Iraq of Khairy Al-Badiri: Cultural Patterns Between Nostalgia and Revolution in His Poetry

Abstract

This study highlights its significance by addressing a creative poet who has not received sufficient critical attention and by employing the concept of “cultural patterns” to reveal the latent perspectives of creativity and culture that have shaped him. The research aims to study how culture and civilizational factors influence and shape literary texts, analyzing how values, beliefs, and social-cultural practices are reflected in these texts. Critics and scholars have regarded Arabic poetry as fertile ground for observing these cultural patterns, and the poetry of Khairy Al-Badiri—the contemporary Iraqi poet—has been chosen for analysis from this perspective.

Using the descriptive-analytical method, this research seeks to explore, identify, and present these patterns and to clarify their role in shaping Al-Badiri’s poetry. It also examines his mastery in conveying these cultural systems, demonstrating how he stages nostalgia for the past and employs symbols to evoke strong emotions toward radical change in society. The study further reveals to what extent the literary discourse has been imbued with the culture of its era and how his poetry has become a vehicle for the features of his civilization and cultural heritage.

After analyzing these systems in Al-Badiri’s poetry through three main axes—cultural nostalgia, revolutionary opposition to the authorities, and the interaction between these two patterns—the study concludes several findings. Among them: the poet merges his personal experience and nostalgic longing for the past, as both time and place, using memory as a powerful, resistant force supporting the broader revolutionary experience of Iraqi society. His deep engagement with societal issues and frequent comparisons between the present and the past lead to the reflection of cultural patterns in his poetry. Al-Badiri thus transmits these issues in a refined literary and aesthetic expression, using them as creative masks without resorting to worn-out cultural or political vocabulary.