Thesis 2026
This research explores the theme of exile in the poetry of Dr. Gharib Iskandar, one of the distinguished poets of Iraq’s 1990s generation. Exile constitutes a core dimension of his poetic experience, reflecting profound psychological, social, and artistic implications. The significance of this study stems from the scarcity of academic work devoted to his poetry, despite the richness and diversity of his poetic output, as well as the intimate connection between the poet’s personal life and the historical and political circumstances that shaped modern Iraqi reality. Employing the descriptive-analytical method, the study is structured into an introduction and three chapters. The introduction outlines key stations in the poet’s life and intellectual background. The first chapter examines the psychological and social dimensions of exile—such as alienation, loneliness, nostalgia for the homeland, and representations of the self and cultural identity. The second chapter investigates the relationship between exile and poetic space, focusing on the homeland as a symbolic entity and the alternative place as a reservoir of memory. The third chapter is devoted to artistic features, namely the poetic image, which draws upon diverse sources including religion, history, mythology, nature, and personal experience, as well as the poetic language, marked by depth, clarity, and emotional intensity, especially in themes of sorrow, time, and politics. The study concludes that Iskandar’s poetry serves as a literary and historical document that mirrors the Iraqi individual’s struggle amid shifting political and social realities. His reliance on imagination in constructing poetic imagery grants his texts a visionary character. The research also highlights the prominence of intertextuality, the centrality of past memory and longing, and the pervasive tone of sorrow and exile throughout his collections. His refined language and symbolic richness create a poetic world that merges personal experience with broader human concerns. Thus, Gharib Iskandar’s poetic experience represents a vital model in contemporary Iraqi literature, expressing collective sentiment shaped by displacement and exile, while offering significant artistic depth worthy of further critical study.
المنفى في شعر غريب إِسكندر (دراسة في الموضوع والفن)
Authors
Supervisor:أ.م.د نهى جعفر عوفي
Abstract
In conducting this research, we adopted a descriptive-analytical approach. The research is divided into three chapters, preceded by an introduction and a preface, and followed by a conclusion and a list of the sources and references used. The preface reveals the most prominent milestones in the poet's life and his academic poetic output. The first chapter covers the psychological and social dimensions of exile and is divided into two sections. The first section deals with subjective themes, including alienation, isolation, and longing for home. The second section addresses the social dimensions in the poet's poetry and is further divided into two parts: representations of the self in the poet's work—the participating self, the marginalized self, and the observing self—and the second part examines cultural representations in the poet's work.
The research is divided into three chapters. The second chapter was about exile and its relationship to place in two sections. The first of these was dedicated to the subject of the homeland as a poetic symbol, and the second was dedicated to the subject of the alternative place for the poet. The third chapter was about the artistic characteristics and it was in two sections preceded by an introduction. The first section dealt with the poetic image and what is related to it, while the second section dealt with the poetic language, which included words, and it consists of five sections: words of place, words of nature, words of politics, words of sadness, words of time. Then the study ended with a conclusion that included the most important results that we reached.