The poem allows al-Sayymb’s register to intrude into the elegy, blending it
with images, such as the thirsty butterflies, which stand for estranged souls
in al-Baymtl’s poetry. The ultimate direction of this section is to revert to
al-Sayymb’s poetry as images of childhood experience. Contrasted with the
state of siege, its urgency and requisites, al-Sayymb’s poetry is presented as
too innocent to cope with such complications.
In the last four lines, there are specific allusions to al-Sayymb’s well-known
poems. The reference to the crucifixion, the mud houses, ash cemeteries,
moons, and nights, is so highlighted that it gives the impression that
al-Baymtlleads the elegy out of its main body of childhood experience toward
specific commitments to transformation or revolution. However, this con-
cluding section is submerged into a dominant referentiality that enables
the speaker to supervise a whole inside, a city under siege, where even recol-
lections are stifled and controlled. Caging these and keeping them subdued,
the siege erodes the wish to “tear down your fences (Baghdad) after death.”
On the other hand, and releasing the text from the limitations of the
physical, al-Baymtl’s “after death” significantly indicates regeneration and
rebirth.
In a poem on al-Mutanabblwritten in 1963, al-Baymtldevotes a section to
“the poet a thousand years later.”^59 In this part, al-Baymtldepicts his exem-
plary poet in terms that anticipate the speaker’s images in this elegy on
al-Sayymb. His poet “roams around Baghdad’s fences and its markets” (Ibid.).
Like the speaker, he is also “on the outskirts of dusty towns,” banished but
yearning for victorious return. In other words, the subtext markers of the
elegy are taken from al-Baymtl’s register, while al-Sayymb’s is relegated to
the distant regions of childhood, deprived of the poetic potential held by the
elegizer.
At face value, this elegy reflects a pattern in dedicatory poetry that takes
with one hand, in Derrida’s speculations on the gift at large, “what it gives
with the other.”^60 Read in depth, and in view of the prefatory matter, the
poem is an interpretation of al-Sayymb’s experience. Limiting that experience
to specific dimensionality, this elegy is the kind of interpretation that Derrida
singles out in Georges Gurvitch’s postscript to Claude Levi-Strauss,
Introduction to the Work of Marcel Mauss. There, says Derrida:
Some venom is surely being distilled, like a counter-poison in its turn, in
the body of this tribute to a tribute, to this already venomous tribute that
was the interpretation in question.
(Ibid. 69, n. 21)Again, negotiation at such textual intersections does not necessarily preclude
difference. Indeed, to lighten Derrida’s blunt analysis, “vibrant generosity”
and “poison” are often present in negotiatory intersections (Ibid. 73).
Perhaps this engagement with al-Sayymb may show its markers of identity
and difference when set in comparison with other poets’ elegies. Sa‘dlYnsuf’s
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS