Abdullah Al-Samti

The poem for the poet Dr. Ibrahim Muhammad al-Awaji is like an aesthetic refuge to which he carries all his visionary luggage, and all his ideas and obsessions with which his poetic self boils. According to this, the poet writes his poem not to get rid of the burden of this luggage as much as he invests it in discovering new luggage, and new worlds in which he explores his fantasies and expresses his sorrows.

Here we are facing a kind of semantic accumulation within the poem, represented in this repetitive swirl that insists on the connotations of nostalgia and longing, whether the travel was sensory in which the transition from one place to another takes place, or moral in which the imagination runs across times and places, via the bird of words.

The distinction we discover in Dr. Ibrahim al-Awaji's poetry is that it is spontaneous poetry par excellence. The poet does not aspire poetically to join a specific poetic movement or direction, nor does he seek to establish or crystallize a specific poetic school, but he presents his poetic self with all its wilderness and plains, with all its longings and aspirations, and with all its instinct and poetic missional performance.

From here, the nature of poetic structures and whether they belong to poetic modernity or not and whether they are a paradox transcending the poetic context or not do not concern the poet.

He only writes his poetic truth, from here the form or the technique do not concern the poet necessarily here. The poem comes out with its spontaneity and instinct whether it takes refuge in the familiar mechanisms of poetic rhetoric, or triumphs over the mechanisms of the new rhetoric. The form does not constitute a major criterion for the poet al-Awaji. Form is just a frame and the major poetic al for him is represented in the connotation and message that he formulates artistically.

In light of that, we do not find that he regrets a form, or imposes a certain structural structure on the reader, but he presents him with a set of spontaneous poetic aspirations that carry the concerns of a contemporary poetic self that has its expressive uniqueness, and has its permanent connections with the imagination of reality if one can say so.

We feel this when we read al-Awaji's poetry written on love, and written about human issues, and written about the homeland and the land.

Al-Awaji's sincerity to his real poetic experience is sincerity to the connotation and to the poetic message he carries to the reader.

Estrangement Foundation

What prompted the poet Ibrahim al-Awaji to give a separate semiotic indicator for estrangement, by issuing a collection of poems entitled with one word: «Estrangement»? Is not one poem or more enough for the poet to carry this meaning? Why did the poet dedicate an entire collection to estrangement? Did the place or the horizon narrow for him so he felt the weight of estrangement?

The semiotics of the title here motivates us to search for this indicative horizon with which the poet titled his collection. For a poet happy with life, love and homeland, estrangement may constitute a vision contrary to his previous poetic contents, at least those contained in his first works, and they involve multiple contents expressing joy in life and innate delight in things of existence with its times, places and details in most of its texts.

Poet al-Awaji allowed us with this naming to contemplate this estrangement with which he labeled his collection, which this study rises to explore its horizons, and seeks to illuminate the connotations and aesthetic dimensions it involves.

The question on which the study is based is primarily seeking to find a simple and initial semantic foundation: Why this estrangement? And then searching for the way in which the poet expressed his estrangement.

Of course, estrangement here is not unexpected, or was poetically descended instantly for the poet. It is certain that there were primary motivations that made the poet reveal this estrangement, perhaps resulting from his contemplation of events, in reality that carries its Arab tragedies from time to time, perhaps in contemplation of this human chaos in which man t rid of his , and sought breathlessly running towards what is temporary material vanishing, forgetting his pure innate .

Estrangement here is it a kind of rejection of the world's ugliness? Is it a kind of oppositional poetic objection in the face of the world's ruin? Is it an elevation of the poetic self that still holds on to what is valuational, ideal and exemplary in a fast-running world? We can as readers find many connotations about the horizon of estrangement, and we can interpret what the texts present, but the interpretation space will not take us far from the space of poetry and its language, and its aesthetic .

Estrangement or alienation?

In the poet's first works there is some presence for estrangement. The poet expressed it in a number of texts, and perhaps retrieving these texts and reading them intensively will lead us to these indicative motivations that motivated the poet to reach the naming of his collection «Estrangement».

Initially, estrangement is considered one of the favorite subjects in ancient and contemporary Arab poetry alike, because travel, travel and migration were actions that the Arab person performed continuously. He in his first desert life moved from one place to another searching for a safe place, for that which contains streams of water and pasture, to be safe from the raids of other tribes, and to be a pasture for him and for the camel. The Arab person t used to this stopping and this traveling, and when Islam and the era of conquests came, the Arab traveled east and west in order to spread the Islamic religion and these conquests and this permanent travel witnessed a large number of poems in which the Arab poet expressed his estrangement, alienation and travels.

As for the contemporary poet, he expressed this estrangement in dense poetic texts, most notably what the poets of the Arab diaspora wrote.

Estrangement is from the favorite subjects that constitute an important side of the semantic sides in which the Arab poet has written until today.

Al-Awaji's Estrangement

The poet Ibrahim al-Awaji expressed estrangement in his first works, and saw poetically its traits and characteristics, and it is indicative that these works include a text entitled: «Estrangement» and there is no blame on us if we provide it in full to see how al-Awaji expressed his first estrangement, within his first collection Al-Midad which is included in the poetic works. al-Awaji says:

Who said that estrangement

is a geographical event

in which the body is remote

from the village

for the soul to remain a prisoner

of the room walls

so the body longs to return

and estrangement becomes

a charming material event

Who said that estrangement is to remain

outside the village wall

searching for another horizon

you continue your existence in it

thinking that you are planting in it

seeds of return

towards your promises

towards the lost paradise

the brilliant

you dip your amputated fingernails in it

until despair

you pierce in it the wall of fear

of the known

you burn in it your longing for estrangement

to row in a sea of unknown depths

unknown dimensions

a sea without an end

searching in it for the misguided

other than you

for a shelter without walls

for a shadow without colors

observing in it the longing for return

to the mother earth

to the pure virgin time

drawing in it the phantoms of dreams

jumping in it the boundaries

of oblivion

and grandmother's talk about the world beyond

the sea

about the story of the knights of the byne era

Who said that migratory birds

cross the path of estrangement

when migrating

or that the Bedouin searching

for a winter pasture

or a summer irrigation

senses the meaning of estrangement

when traveling

For estrangement is a sense of loneliness

in the depth of the crowd

Estrangement is to feel self-distancing

while you are near

that the taste of the familiar becomes

dissonant

and the familiar word

strange

Estrangement is to recoil inwards

that your sense of return becomes sterile

( Ibrahim Muhammad al-Awaji: Poetic Works, the first group, Madad Publishing and Distribution House, Riyadh, First Edition 1420 AH 1990 AD pp. 60-63 )

Features of estrangement at al-Awaji

« Expressing place through poetry must be aware of the indicative structure of the lexical place field in terms of expressing regions, travel stations, streets, houses, and buildings, meaning that the geography of this place must require expressing a set of connotations which are connotations of travel, migration, and connotations of feeling, of spatial estrangement or psychological moral estrangement, all of which are cases expressed by Arab poetry with delicacy, and expressed by al-Awaji also with all breadth of meaning and with all symbolic figurative energy» Abdullah Al-Samti: Structure of the Modern Poem in Ibrahim al-Awaji's Poetry p. 83.

The poet Ibrahim al-Awaji presented in this text multiple poetic features that express the traits of estrangement and its connotations, whether it was estrangement...