The Rhetoric of the Artistic Image in the Diwan (Coming to You) by Nariman Ibrahim

Dr. Abdul Rahim Hamdan

Nariman Ibrahim () is a distinguished Palestinian poetess, a feminine voice with a humane character, having a wonderful presence in the poetic scene, with an unparalleled strength of personality. Her poetry is a literary female cry in the world of art, and her poetic diwan (Coming to You) represents a masterpiece of literature and art.

The poetess, with her amazing poetic energies, managed to have her name honored by being included in the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Arab Women's Poetry among Palestinian poetesses who have firm steps on the ground, whose poetic diwans have been printed, and who have left a distinctive mark in particular. She possesses a promising and original poetic talent that makes her poetry emerge from her heart and thought, flowing gently like the flow of water in a stream.

This is the second poetry collection published in Algeria by the Kana'an Publishing House in 2019. I had the honor to participate in the signing ceremony of the first collection with a critical paper, and today the poetess honors me by discussing her second diwan at this signing ceremony, which consists of ninety-four medium-sized pages and includes fifty poetic texts.

Those who contemplate her second poetry collection discover that it represents a qualitative leap in vision and structure, that there are fundamental transformations in her poetic world, and that these transformations did not occur randomly in meaningless space, but went through stages in her experiences with smoothness and calmness. She does not borrow in her poetry from conventional poetry, but seeks distinction and uniqueness among her peer poets. This is evident in her diwan (Coming to You), and the poetess has made great efforts to develop her poetic experience and adapt her artistic tools. She inclined towards condensation, abbreviation, economy in expression, symbolism, and utilized the aesthetics and clarity of language. The intellectual contents in her poetry diversified, and she tended to employ narrative structure in building her poems. The poetic image, from her own perspective, is the essential means of conveying the experience and influencing the taste of the audience.

Perhaps the most effective way to study Nariman's poetry of the place filled with memories — in Wukday — is to study the artistic image in her poetry, that image in which imagination, thought, and emotion are fused into one crucible, the crucible of poetic language, which enables the recipient to uncover the depths of the poetess's self, her ideas, and artistic vision, highlighting the features of the era, its particularity, and its impact on poetry.

The artistic image is a fundamental component of the poem's structure, achieving a great degree of unity and harmony in the poem. Through it, the poet can bring out the psychological state, and the image, which is an active element in the construction of the general poem, must consider the set of partial images as a cohesive whole, clothed with a unified emotional state, and clarifies a fixed stance on the subject it discusses, which is part of its creator's vision.

One of the features that attract the audience's attention in this beautiful literary work is those images that the poetess drew skillfully and meticulously, and she managed — with astonishing poetic competence — to possess poetic tools through which she paints the image that creates vision. For her, poetry is "drawing with words" or "a linguistic construction" in which the poetic image performs its function in highlighting the aesthetics of meaning and structure.

The most beautiful characteristic of her poetry is her mastery of expressing her poetic experiences using the poetic image; this leads the audience to say that she is a distinguished poetess of the artistic image. She has a wonderful ability to depict feeling and draw sensation and meaning, conveying it to the audience with sweetness and delicacy.

Her poetic images had a direct impact on the audience's taste; her images were sincere both realistically and aesthetically artistically.

The mechanism of image construction for her is characterized by clear precision, as well as her successful choice in perceiving the rhetoric of the poetic word capable of giving words expressive shadows and connotations, so that the recipient feels he reads coordinated poetic images emanating a delicate musical tone. The poetess soars far in a world of sensation and feeling, expressing through the artistic image her intellectual and emotional issues and topics. Among the striking meanings evoked by poetic texts in a subtle way is love, which she spoke about as a woman: love and its related meanings of longing, yearning, sadness, loneliness, desire, pain, the longing for distance and reunion. Her poetry was characterized by tenderness, dreaming, warmth, and boldness; she managed through her poems to express the woman, her feelings, dreams, and thoughts uniquely.

She is a woman innately made for poetry love... so you do not see her addressing her issues except through love, and perhaps she carved from her imagination a beloved to whom she confides and pours out the feelings of the female woman, deceiving the recipient into believing she is talking about a real, actual beloved.

Her poems carried a deep sense of human love, the pinnacle of art and its aesthetics. She says in the poem (The Pulse Precedes Me):

Because I love you

I always stumble in a corner where I shed my whispers

Through the holes of your dark heart’s flute

The pulse precedes my slow step

I stumble upon your name

When it flashes like lightning, I call it with the innocence of the river

Immersed in my mouth to come

So we may restore life its smile of abundance

When it rhymes like the cooing of doves and the lifespan of the deer

We steal a lantern of light from the arm of the sun

So that fresh chants grow in the body of the letter

A song and a cry

Like the call of the houbara when it returns to its forest

And a willow tree under which we shade until the dawn

O the pounding of lilies in the gardens' hills

And a hymnal inscribed on the mouth of delicious rain

Would that time stops in the name of longing!!

Oh, would that you come

And destiny’s hand does not disappoint us!! (Diwan Coming to You, p.24).

In another poetic text, she sings with tender emotion and a stirring poetic image about the beloved, saying:

Your eyes guard me with the evening seagulls

And the lonesome sets its doors ajar

For your eyes, the dawn’s sheet trembles

Embracing the dew of longing

Soaked in the paths of my darkness

For your eyes, I pour all my poems

Between the alleys of cups

While you pour the wine of your voice into my cup

You travel and gift me with loss

Then you come

Distributing jasmine with the nectar you fancy

And you leave me with no feet, I return each time crawling to you, compelled, seized by love