7
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION
AND REJECTION
Why T. S. Eliot?
The influx into Arabic poetics of T. S. Eliot’s mythical method, along with his
perspectives on tradition and modernity, cannot be exaggerated. Yet, there are
differences respecting the nature of its reception and its channels. This chap-
ter proposes to concentrate on one controversial mind among Arab proponents
of modernism, namely al-Baymtl, and to argue the case of influx in terms of
poetic application, appropriation, and use, as these relate to the subject of this
book. Influx inhabits and inhibits locales, souls, and minds whenever there is
a combination of need, desire, and the right consciousness. Al-Baymtl’s poetics
of exile and revolt accommodates T. S. Eliot’s early disenchantment with the
evolution of Western civilization. As his poetics of exile tends to negotiate a
textual homeland, his use of T. S. Eliot evolves into a strategy of containment
whose purpose is to appropriate Eliot while manipulating his interpretation of
tradition. Although his counterpart in the modernist movement, Badr Shmkir
al-Sayymb, came to understand the legacy of the Anglo-American poet some-
time in the late 1950s, al-Baymtlwas drawn to him through the Egyptian
Marxist Luwls ‘Awa,whose article in Al-Kmtib al-Mixrl(1946)^1 had a huge
impact on the poetic scene in the early 1950s. In comparison, Badr Shmkir
al-Sayymb was never oblivious to the impact of Eliot, and his use of the myth-
ical method as well as his specific imagery of hollowness drew many responses
throughout the last decades.^2 Yet, the surmise of some Arab scholars that there
was a definite Eliotic stamp only on the trio, Luwls ‘Awa,, Badr Shmkir
al-Sayymb, and ‘Abd al-Xabnr, is inaccurate.^3 Thinking in terms of direct
borrowing and immediate influence, such scholars miss the intricate workings
of the creative mind, its negotiation with other texts and contexts.
Marxism Christianized
It is even difficult to apply the notion of influence at large to Badr Shmkir
al-Sayymb, for the Iraqi poet Christianized Marxism and emptied the Western
context of reference, to accommodate his poetic for an Iraqi, specifically
Southern, temper. Badr Shmkir al-Sayymb is the amalgam of the historical and the
immediate, the archetypal and the temporal, the extremely indigenous and the