through the troubles of immigration, disorientation, dislocation, alienation,
and spiritual and geographical exile. The confusion is not specifically modern
despite the nature of this age as one of great migration. In Arabic classical
literature there is also blurring of limits between self-imposed and forced
exile. The renowned poet al-Mutanabblwas so desolate once as to decry
“having no folks (to be comfortable with), no native land (to repair to), no
drinking companion (to whom to confide his innermost thoughts), no cup
(with wine to get drunk), no comforting friend.”^19 Resettlement is not an
easy thing, for in the same Arab tradition, there is a counter point to the
pleasures of travel and accompanying rejuvenation. Living as a stranger
entails humiliation. Thus, al-Taw.ldlquotes:
Whenever he sets foot, the stranger is humbled.
His arm is short, his tongue always blunted.
Wherever you see him, you find him always without a friend
People have one another, but he has no one to help him.^20Beauty of other lands may not undo the sense of dislocation and cultural
disorientation, as al-Mutanabbl’s often-quoted lines on Bawwmn show.^21
Expatriation, vagrancy, and exile are different categories and should be read so.
As William H. Gass argues, James Baldwin’s exile, for example, is different
from Gertrude Stein’s, for his “began before he was born, when the darkness of
all our beginnings darkened his skin.”^22 On the other hand, it is only Ezra
Pound who could qualify as a proper exile from among the well-known expa-
triates of the early twentieth century, for “[e]xpatriates may share in the soli-
tude and estrangement of exile, but they do not suffer under its rigid
proscriptions,” says Said in “Reflections” (262–63). Moreover, exile for writers
inscribes its home in writing, for, argues Gass, “the soul is being cast into a
cell of the self where it may mark the days with scratches on the wall called
writing, but where it will lose all companions and survive alone” (Exile 134).
Exiles and expatriatesRather than place, writing involves the actual difference between the sense of
exile and the rapprochement of the expatriate with the receiving milieu.
Whenever writing overcomes dislocation by reinscribing itself within a larger
cultural context, it escapes the constraints and pressures of exile. Even such
an unsettling and disheartening experience as Ovid’s finds its solace in poetry.
“Remember, I’m in exile,” he says, “writing not for fame but solace, to work /
my woe into an artifact.” To him, “that change” is “in its nature / a kind of
distraction better even than comfort.”^23 In Arabic poetry, poets also see the
possibility of survival in a poetic ensemble of images, places, histories, and
names. In “A Horse for the Stranger,” a poem addressed to “an Iraqi poet,” the
Palestinian Ma.mnd Darwlsh finds song the only way out of a suffocating
ENVISIONING EXILE