The Element of Time in Muhammad Afifi Matar’s Poem “Uprooted Steps”

Arabic neo-poetry is known for breaking down the traditional structure of poetry and extending its semantic boundaries by equipping the literary discourses with narrative structures which enable the poet to show their creative imagination and aesthetic views towards objects. “Time” is one of the prominent elements of narration. Formerly, it manifested itself through the logical sequence of events, whereas nowadays narration time does not depend on this sequence and the narrator can change its structure through the interaction between different levels of time to avoid monotonousness. Muhammad Afifi Matar has paid special attention this in his poem “Uprooted Steps” in which, through forming a semantic bridge between present, past, and future events, we see a temporal overlap. This article seeks to analyze the element of time in this poem. It suggests that the poem has a fluid temporal structure so that inside time present, the past and the future are contained. In many cases, the poet does not narrate the events according to the order of their happening, but rather delays or even stops them. The functions of time in this poem are different, changeable, and intertwined depending on the context of the events. These events sometimes take a long time and sometimes happen in the blink of an eye to create a temporal overlap between the past, the future, and the present. Returning to the past in the context of the present sometimes depicts the unpleasant experiences of the past, and sometimes has epic and hopeful effects through the historical calling of non-narrative characters. The poem uses flashforwards from the beginning to highlight future events and to respond as early as possible to the reader’s curiosity about the future. The poet continously plays with the time of narration; to avoid monotonousness, he, with the aid of temporal paradoxes, fills the gaps in time past, informs the reader of future events before their happening, and sometimes interferes with the the passage of time.