What Nazeer El-Azma associates with al-Sayymb’s poetics applies with no less
force to al-Baymtl.^11 Aside from his use of myth to enhance change in decaying
systems and sterile lands, al-Baymtl’s poetry is mainly imagist, deriving its
appeal from combinatory feelings and objective correlatives. Its recourse to
both dialogue and monologue imprints a lively dimension on his poems that
involves them in current debates on politics, faith, poetics, and social ills. His
cities are not necessarily like Eliot’s, although some suffer no less sterility
and decay. Rather than a one set of European, specifically English, cities,
al-Baymtl’s sites are a world of juxtapositions, deeply rooted in his recollections
and perspectives. Toledo is not Baghdad, and Paris is not London. Every city
has a meaning usually connected to a historical instance. Paris is a land of
hope, but Baghdad is closed to poets. His personal experience or identification
with other poets impose a meaning on city symbols and their connotations of
regeneration or sterility. Nevertheless, what Nazeer al-Azma finds applicable
to al-Sayymb in contrast with Eliot may also relate to al-Baymtl. He argues:
Death for both Eliot and al-Sayyab became the wide-open gate for
rebirth; and while the former finds his self in the Christian faith,
namely in its Catholic order, al-Sayyab attaches himself to the
human forces in their ethical struggle of good against evil.
Simultaneously, faith, which included ethics and provides the final
solution, as far as Eliot is concerned, has been the dynamic force,
which always illuminates al-Sayyab’s struggle for better life.
(Ibid. 223–34)As if arguing back against a whole Tammnzi tradition and fellow poets,
al-Baymtlhas chosen ‘M’ishah, or Ishtar, as the incarnation of the poetic
impulse. Rather than the “embodiment of the reproductive nature,”^12 as artic-
ulated in Frazer’s popular reading in The Golden Bough, al-Baymtl’s Ishtar incar-
nates the sum of beauty, love, poetry, water, and joy, along with the aspirations
of the poor in cities of plenty, creativity, and challenge. In a series of incarna-
tions, she undergoes transfigurations as the ultimate “Ishtar” in his “Elegy to
Khalil Hawi.”^13 On occasions, she defies limits and escapes textual boundaries.
In the “Secret of Fire,” we are told that “half of you: a woman / the other half:
impossible to describe.” No words can contain this whole: “Half of you cannot
be described/The other half: a priestess in the temple of Ishtar” (Ibid. 305).
Deconstructing myth
With so much integration and disintegration, wholeness and fragmentation,
sanctuaries and temples, Ishtar encapsulates al-Baymtl’s world, leaving the
“youthful spouse or lover” Tammnz simultaneously in perennial, and perpetual,
need for rebirth. Al-Baymtlidentifies with Tammnz in a way that corresponds
to the many-sided expansion of Ishtar. His persona is available not only to
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION