When metamorphosing in Ibn cArabl’s “cAyn al-Shams” (Eye of the Sun),
otherwise, al-Nizmm, Ishtar, or cM’ishah is the needed spring of love and cre-
ativity. However, she is the desired one toward whom the speaker’s journey
aspires to conclude in fusion. Disembodied and desexualized, her features are
kept to the minimum, a mere dim recollection that is recalled in times of
frustration and despair. Drawing on Ibn cArabl’s Damascene experience, the
persona in the “Eye of the Sun” repeats:
But she returned to Damascus
With the birds and the light of the dawn
Leaving her slave in exile:
Joyful fugitive prepared for sale
Dead and alive,
Drawing on books of water and on the sand
Her child’s brow, her eyes
The flash of the lightning across the night
And a world that dies or is born before the cry
Of death or birth.
(Ibid. 57)The dominant presence of al-Baymtl’s desexualized women brings him
closer to Ibn cArabl’s Tarjummn al-ashwmq(Interpreter of Desires). While
tracing them in every beautiful act or scene, al-Baymtl’s persona undergoes
transfigurations that ally him with poets, Sufis, martyrs, and exiles. His voice
reveals no rapture, however: “I bewail in the river of banishment the times of
strangers.”^130 Usually the yearning for a moment of love is a strategy to
counteract a world of oppression.
However, exile in al-Baymtl’s poetry also evolves in juxtaposed intersections
whereby lack indicates supplementarity rather than opposition. Indeed, bereave-
ment or loss betrays some presence first. The speaker perceives and recaptures it
as a time of dislocation. Without the first, that is, the presence, there is no sub-
sequent feeling. His poem works intertextually in this domain, as he willingly
negotiates among precursors, taking himself to be a mythical soul, unlimited
by time and space. Negotiating in these domains, he is no longer a specific
name or person to be persecuted, annihilated, or swept away. He mentions
that whenever meeting young women, “they were surprised to find me
reciting lines from Ibn al-Fmri,’s poetry [the Sufi poet who died in Egypt in
1235 CE]and speaking of Genesis, thinking that I make fun of them.” He
adds that he had to assure them that “I was born and died in many ages and
that possibly we could have met in these.”^131 Through speaking of cM’ishah’s
transformations, the poet aims to advance his own metamorphoses, including
his fusion in the figures of exiles, martyrs, and Sufis. Indeed, al-Baymtlbrings
all images together, in “Nmr al-shicr” (The Fire of Poetry), in his collection
ENVISIONING EXILE