A Stylistic Study of the Discourse-Based Constituents in Amal Donqol’s Poem “A Special Interview with Noah’s Son”

Identified as a social process, language is used for the creation of meaning and bears ideological connotations across its different layers, while it is employed through interactions with power relations. Poetic language serves as a fertile ground for linguistic and stylistic analyses. Given that stylistics is the study of methods with which meaning is created in literature and other texts through language, studying the function of linguistic patterns is an efficient method for stylistic analysis. Based on critical discourse analysis, discourse semiology, and functional linguistics, this study undertakes the stylistic analysis of Amal Donqol’s “A Special Interview with Noah’s Son.” It argues that the poet has taken up poetic discourse as a social weapon, has selected microlayers of “lexicon,” “syntax,” and “rhetoric” in association with the macrolayers of “ideology,” “power,” and “situational context,” and has personified the infrastructures, in order to tackle the political-economic crisis resulting from the Camp David Accords. The stylistic indicators of his poetry (diction, marked syntactical structures, and rhetorical figures) are discourse-oriented structures that bear ideological content, and according to power relations, lead to the highlighting of the discourse of the friend and the marginalization of that of the foe. Donqol’s attitude towards sociopolitical issues of his country is reflected in his stylistic features, such as choice of words as social signifiers, social indexing, modality in syntactic structures, grammatical voice of the text, along with rhetorical figures such as metaphor, allegory, symbolism, derision and repetition. And these are utilized to express the ideology of resistance against enemies and rejection of the current situation of Egypt and fighting against the policies of the then ruler, Anwar Sadat. Accordingly, this poem is a sociopolitical reading; its poetic language serves as a social action, and its text both makes and is made of social relationships, wherein the poet, considering his own ideology and that of the ruling power, portrays his beliefs by selecting different styles of expression.