of achievement. “Trivia occupied us,” and “we swat at flies,”
We wear the masks of living people
We are half men
In the garbage dump of history.
(Frangieh’s translation 21)Indeed, Eliot invades al-Baymtl’s mind, for, “We are the generation of mean-
ingless death / The recipients of alms” (Ibid. 23).
The biting satire in al-Baymtl’s poetry derives its power from a deep-rooted
tradition to which no Arab poet, perhaps, remains oblivious. While the
Eliotian element can easily fuse into the general rather than the specific, the
remainder establishes itself firmly as a formidable subtext. “We killed each
other and now we are crumbs,” writes al-Baymtlin “Lament for the June
Sun.” Our fights and wars are no more than “War of words / wooden swords /
Lies and empty heroes.” Recollecting reasons for battles and fights in earlier
tradition, he finds that “We did not kill a camel or a grouse / we did not
try the game of death.” Hence, history is emptied of meaning, and people
degenerate into lifeless images. “We wear the masks of living people.”
Al-Baymtltends to step back and forth, between Arabic tradition and Eliot,
to bring the old and the new together, with their store of connotations and
cultural implications. Tradition here is no longer a comforting recollection,
but a repository of details, a source of ironic contrasts that highlight present
disjunctions.
Al-Bayati’s resentful rhetoric, his retaliatory bombardment of critics and
poets of a different mind, is indebted, too, to traditional Arabic poetry,
particularly its strain of venomous and vindictive opposition. Nevertheless,
the Eliotian element is not absent. Especially in “Gerontion,” the addresser is
Gerontion himself, whose dilemma is a kind of in-betweenness in time.
Al-Baymtl’s persona, like Gerontion, problematizes tradition and uncovers its
ironies. Gerontion’s present is as distorted and contaminated as al-Baymtl’s
human condition and national scene. Like the passage in “Gerontion,” where
cosmopolitan culture is depicted in terms of a black Mass, al-Baymtl’s poetics
of satire and bitter criticism are usually leveled against enemies of every sort.
These are usually labeled as “false critics,” or “rats of the fields of words.”
On occasion, these are the “giant peacocks,” the “thief of the poor’s foods,”
who are “half men” in “the garbage dump of history,” as imaged in “Lament
for the June Sun” and other poems.
Yet, al-Baymtl’s entanglement in the Eliotian mosaic and poetic is more
complicated, as it ignites his poetic mind, and directs his memory at times
toward tradition as a living presence that entails dialogue, interaction, and
negotiation. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” where “intersection of the timeless /
With time”^41 takes place and informs its subtext, must have been in
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION