The Equivocation of the Real and the Contemplative in Taher Riad's Collection The Book of the Unseen (Kitab al-ghayb)

Abstract

This paper traces the representation of contemplative visions in existence and human being in the poetry collection The Book of the Unseen by Taher Riad. It does so by depicting the actual elements of life in a way that makes them embodiments of his mental perceptions of existence. The paper highlights how the poet’s contemplative visions transform realistic objects beyond their actual images, thus detaching these objects and their names from their real-life references and instead relating them to the poet’s mental experience. The paper also shows the connection of the poet’s contemplations through the daily and the realistic by re-examining a number of mythical and symbolic narratives: Christ, Narcissus, Prometheus, and Oedipus, to represent his reflections on human formation in relation to the fate predestined in the unseen, and in relation to human perception of the nature of their being. The paper reveals the vision and poetic style of the collection, which combines the details of ordinary life with the relationship of humans to the world and their shared being with it. Thus, the realistic and the imaginary merge through language to represent both the real and the mental, forming a unique experience in the poetics of Arabic modernist verse.

Highlights:

1. The paper illustrates modernist poet’s stance on language.

2. The paper explores tendency toward the details of everyday life in modernist poetry and examens their interpretation.

3. The paper highlights the dialectic of poetic vision in Taher Riad's The Book of the Unseen between everyday details and the contemplative interpretive tendency.

4. The paper analyzes the latent presence of the unseen within the visible world, and vice versa, as manifested in Taher Riad's The Book of the Unseen.

5. The paper illustrates the oscillation in poetic style between the realistic and the imaginative in Taher Riad's The Book of the Unseen.