sense of threat, disruption, dislocation, and challenge, inside Palestine and
outside it:
Beware of the coming Sodom, and do not wait for me on Thursday morning.
I don’t like density, for it darkens the nuances of meaning in its cell
and leaves me a mere body recollecting its forests alone.
There is a room in the echo like the room of my prison cell,
a room where one talks to the self.
My cellis my image. I found no one around
to share my morning coffee.
There is no seat to share my solitude in the evening,
no assembly to share my confusion in my quest for guidance.
Let me be what the horses in their forays wish me to be:
Let me be a prince or a prisoner: or let me die.
My cell becomes one street, two streets. And this echo
comes from that echo, whether it remains or fades away.
I will come out of these walls a free man,
but like a ghost when he floats freely out of himself.
I will go to Aleppo.
Dove, fly with my Byzantine ode
to my kinsman, and take him this greeting of dew.^75Leaning on the original text to problematize the moment, the poet refers to the
precursor’s famous poem, “I said to a dove which was lamenting nearby/ O
neighbor do you realize the state I am in?” to enrich the emerging text with more
details of everyday life that lend the poem a deepened sense of the real.^76 Yet, the
poem also builds on the psychology of enforced confinement, the plight of every
colonized and threatened soul, to concretize the sense of loneliness, hollowness,
and emptiness that the jailer and the colonizer strive to impose on others.
2 The trace poem as topoi:On a different level is the “trace poem,” which takes
the ancestor as topic to develop topoiof alienation at large. The Tunisian Ymhar
Bakrl(b. 1951) recovers in a poem written in French, for instance, the experi-
ence and life of the Andalusian Ibn >azm (d. 1064), and through this recovery
brings into the experience of intellectual vigor, imprisonment, and exile, shades
of French life and European accentuations of disenchantment and alienation.
The emerging text tampers with the ancestor as a mask, for the text is keen on
building an existentialized image of the self with postmodernist inhibitions:
Along the secret
roads the hawks estrange
my gaze deprived of nightingales
on the ridge of stirrups that I lose
my feet quiver and I go down
In the wounded stone, the spark.^77ENVISIONING EXILE