Abdullah Al-Samti

The poetry collection: "The Sorrow of the Inanimate" by the Saudi poet Fawzia Abu Khalid consists of (106) short poetic texts. The collection is embraced by a unified structure that aims at embracing the inanimate, making it speak and feel, making it reveal and practice poetic outpouring. It is an outpouring that is linked – with certainty – to what is metaphorical aesthetic, having its indicative utterance in which another language speaks through the language, a language that stares at things and recreates them. It is a discourse that tends to transcend the logical, intellectual, and even philosophical to identification with things and their companionship as living beings that have their own insight, senses, and distinguished presence among other things.

Here another energy is entwined in the collection: "The Sorrow of the Inanimate" (Complete Poetic Works, Arab Institute for Studies and Publishing, Beirut) through the energy of poetry that excels, creates, and es far. This is its expressive artistic destiny, to undertake adventure, rebellion, and contradiction on the level of reality sometimes or on the level of writing at many times. Without this positive creative rebellion, it would not have been distinguished by its novelty, humor, and innovation.

Thus the poet - who is the pioneer of the prose poem in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where she issued the first prose collection for a Saudi poet in 1972 titled: "Until When Will They Kidnap You on the Wedding Night?" - leads us primarily to naming things anew and changing the habitual view of them. They are things that when they speak, it is as if they are born for the first time, or as if when they speak and utter, their consideration is restored after silence, quietness, and submission.

The poet opens up to this dense energy, and delves into this openness to investigate more and make the imagination more stray in the absolute of this energy to draw from its hidden places and gems, and tell us its new creative innovation.

In light of this awareness, we are faced with a different and distinct poetic work, different in its direction towards innovating these inanimate things and listening to them, and distinct in its way of expressing them so that the description is not from the outside or integrating them partially in a text, but rather by making them speak for themselves, and say what they want to say through the poet's free imagination.

From here, it is possible for us to listen to its private (sorrow), and the selection of the word (sorrow) by the poet is a successful selection, because sorrow has a sad outpouring, and it has a revelation after silence, and it is a sobbing voice in whose depths the wailing is hidden.

Does the inanimate have sorrow?

Converting the inanimate into a speaker is a metaphorical conversion by necessity, in which the inanimate is personified to speak and reveal, and here the indicative relationship repeats from two sides:

• First: determining the type of inanimate, its pattern, and pointing to its hidden details.
• Second: speaking on its behalf through contemplation and dense poetic imagination.

This relationship will be framed through the connotation that each sign refers to, or rather each inanimate item separately, on one hand, and what the poetic self imagines or envisions in this sign on the other hand. Through that, we reach this poetic text that embraces the sign and expresses it by drawing its ideal or non-ideal image, and showing the emotional state of the poet towards this inanimate or that. Accordingly, when we listen to what the hanging clock, the wall clock, the glass of water, the window glass, the mattress, the sheets, the quilt, the umbrella, and the glove say, for example, we listen to different connotations because the expression here is not about the poetic self necessarily, or about an event or a fact, but rather it is contemplation in things, not by describing them and describing their details and elements, but by listening to them, and listening to the sorrow they contain. Through this method of expression (about), it is possible for us to find the identity of the thing, its essence, and its hidden core, while we recognize implicitly some of its features, descriptions, and manifestations. The poet here breaks the traditional superficial description from the outside, and makes the thing face the words face to face, where the expressive distance approaches more, and the poetic personification of the voice of things through the poetic self produces its rich amazing results.

The collection is a set of short, condensed poetic texts that are included in the final analysis in the space of lamentation. In them, the poet portrays her brother's things and describes them, labeling them with sorrow, as if these things and inanimates are mourning with her and feeling thin sadness...