lies behind the intricacy of his poetics:
On the sidewalks of exile
I arise after death
To be born in unborn cities
And to die.^136To see al-Baymtl’s poetics from an empirically oriented perspective, the reader
may trace a certain amount of fluctuation whenever loneliness subsumes the rest
of the images and identifications. The fight to keep memory in the background,
to intertextualize his poetry in a kingdom of words, and to survive in a wood of
variety and richness, entails a great amount of engagement, revision, and propo-
sition. The main effort is to bypass the stage of childhood, the one for which he
takes al-Sayymb to task,^137 and to survive limitations of every kind, including the
one of craft and position, and to empower his poetics of exile with both the uni-
versal and the specific. The emerging image of the two voices, the disconcerted
and the double, could stand for this complexity of experience and vision. It also
contains and appropriates the other recurrentimage of the blind and solitary
wanderer with its enormous connotations. Certainly, the image of the blind
and lonely wanderer eludes Eliot’s Tiresias despite al-Baymtl’s deliberate
association between the two. In “The Blind Fortune Teller” in Al-Kitmbah ‘alm
al-yln(Writing on Clay 1970), his persona shouts: “I am waiting here alone,
for a thousand years / without a door being opened in the darkness” (Works
1:189–90). In a later poem, “Slmfnniyat al-bucd al-khmmis” (The First
Symphony of the Fifth Dimension) in Mamlakat al-sunbulah(The Kingdom
of Grain 1979), the poet repeats, “I am blind and alone,” but the frustrated
voice is offered comfort by a double who dissents every now and then to draw
the poet back to some bright vision. As one of the most schizophrenic of
al-Baymtl’s poems, “The First Symphony” offers, nevertheless, a glimpse
of hope, “between the throes of poetry and my death: I perceive a dim
light...”^138 Indeed this image stands for al-Baymtl’s career, not only as a
modernist poet, but also as a poet of exile par excellence. Without some hope,
disenchantment could close the tunnel forever, and poetry would suffer a pro-
longed pain, with no resolution whatsoever for the Arnoldean dialogue of the
mind with itself.^139 With so much entanglement in poetics and politics of exile,
al-Baymtlcould be among the few whom Jacques Berque designates as the ones
who “refashion one portion of reality,”^140 but he is unquestionably the master of
the exilic in poetry. His refashioning is the more effective for his careful and
meticulous follow up of trajectories of invention and application. Moving
between the routes of tradition and the impositions and needs of modernity,
al-Baymtlwas able to universalize experience while conversing with the needs
and preoccupations of his people. Within this delicate discursive faring, he
engages T. S. Eliot’s modernity poetics and his synthetic view of tradition with-
out giving up his objections to the latter’s conservatism in religion and politics.
ENVISIONING EXILE