cross-cultural boundaries, but also to fight and challenge powers of oppression
and tyranny. He is present to uplift the masses, to decry the present, and to
struggle for the restoration of justice, beauty, and love in decayed systems and
cities. However, having said this, readers of al-Baymtl’s poetry may be discon-
certed by a wailing voice that coincides with Eliot’s images of dead cities,
falling bridges, and wastelands. In respect to the latter, a note of certitude and
faith that stamps later poems cannot dislodge his early images of hollowness,
sterility, and alienation. Al-Baymtlfinds these more attuned to an exilic
experience of disorientation and fatigue, as in “I am Born and Burn in Love”:
No one knows another in this exile
All are alone
The world’s heart is made of stone
In this kingdom of exile.
(Ibid. 207)More than many of his fellow poets, he blends Tammnz with the Greek
Adonis, Christ, Imam >ussein [>usayn], Lorca, and al->allmj in one single
image of the poet as martyr, whose blood and word are the same, leading to
regeneration, growth, and fertility in “Shiraz’s Moon”:
The Lovers wash themselves with my blood
In their exile, the strangers build Shiraz
With my poems
(Ibid. 211)Seemingly in reaction against his fellow poets and counterparts of the so-called
Tammnzlmovement, al-Baymtldeveloped a poetics of his own that negotiates
its images and themes among a number of poetic and socio-political terrains,
making use of all of them while attempting to signpost its individual
character. Mythology and religion are only part of an enormous subtext that
includes history and politics. Yet, although excluded from the Tammnzl
movement by many who wrote on the presence of Eliot in the modernist
endeavor in Arabic literature,^14 al-Baymtl’s mythical patterns accommodate
and subsume others, to the extent that the persona sounds like the modernist
version of Tammnz, parodied or duplicated in metro stations, on sidewalks,
and outside closed city gates.
Transferred from the ancient location and time to a new disconcerting one,
Tammnz is bound to suffer displacements, disenchantments, or transformations.
He may be al-Mahdl, the Messiah of Islam, or a prophet, or he may fuse into
Lorca, Alberti, or Machado, or into historical figures, including Sufis and
martyrs. In this sense, the common background for modernism in Arabic
poetry appears strongly in al-Baymtl’s poetry, despite his astounding realistic
strain at times. Writing about sources for the Tammnzlmovement, al-Azma
THE EDGE OF RECOGNITION AND REJECTION