History Torn Apart in a Woman’s Body

Description

In “History Torn Apart in a Woman’s Body,” Adonis is the same Adonis as in “The Book” and as he was previously in “Songs of Mihyar the Damascene,” a poet striving to reclaim his lost role since the dissolution of the true tribal bond, committed to the values ​​of justice and manhood in the struggle against nothingness in a desert that offered the Arab only meager sustenance.

Adonis, the visionary poet, seeks a tribe of devoted followers who believe in a different path, one that will restore the poet’s pen so he can redraw this world.

Woman is the axis, both the end and the means, in “History Torn Apart in a Woman’s Body,” where she becomes a victim stoned by the mob along with her son, as if putting humanity’s history on trial since the first sin and the first stoning.

He seeks to shake down misconceptions that contradict his view that “woman is a key to knowledge; the image that distorts woman also distorts man, and man, in his insistence on silencing woman, is in fact insisting on silencing himself.” For Adonis, femininity is a key to understanding the world: “In order to discover the world, its secrets, and its relationships, femininity must be our path. Woman is a key to understanding the world’s complexities.”

Adonis believes that Arabic poetry operates within an individual framework, isolated from its cultural context. He sees it as a kind of solo performance, while poetry in the rest of the world is a kind of cosmic symphony. In his poetic project, he doesn’t deviate from this path he has charted for himself. As a poet, he believes that writing must exist within the realm of language, not outside of it. This means becoming an existential concern that reveals the most beautiful and luminous places within the spaces of language and life. This is what Adonis deliberately conveys in his view of woman as both the means of stoning and the goal of transcendence, for history is torn apart within the body of a woman.

Adonis’s woman is both his constant and his changing element. In his challenge to the authority of tradition, his revolution is the beginning of the body and the end of the sea, a desire that advances across the maps of matter to negate it as an individual in the plural. Adonis, the enigmatic yet clear poet, searches for a second alphabet that expresses what the language of the earth has not, and that encompasses the existential concerns the earth still bears, concerns that remain captive to the dialectic of man and woman and the inability of language to convey the secret of a warm whisper between them.