decided to join political opposition to Saddam’s regime. In “Baghdad: Who
Knows?” the poet addresses Baghdad as follows:
But Baghdad
we will remain as we were
whether I live or die
whether you live or die
always you will remain a map
in my left pocket
a map which displays your blind eyes
like two roads
a road for me as I flee from you
and a road for the exile returning in a white shroud
with fire and ashes.^28This is not an expatriate experience of joyful years in London. It does not
apply to Eliot and other self-exiles. Homecoming in the Iraqi poet’s experi-
ence means death, but there is in death a sacrificial meaning that relates the
poet to the early Tammnzlmovement with its faith in regeneration and
rebirth. Years of exile did not release the poet from a harrowing experience
of fear that poisoned his recollections and memories, turning him into a
schizophrenic creature who was at once the victimizer and the victim:
From when does my time begin?
from which promise? Which vow?
uttered by an idol whose firebrand I erected
I said to them: This is my homeland
an idol and firebrand of an idol.^29This experience that turns the speaker into a damaged creature and transforms
homeland into a site of silence and death differs enormously from Nabokov’s
experience, for instance, as an expatriate in metropolitan centers.
According to Vladimir Nabokov, in “the two capitals of exile,” such as
Berlin and London, the direct and immediate response of Russian “intelligenti”
was to form “compact colonies, with a coefficient of culture that greatly sur-
passed the cultural mean” of the milieu “among which they were placed.”^30
However, in them, those expatriates found themselves blending as they
wished. “I see myself, and thousands of other Russians,” wrote Nabokov in
retrospect, “leading an odd but by no means unpleasant existence, in mate-
rial indigence and intellectual luxury, among perfectly unimportant
strangers, spectral Germans and Frenchmen in whose more or less illusory
cities we, émigrés, happened to dwell” (Ibid. 276). Nabokov’s expatriatism
has nothing to do with exile proper. Indeed, it emanates from a privileged
position of a voyeur whose panoptic stand prioritizes its gaze in such a way as
ENVISIONING EXILE