if only the bleeding would stop.
It reminds me of Kurdistan at festive times
celebrating with flutes and tambourines.
And the wrested homeland
—how much we have lost
how much noble Jerusalem means to us.
The beauty of San Diego tortures me.
The silver clouds slaughter me.
How can I live comfortably in a country
where swords are sharpened for our people?^805 Exile as prophecy:Poetry of exile develops prophetic tones. Despite
isolation or enforced estrangement, poetry of exile escapes the imposed con-
straints and limits and spreads like prophecy. Adnnls’s Mihyar as a persona
knows as much:^81
Mihyar, betrayed by friends,
you are an unrung bell,
two syllables on lips,
a song recalled
on the white roads of exile,
a gong sounding
for the fallen of the earth.^82Textual homelands in context
Taken together, these examples attest to the diversity and complexity of the
issue of exile in modern Arabic poetry and poetics. Perhaps, more than any
modern Arab poet, cAbd al-Wahhmb al-Baymtladdresses the theme of exile as
a textual engagement whereby land is displaced onto a poetic terrain. His
poetics builds on his life in exile, his readings, and interaction with classical
and modern literatures. He left Iraq in 1954, and lived in Syria, Lebanon, and
Egypt, and returned in 1958. He was appointed as the Iraqi Cultural Attaché
in Moscow in 1959–1961. He was deprived of his Iraqi citizenship in 1963
after the the first Ba‘thist coup. He returned to Iraq in 1972, and was
appointed by Saddam as the Iraqi Cultural Attaché in Madrid in 1980 until
- He was back until 1990 when he left Iraq for good, living in Jordan
and then in Damascus until his death in 1999.
He wrote on exile in his Tajribatlal-shi‘riyyah(My Poetic Experience).^83
There is first the existentialist concept of exile, he says, like a “lonely and
sole drop of rain, facing its fate unaided on earth” (Ibid. 392). Then there is
the class concept of exile, “whose hero is the poor person” (Ibid.). What
relates more to his own role as poet is the third concept, “as it means the
banishment of the person from his/her homeland and roots” (Ibid.). These
ENVISIONING EXILE