The 21st anniversary of his departure ... Al-Bayati is the lighthouse of the land of Sumer and the poet of longing and exile

We are from exile to exile and from the door to a
chaotic door as the lilies wither in the soil wither
poor, O my country we die and our train never misses ...

Some writers are no less important or beautiful than their literature, and so was the Iraqi poet Abd al-Wahhab al-Bayati (1926 - 1999), who stood through his human poetry against exploitation and racial and sectarian discrimination, as he was a lover of the simple, loyal to the poor, and believing that the poet has no homeland where His homeland is the whole world, where he says:

My love is greater than me.
From this world, the
poor
lovers have made me king of the vision
and the imam of exile and exile

Personal stations

Al-Bayati was born in a small and impoverished popular environment, in 1926, and he got to know the world through the neighborhood in which he lived near the mosque and shrine of Sheikh Abdul Qadir Al-Jilani in Baghdad, where the place was packed with poor and attracted, sellers, workers, and immigrants from the countryside and the petty bourgeoisie, so "knowledge was My first great source of pain. "

In 1944 he joined the Faculty of Dar Al-Moalemeen in Baghdad and graduated from it in 1950, holding a degree in Arabic language and literature. He worked as a professor at the University of Moscow from 1959-1964.

He also worked later in his career in the diplomatic service, most recently as a cultural attaché to the embassy in Spain.

His stay in Spain from 1970 to 1980 had distinguished his poetic journey, which appeared in a number of his poetry collections, and this period was used by some to collectively call it the product of the Spanish stage, which in some of them lived the most famous Spanish poets such as: Aragon and Elwar. As if he had become a Spanish writer, until his Arabic works were translated into Spanish. And he had a friendship with a large number of intellectuals of this country during his stay in Madrid.

Distant exiles

He lived traveling between the countries of the world and their capitals, from Baghdad to Cairo, passing through Madrid and Moscow to Beirut and his last stop, Damascus, or what he calls "complete exile."

Al-Bayati, who has been predominantly nomadic and forced immigration, applies to Tawhidi’s statement that he is the strangest of strangers.

Al-Bayati never settled, and his suitcases were always on his shoulder. Everywhere he finds, he finds dozens of followers, lovers, dervishes, and famous poets from all over the world. Its advantage is its acceptance of all directions: the mystic, the lover, the warrior, the rebel, and the thinker.

Between modernity and mysticism

Al-Bayati's name is related to the movement of modern poetry, or what is called activation poetry, as it is related to the name of the true founders of it: Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab and Nazek Al-Malaika. Al-Bayati is considered a founding poet in the movement of contemporary poetry called "poetic modernity" today.

Al-Bayati ranks first among poets in extracting the mask from the Sufi heritage.

Some critics - including the Iraqi poet Hussein Mardan - say that Al-Bayati imitates the Turkish poet Nazem Hekmat and traces his steps.

The first shock

The romantic stage of my home started in 1950, when he began publishing poems of the collection of "Broken Jugs", as it was widely welcomed by critics of the modernist wave at the time. Some considered it a poetic turn, a new birth, and perhaps for political reasons more than artistic, and I wrote "broken pitchers" in an atmosphere closer to the prison or exile, where he was a teacher in a school in the city of Ramadi on the outskirts of the desert to which politicians were exiled.

Al-Bayati describes these by saying:

There I suffered the same ordeal of these people and lived their climate, and the Iraqi writer Ghiba Tohma Farman called her (the great exile or the big prison)
I will be! No point, I will always be from no place
without a face without history, from no place of
light shocks me and the noise of the city from afar the
same life, paving its way a new boredom
stronger than stubborn death
and captive I do not harbor anything, and for thousands of years
nothing nothing awaits the traveler other than the sad present .

Al-Bayati was one of the pioneers of the library of Al-Khilani Mosque, which was located in Al-Kilani Street, which connects to Al-Rashid Street, where it contained various books, such as the works of Taha Hussein, the poems of Ahmed Shawqi, Maarouf Al-Rusafi, and dozens of Iraqi and Arab writers. The late Iraqi fictional writer Ghaib Tumah Farman gave it to our poet .

Al-Bayati began between 1950 and 1953 publishing his poems in the Cairo Culture Magazine and the Lebanese Literature Magazine, then his most prominent poetic work began, beginning in 1954, "Poems in Exile", which translated into Russian and Chinese, and ended his poetry career with the Divan of the Sea, far away, I hear sighs 1998.

He wrote a number of poems dedicated to a number of poets, including: a funeral Mass to New York, the Eucharist, which is dedicated to Pablo Neruda, love poems on the seven gates of the world, death in the Bosphorus, dedicated to the Turkish poet Nazim Hekmat.

Certificates

The late Lebanese poet Ansi Al-Hajj wrote in the Lebanese Poetry magazine, the April 1957 issue, praising Al-Bayati poetry as an elite poet, while the Iraqi critic Nihad Al-Takarli wrote a long study published in the Lebanese Al-Adeeb magazine describing Al-Bayati as the preacher of modern poetry.

The French poet Louis Aragon wrote in a literary magazine that he is heading the editor, saying of the poet Al-Bayati, "Abdul Wahab, the greatest contemporary Iraqi Arab poet."

The Egyptian writer Mujahid Abdel Moneim describes Mujahid - in an article for him in the National Culture Magazine that is issued from Beirut - in which he states, "Al Bayati is one of the heroes who were made by history. If he had not been born, history would have had a son Beatia." Baghdad's bleak night depicts its bloated homes.

Al-Bayati was the beginning of his youth characterized by isolation, preferring to sit alone in the Baghdad cafes with his own rituals in drinking and reading newspapers and magazines and contemplating the Tigris River from the windows of those cafes, but the life of the exile added to Al-Bayati a new style of life as he began participating in literary conferences, evenings and poetry seminars, which led He made him leave his isolation in Baghdad, heading to the capitals of poetry and literature, which he started from Beirut because of its location and its freedoms. And stamped it in Damascus, where his fellow citizen lies.

On the sidewalks of cafes

There was a special relationship between Al-Bayati and the Turkish poet Hikmat, as he visited him in his country house or in one of the cafes in Moscow, and the latter was a fan of Al-Bayati’s office “Poems in Exile”. There were explicit quotations from Al-Bayati's poetry, which was popularized in the 1950s in Iraq, and became a feature of Al-Bayati, which accompanied him to the end of his life.

The night of the Egyptian capital had an effect on Al-Bayati's psyche, as he wandered in the Cairo cafes in the morning and sat in the "Labas, Rish" cafe. He met the Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz and others, and in the evening he returns to the "Al-Fishawi" café in the Al-Hussein neighborhood, until the dawn hours and then returns to His house with a few friends on foot.

Bitter departure

Al-Bayati left on August 3, 1999, at the age of 73 years, most of whom spent in exile, Damascus was the last, but it came according to his will to be buried in the cemetery of Ibn Arabi, the Sufi who was loved by our poet, and he said when asked about the situation, "I prepare the count so that I sleep to The vicinity of my Sheikh .. To be the second Iraqi poets after the jeweler who choose Damascus in their lives and after their death an eternal residence, as if he wanted to stay next to his elders from the Sufis from the shrine of Sheikh Al-Kilani in Iraq to the shrine of Sheikh Muhyiddin bin Arabi in Damascus.

Al-Bayati's wish was not fulfilled that he would die on the Tigris shore, as he uttered his last breath on Barada Beach, as he is a poet of exile with distinction.

In the book "The Book of the Sea", which just shortly before his departure, Al-Bayati recovers from the sweetness of language to publicly announce his "teachings" blasted by the winds of heartbreaks:

I will say to the words: Be a rose.
I will tell the poets. Be honest.
I will say for years. Return to
life explode.
I will say: Be a rose to remove the lover sea.
I will tell the flowers, Be a tent for my
beloved, and set fire to the drowning cities under the seabed and antique paper.