It's fascinating to witness a woman poet writing in Arabic using a 'feminine' mint plant and a 'masculine' nettle to express her feelings about gender.The play with the natural world and the switch of point-of-view in the poem is reminiscent of the Song of Songs, in which the female speaker may be the Queen of Sheba and aligned with the Arabic world, and the male speaker Solomon and aligned with the Israelites. So here the male figure is a nettle, a plant that spreads and takes over land. Within the erotic tension is (perhaps) a biting national allegory, controlled by the female voice.
Westward Ho
1 day ago
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