Early on in the new Gregorian year 2023, Arab writers and writers began writing posts on the social networking platform Facebook, in which they monitor their defeats, losses, and sorrows during the year 2022, which witnessed a lot of sadness and diaspora, as great poets and critics such as Abdulaziz Al-Maqaleh and Muhammad Ali Shams left. Debt.

Despite the Facebook pages being filled with images of misery, mourning and refraction over the past year, the publications of Arab writers and intellectuals carried signs of hope and aspiration in the clutches of collapse and deterioration, amid the fumes of war and scenes of death, poverty, abandonment and displacement.

On the first day of the New Year, Arab poets and poets sang poetry, while others recounted their creative achievements in terms of cultural publications and contributions, albeit with a clear grumbling style, following the end of a harsh year full of misery of souls and diaspora of places.

The manifestations of welcoming the new year 2023 varied between poems full of hope and writings motivating to face life with great seriousness, perseverance, patience and challenge. However, most of the publications of Arab writers carried aspirations for the best and judged the year 2022, the year of distress and sorrows, as they put it.

As for others, they began - with impatience, hope and patience - counting the remaining hours of 2022, and awaiting the sunrise of their (awaited) new year.

"paralyzed light"

The Lebanese poet Shawki Bazia started his new year with some apprehension, when he sang on his Facebook page a poem titled "January 1", which he concluded by saying:

Pure pretension

That clear snow in the heights of the soul,

While the dead alone hold the reins of the earth

She feels the pulse of her feeble imagination

And deposited in the waste of hope.

However, Bazi' observes the monotony of the first day, which is considered a day off, and comes in the wake of a year that was not good, rather it was full of labyrinths, sorrows and losses, and he says, "The earth is idle this day / and the rivers are idle to flow."

Continuing to write what he says about “breaking down on the wood of misery,” the poet Bazi’ refers us to a glimmer of hope, as he continues:

A hand is enough to disturb the hours/

or a wind to kick, whistling indifferently,

sky back

The astronomer has not yet accomplished the task of gazing

in the horns of Capricorn,

While the sun leaves its custom in the custody of forecasters

And just meditate on the old year

She surrenders her paralyzing light

for the new year.

farewell

Omani writer Mona Habras Al-Sulaimiya opened her new year with a picture taken on the farewell night of the year 2022, which she collected with the Syrian poet Adonis, and quoted from Adonis the beginning of a famous poem of his:

Embracing the spike of time and my head a tower of fire:

What blood in the sand and what is this fading?

Tell us, flame of the present, what shall we say?

History tore into my throat

And on my face the signs of the victim

What is the matter with language now, and what is the narrowest door of the alphabet?

Habras - accompanied by Adonis - appeared on the seat of a car crossing a city center, on their way (figuratively) to renewed hope, and commented: "In this journey, we did not talk about poetry, nor about the constant and the transforming, nor about the Arab revolutions."

And she added, "We talked about the trees that had just borne fruit, and the street lamps that lit up alone last night. And about the palm trees that became wet from the night's rain ... and about the smell of book paper lingering in sight and insight, and about airports whose corridors and corridors are warmed by the laughter of strangers and lovers passing through to the clouds and stars." as she put it.

Yemeni plastic artist Amna Al-Nusairi published one of her most beautiful artistic paintings, in which a "woman" scatters flowers of love and peace in the worlds around her, while the woman stands tall with her head, and in her right hand is an apple.

In the picture and the painting, what is always more informative than words, when the artist Al-Nusairi summed up, in her greeting to her friends on the occasion of their new year: “I hope with the beginning of the new year that the space for joy in life will expand, and salvation and peace will be written for this world, and joy and tranquility will shade all good homes, every year And your life is more beautiful."

For his part, the Moroccan poet Mohamed Benkdour Al-Wahrani bid farewell to the last day of the year 2022 with a picture of him on the Atlantic balcony, standing on a sandy beach flying with his hands in the air, and wrote: “Happy New Year.. The last day of the year 2022 I was near our friend the sea, I threw at its bottom the fatigue of the past year, and received the year 2023 with embrace.”

And as an expression of feelings full of apprehension about the not-so-distant future, based on the magnitude of the recent past, a number of writers began publishing photographs and video clips accompanying the moment of sunset on the last days of December of the past year.

Others residing in the east of the Earth (in the continent of Asia) waited for the moment of the sunrise of the first of January, so they documented the first sunrise moments, accompanied by quick comments: Now the sun of our new year rises.

The year of sorrows

The Yemeni poet and artist residing in Cairo, Muhammad Mashhour, was 2022 for him a year of sadness and separation, starting with the departure of his sister and other Yemeni writers, so he contented himself with a photograph framed by sadness from its four corners like bunches of atrophied grapes in the scene of her painful absence, especially his sister Faten, who She passed away after a severe illness.

Mashhour is unable to translate his grief into words, so he suffices with writing briefly: "The year of grief has passed, and the grief has not passed. My dear sister and companion Faten, my affectionate friend Walid Dammaj, the teacher Abdel Aziz al-Maqaleh, and whoever was my father and friend Yassin Ghaleb passed away," all of them. Yemeni creators who passed away in 2022.

For his part, the Yemeni writer Muhyiddin Ali Saeed expressed his concern about the great fever of optimism that was evident in the publications and wishes of many of his friends: "I am worried about those who are optimistic about the year 2023 ... 2022 may be much better than it."

However, Said's pessimism and a few not optimistic publications by writers and writers here and there would not have surrounded the spaces of hope for a better New Year than its predecessors, for the Iraqi writer Awad Ali, who wrote two lines in New Year's greeting: "I hope that 2023 will be less bad for humanity than 2022." ".

Not far away, the Iraqi writer Hadi al-Husseini published a poem in which he likened the past year to the year of the elephant, referring to the year of Abraha al-Habashi's conquest of Mecca.

According to Al-Husseini, in 2022 wars multiplied and elementary students mastered drawing the face of death, as he says:

"A mute year.../ in which wars reproduced/ gave birth to death/ so that our children in elementary school/ when one of them stands in front of the blackboard/ in a drawing lesson;/ draws the face of death/ and forgets to draw the face of a rose."

In a different way, the Libyan poet Muhammad Abdullah appeared, in a short video clip that included a poetic poem in his voice to the sound of quiet music, while he leaned his back on a semi-concrete column inside an abandoned building.

Abdullah chanted: “I went out looking for me/ I might find a footprint similar to the footprint of my slow steps/ I passed all the ways I might find me/ with one of them/ or sitting contemplating/ the faces of cleaning workers and teenagers/ escaping from the school wall/ I continued my search for me/ In the popular cafes/ I may have forgotten something on the table/ So I went back to get it/ But he didn’t hint to me/ Not there/ Not here/ Not at the bird seller/ Not in the fish market/ As everyone does/ I asked about me in hospitals/ They said/ He was here/ He left before I Recovering".

As for the Tunisian poet and novelist residing in France, Hayat Al-Rayes, she published congratulations on the new year, in which she says: “Thank you 2022, you gave us life until your last breath, so we forgave you everything that you did not give us. Happy New Year.”