Aspects of Alienation and its Factors in Ghada al-Samman’s Poetry

Alienation is an inner feeling caused in individuals resulted from anxiety and stress in social, political, and economic circumstances. Alienation emerges with feelings such as anger, worry, disappointment, fiasco, and solitude resulting in behaviors such as norm-breaking, revolt or isolationism. This phenomenon is also proposed in literature like other sciences especially because poets and writers are mostly considered as among thinkers and intellectuals of every society. With a descriptive-analytic approach, this research tries to reveal and explain types of alienation in the poetry of Ghada al-Samman, a Syrian contemporary poet. Ghada al-Samman, due to some incidents such as her mother’s death in childhood, divorce and emotional failure, social bottlenecks, identity crisis due to the 1967 defeat, being far from home in Europe and familiar with feminist thought experienced alienation which is well reflected in her poems. The results of this study also indicate types of alienation including local, emotional, social, and political in poet’s works. In addition, the results also found that she applied two mechanisms while confronting with such circumstances namely, return to the past and imagination.