Despite the poetic formulations that al-Baymtlinvents and contrives, exile
exerts an enormous pressure on his sensitive soul. However, his musings,
imaginings, and intimate alliances usually dispel the gloom of his poems.
In “Slrah Dhmtiyyah li -smriq al-nmr” (Autobiography of the Thief of Fire
1974), the poem that gives the title to the collection, the poet tends to work
out the dilemma of exile as an ongoing pursuit for love, a salvation that
carries within its process the seeds of endeavor and reward. A poetic dis-
placement occurs here, and the mask gives way to a partnership that is the
very locus of creative maturation. The poem no longer speaks of “I,” for the
individual fuses into a collective “We,” and all women gather in an image of
a woman with red hair, like “a fountain flooding from the sky.” This is “the
princess of exile whose red hair we are after” (Works 2: 349).
Al-Baymtl’s women symbolsLoss is exile, hence comes cM’ishah’s significant presence in al-Baymtl’s poetry. She
is female, but also childhood, ease, freedom, the desired, and the rapturous. She
is the regenerative cycle of cities, villages, seaports, rivers, and fields. To be
driven out of her paradise is loss. The poet targets the powers that enforce
separation. In other words, the sense of loss is a sense of exile, and their twin
presence usually endows his poetry with that painful accentuation that imposes
a certain dryness even in moments of rapturous elation. Thus, cM’ishah (Ishtar)
assumes feminine features, but they are features that “are ripened on the fires of
poems.”^128 Her lushness may slip into the text through fusion with apples, wine,
and a “hot loaf of bread.” She has then the quality of “fire of the fields,” and of
the desire “sleeping in my blood.” Nevertheless, she is also the priestess who
“slips away in the belly of the night.” In other words, cM’ishah “incarnated all
faces,” and contains in her being cities and orchards, standing as it were for the
magnanimous symbol in al-Baymtl’s poetry. In these embodiments and their
denials, cM’ishah becomes both a recollection and a personal life cycle.^129 “A pre-
mature butterfly / fluttering in the summer of my childhood / She incarnated all
faces” (Ibid. 287). The whole section reads as follows:
Eyes burning from excessive compassion
A face behind its mask, hiding
The cities of Salih
And the lemon orchards of the Upper Euphrates
There I spent the summer of my childhood
The winter overtook me.
(Ibid. 288–89)Al-Baymtl’s memory fights specifications and limits, and it is bent on
breaking these into shreds and portions that survive in tension, in another
sequence of integration and fragmentation. The very images of the concrete
ENVISIONING EXILE