In a manner that recalls Eliot’s memory, al-Baymtlpoints to the creative
moment as one beyond limits. Instead of letting it lapse into nothingness
with no transfigurative becoming, he sets it, in ‘Ayn al-shams” / “Eye of the
Sun” (1971) within a regenerative process, rhetorically devised as a release
from the worldly mechanism of the present:
We will meet in another birth, in a new era
When from my face and your face
The shadow and the mask will fall
And the walls will collapse.
(Ibid. 61)The implications of memory, however, are not so clear-cut. Memory is
deliberate; it recalls for a specific purpose: to establish a duplicate city, in
“Marthiyyah ilmmadlnah lam tnlad”/“Elegy to the Unborn City” (1970) a
“hidden, enchanted city / On the map of the world / Similar to my city,” but
also with the implication of possible failure:
In the color of its eyes and in its sad laugh,
But not wearing
The tatters of the wandering clown,
Nor does its summer buzz with people and flies.
(Ibid. 43)If Eliot achieves a greater distancing and detachment through the power of
intertextual insertions that alienate recollections as a past in a presence of
hybridity, al-Baymtlimages his nostalgic legacy as a nymph of some sort, a
sorcerer, or an icon. There he empties his yearnings and belongings, disposing
of them as memory, to be drawn upon in need. Such an endeavor is predicated
on sites of loss. Even if the nymph and the sorcerer gather themselves into a
cloud, the speaker’s yearning is no less than that of a parched land, a vagrant,
and magus whose “pagan... sad heart” has no anchor of certitude.
Significantly, the longed-for image, addressed in feminine terms, is a catalyst
of emotions, yearnings, and rapture, unattainable and elusive. The note,
which is released due to this sense of loss, brings together, in “Thalmth rusnm
mm’iyyah” / “Three Watercolors” (1970), a plethora of poetic voices that have
inhabited his poetic text: “I die like a drop of sad rain / Upon the faces of the
passerby” (Ibid. 49).
The personal agony here is too much for the Eliotian detachment, yet
the rain is emptied of its fertility, while the passerby could be any among
Eliot’s passing crowds. In this verse, there is something from every poet, but
also everything that belongs to al-Baymtl, leaving us, upon close reading,
absorbed in and challenged by the density and richness of poetry, between
trajectories of modernity and tradition. The navigation is both spontaneous
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION