reestablishes them in an independent matrix, free from traditional usage. The
“motifs” thereby “become ambivalent and acquire the intangible multivalence
of symbols.”^39 Aware of the lexical and pictorial use of al-Macarrl, al-Baymtl
finds it more attuned to his temperament to play on ambivalence, especially
in his poem “Sujnn Ablal-cAlm’ ” (“Prisons of Ablal-cAlm’ al-Macarrl” dated
February 20, 1999), in Nuxnxsharqiyyah.^40 If light proves misleading in
al-Macarrl’s Luznmiyyat, according to phonological variations and roots that
charge the lexical leitmotifs with new connotations,^41 al-Baymtlbegins his
poem by playing on the various implications of the red and the black as “Two
thieves hiding / in mud huts / in river reeds.”^42 Color itself derives more
potency against a background of loss and absurdity, which informs a pessimist
frame of mind, too. “Who can quench the thirst of my body / to move it
around the Kacbah,” says al-Baymtl’s Macarrl. The yearning is to rid the self of
the body, and to regain the bones as mere relics of “a blind man’s childhood /
who lost at the gates of God / the magic of colors.” Al-Baymtl’s Macarrlhas
the insight to see beyond the physical handicap.
In the night of my ancestor’s Macarrah
My mother gave birth to me: blind
I could see from among her fingers
Ships sailing toward other spheres
And thieves, some of them rule Baghdad
And other kingdoms,
Died before birth
I could see then my pale mother
Praying at dawn
Calling on the phantoms of the dead in the rooms of the house
Who buries my bones?
To see them regenerate and grow
In the mud of rivers
To make a flute out of them
For the shepherds to play
(Ibid. 7–11)The combination of traditional lore in its pastoral dimension with some
contemporary dismay is not alien to al-Macarrl’s mood, nor does it exclude
the potential for participation in change, in a Shelleyan fashion. With this
swerve, the modern poet identifies with the precursor to fit the latter into his
own poetics, which aspires to survival and growth. In Bloom’s words, “To
live, the poet must misinterpretthe father, by the crucial act of misprision,
which is the re-writing of the father.”^43 In other words, al-Baymtlbrings
together many of al-Macarrl’s enunciations of autobiographical discontent
to fit into a Tammnzlcycle of death and rebirth that redeems the text from
pessimist closure.
POETIC STRATEGIES