where predecessors were in the long quietude of death. And there is
a horizontal line relating the village and the town, where there are
the houses, memories, and playgrounds of childhood. At this inter-
section stands the individual. The terror of exile lies in the very
dislocation of the individual from this intersection, to transplant
him/her in another place where there is no such intersection, for
neither heaven is a priori, nor predecessors, homes, memories, or
playgrounds as such! What remain then, but misery, suffering, and
desolation to preserve the original formation, a dynasty threatened
by extinction and the drying root.
(I: 9–10)Estrangement, memory, and poetrySacdlYnsuf’s sense of dislocation involves a great deal of pain. Poetry itself
develops a new voice, which could be leaving behind “[c]omposure” and
“serenity,” the qualities that Said associates with complacency and placidity
(“Reflections,” 363). As separation is not only estrangement from a loved one,
but also from a past that includes the commitments and aspirations that
make up one’s character and history, it is only a step from death. Hence, no
matter how sentimental Ernest Dowson sounds among his fellow aesthetes in
late-nineteenth-century England, his poem “Exile” captures this sense of loss:
“No man knoweth our desolation; / Memory pales of the old delight; / While
the sad waters of separation / Bear us on to the ultimate night.”^62 In poetic
reconstructions, the exile is a traveler, “without baggage,” in an early poem by
the Iraqi cAbd al-Wahhmb al-Baymtl: “From nowhere, / with no face no history,
from nowhere, / beneath the sky, and in the moaning of the wind, / I hear her
calling me—‘Come!’ / Across the hills.”^63 The traveler assumes this existentialist
loss through the innate desire to make a choice against heavy odds, a point,
which marginalizes him or her, relegating the exile to back alleys and nothing-
ness. In a poem titled “Al-Musmfir” (The Traveler), another Iraqi poet >amld
Sa‘ld picks up this in-between state where the exchange between the exile and
the forlorn traveler takes place, as both are two sides of an image of total loss:
In the terminal, the last station...the last train arrives
The body of the traveler is absent in vacuum...
Blind alleys
Deserted homes
The body of the traveler...
Walks...
No rendevouz and no memory
The pavement narrows.
Between these steps and the road
There is no connection.^64ENVISIONING EXILE