a name “scribbled on maps as if / to fill [...]spaces” (Ibid.). Indeed, to him
this world is antagonistic for being so different from Rome: “I live among /
enemies, in the midst of dangers—as if my exile / were not merely from
Rome but civilization / itself, from order and space” (Ibid. 21). Enforced exile
means deliberate social and human ostracization, and poets feel it more than
others as it entails separation from their audiences. In his eloquent long poem
Jidmriyyah(Mural 1999), Ma.mnd Darwlsh gives this problem another twist,
for separation from home intensifies the need, not only for a homecoming,
but also for one’s language, which ironically establishes its lyricism in the
poem, as if fighting back aridity and death:
My nurse said to me: you were hallucinating a lot,
and shouting at me:
I do not want a return to anybody
not to any country
after such a long absence...
I only want to go back to my
language, to its farthest exquisiteness.^46Exile proper involves not only dispossession, dislocation, persecution, and
danger, but also the danger of a cultural dislocation, an estrangement from
one’s language and its springs of spontaneity. Darwlsh addresses this fear
of cultural estrangement in a number of poems. In “Qmfiyah min ajl
al-mu‘allaqmt” (A Rhyme for the Sake of the Pre-Islamic Odes), he looks on his
identity and the language as one and the same, “I am my language I, / I am a
mu‘allaqah...two...ten this is my language/ I am my language. I am what
words say: / Be / my body, and I am the embodiment for their intonation.”^47
Homecoming for the exile is merely a wish that survives in yearning for
change, a dream, or a mere literary contrivance that keeps tradition alive.
Ma.mnd Darwlsh recalls tradition as a cultural life, rich and poignant, which
reminds him nevertheless of the enormous loss. Absence operates as the
reminder and also as the unhealed wound: “Due to its absence, I composed its
image: from the earthly/ begins the subtle heavenly. Here I weigh and scan/ the
horizon with pre-Islamic Odes...Absence/ is the evidence, it is the evidence.
For every rhyme/ a camp is erected.”^48 Metaphorically, the Odes become his
touchstones and signs of existence as they are the only tangible presence, the
legacy that he carries wherever he goes and of which no one can deprive him.
Their presence is set against loss, and they operate therefore as poetic simulacra
in exile. The impossibility of homecoming is the exilic norm, the very nucleus
of its poetics, but the reliance on a cultural repertoire alleviates the burden. The
exiled writer recreates the self amid intersections of agony, frustration, passion,
love, memory, attachments, and spatial expansion, traditional and modern, as if
to fight back an overpowering sense of loss and annihilation. Exile is a fight for
survival that may court the very impossible offerings of the literary tradition.
ENVISIONING EXILE