occupying the mind of revolution.”^114 To replace this artificiality with music,
the poet has to pass through some transfiguration like a blind musician carried
away by his own unpremeditated and spontaneoussinging:
He cries out with the voice of my mouth or his own. The climax
carries him to the trough of the wave. He weeps beneath the sky of
another country. But the strings continue to pursue me in the silence
of the Hall. Which of us is born now in this desert?^115A community of exilesAl-Baymtlis more assured of his vocation as poet whenever the persona and
the text fuse to create a plethora of voices and texts, specifically exilic. It is
worth noting at this stage that al-Baymtl’s engagement or identification with
al-Macarrl’s career and discontentment is not a smooth one. As early as 1961,
his “Mawcid flal-Macarrah” (A Rendezvous at al-Macarrah), in Poems in Exile,
offers the blind poet of solitude and estrangement from humankind an
optimistic overview of life. The Marxist predilection of those years impels
al-Baymtl to accept mythical regeneration, hence, “We are meeting in
Macarrah like heroes of myths.” Nevertheless, the meeting is a metaphorical
subtext that gives birth to a poetic text that celebrates regeneration. He calls
on the precursor al-Macarrlto
Rise, and behold the land singing, and the sky
A red rose, the wind is a song
Rise, behold the horizon lit with torches
And millions of the down-trodden fighting
In the darkness for sunrise.^116In al-Baymtl’s case, this optimism suffers disappointment. When exiled in
Damascus, al-Baymtlsignificantly gave up those expectations. In a poem,
already cited (The Prisons of Abnal-cAlm’, February 20, 1999), the poet anti-
cipates his approaching death, and identifies with Abnal-cAlm’ al-Macarrl
in his self-seclusion. Al-Baymtlfinishes his other poems on al-Macarrlwith
a note of resignation, but he reiterates his early commitment to revolution
against oppression. Al-Baymtlendows his poetics of exile, as intertwined
with and interfused into al-Macarrl’s poetics of disenchantment, with an
ontological dimension. As a mask, al-Macarrl’s questioning tone against the
rationale for existence is adopted by al-Baymtlto serve his ultimate sense of
bewilderment and despair:
Between the rose and the blade
My soul is a crawling drop of lightENVISIONING EXILE