What invites some close comparison between Eliot’s “Fire Sermon” and
al-Baymtl’s “Nightmare of Night and Day” is their use of songs and singing
against a background of aspiration and subsequent disenchantment. The
artificiality of putting “a record on the gramophone,” and the ensuing song
of the three Thames-daughters in Eliot’s “Fire Sermon” are in al-Baymtl’s
mind, perhaps. The interlocutor in his “Nightmare of Night and Day” reverts
to the rhetorical question: “But what did the song say?” Probably the answer
is one of bewilderment identical to what is in Eliot’s, “I can connect / nothing
with nothing” (Ibid. 2156). In cities of decay and sterility, integration is
impossible, and loss imprints itself on everything. Even songs and old scenes
of rural life and love get polluted, and the modern site becomes one of
sweat and tar.
Where Eliot’s London loses glamour and meaning, al-Baymtl’s Baghdad
carries scars of failure and stagnation: “The Tigris-side city which for
centuries produced and maintained a great civilization seemed to me dead
and finished. I wished it to stay so, to pour its last fragments into a great sea,
and there merge and vanish.”^36 As it stands, it is a site of “All men / Glued
like postage stamps on everything.” It offers nothing to childhood except
“garbage dumps,” and “corpses of houses,” whereas he traces its “man of
tomorrow / Displayed in the storefronts, / Clothed in sorrow and blackness”
(Ibid. “The City,” 18). Not mere inertia or failure here disconcerts the
speaker, but the sense of the city as a beast, producing evil that derives pleas-
ure from inflicting pain on the downtrodden: “The policemen, the sodomites,
and the pimps/ Spitting in his eyes/ As he lay shackled” (Ibid.).
But the city is a presence where nothing connects with nothing, as Eliot’s
persona implies in “The Hollow Men,” for “Death is the fortune teller of the
City,” says al-Baymtlin “Aisha’s Orchard” (Ibid. 282), and the city itself gets
involved in a game of chess, to undergo sordid metamorphosis. The city is
“A cemetery above a cemetery” says al-Baymtl’s persona in “A Profile of a
City” (Ibid. 303). It is worth knowing that al-Baymtl’s early cities are not
identical with his later ones. While not dismissing the temporal cities as
“Unreal” in the vein of Eliot in The Waste Land, they assume, in “The Birth
in Unborn Cities,” a number of forms, as one in “the night of the autumn of
the Arab cities” (Ibid. 279). These are set in contradiction to the desired
“Unborn Cities” of cyclical life and death (Ibid). However, they can suffer
disorientation, and “Rome was searching for Rome,” whenever intellectual
freedom is threatened. However, it is usually “at the gates of Toledo,” or “At
the borders of Alhambra,” that his poetry selects a place for martyrs and
exiles.^37 Indeed, some cities may appear as a dream, “let us fly to Paris,” says
“The Lady of the Seven Moons.”^38 Opposite to these, is Eliot’s city:
Unreal City
Under brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so manyTHE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION