Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

“earth dreams of the birth of a prophet/ who will fill the horizon with justice/
and of the birth of the seasons.” Nevertheless, the speaker parodies myth
making, undermines its assumptions, and steps into its formations:

I carry a corpse in the streets

At nightfall

I will bury it in a brothel or a park

Or in a coffeehouse or a tavern of light.^30

The corpse, which recalls Eliot’s, “that corpse you planted last year in your
garden. / Has it begun to sprout?” is no less of a “distortion of the ritual death
of the fertility God.”^31
While al-Baymtlleans on Lorca and Hikmet to depict sacrifice and poetic
rebirth, the Eliotic element with its “heap of broken images”^32 intervenes
whenever the city becomes visible as a consuming but decaying presence.
Al-Baymtl’s river is not akin to Eliot’s, but it draws on the latter’s as it

Bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers

Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends

Or the other testimony of summer nights.^33

Al-Baymtl’s river evokes and deploys similar notions and articulations,
however, for Eliot’s negation only testifies to a usual expectation of a dirty
Thames. Al-Baymtlwrites:

O you mythical river that sucks

The breasts of the city

Carrying towards the seas, its filth

And the dead horses

And the wreckage of the chariots.^34

As if to parody and undermine the speaker in Eliot’s “Fire Sermon,” al-Baymtl’s
persona sets the song against a dirty and polluted river, not a “sweet Thames,”
which is asked to “run softly” until the speaker ends a song, for “I speak not
loud or long,” promises Eliot’s speaker. Subverted by recollections of the
fleetingness of time and swiftness of death, the song and the promise are
ironically challenged and the remaining aftertaste is one of disappointment
and failure: “But at my back in a cold blast I hear / The rattle of the bones,
and chuckle spread from ear to ear.”^35 Eliot’s river assumes a different meaning
and form whenever disappointment is present:

The river sweats

Oil and tar

The barges drift

With the turning tide.

(Ibid. 2155)

THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION