6 ENVISIONING EXILE (p. 163-164)

Past anchors and problematic encounters

Exile is places and times which change their victims.
(Ma.mnd Darwlsh, "The Tragedy
of Narcissus," p. 178)

Although heavily involved in negotiating a settlement of some sort, poetry usually draws on the resourcefulness of its authors insofar as they have paradoxically experienced location and dislocation, and orientation and disenchantment in a series of snapshots, gleanings, and textual signposts. Faring in the shadows of archetypal wanderers such as Ulysses, Sindbad, and the rovers of theology and archaic cultures or settling for the disappointments, frustrations, and pleasures of the immediate and the real, exiled writers and artists are nevertheless absorbed and imprisoned by memory, with all the implications of attachment to the past or yearning for release from regret. In a reality of so much disenchantment, time and place are blurred, and the poet’s voice searches in vain for a temporal vision. Poetry and music become his gate to life, for "Nothing can take away from you the Andalusia of old times," Ma.mnd Darwlsh says in "Tammrln ’nlm ‘alm gltmrah Ispmniyyah (Preliminary Practice on a Spanish Guitar).Even historical records of a glorious civilization are in danger of losing meaning amid encroaching failures and doubts: "Was Andalusia/ here or there? On earth, / or only in poems?" asks Ma.mnd Darwlsh. To him, the song becomes the people’s way to reorient memory in place and time beyond the repugnant reality of brutality and forced exile:

O song, take all our thoughts, and
lift us, wound by wound,
heal our forgetfulness and take us
as high as you can, to the humanity of man,
shining by his early tents, the
brass-covered sky dome,
to see what lies hidden in his heart,
Lift us up and descend with us down to the place,
for you know best the place
and you know best the time.

Exilic Arabic poetry draws on three sources: first, the strong exilic tradition that includes poems and writings by intellectuals and poets of renown like al-Mutanabbl (d. 965), Abnayymn al-Taw.ldl (d. 1023), the brigand poets and most of the Sufis,4 second, the present scene of political turmoil with its devastating results and impact, and third, the modern "landscape of ruins," in Hugo Friedrich’s words, with its synonymous negative connotations of "[d]eformation, depersonalization, obscurity, dehumanization, incongruency, dissonance, and empty ideality."

Exilic evocations
The power of the past

Arabic poetry of exile serves then as the bridge between tradition and modernity, as it builds on a classical corpus that manifests four significant aspects: first, there is the desire to traverse the universe, gain knowledge and enjoy the new location "against the vicissitudes of time," as Abn Nuwms (d. c.813) says once. Second, there is paradoxically the fear of humiliation and desolation in leading the life of al-gharlb (the stranger). ‘All Ibn al-Jahm (killed 863) is reported as reciting:

Pity the stranger in a foreign country,
what has he done to himself?
He left his friends, and they had no use
for life after he was gone, nor did he.
He enjoyed great prestige when he lived near his domicile,
but later when he was far away, he was downcast
Being a stranger far away, he says:
God is just whatever He does.