Strategies of Desire in Nejoud Al-Yagout’s Poetry

Abstract

This paper considers the ways by which language is used within the context of poetic expression. Kuwaiti author Nejoud Al-Yagout experiments with the usage of English and Italian in her poetry collections This is An Imprint (2015) and Ounces of Oneness (2016). The work, the author argues, is essentially a desire for an ultimate dissolving of boundaries. Western thought relies heavily on binaries and dichotomies that are set in hierarchies. Reading Al-Yagout’s work as a translingual writer enables us to shift between borders of language and culture. Throughout a close textual analysis of her poetry, we arrive at the premise that Al-Yagout’s work is not only undefined by language and culture, but it is also limitless in its expansive call for a dissolution of boundaries. The speaker is almost always androgynous, to use Virginia Woolf’s term, and searches for a deeper understanding of herself within the borders of society. The author of this paper argues that Al- Yagout’s multiplicity of voice arrives instead within the semiotic chora, and yet, the chora in Al- Yagout’s work is not the maternal, but rather, the Divine.