I had not thought death had undone so many,
Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
(“Burial of the Death,”
The Waste Land2149)On similar occasions, al-Baymtl’s somber mood grows into morbidity:
She fell silent while we were lost in the Louvre
We were following the steps of the dead crowd
We searched for our voices in the tumult of the voices
For the meaning in the meaning
(“Aisha’s Mad Lover,” trans. Frangieh 93)Upon such negotiatory instances, Eliot penetrates this mood, disrupting the
possibility of rapprochement and love: “London streets were sighing deeply/
The dawn/ Reflecting the wet pavement in her eyes.”
If al-Baymtl’s early poetry tends to look upon the city in binary opposition
to rural life, his villages are not necessarily romanticized. The “Village
Market” is a site of desolation, bitterness and exploitation. The city for a
villager is “a blind beast / whose victims are our dead, / the bodies of
women.”^39 Although in these early poems of Malm’ikah wa-shaymyin(Angels
and Devils 1950) and Abmriq muhashshamah(Broken Pitchers1954), al-Baymtl
was already aware of Eliot’s tendency to intertextualize, the city of The Waste
Landand theFour Quartetsimprinted on his poems a tone of disenchantment,
and a perspective of a disconcerted persona. “He immediately came to regard
modern urban life and modern Arab cities as cheap replicas of the vibrant
cities of ancient civilization,” writes Frangieh.^40
Eliot appropriated in traditional satire
Eliot’s “Hollow Men” appealed to al-Baymtlin more than one sense. He was
no less ambivalent regarding his role as a poet. Divided among many positions
and perspectives, including the existentialist, the Marxist, and the Sufi,
al-Baymtldeveloped an angry and disillusioned voice. The biting Eliotian
criticism of modernity, the alienation of the human, and the seemingly
drifting masses underwent appropriation in al-Baymtl’s “Lament for the June
Sun,” dedicated to the memory of the political theorist and ideologue Zakl
al-Arsnzl. Eliot’s images of aimlessness, emptiness, and his satire of a whole
generation offered themselves to al-Baymtlwho looked upon the whole 1967
scene as one of waste, failure, lies, and utter negligence. The contemporary
East has no regenerative impulse. Neither has it the right to claim a history
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION