Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati

Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati (December 19, 1926 – August 3, 1999) was an Iraqi Arab poet. He was a pioneer in his field and defied conventional forms of poetry that had been common for centuries.

Abdul-Wahab Al-Bayati عبد الوهاب البياتي
Al-Bayati, who passed much of his life in urban cafés.^[1]
Born	December 19, 1926 Baghdad
Died	August 3, 1999(1999-08-03) (aged 72) Damascus
Occupation	poet

Biography

He was born in Baghdad, near the shrine of the 12th century Sufi Abdel Qadir al-Jilani.

As a man of the city, he lived close to the political heartbeat most of his life—one of his friends, Ahmed Abdel-Moeti Hegazi, said urban centers of "hotels and institutions, cafés and airports" were actually his temporary residences.^[2] London, Moscow, Madrid and Baghdad are all represented in his poetry. He attended Baghdad University, and became a teacher after graduating from Dar Al-Mu'allimin (the Teacher's College) in 1950, the same year that he released his first collection of poems, Mala'ika wa Shayatin (Angels and Devils). In addition to teaching in public schools, al-Bayati also edited the popular and widely circulated cultural magazine Al-Thaqafa A-Jadida (The New Culture). In 1954 he left Iraq after being dismissed from his positions because of his radical communist political views and anti-government activity, and moved to Damascus. Although he returned to Damascus at the end of his life, his early wanderings also took him to Cairo, Beirut and a number of Western capitals. Always involved in world affairs, some of al-Bayati's poems are in fact addressed to international figures such as T.S. Eliot and Che Guevara. Not much information is available about his personal life. Before his exile, he married, but his wife and four children are mentioned only in passing in the few available biographies. This may be because they remained in Iraq after his departure.

After spending four years living in exile in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, al-Bayati returned to Iraq in 1958 after a military coup d'état during which Crown Prince Abdul Illah and his nephew King Faisal were assassinated. The new republican government gave him a post in the Ministry of Education, after which he went to Moscow as a cultural attache representing the Iraqi embassy. Al-Bayati resigned from this post in 1961, but did not return to Iraq right away. He continued to live in Russia, teaching at the Asian and African People's Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. He stayed in Eastern Europe, traveling often, and returned briefly to Iraq in 1964, only to move to Cairo within the year. In the mid-1970s Al-Bayati moved between Cairo, Paris, London, Madrid, Jeddah and Delphi, never staying in one place long but always returning to the Middle East. For the remainder of his life, Al-Bayati moved between his homeland and the rest of the world. "I've always searched for the sun's springs," he said, "When a human being stays in one place, he's likely to die. People too stagnate like water and air. Therefore the death of nature, of words, of the spirit has prompted me to keep travelling, so as to encounter new suns, new springs, new horizons. A whole new world being born."

Although Al-Bayati was philosophical about his wandering, it was not solely a personal choice. His communist politics made trouble for him throughout his whole life. When the pan-Arab, socialist Ba'ath Party took control of Iraq from the 'Arif party in 1968, Al-Bayati returned home only to flee a brutal campaign against liberals a few years later. He returned in 1972 to receive honors from the new government, and in 1980 was again assigned as a cultural attaché and was sent by Saddam Hussein to the embassy in Madrid. When Hussein's government invaded Kuwait in 1990, Al-Bayati left Spain and took refuge in Jordan and later Syria. In 1995, Hussein revoked his citizenship as punishment for Al-Bayati's participation in a Saudi Arabian cultural festival. Al-Bayati's difficulty with Iraq over the course of his life became the subject of much of his writing. There is a story that he once explained it by drawing comparisons between his relationship with Iraq and the story of Prometheus. "Of course," Al-Bayati said, "my relations with Iraqi governments were never conciliatory. I belong to the Iraqi people. I cannot separate myself from the people." He died in exile, apparently without any previously diagnosed illness, in Damascus on August 3, 1999.

Al-Bayati as a Refugee

Due to his revolutionary ideas and advocacy for oppressed people, Abdul Wahab Al Bayati spent more than half of his life in exile. This gives a bitter flavor even to his love poetry. Following is from his The Impossible:

With dawn it comes or does not come,
My love that took to stony silence,
Round the walls it goes, begging,
Torn by talons of death whenever
Out of the death and gnawed by despair
It shouts: O you, creature you!
The Ship of Fate moved on,
Sinbad of the Wind never came,
How was it you came when our wells
Are poisoned, where can you have come from?
Did we meet before I came to be?"

^[3]

With total despair, he speaks about the tormenting pain of exile. Following is his poem entitled Why Are We in Exile the Refugees Ask (translated from Arabic by Abdullah Al-Udhari):

Why do we die?
In silence
And I had a house
And I had ….
And here you are
Without a heart without a voice
Waiting, and here you are
Why are we in exile?
We die
We die in silence
Why are we not crying?
On fire,
On thorns
We walked
And my people walked
Why are we Lord?
Without a country, without love
We die
We die in terror
Why are we in exile?
Why are we lord?

^[4]

The Sufi and Leftist Inspirations

Al-Bayati has intensively been influenced by the Middle Eastern Sufi figures for their visionary values and passionate love. He was fascinated by the love of Satan for God elaborated by some Sufi masters like Imam Ahmad A-Ghazali. This is an unconditional love in which the lover approaches his beloved as par excellence and cannot see any rival for Him. On example is a poem by Al-Bayati entitled A’isha's Mad Lover in his book, Love Poems on the Seven Gates of the World (1971): “In this context Al-Bayati’s poetry becomes Sufi in default, since he assumes the position as a modernist whose aspirations for an earthy paradise have not materialized.”^[5]

Al-Bayati's communist ideology prompted him to make close friendship with the Turkish poet and playwright Nazim Hikmat (1902-1963). They met in Moscow, as both of them were in exile in the Soviet Union. He was also under the influence of other leftist poets and men of letters like the Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), the French surrealist poet Louis Aragon (1897-1982), the Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) and the Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda (1904-1973).

Works

Original volumes

• Mala'ika wa shayatin (Angels and Devils), 1950
• Abariq muhashshama, 1954
• Risala ila Hazim Hikmet wa quas'aid ukhra, 1956
• Al-Majd li al-atfal wa al-zaytun, 1956
• Ash'ar fi al-manfa, 1957
• Ishrun qasida min Berlin, 1959
• Kalimat la tamut, 1960
• Muhakama fi Nisabur, 1963
• Al-Nar wa al-kalimat, 1964
• Sifr al-faqr wa al-thawra, 1965
• Alladhi ya'ti wa laya'ti, 1966
• Al Mawt fi al Hayat, 1968
• Tajribati al-shi'riyya, 1968
• 'Ulyun al-kilab al-mayyita, 1969
• Buka'iyya ila shams haziran wa al-murtaziqa, 1969
• Al Kitaba al Teen, 1970
• Yawmiyyat siyasi muhtarif, 1970
• Qasaid hubb 'ala bawwabat al-'alam al-sab, 1971
• Sira dhatiyya li sariq al-nar, 1974
• Kitab al-bahr, 1974
• Qamar Shiraz, 1976
• Mamlakat al-sunbula, 1979
• Sawt al-sanawat al-daw'iyya, 1979
• Bustan 'A'isha, 1989
• Al-Bahr Ba'id, Asma'uh Yatanahhud (The Sea is Distant, I Hear It Sighing), 1998

Translated volumes

• Lilies and Death, 1972 (trans. Mohammed B. Alwan)
• The Singer and the Moon, 1976 (trans. Abdullah al-Udhari)
• Eye of the Sun, 1978
• Love Under Rain (Al-hubb tahta al-matar), 1985 (transl. Desmond Stewart and George Masri)
• Love, Death, and Exile, 1990 (trans. Bassam K. Frangieh)

Anthologies with only works by Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati

• Poet of Iraq: Abdul Wahab al-Bayati. An introductory essay with translations by Desmond Stewart, 1976
• Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, 1979 (a short introduction and four poems, trans. Desmond Stewart and George Masri)

Anthologies with works by Abd al-Wahhab Al-Bayati and other poets

• Abdullah al-Udhari, ed. and trans. Modern Poetry of the Arab World. Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986.
  • An Apology for a Short Speech
  • The Arab Refugee
  • The Fugitive
  • Hamlet
  • Profile of the Lover of the Great Bear
  • To Ernest Hemingway
• Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed. Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987
  • The Birth of Aisha and Her Death
  • Eligy for Aisha
  • The Impossible
  • Luzumiyya
• Simawe, Saadi ed. Iraqi Poetry Today, ISBN 0-9533824-6-X London: King's College, London, 2003
  • The Dragon
  • An Elegy to Aisha
  • I am Born and I Burn in My Love
  • Love Under The Rain
  • The Nightmare
  • Nine Ruba'iyat
  • Shiraz Moon
  • Three Ruba'iyat
  • To Naguib Mahfouz [Amman, 15 April 1997]
  • To TS Eliot
  • Transformations of Aisha: Aisha's Birth and Death in the Magical Rituals Inscribed in Cuneiform on the Nineveh Tablets
  • Two Poems for my son, Ali
  • Who Owns the Homeland?
• Writing on Aisha's Tomb

See also

•  Poetry portal

• The Dragon (poem), by Al-Bayati.

Further reading

• Azouqa, Aida. "Defamiliarization in the Poetry of ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati and T.S. Eliot: a comparative study." Journal of Arabic Literature 32.2 (2001): 167–211.
• Boullata, Issa J. "The Masks of ‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayyati." Journal of Arabic Literature 32.2 (2001): 107–118.
• Kadhim, Hussein N. "‘Abd al-Wahhab al-Wahhab al-Bayyati’s ‘Odes to Jaffa’." Journal of Arabic Literature 32.2 (2001): 86–106.
• Musawi, Muhsin Jasim. "Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati’s Poetics of Exile." Journal of Arabic Literature 32.2 (2001): 212–238
• Musawi, Muhsin Jasim. "Engaging Tradition in Modern Arab Poetics." Journal of Arabic literature 33.2 (2002): 172–210.
• Noorani, Yaseen "Visual Modernism in the Poetry of ‘Abd al-al-Wahhab al-Bayati." Journal of Arabic Literature 32.3 (2001): 239–255.
• Rizk, Kahali Shukrallah. The Poetry of ‘Abd Al-Wahhab Al-Bayyati: thematic and stylistic study, Dissertation (Ph. D), Indiana University: 1981.
• Salama, Mohammad R. "The Mise-en-Scene of ‘Writintg’ in al-Bayati's Al-Kitabah ‘ala al-tin ‘Writing on the Mud’." Journal of Arabic Literature 32.2 (2001): 167–211.
• Stetkevych, Suzanne Pinckney. "Perhaps a Poet is Born, or Dies: the poetics of ‘Abd al—Wahhab al- Bayyati." Journal of Arabic Literature 32.2 (2001): 88–238.
• Stewart, Desmond, editor and translator. Poet of Iraq, Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, an introductory essay with translations. Gazelle Publication: 1976.

Notes

1. Photo by Randa Shaath; accompanied article "Points of reference" in Al-Ahram Weekly (August 1999, Issue No. 442)
2. Hegazi, Agmed Abdel-Moeti. "Points of Reference March 17, 2005, at the Wayback Machine." Al-Ahram Weekly Online Issue No. 442 (12–18 August 1999). Retrieved on 4 May 2005
3. Jayyusi, S. K. (ed.). (1987). Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology. New York: University of Columbia Press, p. 170.
4. Hamalian, L. & Yohannan, J.D. (1978). New Writings from the Middle East. New York: New American Library, p. 66.
5. Al-Musawi, M. (2009). Islam on the Street: Religion in Modern Arabic Literature. Toronto: Bowman and Littlefield Publishers, Inc., p. 211.

References

• Ryding, Karin C. - "A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic", Page 88, Section 5, "Nouns of intensity, repetition, profession", Cambridge University Press, © Karin C. Ryding 2005
• Author Unknown. "1958: Coup in Iraq Sparks Jitters in the Middle East" BBC 14 July 1958. Accessed 1 May 2005.

This site is an archived BBC article on the military coup d'état in 1958 that allowed al-Bayyati to briefly return to Iraq.

• Author Unknown. "An Interview With al-Bayyati" Al-Ahram Weekly February 1999. 13 April 2005

The author interviews al-Bayyati, who discusses with great feeling his ideas on the craft of writing, on religion, on women and on the politics that have shaped his life. This interview offers a charming glimpse of al-Bayatti's character, wit and personality. An extended obituary for al-Bayyati is also included at the bottom of the page.

• Bahgory, George. "" Al-Ahram Weekly 18 August 1999. 13 April 2005

A short poem and drawing in memory of al-Bayyati by celebrated Egyptian artist and cartoonist George Bahgory.

• Frangieh, Bassam. "" Yale University Date Unavailable. 13 April 2005

This article examines work by modern Arabic poets in terms of historical and political events. It includes al-Bayyati's "Elegy to Aisha" with commentary.

• Hegazi, Ahmed Abdel-Moeti. "" Al-Ahram Weekly 18 August 1999. 13 April 2005

Ahmed Abdel-Moeti Hegazi remembers al-Bayyati. This is an in-depth look at the poet from the perspective of a friend who had been acquainted with him for many years. It offers a fresh and enthralling view of al-Bayyati, and is by far the most personal article we have come across. This is the only example we have found of someone writing about al-Bayatti the man rather than al-Bayatii the poet. The site also includes a biography.

• Liukkonen, Petri. . Books and Writers (kirjasto.sci.fi). Finland: Kuusankoski Public Library. Archived from the original on 17 March 2005.

The text of this site, which appears in a few other locations on the web, includes a brief biographical overview of the author and a list of selected works. It discusses al-Bayyati's poetry in the context of his life, giving examples of poems influenced both by his politics, his separation from his homeland and his later Sufist influence.

• Ormsby, Eric. "" Maisonneuve May 2004. 12 April 2005.

Eric Ormsby eloquently describes seeing al-Bayyati read his poetry at a conference of Near Eastern poets, and reviews the book Iraqi Poetry Today. His review also offers an abridged historical commentary on the work of several poets included in the book.

• Pollard, Lawrence. "How War Inspires the World's Poets" BBC 10 November 2002. 13 April 2005

A BBC special in honor of Remembrance Sunday, BBC World services correspondent Lawrence Pollard examines the ways that war inspires poets and writers the world over. The sit includes an extract from "Lament for the June Sun" by al-Bayyati with commentary.

• Saleh, Fakhri. "al-Bayyati:A Great Innovator in the Language of Poetry"^{[permanent dead link]} The Star 12 August 1999 HighBeam Research. 13 April 2005

An overview of al-Bayyati's life and poetry, written following his death. Unfortunately, membership to the site must be obtained to access the full text.

External links

• Death of Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati, 73; Iraqi Poet and Innovator in His Art
• Man and Woman English translation of one of Al-Bayyati's poems