The dualities of alienation and contrast in the poetry of Saadi Youssef

Abstract

When we examine the poetry of Saadi Youssef, we find numerous pairs and contrasts woven into his verses, reflecting the alienation he experienced both within himself and in his homeland. These pairs manifest in his use of antithesis, parallelism, and allegory through dialogue and the establishment of connections between the self and natural elements such as birds, rivers, trees, and streets. The poet is a stranger, suffering psychological alienation from his profound anguish and contemplation of his unsatisfactory circumstances. Furthermore, he was a fugitive, driven from power by the ruling authorities, and narrowly escaped death. This article aims to elucidate the methods and extent to which Saadi Youssef employs these pairs in his poetry to express alienation and its connotations of negation and loneliness. Our research seeks to answer the following questions: How did Saadi Youssef utilize these opposing pairs and contrasts to depict his alienation? What is the central theme around which these pairs revolve? And what were the poet's psychological motivations in resorting to them? The study reached important conclusions: the poet Saadi Youssef was able to employ opposing dualities and contrasts to express the state of alienation through the duality of the present and the tragic contrast, as well as implicit contrasts such as death and life, the near and the far, environmental aspects of nature and the self, and the duality of past and present time.