reality where everything changes into a grave, and where great names and
poets are confiscated or lost in the sordid reality of invasions, brutality, and
death. The negative categories usually associated with modernism assume a
redemptive function through poetic and sacrificial association.^24 The poem
appeared in his collection A.ada ‘ashara kawkaban(1991, Eleven Planets). It
is an ensemble of classical and modern registers, a combination of voices, and
a subtle navigation among cultures and topographies. It bridges the history
of modern Arabic poetry, and interweaves commitments and idealisms in a
polyphonic text which in the end turns into a cross, a burden, and a sign for
what is taking place. It is a token and a reminder, which is nonetheless
effectively operating against such an ordeal:
Not one bird is left in our voice
to fly to Samarkand
or any other city.
Time is shattered,
language shattered,
and this air, which we used to carry on our shoulders
like bunches of grapes from Mosul
is now a cross.
Who will bear the poem’s burden for us?^25This is not the voice of an expatriate, but the cry of many voices in pain.
The search for “a change in creative surroundings,”^26 avowedly distinguishing
expatriates, is rather an aesthetic and cultural concern, a privileged phenome-
non that re-addresses itself to “the condition of exile as the basic metaphor
for modernity,” as Aijaz A.mad argues.^27 To set it apart from exile proper,
Ahmad develops his argument in line with the cultural theorists’ concern with
commitment and engaged positionality. He further explains: “modernism
itself [...]has been framed so very largely by self-exiles and émigrés—James
and Conrad, Pound and Eliot, Picasso and Dali, Joyce, Gertrude Stein.”
They might have shared modernist concerns with exiles, those “who had
experienced the same kind of ‘suffocation’ in their own spaces of this globe,
and were subsequently to leave behind immense resources of genre and
vocabulary for delineating that predominant image of the modern artist who
lives as a literalstranger in a foreign and impersonal city” (Ibid. 134).
To apply to modernist Arabic writing this differentiation between
expatriation and exile, or between living abroad and forced exile, we can
choose excerpts from two poems by the late Iraqi exile Buland al->aydarl
(d. 1996) whose intimations demonstrate the psychological crisis the poet
passed through before and after taking the decision to leave Baghdad. Buland
al->aydarlsuffered exile under the anti-communist regime of 1963. He was
back in the 1970s, and left to London in 1977, working in the state-run
quarterly Funnn ‘Arabiyyah, based in London and Baghdad. In the 1980s he
ENVISIONING EXILE