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Al-Ahram Weekly 12 - 18 August 1999 Issue No. 442 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 12 - 18 August 1999 Issue No. 442
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Books Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters Stations of exile
Abdel-Wahab Al-Bayyati was born in 1926 in Bawwabat Al-Sheikh near Baghdad. At the age of 18, he moved to the capital, where he studied Arabic literature at the Teachers' College. After his graduation in 1950 -- the year in which his first collection of poetry, Angels and Devils, appeared -- he worked as a school teacher until 1953, when he was sacked from his job and imprisoned because of his radical views. He left Iraq in 1954, thus beginning his life-long exile.
He took up residence in Damascus first, then Beirut, before embarking on his first, relatively short stay in Cairo (1957-58). He returned to Iraq following the July 1958 Revolution, and was soon posted to Moscow as a cultural attaché in the Iraqi embassy. He lived in Moscow for five years. After the 1963 coup in Iraq, Al-Bayyati was stripped of his nationality. He lived in Cairo as a political refugee between 1964 and 1971, before returning to Iraq, where he spent most of the 1970s. Posted to Madrid in 1980 as part of the Iraqi diplomatic mission in Spain, he stayed on for 10 years; because of his opposition to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, he was then sacked and stripped of his Iraqi nationality once again. After travelling from one European capital to another, he settled in Amman until 1997, when he moved to Damascus -- "to die," as he often said in the last two years of his life -- and to be buried in the shrine of the Sufi Andalusian philosopher and poet Ibn Arabi. Forty-five years ago, Damascus was his first stop on the road to exile. As Baghdad grew ever more distant, appearing to recede in the distance, it was Damascus, again, that he chose as his final station.
