The connection between art, specifically poetry, and personal experience of loss, fear, love, longing, expressing sadness and moments of happiness, has long captured the attention of poets and literary scholars. In some cases, poetry is sometimes among the remaining culture relics left to relay certain emotions and experiences in the face of estrangement, displacement, and dislocation. In the description of the loss of the Palestinian land and his sense of disorientation, the Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes referring to an Israeli soldier: “His gun took from us the land of the poem and left us with the poem of the land” (13). It is in the poem of the land that poets now reside. Taking this statement as both a point of departure and framing, this paper will address one of the recent, and arguably, deepest wounds and ruptures for the Arab psyche: the civil war in Syria. Specifically, this paper will illustrate the way in which Syrian poets are compelled to articulate the suffering of their nation and how the quest of Syrian poets today in responding to the present chaos of their life and nation is elegiac. Particularly, I will examine Mostafa Haj Hussein’s two collections, Tal?b?b al-Raj?’ (2016) and Qabla ‘an Yastaf?qa al-daw (2016), to trace the poetics of death in his writing. I intend to show how the intimate connection between poetry and loss, both the loss of space and that of sanity, is threaded through the language of contemporary Syrian poets such as Haj Hussein. The paper will also demonstrate that in the loss of home, the poem becomes the home and the shelter of the Syrian poet in which to take solace. In other words, upon entering the land of the lost space and lost sanity, the poets’ language and words become not only an experience of sadness but rather the site of sadness for the Syrian poet who, as Maurice Blanchot puts it, “wants to make a work and make of death his work” (et faire de la mort son oeuvre) (124).

Near the end of his nuniyyah Ibn Zaydun declares: “I cry faithfully, though you have shut me out / The phantom is enough, and memories suffice.” By now, the appearance of the tayf al-khayal—the qasidah’s visit by the phantom of the beloved—has become rare. An ancient way of interpreting loss, the khayal is tied to longing, remembrance, and nostalgia. Like the classical atlal, which represents the figment of a place, the khayal is the shadow of a person, which does not lose intelligibility, but rather marks a moment of creative production that collapses the sequential into simultaneity. I read another appearance of the khayal in exiled Syrian poet Rasha Omran’s collection al-lati sakanat al-baytah qabli, which revitalizes the image of the phantom-beloved to inhabit the intimate space of the home. I argue that Omran problematizes both the spatial category of homesickness and the temporal aspect of nostalgia through the khayal which signals a break in the linearity of time as well as in its agitation of corporeal affiliation. I use the tayf al-khayal as a critical lens with which to read Omran’s phantom and to do so, I rely on readings of the khayal in early Arabic poetry in order to mobilize a robust understanding of this phenomenon of the nearly-departed beloved in the double sense of its diaspora. Like the phantom, the poet’s distance is both temporal and spatial. However, unlike the silent khayal, the poet, although parallels the displacement and journey of the phantom, nevertheless utters a point of poetic departure. Drawing on theorizations of loss—particularly the discursive implications of displacement—I ultimately argue that by intersecting subjectivity and space in a time characterized by the absence of space and locality, Omran’s work questions the politics and ethics of territorilization. Furthermore, my reading of classical Arabic poetry alongside modern poetry performs a similar critique, unsettling and interrupting the temporal boundaries of separation that have come to characterize Arabic literary studies. I emphasize that despite the apprehensions and attachments of the khayal, its association with loss paradoxically allows it to register what is lost, thus precipitating a mode of expression that re-places loss and becomes the condition of a new political agency.