Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

writers who constitute a substantial part of the dominating discourse.
Al-Baymtlis not as direct. After the negative criticism accorded to his early
poetry of commitment, he develops narrative tropes and poetic incursions
into available textual belongings, to come up with a register and matrix of
his own. His attack on these inquisitors and enemies never ends, but he
selects from among them his immediate challengers who work in the field of
culture and literature. Speaking of these, al-Baymtlsays:

A thief from among them

A turbaned and ostentatious weeper

Halted me in my death-pit

Threatened to throw me out of paradise

And said: What do you believe in

I said: in the bleeding dawn’s fire

In my loss in this planet.^112

While the concluding two lines corroborate al-Baymtl’s faith in rebellion,
and the full commitment to exile as an open space and time, beyond limitation
and coercion, there is his other register with its counteracting strategies. Loss
in the latter is freedom, and vagrancy is an existence unattainable to the rest.
As for the bleeding dawn, it is al-Baymtl’s marker for transcendence and
perpetual becoming.
Rebellion is inclusive as a recurrent motif in al-Baymtl’s poetics. Its many
images, especially the “bleeding dawn” and the “pillar of fire,” usually lead
the speaker back to the uncultivated—but not necessarily Eliot’s “sacred”—
wood, where words are pure and innocent, making up a settlement for him,
which is no less than a textual homeland. In “Death and the Lamp,” we read:

Here I am

Naked like the desert sky

Sad like a gypsy horse

Haunted by fire

Exile is my homeland

Words are my exile.^113

While this poem should remind us of what the Palestinian Ma.mnd
Darwlsh say about exile in his collections of the 1990s, the emphasis on
language as the haven and the exile is worth notice. This combined interest is
a later flowering in al-Baymtl’s poetic occupations. However, why does al-Baymtl
insist on revolutionary rhetoric to target obsolete language? In Mamlakat
al-sunbulah(The Kingdom of Grain 1979), he suggests a language of terror, in
a kind of “poetry guerilla war against straw canons.” The poet is “a terrorist
against the absurd,” for he is “fed up with expression.” He is “an insane terrorist

ENVISIONING EXILE