In the Name of the Mother and the Son

Man is the product of his experience, and Ibrahim Nasrallah is one of the few poets who have lived and communicated with people. Creativity can only be a human act stemming from the universal human experience.
In “In the Name of the Mother and the Son,” the poet draws on his experience in narrative fiction to enrich his poetry with biography. This collection forms a poetic biography of his mother, based on a unified emotional state through which he views all mothers, especially the Arab mother, with her primitive, cognitive, and spiritual connotations. These are indicative of the Palestinian condition in the broadest sense of the word. I believe that world literature is written by pain, not joy. Therefore, his texts in this collection represent a true drama that confronts us with the theme of man and time in an open, multi-layered text, through which he delves into obscure and dark areas with a light that illuminates the path and opens the horizon. In a poem titled “The Party,” he says: Flowers and a crowd of songs, an anthem and a memory from a long time ago, and the sun of Saturday morning, complete, an orphan who was delayed, a widow advancing, supporting a widow (…) Old soldiers, battles of lost times, thirty wars declared against the light, and thirty like thirty, hidden in their scabbards, young ones in Eid clothes, horses filled with the joy of their riders, a procession coming from far away, ululations raised to the sky, the commotion of men from the darkness, they appeared, and from yesterday’s newspapers and inkwells, they all approached, they took pictures, they cursed the end of life and memory, they drank the cup of a dead man’s dream here, before the eldest of them came forward to cut the silk ribbon and open the cemetery. This collection of poetry includes forty-four poems that express the thought, conscience, and experience of a veteran poet, who in his literary works achieved a balance between the specificity of the experience and its generality, which opens the door wide to the defeat of the Arab spirit and its closure in on itself. But “Nasrallah” opens it gently and gently to breathe into it the spirit of life; We learn from it that poetry and life are two sides of the same coin, and poetry can only be a companion in our sorrows and joys. Only then does poetry enter our hearts and our souls blossom with the ecstasy of the will to live.