Strategies of Desire in Nejoud Al-Yagout’s Poetry
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume3, Number4. October 2019 Pp. 19-23
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol3no4.2
Strategies of Desire in Nejoud Al-Yagout’s Poetry
Shahd Alshammari
English Department, Gulf University for Science and Technology
Kuwait
Abstract:
This paper considers the ways by which language is used within the context of poetic expression. Kuwaiti author Nejoud Al-Yagout experiments with the usage of English and Italian in her poetry collections This is An Imprint (2015) and Ounces of Oneness (2016). The work, the author argues, is essentially a desire for an ultimate dissolving of boundaries. Western thought relies heavily on binaries and dichotomies that are set in hierarchies. Reading Al-Yagout’s work as a translingual writer enables us to shift between borders of language and culture. Throughout a close textual analysis of her poetry, we arrive at the premise that Al-Yagout’s work is not only undefined by language and culture, but it is also limitless in its expansive call for a dissolution of boundaries. The speaker is almost always androgynous, to use Virginia Woolf’s term, and searches for a deeper understanding of herself within the borders of society. The author of this paper argues that Al-Yagout’s multiplicity of voice arrives instead within the semiotic chora, and yet, the chora in Al-Yagout’s work is not the maternal, but rather, the Divine.
Keywords: Arab, Anglophone, desire, Gulf, Nejoud Al-Yagout, poetry, strategies, women, Kuwait
Cites as: Alshammari, S. (2019). Strategies of Desire in Nejoud Al-Yagout’s Poetry. Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies3 (4) 19-23.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol3no4.2