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Formulating Belonging as an Existential and Aesthetic Choice in Hanaa Meeko’s Collection “I Accept Only the Spices of My Homeland”
Soud Qabli/
Poet and artist Hanaa Meeko presents in her collection “I Accept Only the Spices of My Homeland” a poetic experience nourished by memory, language, and geography, where she redefines belonging as an existential and aesthetic choice. From the dedication onward, the text unveils a shadowy relationship between the self and its inner light—an interplay of crossing and fullness, devoid of separation and breakage—making writing an act of survival as much as it is an act of naming the world and the things surrounding the poet.
The poems in “I Accept Only the Spices of My Homeland”—published in an elegant edition by the Nours Publishing House, managed by writer and journalist Abdel Aziz Koukass—move through multiple spaces: from “The Mosaic of Beyond the Sea” to “The Mountains of Kilimanjaro” and the lines of the equator, without losing sight of its primary center of gravity: the homeland as a physical sensation of language. The poet does not shy away from the cracks or from the paths of the road, as her verses seek to descend into the caves, into the ups and downs where the initial stirrings of consciousness and writing take shape. Here, drowning in beauty becomes a practice of freedom, and light becomes a glimmer sought whenever darkness dares to assume the heart’s form.
Hanaa Meeko’s collection emerges as a poetic work that bets on redefining the relationship between the self and place, between memory and language, and between belonging as a sensory experience woven with an artistic sensibility that both the eye and ear readily detect from the depths of poetry and contemplation, where the poem transforms into a space of passage, into an act of deep listening. From the dedication, the text declares its allegiance to a subtle shadowy zone: “To its shadow that crossed me and left me filled with its light.” Thus, the shadow becomes a condition for the emergence of light, not its opposite, and writing does not seek to recall the lost but rather to fill itself with what crossing has left behind. This threshold early reveals a poetic sensitivity that sees the internal experience as the source of all meaning.
The collection “I Accept Only the Spices of My Homeland” does not present a direct national discourse, nor does it fall into consumptive nostalgia; rather, it operates on belonging as an aesthetic and ethical choice. The homeland is an experience continuously reshaped through language. Hence, the strength of the text lies in its capacity to blend the universal dimension of human experience with the intimate particularity of the writing self.
The poems in the collection traverse a vast geography that shields against disorientation, deepening the question of roots. Here, the homeland is not reduced to maps or slogans but is reclaimed as a sensory experience, a taste, as spices without which the poem cannot take shape. The “spices of the homeland” are not a superficial metaphor, but a dense poetic concept that refers to sensory memory, to the first scents, and to what is ingrained in the body before it is conceived in thought.
The language in the collection is charged with high visual energy, merging nature with spirit, metaphor with sensory experience, in a writing style that leans more toward contemplation than rhetoric. It is a collection affirming that belonging is not a slogan but a taste, and that the poet accepts only that which is fitting for her linguistic body: the spices of her homeland. The poem in “I Accept Only the Spices of My Homeland” becomes a gentle act of resistance testing the strength of the poetic voice: a resistance against forgetfulness, homogenization, and exhausted language. This collection writes poetry as a search for a glimmer of light, affirming that true belonging is felt between the bays of language and the images of the poem.
