In application, there is much in al-Baymtl’s prefatory matter to his “Kitmbahcalmqabr al-Sayymb” / “Writing on al-Sayymb’s Tomb” (^58) that corroborates
Derrida’s deconstruction of the generosity premise. Indeed, what a-Sayymb and
the whole Tammnzlgeneration took upon themselves to carry out in writing,
according to al-Baymtl’s implicit rejoinder (>arm’iq83), made no exceptional
contribution to literature: “Crying for Tammnz and al->usayn has been the
very obsession of the poor who have been trying to melt the large prison wall
by their tears, arms, and shouts.” Although singling out al-Sayymb’s “Canticle
of the Rain” as a “promise” and a “warning,” there is that repressive urge to
suggest al-Sayymb’s failure of vision, for a “death swamp opens its mouth” to
enact a new siege that isolates poetry and holds people captive. In other
words, the prefatory note simultaneously devaluates al-Sayymb’s major
poem—its benedictions and notes of faith—while citing it with admiration.
This argument does not necessarily resolve the complexity of al-Baymtl’s
elegy as an act of gift giving. Its lyrical–elegiac opening involves it in the rit-
uals of the pastoral elegy. Nevertheless, there is in it homage and allegiance
through the identification of the speaker and the dedicatee. The speaker is a
lover, yearning to bypass time and space in order to reach the interior of
Baghdad, and to recapture the past of childhood experience and the present
life there. As his desire is impossible to realize, it assumes additional urgency.
Walls of partition shut poets out, and the city is in a state of siege. The
very wish to regain childhood is a textual tactic, for the speaker never shares
such an experience with the dedicatee. In fact, al-Baymtl’s poetry presents
its speaker as a grown-up. Conversely, al-Sayymb’s poems are always made of
such an intertext, the “anteroom” of the poem, where childhood experience
involves recollections of rivers, groves, moons, songs, rain, and mothers.
The text raises further complications. While the title “Writing on
al-Sayymb’s Tomb” implies that the speaker is condescending toward an equal,
the elegy is drawn into textual strategies that vie for ascendancy and control,
especially in terms of register. Beginning with the speaker’s act of transgres-
sion, climbing Baghdad’s fences, there is figuratively a positionality from
which the poet assumes the upper hand, to “stretch my gaze into the houses,”
passing beyond siege and surveillance, as both a fighter and a voyeur. The
latter’s vision surpasses immediate time and place, reaching far back in
history, to associate with martyrs and legendary lovers.
Instead of limiting himself to this wish, the speaker’s prayer for identification
with lovers is preparatory for another wish to regain childhood, before the
complications of poetic maturity:
So that we can meet as two children
And begin where things usually begin
We water the thirsty butterflies,
We make fire out of the papers of our notebooks,
We run into the gardens
and write the lovers’ verses on the wall.
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS