Toward a Revolutionary Emirati Poetics: Ghabesh's Beman Ya Buthayn Taluthin?(Saleha Obeid Ghabesh) (Critical Essay‪)‬

Abstract This paper critically investigates the dialectics of myth and tradition in Beman ya Buthayn Taluthin? / Who Will Secure a Safe Haven for Buthayn? (2002) by the female Emirati poet Saleha Obeid Ghabesh in order to locate this poetic collection in its appropriate place within the context of the Arabic literary canon. Utilizing contemporary literary theory as analytical framework, the paper explores the poet's reconstruction of myth and tradition as aesthetic dynamics to articulate significant topics integral to the UAE community and the Arab world in an era of enormous transformations. In an attempt to interrupt the cultural mythology of a patriarchal society and encounter a world battered by humiliating defeats, the poet resurrects the Arabo-Islamic history in Andalusia to navigate contemporary issues rooted in the collective memory of the Arab nation. Confronting a web of decadent traditions which draw the Arab world backward and subverting politics of oppression which aim to silence Arab women during the era of gender consciousness, the poet engages intertextuality as a sophisticated technique linking the past with the present in a subtle poetic context.