Appraisal Analysis of Al-Sayyab’s Attitude towards Women in ‘The Blind Prostitute’

Abstract

In the 1950s, the well-known Iraqi poet Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab wrote his long poem “The Blind Prostitute”, which was considered a poetic epic that portrayed how the outdated social system in Iraq pushed a poor girl into prostitution.  The poem was written in a phase described as the realistic phase in Al-Sayyab’s poetry. The purpose of the current paper is to analyze the poem and examine Al-Sayyab’s attitude towards women in it by applying the framework of the Appraisal Theory to see if his attitude was affected by his ideological and literary tendencies. The researcher found that the application of this theory confirmed that Al-Sayyab was a loyal poet to realism when he was evaluating women, and that he believed that the salvation of his country could only be achieved by liberation from the exploitation of colonialism, and then creating a society that is educated and culturally civilized, in the cities as well as in the countryside.