and the abstract, the local and the universal, interweave as if to fight back the
impinging recollection of the past. There is no denial of loss and alienation,
but these occur in a cycle of love and deprivation, gold and ashes. Contrasting
images and significations of opposition flow in profusion whenever a nostalgic
mood is about to interpose. Between memory as such and the fear of loneliness
and the utter failure of the creative impulse, the typical poem since the 1970s
is one of great anxiety and tension. The “middle of the night,” “winter,” and
“Autumn of Arab Cities” (Ibid. 279) are al-Baymtl’s images for loneliness and
gloom, especially in “Birth in Unborn Cities.” They usually creep up to evoke
loss, ostensibly associated with cM’ishah’s departure, in “Aisha’s Profile,” but
also signaling rebirth in the manner of Shelley’s “West Wind”:
After her departure
I carried in my exile
The gold of poems and ashes
(Ibid. 287–88)Al-Baymtl’s memory has a history of its own beyond the specific childhood
recollections of Al-Jur.(The Wound). In every stage of his exile, there is a new
symbol of attraction that receives an enormous supplication as if the poet fights
back fears of stagnation or dryness. Such is Lmrmof October 26, 1974. In his
“I am Born and Burn in My Love,” Lmrmis the catalyst and the matrix, providing
memory with meaning and entangling it in a larger context of reality and illu-
sion. She becomes the signified and the signifier, while the speaker is caught up
between desire and fear of loss: “In my memory Lmrmawakens,” like a “tartar
cat” (Ibid. 197), with its yawning and clawing. Every motion and emotion, the
sound and the act, implicate memory in endless imaging that bridges the
spatial, the pictorial, and ephemeral. Such subordination entails no release from
her “Hanging...[him]with her tresses,” or “suspending [him]like a hare upon
the wall / Fettered by the string of...[his]tears” (Ibid. 197). Her enveloping
presence occupies his vision, captures his attention, and colors his perspective.
It is there in “paintings,” in “icons,” “beneath the golden mask of death” and
in the “enchantment of adorned women.” Indeed, she is everywhere, but too
elusive to be a concrete or tangible presence: “Leaving over the golden mask of
death / A ray of light from a day that died” (Ibid. 199).
Is Lmrmmeant as a substitute for cM’ishah? A version of the seductive, yet
unattainable woman? No. Lmrmis memory in a state of creative becoming.
Her presence establishes the creative impulse and gives form to recollections.
Her departure conversely indicates the poet’s anxiety and fear of poetic
drought. Indeed, al-Baymtl’s rhetoric for this state of bewilderment and
bafflement is another application of “guerilla” terminology that seeks to balance
a blank, a lack, or a hole in memory. Black holes worry al-Baymtl, and he
borrows a register of violence to counteract inertia. If this bafflement is
prolonged he is: “Exiled in my memory, / imprisoned in words, / I flee under
ENVISIONING EXILE