الهوية العراقية عند الشاعر عبد الوهاب البياتي

Abstract

Abdul Wahhab Al-Bayati was an Iraqi poet born in 1926, during a period fraught with painful events in Iraq's history. He graduated from the Higher Teachers' Training College in 1950 and worked as a teacher. In the same year, he published his first poetry collection, Angels and Demons (Mala'ikah wa Shayatin), which was followed by a prolific sequence of literary works.

Al-Bayati is considered one of the prominent poets who actively engaged in political life, an involvement that ultimately led to his long exile outside Iraq, where he endured the pain of alienation and displacement.

The era in which the poet lived witnessed diverse political currents and conflicts, making the issue of identity and belonging a paramount concern of that historical period. Examining art and literature from this period is essential to consolidating and safeguarding national identity against erosion, particularly amid the multi-faceted political struggles that Iraq faced, which threatened the identity of both the homeland and its people.

In his poems, Al-Bayati embodied the manifestations of Iraqi and Arab national identity to protect it from oblivion amidst the turbulent events that swept Iraq and the Arab world. His central concern remained how to preserve this identity as the fundamental symbol of the nation and its existence.