A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry

THE RECOIL FROM ROMANTICISM 256

entitled 'Sarbarus fi Babil' ('Cerberus in Babel') I satirized Qasim and his

regime severely and his myrmidons did not realize that. I also satirized

that regime severely in my other poem 'City of Sindbad'.^73

But the use of myth did not prevent Sayyab from writing some of the most
nightmarishly horrifying comments on the bloody events in Qasim's Iraq, as
we find, for instance, in 'The City of Sindbad', where we read:

The Tartars have come, their knives dripping with blood

Our sun is blood and our food

Is blood served on platters.

They have set fire to Muhammad the orphan

And the night is alight with the blaze,

Hot blood gushing forth from his feet.

His hands and his eyes...

A horseman rode in the streets.

Murdering women

And dyeing cradles in blood ...

It seems that Babel, the ancient walled city, is back again.

With its high domes of iron, its ringing bells

Mournful as a graveyard,

The sky above it the courtyard of a slaughterhouse.

Its hanging gardens planted with heads

Cut off with sharp axes, and crows

Pecking at their eyes.^74

Nor was Sayyab always successful in his use of mythology: on the contrary
the mythological allusion is sometimes, for his Arab reader at any rate, no
more than a mere erudite reference for which the poet provides an explana-
tion in a footnote, and at other times it is neither an organizing factor nor a
device to release an emotional charge in the reader by tapping a common
source of attitudes in his culture. One of the notorious examples is his long
poem 'From Fukay's Vision', which is cluttered with forced and ill-digested
allusions to literature and mythology from East and West which do not seem
to serve any serious purpose or perform a valid function in the poem.^75
With Sayyab's subsequent volumes begins a new phase in his development,
in which he became gradually more introspective and subjective, and less
absorbed in political or public themes. In the collection The Sunken Temple
(1962) there is a marked interest in death, in the Persephone myth, in figures
from the poet's past such as his cousin Wafiqa (who died while giving birth
to a child and on whom he projected the persons of his mother and mistress):
Wafiqa's gardens are identified with Persephone's in the underworld of Pluto.
The volume contains a prayer to God in which the poet asks Him to put an
end to his suffering. But there are still poems of public concern in the collec-