The Image of “Al-Aqsa Flood” in the Poetry of Al-Harith bin Al-Fadl: A Semiotic Approach to Form and Signification

Following the Al-Aqsa Flood operation (2023) and the subsequent brutal Zionist aggression against Gaza, a vast number of poets and writers emerged to denounce the occupiers’ crimes and write about the resilience and resistance of Gaza. Among these writers is the Yemeni poet Al-Harith bin Al-Fadl, whose initial poems in his new collection, The Gasp of the Third Bā’ (Shahqat al-Bā’ al-Thālithah), focused on the calamities endured by the Palestinian people in Gaza during this aggression. This research seeks to explore the dimensions of representing the “Al-Aqsa Flood” event in the poet’s diwan, adopting a semiotic approach as an analytical framework to uncover the mechanisms of aesthetic formulation and the generation of significations in his texts. The study stems from a core hypothesis that the poem in Al-Harith bin Al-Fadl’s experience is not merely an emotional echo of a political or military event; rather, it is a complex semiotic construction that reshapes and deconstructs reality to build a linguistic icon charged with symbols and resistant mythology. To achieve this objective, the study delves into examining how the vocabulary of war and destruction transforms into artistic signifiers that transcend their referential function to become tools for consolidating collective memory. It also offers an in-depth analysis of the dialectic of Self and Other that delineates the symbolic boundaries of the conflict, relying on the deconstruction of binary oppositions that endow the text with heightened expressive energy. .