Within the framework of contemporary critical studies on the image of the city in modern literature, it is crucial to critically examine the city motif disseminated in Arabic and Iraqi poetry, particularly the poems of the pioneering poet Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati in order to emphasise major city motifs rooted in modern Iraqi literature and culture. In addition to a critical investigation of the major aspects of the Iraqi city, it is also imperative to examine the socio-political trajectories integral to the image of contemporary Arab cities particularly Baghdad. Unlike their Euro-American counterparts, the Iraqi city poets, particularly Al-Bayati, live in pre-industrial, non-productive and consumptive cities, dominated by police and military establishments. Therefore, the Iraqi city poets give priority to issues such as political corruption, human rights violations, economic exploitation, decadence, moral bankruptcy, prostitution, poverty, injustice and related local issues endemic of life not only in Iraq but also in the capital cities of the Arab world. While discussing the attitude of modernist poets toward the city in “The Crisis of Language,” Richard Sheppard argues that many of the major modernist poets had come into eadlong conflict with the antipathetic institutions of the rising industrial city (Sheppard 1987: 330).
Like Eliot, many Arab poets have expressed their hostility toward Arab cities in general associating them with alienation, poverty, oppression and political corruption. Salma Jayyusi in Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry points out that although “The Waste Land” is not a poem of despair it “stresses the living death of the crowd in the unreal city” (Jayyusi 1977: 724). Explicitly, many Arab poets imitate or even copy Eliot’s vision of the modern city ignoring the differences between the Euro-American metropolis and the Arab cities. Others have approached the city motif from different perspectives according to their political ideologies and exilic experiences.
The city analogy in Arabic literature has been part and parcel of the modernist tradition ever since Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab in “Jaikur and the City” poured out his invective against the city in the fifties, describing its streets as “coil of mud” which “bite into my heart,” and moaning: “my right hand: no claw to fight with on the streets of the city, no grip to raise up life from the clay” (Cited in Gohar 1998: 49). As in American poetry, “the city” has been a prominent theme in modern Arabic literature, especially in poetry, and it is the negative aspects that have been particularly stressed. Like Eliot, Arab poets have explored the city motif to express their thoughts about contemporary life presenting the Arab city in a variety of images that has changed and developed since the 1950’s until the present time. The unreal Arab city is a solid wall that cannot be penetrated, a labyrinth where the poet is lost.
Other poets have seen the city as a place of corruption and menace associating it with social squalor and political complicity. It is a cactus land, a mill, a wilderness, a bottomless sewer where the alienation of the poet is complete. This has been one of the best treated themes in Arab modernist poetry, with the personal experience of the poet at large in the forbidding city becoming merged with the communal experience of seeking a deeper interpretation of the clash between city and country. In the city poetry of Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati, the poet incorporates contemporary Baghdad as a symbol for city life. Imitating Eliot, he composed elegies for Baghdad, the historic city. In his poetry, Baghdad, “the unreal city”, lives in the awareness of the poet’s speakers mostly political prisoners, prostitutes and other victims of the city where corruption is rife. The references to victimization and corruption endemic to Baghdad symbolizes aspects of city life: The Tigris and the Euphrates sing no more because of the moral corruption of the city.
Since the 1950’s, most of the educated elite in Iraq, due to systematic dehumanization and political oppression, pursued for decades by recurrent Iraqi regimes, were forced to leave their country and live in exile and Diaspora. Therefore, the Iraqi poets in exile have revealed nostalgia for their cities in Iraq, in addition to other Arab and Islamic cities. In the poetry of Fawzi Kareem, for example, there is nostalgia for Baghdad, the city of “forgotten alleys, bridges and taverns”. For Sarkun Boulos, the Iraqi metropolis becomes an eternal symbol of alienation harboring outcasts and prostitutes, a Babylon where Jews are inflicted with suffering and damnation. For Fadel Al-Azzawi who echoes Baudelaire’s city in his poetry, the Iraqi city is haunted by ghosts and nightmares about alien invaders bathing their horses in the blood of the city people.
Further, in the poetry of Sami Mahdi, the new Iraqi cities erected in the era of oil are different from the ancient cities of the country. The new metropolis is populated with strangers and outcasts who come from different destinations. The poet finds it difficult to identify his friends or kinsmen in these cities. The structure and shape of the city have changed like its traditions and moral systems; thus, the poet suffers from alienation and loneliness in the new Iraqi city in the post-petroleum epoch.
The City Narratives in the Poetry of Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati
In an essay entitled “The Real Poet is not Hindered by Authority: Those who Surrender are Cowards not Poets”, Al-Bayati demonstrates that he attempts in his poetry to create the ideal city because “most of the cities in the world are not cities of freedom, but cities of prisons, banks, dusty roads, insects and thieves” (Al-Bayati 1972: 3). In “My Poetic Experience”, Al-Bayati likens the modern Arab city to the circus clown whose dress is deliberately made up of bits and pieces of multiple-colored cloths just to make people laugh at him. Al-Bayati’s view is relevant to some extent particularly when it is applied to some modern cities in the rich part of the Arab world where one may encounter a Bedouin who speaks a local Arabic dialect while driving a European or Japanese car and using American money in his economic transactions. Those cartoon cities have been built randomly without prior planning (Al-Bayati 1972: 24).
Unlike their counterparts in Europe and America, these Arab cities did not develop due to industrial or technological expansions, but they were created to fulfill the urgent consumptive needs of nations that suddenly became rich. The new Arab cities that were created as a result of the increase in the oil revenues, like other ancient Arab metropolises (Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Baghdad) are non-productive communities that have failed to manufacture anything except belly dancing, songs, prostitution, and political rhetoric. Both types of Arab cities have been transformed into shopping centers for goods and commodities coming from industrial/imperialistic countries, and recently from Israel.
In the city poetry of Al-Bayati, the central persona describes himself as being sold into slavery “in the cities of the East / ravaged by whirlwinds”. Like T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Al-Bayati was against the city which is depicted in his poetry as a blind beast. Ihsan Abbas, in Al-Bayati and Modern Iraqi Poetry, points out that “to the poet, the city is a dirty world and an abyss of death which devours people. The city is a horrible place which turns man into a dwarf” (Abbas 1980: 23). Furthermore, in New Aspects of Contemporary Arabic Poetry, Abdul-Hamid Jeedah critically examines Al-Bayati’s concept of the city. According to Jeedah, Al-Bayati’s city is brutal, barbaric and repulsive. Al-Bayati’s hostile attitude toward the city, according to Jeedah, does not stem from his nostalgia for the village or for a pre-urban past but because the city is associated with immoral values, worn-out traditions and political corruption (Jeedah 1992: 286).
In his poem “The City”, Al-Bayati speaks about his experience in what he calls “the naked city”, personified as a female taking off her clothes. The poet associates Baghdad with immorality, political oppression and madness. Baghdad is a city which kills its people dehumanizing its individuals and castrating its revolutionaries.
In another poem from his anthology, second volume, Al-Bayati speaks about the city in general echoing Eliot’s famous line: “Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria / Vienna, London”. Echoing Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, Al-Bayati cries: “defeated and victorious cities / Babylon, Rome, Naynawa [Iraqi city] Thebes / God and Satan / Man, the heir of this world / is roaming naked all over the earth / looking for the forbidden fruits / in cities without spring / cities that are dominated by darkness” (Cited in Gohar 1998: 52).
In most of his city poems, Al-Bayati refers to different cities as symbols of modern life. However, he uses Babylon as an objective correlative to indicate the deplorable conditions of the Arab world after the 1967 war. The reference to Babylon evokes the suffering, gloominess and pain that haunted the collective Arab consciousness after the defeat of 1967 war. Due to the extremely difficult socio-political situation in Iraq in the 1950’s and 1960’s, Al-Bayati escaped from the Iraqi city, associated with coward politicians and moral corruption, to join the masses and urge them to revolt against local tyranny and hegemony the same way they protested against imperialism, during the colonial era.
The poet escaped from Baghdad because in the city of Al-Bayati, poverty is rife, innocence is lost and man is crushed by the police apparatus. In the city, the poet only “saw blood and crime” and he also watched “innocent children turning into victims and orphans / looking for a bone in the waste and garbage of the city / looking for food in the dunghill of the city”. He also “saw the moon dying / and the city houses turning into a heap of corpses”. The poet feels disgusted in the city because he “saw human bodies being exhibited in the shop windows” (Al-Bayati, Vol. (2), p.282).
Nevertheless, Al-Bayati, in his later poetry indicates the possibility of abolishing social ills from the Iraqi / Arab city by revolutionary means, thus some optimism is associated temporarily with his city. Ironically he Iraqi poet has spent his life looking for an alternative homeland in the Arab world, however he found this homeland in the city of Moscow.
Al-Bayati’s Jaffa Poems
During the 1950’s, the decade which followed the Arab defeat in the 1948 war and the establishment of the state of Israel on the Palestinian territories, a considerable body of largely declamatory verse was written about Palestinian cities by Arab poets who envisioned themselves as participating at the discursive level in the Arab struggle for the liberation of Palestine. During his Socialist / Realist stage, Abdul-Wahhab Al-Bayati wrote the best well-known poems ever written on a Palestinian city, “Odes to Jaffa” collected in his anthology Glory to Children and Olive Trees (1956). The Jaffa poem sequences incorporate five poems: “A Song”, “Barbed Wire”, “A Letter”, “Glory to Children and Olive Trees” and “The Return”.
Due to the Arab nationalist ideology of the post World War II era, which rejected the continuity of the Zionist colonial project in Palestine identifying the struggle with the Zionists over Palestine as a struggle for Arab existence rather than a territorial dispute, Al-Bayati’s poems on Jaffa acquired nationalist dimensions and deeper political insights. The struggle of the city of Jaffa became part of the collective act of resistance and an attempt to mobilize a nationalist response against the Zionist occupation of Palestine as a whole.
The Nineteenth Century and the City-Country Dichotomy
In the nineteenth century, major Arab poets glorified life in the city denouncing the country associating it with illiteracy, ignorance and backwardness. Ahamd Shawqi, the poet laureate and the central neo-classical figure in the Arab literary Renaissance of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century who toured many Arab, Islamic and European cities, was sympathetic toward the city. In his poetry, there was a return to the poetic diction, images and metaphors of the Abbasid and Arab-Islamic literary traditions in Andalusia.
Likewise, ancient Arab poets such as Al-Buhturi and Al-Mutanabi who came from Bedouin communities or who descended from rural backgrounds were interested in the city of Baghdad considering it as a symbol of perfection, power, modernity, discipline and safety. Nevertheless, the disappointing experience of modern Arab poets living in the city of Baghdad such as Al-Bayati, Al-Sayyab and others (who suffered from political and religious persecution), triggers feelings of alienation and exile. This negative attitude toward the city is associated with their convulsion at what the city represents as a locale for the central government, oppressive authority and economic exploitation of the poor classes. Like other Arab cities, Baghdad is a symbol of political tyranny and despotism.
In the Arab city, as a whole, the masses were prevented from expressing their views due to political tyranny. Al-Bayati was one of the Arab poets who suffered from torture and pains at the hands of the political regimes that took the city of Baghdad as its center in the 1950’s and 1960’s. In Baghdad, Al-Bayati finds nothing except hunger and loss. The poet considers the political corruption as the basic reason for all the city problems. He attacks the ruling regime in Baghdad for suffocating people’s views and opinions. He believes that the discovery of oil in Iraq as well as in other Gulf countries, is a curse because it turns the Arab cities into consuming communities living on the products of European countries.
Baghdad as the Centre of Political Establishment
Dealing with Baghdad as the center of political establishment, the city is depicted in Al-Bayati’s poetry as an Arab woman ravaged twice, once by the tartars and foreign invaders and once by local tyrannical rulers who dominated everything including natural resources, national income and the lives of people. Al-Bayati attacks the city of Baghdad itself because it surrendered to the oppressive policies of its puppet rulers. Baghdad is, thus, depicted as a defeated city that failed to overthrow the dictatorial regime that sucks the blood of its people.
Explicitly, the city of Baghdad takes different images in Al-Bayati’s poetry where it is depicted as “the song of paradise”, “city of the stars” and “city of palms and tears”. In addition to what critics said about the poet’s attitude toward the city, Al-Bayati, in his collection of poems, Angels and Devils, portrays Baghdad as a city where people starve and die of poverty and hunger. The romantic portrayal of Baghdad — as indicated by Salah Fadl in his study cited above — is replaced by the horrible image of a city where holy books are being profaned. The hostile attitude toward the city is due to the poet’s vision of Baghdad as a city of political corruption and oppression. Due to his views, Al-Bayati was forced to leave Baghdad for ideological reasons and his nationality was withdrawn afterwards. Obviously, Al-Bayati’s vision of the city was shaped by the political and social events that took place in Iraq since the 1950’s. Due to his travel and movement from one city to another, it is difficult to identify the poet with one particular city, however, Baghdad is endowed with primary importance in most of his important poems.
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