THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 212Like fire, birds and daylight.
No more walls stand between us now.
No ruthless tyrant rules over us. (i,546)although one may mention in passing that the poet's imagination has clearly
been affected by his exile which has made him resort to non-traditional Arab
imagery expressing joy such as the ringing of church bells to honour heroes.
Even the sun is here used with a different emotional significance from what
we find in the opening of 'The Village Market' where it is accompanied by
flies, lean donkeys and worn-out boots. In 1965 he wrote in a poem addressed
to President Nasser, obviously inspired by his enthusiasm for Nasser's Arab
socialism:
O generation of defeat, this revolution
Will wipe out your shame, dislodge the rock,
Peel off your crust, and in the barren wastes
Of your life cause a flower to bloom. (n,5)This excessive optimism may explain why the disastrous Arab defeat of 1967
had such a shattering effect upon Bayyati, as indeed it had on most Arab
writers. In 'Lament for the June Sun' (1968), (published in his collection
Dead Dogs' Eyes), a poem which managed to reach a large English audience in
a translation which appeared in the periodical Encounter (Oct. 1971, p. 22),
he ruthlessly expressed the kind of bitter self-criticism and self-condemnation
which was typical of the feverish soul-searching and breast-beating that Arab
intellectuals went through soon after the Six Day War. Speaking in then-
name he says:
In the cafes of the East we have been ground
By the war of words.
Minced by wooden swords,
Lies and horsemen of the air.
We did not kill a camel or even a sand grouse
We did not try the game of death...
In the cafe's of the East we swat the flies
We wear the masks of the living in history's rubbish heap.
Aping men.
We dared not ask the one-eyed charlatan, the anti-Christ,
Why did you escape?
We are the generation of free death
Recipient of alms. (n,3 3 6)Bayyati had remained a committed Marxist giving expression to his
political creed in volume after volume. In 1960 he wrote, in 'Art for Life',
in a somewhat aggressive tone: