Psychological Alienation and the Aesthetics of the Lost Place in the Self-Laments of Mālik b. al-Rayb, Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī, and Ibn Ḥamdīs al-Ṣiqillī

This article examines how configurations of place function as a semiotic apparatus that reshapes the lyric self in classical Arabic self-elegy. It focuses on three case studies: Mālik b. al-Rayb’s death-bed lament, Abū Firās al-Ḥamdānī’s Rumiyyāt, and Ibn Ḥamdīs al-Ṣiqillī’s laments for lost Sicily, which respectively stage estrangement in the open wilderness, carceral confrontation with a Byzantine Other, and a homeland reconstituted in language. The study pursues three objectives: (i) to trace the shifting relationship between self and place across these texts, (ii) to describe how linguistic and sonic markers of alienation are patterned in each corpus, and (iii) to reassess prevailing critical narratives of the Arabic self-elegy. Methodologically, it combines close reading with semiotic and critical discourse analysis, supported by targeted lexical mapping of place- and exile-related fields and descriptive analysis of pronominal choices and sound structures (refrain, parallelism, echo). The analysis shows, first, that Mālik b. al-Rayb’s poem organizes nostalgia around solitary bodily vulnerability in a liminal desert space; second, that Abū Firās’s prison odes transform spatial confinement into argumentative self-assertion vis-à-vis both Byzantine captors and an Arabic audience; and third, that Ibn Ḥamdīs’s Sicily becomes a mnemonic archive in which communal loss is staged and renewed. Taken together, these findings outline a trajectory (1st–6th AH) from individual farewell poetics toward symbolic resistance and then mnemonic reconstruction, and they offer a comparative framework for the poetics of place in Arabic literature.