Salim Barakat's Poetry as Linguistic Conquest: "The shot that kills you may you recover"

What is it about?

Salīm Barakāt is a Syrian-Kurdish poet and novelist, who first appeared on the Arabic poetic scene in the early 1970s. Although he experimented in his early work with a mixed form of verse and prose, he ultimately took up prose as matter for poetry, positing a distinct definition of the “poetic” rooted in an interrogation of the Arabic language and a close attentiveness to and violent playfulness with its grammar and syntax. This paper is a close reading of a poem titled “Istiṭrād fī siyāq mukhtazal” (Digression in an Abridged Context) from his 1996 collection T̩aysh al-yāqūt (The Recklessness of Sapphire). Language in this poem is penetrated, disrupted, occupied and overcome as the poem progresses towards its final Kurdish “shot,” towards the echo within one tongue of another tongue that has been repressed. Thus, Barakāt superimposes the linguistic onto the ethnic, sublimating the tension of Arab and Kurd into an invasive linguistic intervention. By that, he also disrupts the relationship between language and voice and urges us through his language play to hear, in Arabic, a different voice.

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Why is it important?

This is one of the very few critical engagements with Barakat's poetic works in English. He is a prominent and highly acclaimed poet and novelist in Arabic yet remains relatively unknown to English readers.