Through a private interview with the Yemeni poet Muath Hamid Al-Samei I came to uncover the contours of a profound journey\u2014one never paved with roses, but one that often resembled a walk through the realm of jinn.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Muath-Al-Samei-277x300.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
It is not easy to be a friend to everything except yourself, he began, convinced that thought offered truer companionship than people. Yet he soon discovered that the shortest path toward his own being was strewn with rugged obstacles\u2014entering it was no less than wandering through the wilderness of jinn.<\/p>\n
Muath descends from a world as tumultuous as the very edges of defeat and disappointment. He hails from Sanamat, his birthplace, a name heavy with strangeness and endless longing. The village lies east of Mount Saber, in the district of Al-Mesrakh, Taiz Governorate\u2014small as a literary text, crouching at the hill\u2019s edge \u201clike an aged eagle,\u201d as he describes it, cradling both the sun and the clouds.<\/p>\n
In this place, he grew up in a home that mirrored his own being: an old rural cellar, so low that one could scarcely stand upright beneath its ceiling\u2014more a hut wedged into the throat of stone. There he shared life with his family, with God, as he says, \u201cwith two stars that outgrew him at nightfall, with the pulse of his mother, with cold and wind and sun and rain, and with his father\u2019s hands dampened by the sweat of the fields.\u201d<\/p>\n
From his earliest years, his grandfather and father taught him fragments of the Qur\u2019an, Hadith, wise sayings, and inherited verses of poetry. Despite his frequent rebellion and the punishments that followed, they instilled in him the first principles of reading and writing, before sending him\u2014reluctantly\u2014to Al-Majd Preparatory School in the village.<\/p>\n
The school was no better at nurturing knowledge\u2014or perhaps he was not ready to receive it. The only path along which he felt true desire and delight was that of eloquence, poetry, and the oral stories passed down through memory. The composition class became his quiet refuge amid the noise of school life, especially when the subject was open-ended and granted him the freedom to soar.<\/p>\n
This singular inclination pleased his grandfather, a man with deep passion for eloquence and literature, though it angered others. During his preparatory years, another figure left a lasting mark: an Egyptian teacher named Hassan, who would read Muadh\u2019s compositions aloud before the school assembly and gently tell him, \u201cYou are a poet.\u201d<\/p>\n
At this tender age\u2014before he had even reached thirteen\u2014Muath was married, driven by family circumstances and the pressure of customs which then, and in some measure still today, demanded such arrangements. Around the same time, he stumbled upon a hidden treasure on an old shelf in his grandfather\u2019s house: Diwan of Al-Shafei the mystical writings of Ibn \u2018Alwan, and a manuscript containing the verses of Al-Ma\u2018arri and the tales of Abu Nuwas. He devoured them with the hunger of a captive, inscribing them upon his heart.<\/p>\n
Secondary school brought him no better fortune. It tore him between two far-flung institutions: Al-Janad Al-Nejada School and Al-Enqadh Al-Serari School. Each day he traversed long distances along paths of \u201cfrost and fire,\u201d as he described them, gaining little but the endurance of sprinting across mountains and valleys.<\/p>\n
It was during this restless period that he began his first true attempts at writing. He scribbled verses on scraps of paper, in the margins of books, even on cigarette packs. Rarely did he share them, save with his closest friend and \u201cthat snub-nosed girl\u201d of his childhood\u2014\u201cthe wonder of his past and the mother of his poems forever\u201d\u2014who once told him one evening: \u201cA man cannot be a true lover until his fingertips drip with poetry and songs pour from his lips, colored like birds.\u201d<\/p>\n
When he finally dared to share his poetry with a wider audience, he was met with mockery and accusations of plagiarism. The rejection crushed him, driving him to tears of anguish, until he withdrew into silence.<\/p>\n
Yet a decisive turning point awaited him. Some of his verses reached the eminent poet Mohammed Saeed Abdullah\u2014\u201cthe finest and most eloquent voice in the entire region,\u201d as Muadh recalls. The great poet, with all his stature, descended into the boy\u2019s humble room, sat with him as an equal, stroked his head like a prophet, and said: \u201cYou are a true poet, my son. You need only to embrace the experience with courage and boldness. Fear no one.\u201d<\/p>\n
That day, Abdullah gifted him a bundle of books: volumes of love poetry, the complete works of Al-Mutanabbi, and pamphlets of Al-Baradouni. From then on, he nurtured Muadh with love, poems, and letters, until death carried him away. \u201cI am indebted to no one after my father,\u201d Muadh says, \u201cas I am to this man.\u201d<\/p>\n
After completing secondary school, he was drafted into two years of compulsory service. That period left a deep imprint on him, granting him ample time for reading in a nearby library overseen by a kind-hearted man who, as Muath puts it, \u201copened his heart before he opened its shelves.\u201d<\/p>\n
In 2002, Muath left his village\u2014with all its beauty and misery\u2014for the city. There he struggled to balance supporting his family with completing his university studies, but faced many obstacles. Two years later, he embarked on a journey abroad, seeking new experiences, opportunities, and a deeper understanding of the estrangement he had already felt in his homeland.<\/p>\n
Life abroad brought both hardship and reflection, and his poems grew heavier with affliction. He labored in various trades, yet devoted every free hour to the Obeikan Library, where he met poets and literary enthusiasts. It was there that he took his first steps onto the international literary stage\u2014receiving an invitation to a literary conference in Tunisia. For days, he mingled with poets, writers, and artists, and for the first time felt he was standing on the threshold of his rightful place in the world.<\/p>\n
In 2012, Muath Al-Samei made the decisive choice to return from abroad. That return carried both the heaviness of life and the essence of resurrection. Soon he realized that his educational and cultural grounding was too fragile to sustain him, and so he resolved to begin again from the very roots. Within two years, he harvested more than all the government schools, across their three stages, had ever offered him.<\/p>\n
During this period, he frequented caf\u00e9s and informal literary forums, where he found companions who \u201cwashed their faces in words and hung delirious poems upon the damp walls.\u201d At the dawn of 2014, he received a gracious invitation from Professor Mohammed Farea to stand upon the stage of Al-Saeed Cultural Foundation\u2014the country\u2019s foremost literary forum\u2014side by side with the grandest of poets. That evening he won first place in the \u201cAlaq\u201d competition for classical poetry at the city level.<\/p>\n
Soon after, fate smiled on him again, this time through luminous figures such as Engineer Abdulkarim Al-Noman and poet Yasin Abdulaziz, who took him by the hand, pruned his gardens, nurtured his seedlings, straightened his bent frame, and lifted him upward.<\/p>\n
He began to feel the intoxication of presence and to touch the literary scene in earnest\u2014until \u201cthe sky fell\u201d with the onset of war in 2015, which brought his first displacement. Aden was not a final refuge. He returned to his village, but found no space wide enough to contain his brokenness. \u201cAt the end of 2015,\u201d he recalls, \u201cit kicked me toward the sea\u2014perhaps thinking the ocean more capable of containing corpses.\u201d<\/p>\n
Through all this journey, Muath remained that forgotten man in the geography of text, a figure without fixed form, for \u201cwith every five defeats his features and habits change.\u201d He practices the rituals of writing with effort\u2014stumbling, leaping, falling, flying, bowing, standing again. He is the offspring of that enigmatic bond between poet and man.<\/p>\n
He fled early to poetry, though without knowing from what he fled: perhaps from himself and his desolate childhood, perhaps from the false promises of tomorrow, or from the doubts and forgotten games of his first beloved. In time, he grew accustomed to solitude, like \u201ca wandering monk fading on the banks of letters, swatting away the blackness of dusk with his disappointments, and prodding the sky with his broken dreams.\u201d<\/p>\n
For him, writing is less a craft than a spiritual necessity. He inhabits the text in all its molds and forms, with its eternal contradictions that mirror human relations, and with its renewal as a creative eternity of hidden correspondences.<\/p>\n
Despite all he has written, Muath remains convinced that he has not yet begun, and that what he has published is nothing more than a handful of first attempts\u2014mere beginnings, nails we stumble upon in the crowds of tomorrow. Among his works are Love and War, Many Tears for One Feast, and most recently, his collection The Curse of the Keyboard, published in Beirut under the patronage of Adonis, within Eshraqat series of Abaad Publishing and Distribution House.<\/p>\n
Still, he carries many projects within him. For years he has labored over a long novel manuscript\u2014his true narrative voice\u2014alongside another novel set aside for a time, and two poetry collections in progress: An Ambush in the Air and Metallic Longings.<\/p>\n
For Muath, the human being is the first key to humanizing the surrounding world, and this is his pursuit: nothing beyond humanizing himself. Writing, for him, is not the hunt for words. Rather, it comes \u201cas a jinni, in a call that crosses imaginations and eras, in a message whose rain is unexpected, in a fleeting visit like lightning that sparks the seedlings of grass in his depths.\u201d The text ambushes him and slips away, while he pants after it, careful not to stumble into the mire.<\/p>\n
For him, writing is a strange window, filled with life yet inhabited by death\u2014a place where we cast our disappointments with the elegance of a wolf in rainy daylight, if only to wound the generations to come.<\/p>\n
Life itself was his first and harshest teacher. Every loss transformed into a poetic breath; every moment of fragility left behind a sentence he would never have written otherwise. He reads widely, not to imitate but to discover his own boundaries, and every poet he encountered became a mirror reflecting another face of himself.<\/p>\n
He believes it is Arab conventionality that charts our paths, and that the Yemeni literary scene is but a mirror of the fragmented Arab world scattered across the map. True change, he insists, lies in the hands of the contemporary poet of diverse sources\u2014one who cares less for form than for substance, for it is the idea that dictates the form through which it erupts.<\/p>\n
And though poets are often described as visionaries or prophets, he believes they must know\u2014by creative instinct\u2014that they are not mere transmitters of reality, but its destroyers and rebuilders. To achieve this, they must pass through two conditions: first, the complete dismantling of the present reality; and second, the reassembling of its elements in a manner closest to liberation\u2014within and without.<\/p>\n
Such is Muath Al-Samei: a poet still searching for his path, trimming the vines of poems that climb the sidewalks, carrying within him the eternal contradiction between man and poet, between flight and confrontation, between the cellar and the poem.<\/p>\n
From his latest collection The Curse of the Keyboard:<\/p>\n
The Curse of the Keyboard<\/p>\n
You drift through my mind like a text.
\nI have grown weary of loving you in the old ways,
\nwith the worn-out gestures of bygone lovers.
\nI am tired of loving you with the languor of Jamil and Buthayna,
\nwith the exhaustion of Qays Ibn Al-Mulawwah,
\nwith the timid mirrors of Romeo,
\nwith the sword of \u02bfAntarah\u2014
\na blade that cuts nothing
\nbut our throats on paper.<\/p>\n
Love, my willow, has become a commodity,
\nfaded, counterfeit.
\nThe sword of \u02bfAntarah is no longer fit for battle,
\nnor even for the kitchen\u2014
\na knife unneeded
\nto slice an onion.<\/p>\n
So let me search for a way to love you
\nbeyond the walls of our village, crowded with rifles and barricades,
\nbeyond our tribes, branded
\nby the cough of night and the rule of boys,
\nbeyond this sky so swollen
\nwith fangs and nails and masks.<\/p>\n
Let me search for a way in which you are water,
\nand I am wind\u2014
\nthe wave, the hill, the storm.
\nA way to love you
\nwith the audacity of a mufti,
\nthe innocence of a wolf,
\nthe hardness of ice,
\nthe certainty of thorn.<\/p>\n
To love you with the multiplication of bacteria,
\nwith the permanence of bilharzia,
\nwith Corona\u2019s invasion of the planet\u2019s pockets.
\nTo love you in the manner of the night,
\nin the manner of clouds,
\nin the manner of lanternfish
\nglimmering in distant oceans.<\/p>\n
A way more reckless than Bar\u00e7a\u2019s crowds,
\nmore feral than the claws of tigers,
\nstranger than Camilo lost
\non the edges of the universe.<\/p>\n
Tell me\u2014
\nwhat would you say
\nif I tried the way of Emmanuel Macron and Brigitte Trogneux,
\nand loved you only for a while?
\nI find it madder still,
\nand fraught with peril.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Mohammed Al-Mekhlafi \u2013Yemen Through a private interview with the Yemeni poet Muath Hamid Al-Samei I came to uncover the contours of a profound journey\u2014one never paved with roses, but one that often resembled a walk through the realm of jinn. It is not easy to be a friend to everything except yourself, he began, convinced …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":113763,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[13194,12486,13195],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115765"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=115765"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":115767,"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115765\/revisions\/115767"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/113763"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=115765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=115765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/worldofculture2020.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=115765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}