“Marthiyyah ilm Nmzim >ikmat” (Elegy to Nmzim >ikmat), al-Baymtl
rephrases interaction as follows, “The virgin wave / plaits its sister’s hair
in the evening gloom.”^50 Nothing can escape contamination, and textual
virginity is a paradoxical term as long as there is fusion and contact. Indeed,
to claim freedom from contamination is in itself an act of repression, for
available textual terrains invite premeditated raids. Especially regarding
al-Sayymb, al-Baymtlbetrays more anxiety than usual.
Along with the “daemonization” of a precursor that develops in the belated
“counter-sublime,”^51 there is a tendency, in al-Baymtl’s dedications to some
“blocking agents,” to humanize the latter in comparison, keeping them,
and their advocates, at bay. Sensitive to “the war” waged against him in the
1950s, al-Baymtl’s counter-discourse identifies with the veritable figure of
al-Mutanabbl, who, in similar situations, rejoined, “I am not in the habit
of concern” about what is said.^52 Indeed, al-Sayymb serves now as a reminder
“of these dismal unlucky years when we were fighting wind-mills, bringing
back to my mind ages of Arabic poetry, with their noise and fights for the
gain of the rose of the impossible” (Ibid. 81). Al-Sayymb’s advocates are set
aside as such, while al-Sayymb himself is “eclipsed,”^53 as no more than “a
bridge between the Romanticism of the 1940s and the movement for renewal
in the 1950s.”^54
However, as “Negation of the precursor is never possible, since no ephebe
can afford to yield to the death instinct,”^55 al-Baymtldevotes an elegy to
al-Sayymb with a belated introductory note that prepares for the elucidation
of reference in the poem. In another place, al-Baymtllooks upon this elegy as
the most generous gift, “an initiative, never undertaken by any other poet in
the twentieth century.”^56 The implications of an avowed act of giving are
many, to be sure, for to accept Mauss’ discourse and Derrida’s recapitulations,
there is in al-Baymtl’s gift “an ethics and a politics that tend to valorize the
generosity of the giving-being.”^57
Nevertheless, when given to the dead, this gift is even illustrative of the
generosity principle described by Derrida: “for there to be a gift, there must
be no reciprocity, return, exchange, counter gift, or debt” (Ibid. 12). On the
other hand, to claim it as gift, a unique “initiative,” entails an engagement
with the addressee, driving the dedicator to address al-Sayymb’s readership in
an act of displacement. According to Derrida’s significant observation, to
offer a gift (and if the elegy is a gift), the donor “must not see it, or know it
either” (Ibid. 14). Derrida further contends:
Otherwise, he (the donor) begins at the threshold, as soon as he intends
to give, to pay himself with a symbolic recognition, to praise himself,
to congratulate himself, to give back to himself symbolically the value
of what he thinks he has given or what he is preparing to give.
(Ibid. 14)DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS