SAYYAB 253full height of his creativity. In such poems he managed to fuse together in the
heat of the imaginative act the most disparate elements of his experience,
so that it is impossible to disentangle the individual predicament of the
suffering poet from the commitment to a social or national ideal. In them we
find an emotional complex of elements related to the man who since early
childhood has been yearning for a mother's love and who has therefore been
nostalgically looking back to the happy days of his early childhood in his
native village with its river, its shells and its palm trees, the emotionally
starved young man who seems to be constantly suffering from unrequited
love, the committed Marxist dismissed from his job as a school teacher,
hunted by the police in an authoritarian state and forced into exile for long
periods of time in Iran and Kuwait (where he earned his keep by washing up
dishes and doing domestic chores). A good example is 'Hymn to Rain'. The
poem describes Sayyab's feelings as he watches rain falling on the Arabian
Gulf in Kuwait where he is a political exile. The mood alternates between
nostalgia for the poet's childhood and homesickness for his country, between
grief over the present situation in Iraq and hope for the future. Rain is life-
giving and results in flowers and crops, but in Iraq it brings only hunger for
the people. However, despite the prevailing sadness of the poem it does not
end on a pessimistic note.
'Hymn to Rain' opens with an address to what at first sight seems to be
a woman, (which reminded Jacques Berque of the amatory prelude (nasib)
in the traditional ode)^69 :
Your eyes are forests of palm trees at the hour of dawnBut the exact identity of the person the poet is addressing is never explicitly
disclosed and from the progress of the poem and the nature of the rich
imagery used, it seems that what we have here is a composite figure: it is
both the lost mother and the missing mistress, the idealized village of the
poet's childhood, Iraq itself and even nature at large. Hence the apparently
contradictory nature of the profuse imagery: when the eyes smile 'vines
turn green and lights dance', the eyes are compared to 'moons reflected in the
river': they are dark but 'in their depths stars pulsate':
They drown in a mist of transparent sorrow
Like the sea stroked gently by the hand of evening:
Having both the warmth of winter and the shiver of autumn,
Death and birth, darkness and light.
Once more my soul overflows with the tremor of tears.
And I am possessed with a violent turmoil embracing the sky,
As violent as a child's fear of the moon.By a natural process of association the poet's thoughts turn to the main