The riders died.
Is this how the years pass?
With pain tearing the heart?
(Ibid.)While making use of the voyages of Sinbad, these poetic letters have a
counter message. There is no glory and gain abroad, and life is miserable for
an exile. The poem negates the promise of munificence and certitude that we
usually come across in popular Arabic travelogue. The poem oscillates
between nostalgia and loss, and its family reference carries no consolation
to the son in Iraq. The “golden days” recalls a history and a past that are lost
forever. They indicate absence and implicate the son in a present of pain and
failure. The accumulated images are evocative in the sense that they build up
a mood of sadness and agony. The speaker entangles the son as the listener,
and there is even an intentional design to make him share the father’s sense
of loss and disappointment in exile. The homeland carries no beckoning
message of relief. Amid destruction and failure, there is no point in setting
the sail toward home.
The muted voice of the son, however, may lie behind this address, for the
rebuffing note is one of dismissal, not compassion. The son may have asked
for a homecoming, and the father’s dismissive remarks mount up reasons for
the speaker’s decision to live in exile. Al-Baymtl’s poetic letters are in total
opposition to the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet’s series of epistolary poems to
his son and wife. They are worth the comparison, not only because of the
poets’ friendship and common cause, but also mainly because there is a dif-
ference between exile and death. The Turkish poet needs no traditional lore
to manipulate or debate, for he is sure of his mission and commitment. The
Iraqi poet writes from exile to justify estrangement, and also to narrate his
misery, whereas Hikmet writes from prison in 1955 on the way to execution.
Hikmet’s “The Last Letter to My Son,” resonates with commitment and love.
It also builds a register of defiance.
Memet,
I’ll die far from my language and my songs,
my salt and bread,
homesick for you and your mother,
my friends and my people,
but not in exile,
not in some foreign land–
I will die in the country of my dreams,
in the white city of my best days.^33The conversational tone is compassionate; as it works its way within the
father’s understanding of his ideology as one of faith in his culture. This faith
POETIC DIALOGIZATION