6
ENVISIONING EXILE
Past anchors and problematic encounters
Exile is places and times which change their victims.
(Ma.mnd Darwlsh, “The Tragedy
of Narcissus,” p. 178)Although heavily involved in negotiating a settlement of some sort, poetry
usually draws on the resourcefulness of its authors insofar as they have paradoxi-
cally experienced location and dislocation, and orientation and disenchantment
in a series of snapshots, gleanings, and textual signposts. Faring in the shadows
of archetypal wanderers such as Ulysses, Sindbad, and the rovers of theology and
archaic cultures or settling for the disappointments, frustrations, and pleasures of
the immediate and the real, exiled writers and artists are nevertheless absorbed
and imprisoned by memory, with all the implications of attachment to the past
or yearning for release from regret. In a reality of so much disenchantment, time
and place are blurred, and the poet’s voice searches in vain for a temporal vision.
Poetry and music become his gate to life, for “Nothing can take away from you
the Andalusia of old times,” Ma.mnd Darwlsh says in “Tammrln ’nlm‘almgltmrah
Ispmniyyah (Preliminary Practice on a Spanish Guitar).^1 Even historical records of
a glorious civilization are in danger of losing meaning amid encroaching failures
and doubts: “Was Andalusia/ here or there? On earth, / or only in poems?” asks
Ma.mnd Darwlsh.^2 To him, the song becomes the people’s way to reorient mem-
ory in place and time beyond the repugnant reality of brutality and forced exile:
O song, take all our thoughts, and
lift us, wound by wound,
heal our forgetfulness and take us
as high as you can, to the humanity of man,
shining by his early tents, the
brass-covered sky dome,
to see what lies hidden in his heart,
Lift us up and descend with us down to the place,
for you know best the place
and you know best the time.^3