The Anxiety of the Thirties and the Ashes of Ramadan

Osama Abu Al-Laylat – When we pass our thirtieth year, age ceases to be merely a number in the ledger of days and becomes a sharp confrontation with the fissures of memory and questions of existence. This is precisely what I felt as I read the poetry collection *At Thirty from Its Palm Tree* by the Omani poet Aisha Al-Sayfi; she opens the windows of her soul to chronicle this unsettling maturity. I confess that when I paused at her poem “Their Flanks Turn Away,” I felt I was facing the zenith of this emotional hemorrhage, where the text transforms into a long Sufi prayer. The poet borrows the title of her poem from the Quranic verse: “Their flanks turn away from their beds,” but with excessive sensitivity, she alters this purely devotional concept. Here, the flanks do not turn away from sleep in pursuit of tranquility and metaphysical certainty, but because the soul has become “possessed” and burdened by a restless awareness of life’s desolation and human suffering. Turning away is no longer merely an act of worship; it has become a long wakefulness and an inevitable confrontation with the self and memory. Al-Sayfi composed her text to the rhythm of the *mutaqarib* meter’s *fa‘ūlan* pattern, with a rapid, pulsating tone resembling the beats of an exhausted heart. Yet the true beauty lies in the internal music created by the successive, shocking repetition of the preposition “bi-” (in/by/with): (in the sea, in drowning, in death, in a drop, in laughter, in women, in homelands). This lexical accumulation embodies the idea of spiritual crowding and fullness within the poet, as if she is telling us that her soul is a vessel overflowing with the sorrows and destinies of all beings. Al-Sayfi takes us with astonishing ease from her narrow room and desolate streets to a vast cosmic space. Initially, she subverts the meanings of ordinary things; the sea, which symbolizes freedom, suddenly becomes a cemetery for “the drowned,” and the dim light pole on the street transforms into a sharp instrument “that wounds the solitude of passersby.” Then, she quickly sheds her personal grief to weep for others, her soul becoming a mirror reflecting the torments of the human margins. She weeps for hungry women, mourning widows, and children without a homeland. Moreover, she goes further by granting inanimate objects human life: we find “anxiety” transforming into wild gazelles running madly toward distant cities, and “homelands” becoming living beings searching for prisons in the sky—a metaphorical expression of both sweetness and bitterness regarding the desire for liberation and freedom. The poem concludes with a firm resolution that returns us to the starting point, closing the text and endowing it with Sufi majesty. After beginning her text with a desperate cry: “Possessed by the sea, O God,” she ends it with a humble supplication: “Possessed, O Lord, grant me the poem.” At the end of this fierce existential battle with the age of thirty, Aisha Al-Sayfi does not ask God for relief or rest, but for only one thing: “the poem.”