Fields of wheat and the seeds of writing..

A reading of the poetry collection "Your Hand That Fills Me with Wheat"

By the Syrian poet "Fidaa Al-Baeini"

— In poetic writing, what are our conclusions in searching for the secret of poetry, starting from the fact that it concerns human emotion? This is because it retains its total temporal presence historically/psychologically, and what deepens it to preserve the ember of human expression in its most beautiful forms and what draws its qualitative immortality. All this is due to possessing this spiritual dimension that is continually generated like bells that bring back the melody of life, love, and the song of existence.

Fidaa Al-Baeini, a Syrian poet, extends her probes to us through her poetry collection "Your Hand That Fills Me with Wheat" published by Abjad Foundation in its first edition in 2022. Through her texts, she reveals her present awareness and questions her current existence through which her poetic existence is realized. As an introduction to her textual world in this collection, the equation of the field and the barn appears before us, as what is sown, planted, harvested, and stored in silos is all done by the "hand" — the instrument awakened to the pulse of the soul and mental works, practicing creation, innovation, and making things. "Your Hand That Fills Me with Wheat" is an emotional and human equation skillfully sown by Fidaa Al-Baeini as a written record, taking us, since the dedication, to identification with the elements of nature to create poetic perceptions for the receiver and then to build her textual structure.

(( To the wind that balanced between my hands / a hand of wheat and a hand of soil

To the soul that entered between my ribs from the windows of the Merciful /

So the birds of speech flew )). p.4

— In her text "The Rake Breaks Me," the poet attracts symbols with their historical and religious dimension, revealing her self-confidence and her presence before the absent other, in a figurative equation where the symbols (the boat / fish / dove / Noah / the land) appear... as if she rewrites the story of creation and its flood, then reformulates it onto the poetic self. She is the earth covered with clay, a clay capable of germination and the resurrection of spring every year. But the whole experience is let down by the times from the poet’s perspective; there is fear that she might not discover fertile ground for love!!

From here, the story of creation is recalled with its scattered symbols in the text, and here her inattentive hand sends her dove like Noah awaiting its return — the dove — lest she finds that what she sought for a new existence and a new world is mere vanity, with no dry land to settle on, and all her attempts to prove a new land are "delirium".

— Poet Fidaa Al-Baeini continues the dialectic of affirmation and negation in her dialogue with the other, as if here she is Eve present in another place of virgin land, standing questioning either the amazement of the sky at times, before the mirror of her soul at another, and before the other in all his fluctuations at other times... present and absent. This is what is realized in the context of her poem "My Paper Has Not Tasted Your Ink Yet," in which she re-asks the question of feminine presence extended with its historical and symbolic depth and its presence in "Myths of the Lovers of the Ancients."

The other is present here as "Adam" on the other side of the earth, and the poetic self is present here as "Eve" on its other side, and the question takes the extent of the philosophical debate about the origin on this earth, containing elements emanating from the entirety of human existence:

(( We have not sung our song yet, nor played its melody

So how do we interpret the harvest of the flutes in the fields of our souls?

We are not born yet..

I am neither from your marrow nor did I nurse you

So why, when I felt the place of my secret

A cord grew from it that I do not see..

Do I pull it for you to rejoice..?

p.12

— Critic Dr. Hatem Al-Sakar sees in this text ((But many Arab prose poem poets do not pay appropriate attention to the meaning, so their texts revolve in a semantic void, and a deficiency in expanded semantic specification that meaning deepens. It is not the explicit meaning that modernism abandoned under the claim of avoiding directness and superficiality, but rather a textual strategy based on the poet's connection to the world, his support for life, his position on society and the institutions organizing his life, prevailing ideologies, and the issues of freedom that frame life and shape its vocabulary)).2

Fidaa Al-Baeini, in her collection "Your Hand That Fills Me with Wheat," sings in a pure language whose source is the inner expression of the woman's voice, with its high tone, through texts generated as a "dialogue" emanating as if in conversation with everything around it, but the most influential and most present is the being of the other "the man" with all his attributes. Hence, with him and through him, the form of dialogue takes the form of debate, present or absent, embodied as a human or as a past memory...

(( Come to me barefoot / and surrender..

The water is your land, so proceed to a palace for you

I spun it from the cotton of clouds / on the mountain of wind.

Come and ascend / do not ransom me with a dream

For your vows will not save them, Ibrahim's knife )). Summary text p.20.

— From page 55 of the poetry collection, the texts take on expressive abbreviation and linguistic compression, and the poet’s language almost narrows its course towards delineating poetic images self-sufficient in themselves. Images take from the transparency of language the attribute of "whispers" in a poetic oscillation to enter the sanctuary of the beloved/beloved/other... These whispers appear as description and allusion through highly glowing emotional pulses at times and dimmed radiance at other times, with direct language entering their textual formation..!! This language oscillates between the strength of words as a written matrix in one passage, and gratuitous expression that does not fulfill its artistic and aesthetic purpose in another... That is what draws her to writing — this emotional momentum, perhaps uncontrolled, in its context through expressing the lived condition of the poetic self in a heated confrontation with the "other." Or through calls to memory and its mnemonic storage as it spills over the edges of reality, poured out in textual documentation.

& Your Hand That Fills Me with Wheat / Poetry / Abjad Foundation for Translation, Publishing, and Distribution

1st ed. / 2022 / 105 medium pieces.

— Hatem Al-Sakar / The Forbidden Fruit — Atayaf Cultural Network / Rabat — Morocco.

1st ed. 2018