When the father trembles: The body's betrayals, masculine aging, and paternal Authority in Mamdouh Adwan's “on you life relies”

Abstract

This article reads Syrian poet Mamdouh Adwan's 2000 poem Alayka Tataki’ al-Hayah [On You Life Relies], first published in Damascus, Syria, as a cultural text about masculine aging, paternal authority, and embodied vulnerability. It argues that the poem's repeated figure of khiyanat al-jasad [the body's betrayals] does more than aestheticize bodily frailty. Through second-person address, negative anaphora, free-verse fragmentation, and the recurring imperative “die, my father,” the poem theorizes old age as a crisis of recognition in which a father once imagined as a sovereign household body is remade through tremor, faltering speech, impaired vision, worn-out memory, dependence, and family laughter. Bringing cultural gerontology into dialogue with embodiment theory, aging masculinity studies, disability studies, modern Arabic poetry scholarship, and work on Arab kinship and intergenerational care, the article shows that the poem's crisis lies less in aging itself than in a model of paternal masculinity that cannot accommodate dependence without shame. The article contributes to aging studies by developing the concepts of humiliated embodiment and paternal unmaking, by challenging both decline and successful-aging narratives, and by arguing for modern Arabic poetry as a form of gerontological knowledge production.