masks, and this community offers more than succor and a home. Speaking in
his own voice, he says:
I call on you Alberti!
And poetry answered
The hidden lightening inside the bleeding crowds
Passing in the night of exile
Illuminating all sufferings of Spaniards
Rome answered
And the wild sea music answered
We were children who penetrated the woods
But the music subsided, and the sea
Disappeared into books which spoke about light
Coming from the heart of Toledo
About an Arabian Star traveling in Europe
Sleeping at the gates of Toledo
We were children.^119However, to include so many exilic premonitions and symbols, the text has
to expand to accommodate all the defeated and conquered space, whenever
human beings suffer repression and persecution:
I called on you Alberti
And answered the cries of all exiled Spaniards
In every land where man suffers death
(Ibid.)It should not be surprising that al-Baymtl’s Alberti becomes the major symbol
for exile, and the poetic subtext becomes synonymous with space. Cities
like Baghdad, Granada, Toledo, and Rome are intertextualized in their
symbolic density to include historical details that highlight accounts and
instances of collaboration and division, rapprochement and estrangement.
Outside these cities stand stone walls that shut the poet out. These walls
keep away butterflies, al-Baymtl’s recurrent symbol of the sad, sensitive
soul.^120 Rome is to remain closed to him, as he says in the same poem, and
it remains asleep while the poet tries to overhear the coming dawn from
behind the closed gates (Ibid. 167). Indeed, Rome without the flame of
poetry or “a column of light” (Ibid. 163) is to suffer alienation. “Rome was
searching for Rome in clandestine leaflet” (Ibid. 163). While leaning on
Alberti’s and Lorca’s experience in Rome, the poet develops an intertext
charged with defiance which nevertheless undergoes some softening in his
Sufi poems.
ENVISIONING EXILE