him:
Pray for me!
Across the walls of my naked, hungry, sad homeland
(Ibid. 141)This homeland evokes nostalgia and longing for people and scenes. Every
detail resurges in that pivotal crossing where memory gets entrenched. In a
paradoxical strain, memory thrives on these images, enriching the text,
whereas the lyrical poet is pushed aside, forlorn and empty-handed:
My fathers and I
In the solitude of the house
Alone, with no love or souvenir.
(Ibid.)Even in his collection of 1956, Al-Majd lil ayfml wa-al-zaytnn(Glory to
Children and Olives), memory tends to open up the wound, to keep it bleeding,
while the speaker addresses his wife, “the sister of my soul,” as his “dove,”
whose “eyes are two lamps of gold and fire” to illuminate “the night” of his
“exile” (Ibid. 209–10).
Nevertheless, in al-Baymtl’s work (Broken Pitchers 1954) the image of the
forlorn wanderer takes shape. Overwhelmed by loneliness and dislocation, the
wanderer appears in almost half of the poems. Critics and anthology editors
find his “Musmfir bilm.aqm’ib” (Traveler without Baggage) the most repre-
sentative of his early wanderings. It certainly expresses the bafflement of a
speaker caught among dislocation, commitment, and existentialist thought.
Deprived of identity, a traveler with no baggage—he, in the same poem—is
in the in-between state in an elusive terrain that breeds many intersections
in al-Baymtl’s poem. Taverns, cafés, stations, and sidewalks have punctuated
his poems since then, fixing and posting him to the wall, a voyeur with a
disconcerting outlook:
On the wall
The light of day
Sucks my years, spits them out in blood
The light of day
This day was never meant for me^89In a prophetic note of disenchantment, al-Baymtlsets the tone for his
subsequent poetry as one of exile: “I shall remain from nowhere, with no face,
no history, from nowhere” (Ibid. 121). The implications of this subtext are
far-reaching, as the poet is enabled now to fight back or decry the poetics of
ENVISIONING EXILE