The Motion of the Mutable and the Constant: An Analytical Study of the Temporal Rotation in the Poetry of Khaled Al-Faisal

Abstract

This research is based on the conviction that dialect literature carries a cultural and artistic value that demands attention. Categorizing this literature as “popular” or “colloquial,” has been adopted to distinguish it from formal Arabic-language literature, but this research intentionally stays away from these two names, since their implications detract from the value of popular literature and considers it simple and spontaneous consequently, addressing the commoners, based solely on its use of colloquial dialects in direct expression. Surely, oral circulation does not diminish the ability of language to express, nor does it exclude poetry from acquiring the elements of high literature. One of the best representatives of the innovative leap in Nabati dialect poetry is Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, whose tireless effort to activate the mind, and to expand the circle of knowledge, manages successfully to merge the inherited modes of poetic traditions with the vibrant exploration of new patterns of thinking. This paper studies the concept of time in Khaled Al-Faisal’s poetry and his deep reflections on the meaning of the dynamic changes in the cycles of transformation of history. The relationship with the past is one of consolidation and rooting that anticipates the future and prepares for it: every epoch consists of units that interact in a rotational movement: it does not follow a straight linear system of progress from back to front, but rather tends toward the natural cosmic upward spiral movement, whose successive cycles activate the process of filling and emptying, possessing and abandoning, youthfulness and decaying, living and dying. The importance of researching the poetics of time in Khaled Al-Faisal’s poems lies in the fact that such an approach applies a modern and different critical method which traces the philosophy of time in poetry as a new key to reveal the cognitive system which drives the general pattern of his poetic experience. This reading opens up an intellectual and contemplative horizon for us to deal with the essence of time and its paradoxes as manifested in present existence, past retrieval, and futuristic anticipation, three different movements in time that cannot be isolated from the stability of their continuous sequences.