Representation of Reification in Muhammad Afifi Matter’s Poetry

Abstract

Since the first existence of Man, he has been searching for the realization of his humanity and his existential position on this earth. Despite all his knowledge leaps, scientific and technological progress, artificial intelligence, economic revolution, and modern revolutions, which were later represented in globalization that has made the world a small village, human happiness in the West and East is in clear regression, to the extent that man is no longer in harmony with himself and separated from his society. The economical and communication revolutions have contributed to the alienation of people from their human culture, and brought an unmistakable alienation phenomenon. This is the phenomenon of reification. Perhaps what the twentieth century has produced of modernity and capitalism has not only marginalized man, but rather killed him and revived things. That is why it is not surprising that poets approach the dispossessed man, seeing him characterized by rupture and surrender, even as he achieves some immediate individual pleasure at the expense of long-term collective happiness. This paper is based on a hypothesis that it tries to test. This hypothesis is the emergence of the phenomenon of reification and its representation in the poetry of one of the modernist poets, Muhammad Afifi Mater, due to its frequent use in his poetry with a questioning philosophical vision. The research consists of two parts: the first is theoretical that explains the concept of reification. The second is procedural that tests critical theorizing because the procedural practice is the aim of testing the theory and verifying it on the studied poet.