"Exiled from the meaning of exile"

The poetics of displacement in Sa'di Yusuf's poetry

Abstract

Sa'di Yusuf has long been acknowledged as Iraq's foremost living poet and one of the progenitors of "the exilic poem" in modern Arabic literature. The article discusses the poetics of exile in Yusuf's poetry from the 1960s to the present day. Applying the theoretical framework developed by Claudio Guillén, it demonstrates how Yusuf's exilic writings reveal a gradual shift from a "narrative of exile," which is underpinned by a distinct elegiac mode, to a "narrative of counter-exile," which is characterized by a tendency toward integration, increasingly broad vistas or universalism.