The Theme of the Body between Deficiency and Annihilation in Dakhil Al-Khalifa's Poetry: A Thematic Study

Abstract

The poet Dakhil Al-Khalifa, a stateless (bedoon) poet who was born and raised in Kuwait, has an extensive collection of poetry that he completed in seven volumes. The collection covers various themes, with the body theme being the most prominent. It branches out into sub-themes that cover most parts of the body and are connected to other themes such as life, death, and homeland. The poet employed these themes in the context of the issue of statelessness as follows: Body theme: The poet was forced to contemplate his own identity, and thus he considered the body as his homeland due to the deprivation of his national identity. The most important themes in this context are: The deficient body: It manifests itself in the expression of the body in a state of deficiency, as with missing body parts such as the head, legs, features, and more. The poet employed these meanings to express his issue regarding the deficiency that stateless people face. Annihilation: It is a wide-ranging theme through which the poet expresses the misery of his reality, considering their lives to be a death and preferring the world of the dead over the world of the living that is overcrowded with injustices and violence. The study adopted a thematic approach to count the themes, trace their frequency and repetitions, attempt to reveal their network of relationships among themselves and with the issue of the poet. The study concluded that the alienation of identity prompted the poet to take the body as a homeland, and that his fragmentation and his feeling of lack of identity made him express through the imperfect body his self and his cause, and the feeling of deprivation led him to express the theme of annihilation about his life and his miserable reality.