context meets death, “I am crucified at dawn, / on the walls,” he says in “Love
Poems at the Seven Gates of the World.”^25 Exile, death and resurrection
exchange meaning, not only in al-Baymtl’s poetry, but also in Adnnls’s. In the
latter’s “The Desert,”
Everything sings of his exile/ a sea
Of blood—what
Do you expect from these mornings other than the veins sailing
In the mists, on the waves of the massacre?^26The implications of poetic experience in a hostile or indifferent climate
receive further intensification whenever al-Baymtlmaintains a dual perspective
of the word as poetry and the word as incarnation, which Svarny traces in
Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” (p. 221). Al-Baymtl’s persona reiterates this association
between estrangement and incarnation, for the poet is a Christ figure, and
resurrection is a perpetual recurrence in a cycle of death and rebirth: “I arise
after death/ to be born in unborn cities/ and to die.”^27 Collapsing the mythi-
cal and the theological, al-Baymtl, nevertheless, veers away from Eliot’s
prayers to negotiate other intertextual terrains for, “In a field of ashes” used
by the “rats of the fields of words,” there is a design, says al-Baymtl’s speaker,
to bury the poet. The conspirators fail to perceive that “the poet on the cross
of exile/carried the sun and flew.”^28 The fusion of images and mythical
connotations, along with the intentional collapsing of these, are at the heart
of al-Baymtl’s poetics of inclusion and exclusion, especially if The Waste Land
is in consideration.
The paradoxical appeal of The Waste Land
Although alien to Eliot’s worldview in The Waste Land, this association of
poetic resurgence and revolt is paradoxically applied by its Arab admirers.
Many reasons stand behind the enormous popularity of Eliot’s The Waste Land
among Arab poets of the 1950s. In his article on “Modern Arabic Literature
and the West,” Jabra finds a similarity in temper and vision. He suggests,
“Arab poets responded so passionately to ‘The Waste Land’ because they, too,
went through an experience of universal tragedy not only in the World War II,
but also, and more essentially, in the Palestine debacle and its aftermath”
(Ibid. 14). He further explains, “A whole order of things had crumbled, and
the theme of the sterile ‘cracked earth’ thirsty for rain seemed the most
insistent of all” (Ibid.). Especially in al-Sayymb’s poetry the yearning for rain
is accentuated in rhythmic beats and refrains, whereby the deep longing
recurs as a welcome act to a parched land. The yearning can be parodied or
undermined by floods or drowning, but it nevertheless works in a pattern
that derives significance from a double bind of belonging to an actual life, the
Iraqi South, and to a mythical substructure of death and rebirth, highlighted
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION