Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition

Exile and the universal in poetry

The wound cannot be healed by itself, for there must be a personal effort to
enable the poetic text to grow and gain diversity apart from the seeming
impasse. To al-Baymtl, the best way is to universalize his experience, to identify
with similar exiles, or even to subsume his poetics within a larger intertext.
What may issue as virginal is bound to gain complexity through this
interwoven intersection, as his “Marthiyyah ilmNmzim >ikmat” (Elegy to
Nazim Hikmet) suggests:

The virgin wave

Braids its sister’s hair in the evening gloom

Fish get caught in its net

So does the sky.

The implications of this subtext are far reaching, for the poet is now enabled
to fight back the poetics of stagnation and sluggish thought:

The letters of yellow books

Gather together,

Giving birth to a red rose.^97

Nevertheless, such a formula does not assume perfection, for the “virgin
wave” continues to “measure the sea,” as he articulates in his poem “al-Nihmyah”
(The End), addressed to Hikmet (1: 470). Whenever Hikmet is mentioned in
these elegies, al-Baymtlviews poetry as an ongoing pursuit, an endeavor of
restless doing and undoing. The virgin wave could appear in a “floating
cloud” which is “driven by the wind from one exile / to another,” as is the case
in his “Marthiyyah ukhrmilmNmzim >ikmat” (Another Elegy to Nazim
Hikmet, Works, 1: 471).
The configurational poetic that emerges whenever Hikmet is recalled
relates not only to both the counterpart and the vocation, but also to al-Baymtl’s
archetypal images. In his poetic recourse to ‘M’ishah (Ishtar), for example,
al-Baymtltakes her as the most effective symbolic pattern of love and change
to which he holds to overcome feelings of ennui or failure.^98 Along with this
intentional reliance on myth, al-Baymtl’s Marxist grounding substantiates
his faith in a future. Yet his many disappointments work at times against this
faith. Hikmet always comes across as the exemplar of the poet–fighter, the
one whom Neruda celebrates whenever a mention is made of his experience
with his jailers. Speaking of his experience on a warship where he was tried
and thrown into a section of the latrines “where the excrement rose half
meter,” Hikmet was about to lose faith and strength. “Then the thought
struck him,” reports Neruda, “my tormentors are keeping an eye on me, and
they want to see me drop.”^99 Hence was his decision to sing louder and

ENVISIONING EXILE