Beyond language, deeper than words… A reading of the poetry collection (A Call That Stumbles Like a Stone) by the poet Khaled Hussein

Avin Alo

By Ramina Publications in London, the first collection of poetry by the poet and academic critic Khaled Hussein was published, entitled “A Call That Stumbles Like a Stone,” designed and typewritten by Yassin Ahmadi, and the cover art by the artist Zuhair Haseeb. The collection includes (104) pages of prose poems of varying size.

Through the title, an idea is formed in the reader’s mind about the content of the message – the book. The reader may imagine at first glance that the poet’s call has lost its way to him, but this perception disappears upon reaching the final pages of the collection.

A terrain instead of an index and three towering poetic turns: the first and second turns are divided into four titles, while the third is divided into two titles, and between that terrain and its diversity, which was coordinated by a professional linguist, we glimpse subtitles of the poems, such as: Foothills of Rams and a Bitten Tongue, and (About That Tree That It illuminates the night in its blind journey), and (like a poem that stays on the tongue of the language) and (so that I blush like forgetfulness between your fingers)… “narrative clashes within the surface of poetry.” This is how the poet Khaled Hussein paved the gateway to his vast poetic world with words, so that the reader can enter them and be dazzled by the glow that they create. A strange world parallel to the world we live in.

Khaled Hussein’s language in this collection is distinguished by its beauty, depth, and ambiguity. He uses images, metaphors, and symbols to create a rich and unique poetic space. The collection’s poems address various topics, such as: love, loss, loneliness, memory, and existence. His poetic experience is distinguished by its magic and depth. It touches the reader’s feelings, provokes his contemplations, and expresses deep human feelings with beauty and accuracy. His poetic images often depend on accurate description and attention to the details of things.

If you contemplate the inanimate things he is talking about, you will soon feel their pulse and the flow of the spirit within them.

You can almost hear her voice and feel her sadness and anxiety, and thus glimpse her strange death, and then her eternity in the mind of the reader. In formulating this language, the poet is accustomed to the subtlety of the senses, the beauty of the compositions, the poetic images, and the interwoven metaphors.

(I wish I were a stone blamed for my silence, the shepherds pass me by and lovers make me cry, the winds pass me by, and the storms sweep over me and I remain, as I am, a stone singing the hymn of eternity to eternity. Oh I wish I were a stone, so that love would pass me like a traveler without a trace, so that the gazelle would cross me and not pierce my heart!.. Oh I wish I were there and a stone lived in me…)
(With its splendor
the deer erupts into the space of the room!
She leans on the edge of the echo, stares out the window at a narrow sky, listens to his voice in song, then lowers her eyes to him.)

(The water that hits your waist, the water that sparkles with the radiance of your thighs
The water that descends around your breasts is sparkling
The water that falls on your hills
What a pitch
O water…!)

(Who said that the ibex threw me into the valley? The ibex is a friend to me. I did not kill the ibex, nor did the ibex throw me! I was on the cliff, playing your hair to the wind and your lips to the roses when an arrow hit me in the side of the heart!
I called you: Xecê

A call that stumbles like a stone embodies Khaled Hussein’s journey through his personal memory and experiences, mixed with symbolism and many connotations. It expresses the poet’s feelings of love and hope, despite the harsh circumstances he is going through, as it appears to us through his texts. His concept of love has multiple forms. It moves between love as an abstract concept, and love of the self and the earth, which makes this collection arouse diverse and complex feelings in the reader, and prompts him to contemplate after finishing reading it.