Indeed, al-Baymtl’s engagement with Eliot’s primary images ignites
light, warmth, and keen recollections in the Iraqi poet’s text, enriching it with
very acute tensions without blocking its accumulation of lore, myth, and love:
In every woman’s eyes of those earthly cities
He espied her:
In flowers cloaked,
In reddish-lemon leaves mantled
Hurrying barefoot under the rain
Beckoning him, “Come follow me.”
Madly running he weeps
Years of exile and the torment
Of unrequited search and restless travels.
(Ibid.)The initial engagement with Eliot’s London substantiates another, whereby
the poet reverts to his genderless women, Lara and others like her, whose
appearance and disappearance, love and estrangement intensify the speaker’s
self-consciousness, sense of exile, and suffering. Just like al->aklm’s pro-
tagonist with his acute sense of displacement, al-Baymtl’s persona negotiates
an impossible settlement at a textual intersection, eagerly recovered in
his poems of dedication. Aside from his poems to Mao “the poet” and to
T. S. Eliot, there are others addressed to Hemingway, Aragon, Camus, the
Kurdish poet cAbdullmh Kurmn, the Turkish poet Nmzim >ikmat, cAzlz
al-Sayyid Jmsim, Najlb Ma.fnz, and many others.^32
Al-Baymtland Khalll >mwl—the existentialist and
the forlornAt these intersections, al-Baymtl’s poetry offers its distinctive, though
surprising, fusion of Sufism and postmodernism, reality and fiction, frustra-
tion and love, and childhood and manhood. Al-Baymtlbreaks time into images
and patterns that cut across the horizontal and the vertical, making the present
an uncertain crossing. Adnnls’ AghmnlMihymr al-Dimashql(Songs of Mihymr
the Damascene) passes through such intersections into a re-enactment of a
past against historical distortions. On the other hand, Khalll >mwlcould
circumvent the problems of identity and cultural displacement through a
cultural journey, such as the one in “Al-Ba..mr wa-al-Darwlsh” / “The Sailor
and the Dervish,” to negotiate a resolution of some sort. However, there has
been no such patterning in al-Baymtl’s poetry since the 1960s. In fact, >mwl’s
poem “The Sailor and the Dervish” specifies the Sailor’s impossible choice
between the intellectual offers of the cultural West and the mysticism of
the East. Like al->aklm’s Mu.sin, >mwl’s Sailor also stands for Arab intel-
lectuals in limbo, for he does not belong to the company of Ulysses, Faust, or
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS