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The Dweller in His Architecture in the Wilderness" by Kurdish Poet Lekhder Salfij: A Journey Through the Worlds of Exile and the Fragmented Self
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Palestinian Publishers
Recently published by Lamassu Publishing House in Sweden, "The Dweller in His Architecture in the Wilderness" is a poetry collection by Kurdish Syrian poet and translator Lekhder Salfij, a member of the Syrian Writers Association. The collection contains eighty poems spread over one hundred twenty-five pages, taking the reader on a profound poetic journey into the worlds of internal exile, where the self intersects with absence, and language with silence.
The poems in the collection are characterized by their melancholic atmosphere, saturated with feelings of wandering, isolation, and separation from time and place. The fragmented self is manifested through dense and cryptic poetic images, invoking memory as a refuge and recalling childhood details, parents, and disrupted love as echoes of a greater loss.
In this collection, exile is not limited to a geographical location; rather, it transcends to become an existential state, which the poems engage with through a mystical sensibility and a language deeply immersed in contemplation. The poet does not merely recount a transient experience but lives it through writing, transforming fragility and longing into a unique poetic architecture that fluctuates between dreams and breakage, appearing as a being with a body that buries, speaks, and mummifies, shifting from a state to a living entity that accompanies the poet as a dark companion. At the same time, exile represents a space for silence, contemplation, and accumulated losses, with the geography of memory revealing symbols such as Damascus, old cafes, and the flower market, which emerge as broken mirrors of past lives.
In this collection, the poet navigates between the specters of the exiled self, semi-vanishing places, and symbolic characters like the stranger, the seer, and the dweller, all swimming in the realm of wandering and alienation. He weaves the worlds of his poems from precise sensory details like coffee, the coffee pot, the flute of the dead, the scent of the father, and the grandfather's clock, creating a fractured memory pursued by the phantoms of loss and the spirit's yearning for presence. Consequently, another theme arises—alienation through these characters, separated from the collective and standing on the margins of the world, where isolation is not a choice but a consequence of withdrawing from a time that no longer resembles the self.
The poet employs mystical language and symbols such as "the interpreter of longings," incense, the blind seer, and a cry in a Greek song, opening the text to a metaphysical and mystical dimension, where the self seeks purification or symbolic annihilation in an ongoing poetic "worship."
The poetic self in the collection is a fragmented entity distributed among a range of opposing binaries: memory and present, love and loss, homeland and exile, self and other or world. Each poem operates as a psychological fragment revealing a new part of this incomplete self that does not reconcile with the world, but rather lives in wandering as a symbolic place of existence.
The poet's style in the collection is marked by smooth language with a poignant rhythm, dominated by feelings soaked in sorrow, reinforced by intense suggestion, and a tendency to circle within the poetic line, making the reading an introspective experience and incorporating open symbols that carry deep emotional and cultural charges.
"The Dweller in His Architecture in the Wilderness" represents a poetry collection that is not read with a single interpretation but is re-read in light of the changes in the self itself. Each poem opens a door to human fragility in the face of absence, time, and yearning, making this collection a good example of alienation poetry. It serves as a living model not only of the poet's alienation from his homeland, Syria, or merely to reflect the exiled Syrian experience. Given its universal theme, this general feeling of alienation and fragmentation resonates with every person in similar circumstances, transforming the collection from individual specificity into general human poetry.
Among the poems in the collection that represent some of its core themes is the poem "The Exiled Ones to the Shoulders of Wilderness":
The Exiled Ones to the Shoulders of Wilderness
Daily insomnia,
A voice I refrain from
But it enters me,
Seeping inside,
And urges me to speak to them
Before the rust falls
From my throat, rendered mute by blame.
The Exiled Ones to the Shoulders of Wilderness
By the curse of patience,
So that symbols may sing their songs
In the craft of forgiveness.
They have become addicted to scratching me with the good metaphor
And departed.
They took a piece of my body with them
To remind me of them.
