Kurdish Existential Concern in Arabic Poetry

Abstract

The anxiety and alienation are conditions which drive poets to search and, at times, to go astray in the homelands and exiles of the existence. These conditions could be real or metaphorical according to poets' experiences. They attract and seduce poets until they settle in the imaginary space of the poetic language. The Arabic language was an imaginary homeland for two Kurdish poets in two different eras: Shams Al-Din Al-Suhrawardy (1155-1191) and Salim Barakat (1951), who both used the Arabic language in order to aesthetically express their anxiety and alienation. It cannot be confirmed that the motif which drove both poets to invest the poetic language were similar or exactly the same. However, the semantic interpretation of both experiences allows the researcher to examine common aspects between them in terms of the way they used the potentials of Arabic language, which was totally different from their mother language. There is another comparable point between Al-Suhrawardy and Barakat relates to their poetic experience with regard to the existential questions, as well as the poetic treatment with similar human situations