louder, until he “vanquished the filth and his torturers.”^100 Indeed, Hikmet’s
poems from prison left a clear impression on al-Baymtl, for while Hikmet
deliberately follows up his intimate love for freedom, especially in spring, he
nevertheless will not let this be the only dominating voice in his prison
poems. Nostalgia and celebration of the outside enhance the painful isolation
and confinement as they work on the poet–prisoner, but the poet comes often
with a refrain of pleasure and hope worked out in sentimental celebrations of
the little that may be snatched from his jailers, as in this excerpt from his
“Letters from a Man in Solitary” (1938):
Sunday today.
Today they took me out in the sun for the first time.
And I just stood there, struck for the first time in my life
by how far away the sky is,
how blue
and how wide.
Then I respectfully sat down on the earth.
I leaned back against the wall.
For a moment no trap to fall into,
no struggle, no freedom, no wife.
Only earth, sun, and me...
I am happy.^101Such early intimations cannot be lost to the poet who met Hikmet in Moscow
and became one of his close friends. Yet, these work in a complex matrix of
readings and cultural configurations or separations.
Unless we understand the association between exilic experience and
creativity, we are bound to miss al-Baymtl’s otherwise articulate poetics of
exile. Aware of the dangers of relapsing into mere rhetoric, as in the polemics
of his early poetry, al-Baymtlhas deliberately negotiated for a free poetics,
unrestricted by premeditated experience. His poetics of exile vies for a text of
vagrant words, a wood uncultivated, and paths untrodden.
The poem as a force of lifeThe image of the wanderer is a central and dominant one. It derives poetic
and textual significance from this roaming and association with voices, signs,
benedictions, premonitions, and portents. The emanating poetic matrix is
rich, and the poem that begins with myth, passes through the prayers and
musings of poets and imams to settle in the end in the subtext of estrange-
ment and exile, before offering itself anew as a product. In this intricate fashion,
the poem is historical and transcendental, temporal and permanent. It is a
text that fights back oppression and exploitation while opting for the endless
and the eternal. It is worth noting that al-Baymtl’s last poems emphasize this
ENVISIONING EXILE