Widows’ Doomsday: Virgin Widow

By Hassan al-Nassar

This poetry, Widows’ Doomsday, is similar only to the eyes of a woman whom people left in Baghdad. The woman who kissed us hastily, saying, “don’t go there.” She begged us with eyes that nurtured her sadness and agony...failed to realize that the country, the country that grew in our hearts, which was once full of love, is stomping on the lover’s hearts with its seven thousand¬-year-old boots of agony. She did not believe, until this very moment, how the years of this tremendous love have turned into the years of tremendous killing, war, and destruction. The woman who kissed us hastily could not believe that this text had whipped our feelings with the whip of poetry for many years, and went through a lot of torture and terror.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Nov 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781664131118

Book preview

Copyright © 2020 by HADI UMAYRA.

[e-mail]

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/23/2020

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

819745

This book is dedicated to

….

"To you

and to you only,

the virgin widow"

The poet

Contents

Away from Baghdad, the Capital of Light

The Poet of Widows…

Introduction

I Imitate the Walk of the Night

Simple Messages

To Wake Up in All Directions

All Rise… All Sit

Allegiance

When He Found Himself

Aisha, Baghdad, and Me

The Capital of Light

The Heads Eat Each Other

Directions

Robberies

Faces Condense

Swings

The Coronation of Alienation

Secret Drawing of Earth’s Maps

Texts

Widows’ Doomsday

Away from Baghdad, the Capital of Light

The poems of Hassan al-Nassar cannot be read without evoking Baghdad, the hidden purport part of the poetry. The poetry represents sad hymns that reflect the image of the place where his childhood and youth were witnessed. They also reflected the poet’s disappointments and his generation which bore the burdens and details of wars.

The 80s poetic climate is a reflection of a lost air, confiscated freedom, and evoked nostalgic memories. The poet is into a constant moan because of the horrors, and the restoration of the nightmares of war and the terrifying images that are not leaving his memory.

This observation is obtained by reading this poet’s poetry and it confirms his participation with his generation in the event of that war. The poet found himself forced to live the diaries of that war, risking his life, his dreams, and his humanity. He tries to represent his poems with images from his memory. His culture emerges in this work, and what is included in his poems reinforces the semantics of the texts. Hassan al-Nassar has a close connection with the historical and civilizational legacies of Iraq, in his old beliefs of life’s diary and its vocabulary.

The critic Dr. Hassan Nazim alerted to many of this textual evidence and presented the collection of Hassan al-Nassar All Rise - All Sit, where the poet insisted on mixing people, objects, and phenomena in one world. He mourns his fate while he talks about our destinies… This diagnosis is perfectly correct for the case of Hassan al-Nassar in his review of this life in parenthesis: The war where Baghdad does not sleep because of the bang, and the exile expands to start from the state or experience of being isolated from his own country and then ends up in the American foreign land. Where the inner soul distracted by many intersections imposed by the past and what happened to Baghdad, to which he belongs is subconsciously poetic. The process of mixing pictures, scenes and landmarks are carried out in his poems, and the woman is slowing down at them in Baghdad. Both of which are always present in the folds of poems, their files, and their references.

Baghdad is melting our intense love as someone lost his way…

The water is lost in the Euphrates River…

The woman is lost in her femininity…

The light is lost in its capital…

Baghdad… Oh.. The capital of light.

The Euphrates River is mentioned in his poems, which does not pass geographically in Baghdad in its run, but it is adjacent to its history, and as the other bank of its entity. Baghdad was born between two rivers.

The woman, who was likened to Baghdad, always attended in the poems, where it was mentioned in each poem, the poet likened the woman to the Euphrates River, as well as to Baghdad. The possibility of interpretive reading for these poems can be replaced by considering that the day symbolizes the poet /Day Time /Euphrates, and the woman symbolizes /Baghdad /The Capital.

Another example confirms our conclusion about mixing and similarity in meaning:

The country that I inhabited is no longer my country

The woman that I loved is no longer my woman

The structural pattern of the poetic sentence here gives us a very clear reciprocal relationship:

The country that I lived in was no longer my country, and the woman that I loved was no longer my woman.

The keys to reading this collection of poems are deciphered, and they don’t depart from the poet’s familiarity. His poetic speech of the prose poem as a form and a meaning can host the narrative style in the poetic text. It also allows you to go freely throughout memory and evoke its stored images because they have valuable hidden images. Perhaps the long poem represented the size of a collection of poems which answers this, as the war scatters the pages of the text and devours its lines. But the war is divided between the folds of the long text that the poet made a glorification of the widows, witnessing the emptiness of their eyes, waiting for their wilting because of what the war did to them. The poet smells the war in their clothes, and its vocabulary enters into his speech even when he speaks for himself:

Quietly…

I sleep with a cold heart like a minefield.

Besides my body, on the shoulder, I’m carrying

the wishes of others’ bodies.

In Widows Doomsday, the poem takes on behalf of the poet worthy revenge of the war and its inevitable. A war that has no freedom in its atmosphere, and