The Role of Contradiction in Textual Cohesion: A Case Study of the Collection of Nostalgia Letters to Yasmin by Ghada Al-Samman

The contemporary poetry has benefited the arrays and interpretations that express the poet's feelings according to the political and social indicators that are experienced. Therefore, the reader needs to recognize similar and different in-text communications, such as repetition and association. The purpose of association is to provide a kind of methodical and special connection between words. Some examples are contradiction, part to whole, whole to part, general to specific, specific to general, logical course, and substitution.Contradiction as a lexical link expresses a kind of internal connection between the components of a text so that by stating the meaning of a word or a sentence, its opposite meaning immediately comes to mind. The reason for using this artistic tool in contemporary poetry is the existence of contradictions in the surrounding areas and events that have taken place, including wars and natural disasters, which contain different contradictions like death and life, defeat and victory, sadness and happiness, crying and laughing, etc.Ghada al-Samman, one of the Syrian female poets, has significantly used this artistic phenomenon in her poems because of the existence of contradictions in the individual, social, and political lives, her different opinions in the field of women's freedom and equal rights for men and women in a patriarchal society, and the existence of fanatical and traditional wives.A descriptive-analytical method was used in the present study to examine the contradiction technique employed in "the Collection of Nostalgia Letters to Yasmin” by Ghada al-Samman. The results show the following:- Contradiction in Ghada Al-Samman’s poetry reflects issues such as missing the homeland, love and hate, death and another birth, false friendship with enemies, a fake war with friends, crying and laughing, Western culture and Eastern culture, and many other beautiful concepts.- Contradiction in nouns has created a contradictory structure in the poetic text. In other words, the use of contrasting nouns has been effective to increase the cohesion of the text.- Contradiction in verbs has created dynamism in the poetic text as well as the emergence of contradictory concepts resulting in increasing the semantic link of the text. This implies a kind of intellectual dynamics  originating from the poet’s indirect expression.- Various contradictions in sentence composition express a kind of balance between the words of a phrase. These contrasting combinations has added unpredictable concepts to the texture and has created an unexpected perspective for the text reader.- Contradiction in images has given the text new and innovative concepts with two arrays of simile and animation through the creation of vivid and artistic images. This phenomenon as a dynamic tool has complemented the unspoken concepts.