Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

The poem’s self-interrogation

The poem “Al-Mlihah wa al-manfm” is caught between the horizontal and the
vertical in space and time, between past experience and present bewilderment.
The speaker’s tone is one of anger, rage, and frustration. The poem itself is
interrogated and found guilty of inadequacy and poor performance. It
is placed in a full context of experience and life that provokes castigation and
disparagement:

You coffin weaver in a hot noon

My warrior died as though of the religion of poor millions

Died in a strange land

Died, with no beloved to cry

For him, in his yellow bier.

(1: 278–79)

Dissatisfaction with the very vocation of poetry sounds even greater as the
speaker delineates past experiences of imprisonment and exile, as set forth in
this poem within a disproportional context of counterpower, repression, and
coercion, along with personal misgivings:

I was torn and fought windmills

And rode the black moon as mare

Through the desert of my songs

And I created poetry from the suffering of my poor people

So what is next?

(Ibid.)

As for the gods of mythology and religions, they seem to offer nothing in his
exile. Exile subsumes everything and turns these into mere artifacts, replicas
of some sort that cannot sustain an experience, which, nevertheless, emerges
in the full text, a poem of exilic disenchantment. Through denials and
negations, lack imprints itself as a surplus, to use the Derridean manipula-
tions of Lacan. Addressing Gods of mythology, the voice in “al-Mlihah wa
al-manfm” (Gods and Exile) challenges their offerings in a rhetoric that also
interrogates the whole Tammnzldrive of his counterparts:

This is you, and this is what you see

You are lakes of amnesia

Plains of ashes

Trodden forever by your dead knight

In the heat of noon.

(Ibid.)

ENVISIONING EXILE