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'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati (1926-1999) |
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Prolific Iraqi poet, along with Nazik al-Mala'ika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab one of the most important Arab avant-garde writers from the 1950s. 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati celebrated the rise of Arab nationalism and the struggle of workers. More than half his life he lived outside Iraq. His poetry is characterized by its deep historical sense and use of conversational quotations. A Marxist, he was committed to the liberation of the oppressed masses. "In my view the poet is immersed up to his ears in the chaos and welter of this world and of the revolution of man," he said. Between the years 1950 and 1998, al-Bayati published some 35 collections of verse. The Ship of Fate moved on, 'Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati was born in Baghdad. Near his home was
the
shrine of the 12th century Sufi Abdel Qadir al-Jilani. From his
early youth, Al-Bayati had been involved in radical
politics. After graduating
from the Iraqi Teachers' Training College in Baghdad in 1950, al-Bayati became a teacher. He taught
in public schools and edited one of the most widely circulated cultural
magazines, Al-Thaqafa Al-Jadida (The
New Culture). During the early 1950s, the mission of al-Bayati's
poetry was to analyze the many injustices endemic to Iraqi life. A member of the Communist Party at the time, al-Bayati was also
asked to read his poems at demonstrations. Because of his
antigovernment activities, he
was dismissed from his work and sentenced to imprisonment and work in a
concentration camp. On his release in 1955, he went into exile. Thereafter he lived in
exile
in Lebanon, Syria and Egypt, separated from his family. Invititated by
the Organization of Soviet Writers, al-Bayyati traveled to Moscow, where he
became friends with the exiled Turkish poet Nazim
Hikmet.
After
the 1958 overthrow of the royal regime, Al-Bayati returned to Baghdad.
For a period he held a post in the Ministry of Education, before the
republican Iraqi government appointed him cultural attaché at the Iraqi
embassy in Moscow. He resigned in 1961 and then taught at the Asian and
African Peoples'
Institute of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. When he accepted President
Gamal Abdel Nasser's invitation to visit Egypt, his Iraqi citicenship
was revoked. Without formal nationality, he lived in Cairo for the next
four years, and continued traveling widely in the Eastern Europe. Granted a new pasport, al-Bayati moved back to his home
country after the pan-Arab,
socialist Ba'th party took the control of the regime. He worked as
cultural adviser to the Ministry of Culture and Information, but was
forced to flee again
to escape the brutal campaign against
leftists.
"The Arab leaders are the enemies of their peoples," he once said. ('Preface' by Bassam K. Frangieh, in Love, Death, and Exile by Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati, 2004, p. ix) In 1972
he was back in Baghdad and honored by the present government.
Eventually he was assigned in 1980 by Saddam Hussein as cultural
attaché to
Iraq's diplomatic mission in Madrid. Al-Bayati's ambivalent stance
toward Hussein led the Iraqi dissisent Kanan Makiya to claim in his book Cruelty and Silence
(1992), that Arab intellectuals, including al-Bayati, were too eager to
render Saddam an Arab champion against the West while overlooking the
dictator's crimes against his own people. Following Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, al-Bayati left in protest his post in Spain, and sought refuge in Jordan. Noteworthy, King Hussein did not join the international coalition against Iraq. While in Amman, al-Bayati's favorite restaurant was Al-Yasmeen; a wide range of intellectuals around the world came to meet him. Saddam Hussein's government stripped him of his citizenship after he visited Saudi Arabia to participate in a cultural festival. In 1966, he moved to Syria, where he at the same time enjoyed the patronage of Hafez al-Assad and made made friends with Assad's political opponents. Al-Bayati spent his last days with fellow Iraqi exiles in the cafes of Damascus, where he had moved from Amman. He died on August 3, 1999, of a heart attack. Major international newspapers reported his death. Despite his anti-government stand, al-Bayati's books were sold in Baghdad book shops. From nowhere, His career as a writer al-Bayati began with a commitment to
proletarian struggle, but he also drew on mythological and historical
material from the rich literary legacy of the great mystics. He read
widely, from Mayakovsky to Lorca and Paul Eluard to Neruda. He also
translated Aragon. Mala'ika wa shayatin (1950, Angels and Devils), al-Bayati's first
collection,
still followed the Romantic, popular trend. Al-Bayati was among the
first Iraqi poets who broke away from classical forms and joined the
free verse movement in the 1950s. One of his major early works, Abariq
muhashshama
(1954, Broken Pitchers), was written mostly in free verse and became
known all over the Arab world. His subsequent collections made him a
leading
voice of the generation who felt betrayed by their leaders. In the much
quoted poem 'The Arab refugees' (1961) he wrote: "Naked and stabbed, / the
Arab refugee is begging at your doors. / Ants and the birds of wounding
years / are eating at his flesh." (quoted from The Influence of the Political Situation in Palestine on Arabic Poetry from 1917-1973 by Khalid Abdullah Sulaiman Mohammad, thesis, University of London School of Oriental and African Studies, 1982, p. 224) Shocked by the defeat of the Arab
armies in the Six-Day War in 1967, al-Bayati depicted in The Eyes of the
Dead Dogs (1969) Prophet Muhammed as a Christ figure: "O my friend, / They stole happiness from you / They deceived
you, / Tortured you, / Crucified you / In the snare of words / In order to say: / He died / To sell you a place in the sky." (from 'Something
About Happiness,' in Love, Death, and Exile, poems translated from Arabic by Bassam K. Frangieh, Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2004, p. 29).
The Christ theme surfaces in many poems dealing with the plight of
Palestinian refugees: "The night is banished by the lanterns of eyes, /
Your eyes, my hungry brethren, scattered beneath the stars. / And it
seemed as if in a dream I had paved your road / With roses and tears, /
As if Jesu had returned with you to Galilee, / Without the Cross." (from 'Return,' quoted in A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry by M. M. Badawi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 211) A representative of the Socialist Realist school in modern Arabic poetry, al-Bayati wrote in simple language which came near the common speech. He also used literary allusions and elements from the traditional poetry and Western modernism, popular proverbs, sayings, and snatches of dialogue. These he weaved into his call of the revolutionary change of the world – revolution is the precondition for an earthly paradise: "Yet in spite of the suffering, I am / On the road to the sun, marching." (from 'Something About Happiness,' Love, Death, and Exile, p. 29) Although al-Bayati's verse maintained popularity among opposition supporters, the poet himself enjoyed the patronage of monarchs and dictators of the Middle East. Much of his poetry was translared into Chinese and Russian. During his poetry reading at the University of Pennsylvania in 1991, Sheik Omar Abdulrahman, the mastermind behind the truck bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, sat in the front row. Some of his poems were addressed to such figures as Mao Zedong, Maxim Gorkii, Vladimir Maiakovskii and Ernest Hemingway. Echoing the thought of Camus and Sartre, al-Bayati once stated, "Whether for the individual or for the society as a whole, the revolt against life is the first step in the revolutionary process." ('Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization' by Yoav Di-Capua, American Historical Review, October 2012, p. 1081) Much of al-Bayati's later poetry was influenced by Sufism, although he did not write many Sufi poems. The separation from Iraq, his wife and four children reflected often in the nostalgic tone of his work, where loneliness is his new poetic homeland. He also expressed his doubts and sadness: "From the depths I call out to you, / With my tongue dried up, and / My butterflies scorched over your mouth. / Is this snow from the coldness of your nights?" (from The Book of Poetry and Revolution, 1965, in An Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry, selected, edited and translated into English by Mounah A. Khouri and Hamid Algar, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974, p. 111) The figure of A'isha, Omar Khayyam's beloved, appears often. She is for the poet the symbol beauty and love, "A saint fleeing in the middle of the darkness," who gives him hope and a reason to believe in a better life. For further reading: Re-orienting Modernism in Arabic and Persian Poetry by Levi Thompson (2023); Modern Arabic Poetry: Revolution and Conflict by Waed Athamneh (2017); Arabic Poetry: Trajectories of Modernity and Tradition by Muhsin J. al-Musawi (2006); 'Introduction' by Bassam K. Frangieh, in Love, Death, and Exile by Abdul Wahab Al-Bayati (2004); The Poetics of Anti-colonialism in the Arabic Qaṣīdah by Hussein N. Kadhim (2004); ''Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati' by Ferida Jawad, in Censorship: A World Encyclopedia by Derek Jones (2002); 'al-Bayātī 'Abd al-Wahhāb (1926- ),' in Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature: Volume 1, A-K, edited by Julie Scott Meisami, Paul Starkey (1998); 'Introduction' by Bassam K. Frangieh, in Love, Death, and Exile (1990); When the Words Burn: An Athology of Modern Arabic Poetry, 1945-1987, edited and translated by John Mikhail Asfour (1988); Palestine and Modern Arab Poetry by Khalid A. Sulaiman (1984); Poetry of Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati: Thematic and Stylistic Study by Khalil Shukrahhah- Rizk (1981); Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry, Vol. 2, by S.K. Jayyusi (1977); Poet of Iraq: Abdul Wahab al-Bayati. An Introductory Essay with Translations by Desmond Stewart (1976); A Critical Introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry by M. M. Badawi (1975) Selected works:
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