SAYYAB 255The same interweaving of the personal and the public and political
elements is to be found in several other powerful poems. In 'The River and
Death', to mention but another example, the poet's yearning for Buwaib, the
river of his childhood village, particularly his longing not only to play but
also to drown in it, is in part an expression of a desire to go back to the womb,
a memory of the child's fascination with death and the unknown. Yet water is
at the same time the element of life, hence the poet's wish to die as a political
'martyr', the yearning in his blood for a bullet 'whose sudden and awesome
ice will bore the depths' of his heart and 'like hell-fire will set ablaze' his
bones. But it is a death inspired by the wish to 'share the burden of mankind'
and therefore by bearing the load with other men to bring back life. 'My
death', he says, 'will be a victory.'^70 One may perhaps add that the intensity
of Sayyab's feeling of commitment and hence his ability to combine the
personal and the public did not disappear with his gradual disenchantment
with the communist ideal during the 1950s.
Rain, as an archetypal image (in Arabic no less than in other literatures),
is a dominant motif in Sayyab's poetry. But in this he seems to owe a direct
debt to Edith Sitwell, and of course to T. S. Eliot who makes a striking use of
the rain theme throughout The Waste Land. As has already been suggested,
Eliot's use of myth has had considerable influence on Arab poets, of whom
Sayyab is a conspicuous example. 'Hymn to Rain' is based on the concept of
rain and fertility which underlies the Tammuz/Adonis myth, but in Sayyab's
later poetry there is an increasingly overt use of this myth of death and re-
birth, together with others including the Christian myth, the last of which he
seems to have been led to use extensively under the influence of Edith
Sitwell.^71 The myths are used in several poems of a political character,
Marxist and Arab nationalist alike, such as 'Message from the Grave' (dealing
with the Algerian struggle), 'The River and Death', 'Christ after Crucifixion',
'City of Sindbad' and 'City Without Rain'. It is not difficult to see the relevance
of the myth of death and resurrection to Arab poets like Sayyab who are
passionately concerned about the need for sacrifice to bring about a rebirth
of their people. As one scholar put it: 'He resorts to the myth of Tammuz in
his search for symbols to represent the victory of life over death, and finds
in it all that he needs to embody his vision of a plenteous, new life for his
people.'^72
There was also the political consideration which Sayyab himself once ex-
plained in 1963:
My first motive [in using myths and symbols] was political. When I
wanted to resist the royal Sa'Idi regime with poetry I used myths to veil my
intentions, for the myrmidons of Nuri al-Sa'id understood no myths. I
also used them for the same purpose in the regime of Qasim. In my poem