Obeid Ghabesh's Poetry Analysis

1337 Words6 Pages

Though she is not yet a popular poet in the sense that great numbers of people read her works, one could praise the poetry of Saleha Obeid Ghabesh for its thematic diversity, brilliant use of language, its structural inventiveness and its subtle depiction of Arab dreams and frustrations as well as its exploration of revolutionary feminist issues. In addition to its feminist perspective, the poetry of the female Emirati poet is imbued with lyricism and textual complexity that resist generic categorization. Besides an engagement with social and political issues, Ghabesh 's poetry is characterized by its existential concerns and universal motifs which make it appealing to those interested in promulgating historical and universal pursuits. Since she is largely unknown in the Arabic literary canon, her poetry, particularly her anthology Beman Ya Buthayn Taluthin (2002) requires critical explication and analysis. Capturing the catastrophic history of the Arab world at present, the poet reconstructs episodes from the history of Islamic Andalusia engaging into intertextual dialogues with feminist Andalusian poetry in which narratives of …show more content…

Serving as a potential signpost in Emirati cultural criticism, her poetry attempts to abolish all distinctions between men and women in the Arab world as well as other binarisms that constitute a legacy of patriarchal ways of thinking. Incorporating feminist and social issues rooted in the collective consciousness of the Arab people, Ghabesh attempts to locate contemporary Emirati poetry in the context of current transformations in global relationships linking local cultural discourses with the intellectual concerns and orientations originating at the central sites of Western literary

Open Document