Nostalgia and Emotional Time in the Poetry of “Jassim Assaker”: A Study of the Affective Structure.

Abstract

Summary:

Nostalgia is one of the most prominent emotional impulses in poetry, as it connects the poetic self to its past and enables the recovery of lost moments through the reconstruction of time within the text. In modern Arabic poetry, nostalgia goes beyond mere remembrance to become a mechanism for producing emotional time, where personal experience intertwines with the artistic structure of the poem, creating an imagined emotional space of memory, place, and human relationships. The poetry of the Saudi poet Jassim Assaker offers a rich model for examining nostalgia and emotional temporality, as he reorganizes emotional experience and transforms it into a comprehensive rhetorical act based on imagery, repetition, and musical language.

This study explores how the rhetoric of nostalgia is formed in Assaker’s poetry and the mechanisms through which emotional time is reproduced. It reveals that nostalgia in his work unfolds through three interrelated paths: childhood, place, and human relationships with lost time. Childhood represents the initial consciousness and a source of psychological balance, where memories restore images of innocence and openness to the world. Place functions as a living memory that embraces early experience and emotionally regenerates it, making its recall a reconstitution of the poet’s self. Human relationships reflect the peak of loss and absence, transforming into emotional energy that revitalizes the text and allows the poet to re-explore past time and recover lost feelings. Through these paths, nostalgia evolves into an integrated poetic rhetoric that reshapes time within the text, making language a tool for producing emotional time and embodying memory, place, and relationships. Thus, his poetry becomes a space for re-establishing the self and reviving emotional experience.