“Marthiyyah” (elegy), addressed to al-Sayymb, makes use of the latter’s poetry,
its register and significant tropes and implications. Al-Sayymb’s village,
Jaykur, his use of Christ and crucifixion, Jove, prostitutes and date palms,
populate the poem as its intertext and matrix:
Jaykur lightens a lantern in the dumb evening without getting its light
The orphan died, leaving a widow and orphans behind
O God’s mercy that accommodated his misery
O Mother for the one who has no mother to close his eyes: be his cover
Offer the suffering body rest and the mouth a drop of water.The poem accumulates details of the register of the forlorn, harping also on
Christian and Islamic markers, on the Prophet’s early encounters with his
hostile but wealthy tribe, to develop a contrast with the world of the
exploiters, who are the happiest for the death of a poet: “Who buys the
Messiah’s skin? / We slayed him / so universe rest in happiness.”^61 The motive
behind the poem is one of identification with the forebear’s misfortune, for
the poet reaches this stage after passing through some ordeal:
My grave behind the hill foreshadows doomsday
In the desolation of the last exile, and there a pigeon takes shelter.
Cold makes me shiver: Iraq...Iraq...No other but Iraq.
(Ibid.)Sa‘dlYnsuf’s poem is a Romantic one, with little or no serious anxiety.
Provoked by hardship and exile, it reads the speaker’s destiny in the poetry
of another. Al-Baymtl’s address to Khalll >mwlis ridden with yet more com-
plexity and anxiety. No less given to the view of poetry as a sacrificial act of
a textual nature, >mwlwas more disturbed by the ideological idealization of
acculturation. Blind adherence to tradition as much as mimicry produce
no less horrid leaders than Lazarus, in his “Li-cMzar cmm 1962” / “Lazarus
1962.”^62 Rather than a mythical hero of some regenerative power, Lazarus is
resurrected from the dead to lust again for death, leading and herding others
who are as dead in face and soul on a nightmarish journey between life and
death. Anticipating the reign of dictators and their wars of defeat and
destruction, the poem is among the most prophetic Arabic textual sites.
“Hmwl’s Lazarus,” write Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, “is no simple
representation of tyranny or corruption, but at once an embodiment of the
Manaqib or virtues which an anti-colonial society requires, and also a funda-
mental derailment of that power, a process by which he comes to resemble the
forces he has opposed.”^63 Against this scene, the poet can no longer pose as
savior, sage, or hero: intellectuals are powerless. Henceforth, and in concor-
dance with other writings, the scene witnesses the emergence of masks,
contrafactions, historical parodies, and fragments that counter the idealized
DEDICATIONS AS POETIC INTERSECTIONS