Research in Contemporary World Literature

Research in Contemporary World Literature

Analysis of Mutawakkil Taha's poems based on Bakhtin's theory of polyphony (Case study: Quds poem, the land of the sky)

Document Type : Research Paper

Authors
1 Department of Arabic Language and Literature, Faculty of Literature and Humanities, University of Tehran, Tehran, Iran.
2 professor of Tehran University
10.22059/jor.2025.375104.2519
Abstract
Mutawakkil Taha (1958) is one of the Palestinian writers who, through his critical poems, tries to portray the oppression imposed on the people of his country by the Zionist occupation, on the one hand, and to denounce the Arab rulers’ indifference and silence towards the yoke of the arrogant powers and the occupation of the land of Jerusalem, on the other, and to defend the ideals and values of his nation regarding the issue of the Holy Jerusalem. In the authoritarian atmosphere of his time, Bakhtin (1895) considered the literary text to be a suitable arena for the emergence of polyphony, thus providing an opportunity for dialogue between multiple voices. In the ode “Al-Quds, the Land of the Sky,” the Palestinian poet has represented discordant voices and opposing ideas in order to achieve his ultimate goal, namely the occupation of the land of Jerusalem by the Zionists, in this literary context. Accordingly, the present study, relying on the assumptions of Bakhtin's polyphonic theory, aims to extract polyphonic components from the core of the text using a descriptive-analytical method. The results and achievements of the research prove that, due to the use of polyphonic technique, the poet has been able to marginalize the dominant discourse by using two-way speech, intertextuality, Chronotope, direct dialogue and hegemonic rhetorical propositions, and through the democratic speech, the wrong actions of the perpetrators and despots of the occupation of Al-Quds and accordingly show the inappropriate situation of his country.
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Early View, Accepted Manuscript
Available Online from 01 November 2026