The Poetics of Witness and the Ethics of Sacrifice: A Critical Literary Reading of Abdel Latif Mubarak’s “A Martyr” in Contemporary Global Poetry

By: Rizal Tanjung

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This article examines Abdel Latif Mubarak’s poem “A Martyr” as a contemporary literary testimony that articulates the intersection between poetic language, historical trauma, and ethical resistance in the modern world. Through close textual analysis, this study explores how Mubarak reconstructs martyrdom not as religious symbolism alone but as a universal human condition shaped by political violence, commodification of bodies, and systemic injustice. Drawing upon postcolonial theory, trauma studies, and the poetics of witness, the article argues that “A Martyr” functions as both aesthetic creation and moral indictment of global modernity. The poem situates suffering within collective memory while challenging dominant historical narratives that normalize violence as progress. Mubarak’s work exemplifies how contemporary Arabic poetry engages with global human rights discourse through metaphor, lyric intensity, and ethical urgency.

Keywords: contemporary Arabic poetry, martyrdom, trauma literature, postcolonial poetics, ethical witness, global humanities

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Introduction: Poetry as Testimony in the Age of Normalized Violence

Modern history increasingly unfolds as a sequence of humanitarian catastrophes mediated through digital imagery and political rhetoric. War, displacement, and systemic oppression have become recurring spectacles rather than moral emergencies. Within this landscape, poetry re-emerges as a form of ethical witnessing — a literary space where trauma resists erasure.

Abdel Latif Mubarak’s “A Martyr” stands within this tradition of testimonial poetics, aligning with writers such as Mahmoud Darwish, Pablo Neruda, and Carolyn Forché, who treat poetry not as ornamentation but as historical consciousness. Mubarak’s voice, however, transcends national boundaries, articulating martyrdom as a universal condition of humanity subjected to structural violence.

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Reconstructing Birth: The Metaphor of a New Historical Womb

The poem opens with a striking ontological demand:

> “Sign me up, right here,
To a womb that defies history’s commute.”

Here, Mubarak employs birth imagery as historical resistance. The “womb” symbolizes not biological reproduction but civilizational renewal — a refusal of cyclical oppression. History’s “commute” suggests repetitive trajectories of violence, colonization, and ideological domination.

This aligns with Walter Benjamin’s critique of linear historical progress, wherein modernity disguises catastrophe as development. Mubarak’s poetic subject seeks rebirth outside this destructive continuum, proposing an ethical rupture with inherited systems of power.

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The Body as Commodity: Slavery’s Contemporary Afterlife

The line:

> “Never did I nurse from the breasts of women in a slave market.”

evokes both historical slavery and its modern manifestations. Feminist postcolonial theory identifies the body — particularly the colonized and female body — as a primary site of economic and political exploitation.

Mubarak collapses temporal distance, suggesting that modern capitalism continues to reproduce slavery through labor exploitation, human trafficking, and war economies. Nourishment itself becomes contaminated by injustice — life sustained by oppression.

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The Failure of Spiritual Abstraction

> “I could not trust mystics,
Nor did their bells ring recognition in my heart.”

Rather than rejecting faith, Mubarak critiques spiritual disengagement. Ritual without justice becomes complicity. This reflects liberation theology’s insistence that spirituality divorced from social ethics serves oppressive structures.

The poet interrogates metaphysical comfort that refuses to confront material suffering — a theme resonant across contemporary trauma literature.

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Visualizing Mass Death: Coffins as Architecture of Modernity

> “When I see coffins stacked,
Black as the tears of rain.”

Stacked coffins evoke industrial-scale death — genocide, war casualties, pandemic mortality. Death becomes infrastructural, normalized within global systems.

Rain’s “tears” anthropomorphize nature itself as grieving witness, positioning ecological imagery as moral commentary. The poem thus participates in eco-critical trauma discourse, where environmental metaphors amplify human suffering.

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Freedom’s Hidden Cost: The Economy of Martyrdom

> “The bodies of the martyrs,
Whose lives gifted you freedom.”

Mubarak exposes what Achille Mbembe terms “necropolitics” — political systems that produce freedom for some through the death of others. Democracy, prosperity, and security are revealed as historically subsidized by colonial violence and contemporary warfare.

Martyrdom is stripped of romanticism and reframed as systemic sacrifice demanded by power structures.

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Gallows as Dream-Makers: Violence as Civilizational Foundation

> “Gallows craft your dreams.”

The gallows functions as metaphor for institutional repression — prisons, executions, disappearances — mechanisms through which modern states manufacture stability.

Here, Mubarak aligns with Michel Foucault’s analysis of disciplinary power: civilization is maintained through controlled violence, often concealed beneath narratives of order and progress.

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The Imperative of Witness: Becoming the Martyr

The poem’s final command:

> “Be a martyr.”

is not a call to death but to ethical consciousness. In a corrupt system, moral clarity inevitably leads to marginalization, persecution, or sacrifice.

Martyrdom becomes synonymous with integrity.

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Global Recognition and the Politics of Literary Validation

Mubarak’s reception of the DivinaMente Donna International Excellence Award in Rome signifies a transnational acknowledgment of Arabic poetry’s role in global ethical discourse. Historically marginalized literary traditions are increasingly recognized as central to contemporary humanistic reflection.

This recognition underscores the universality of Mubarak’s themes and the capacity of poetry to bridge cultural trauma.

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Poetry Against the Machinery of Forgetting

“A Martyr” operates as both lyrical creation and historical intervention. It resists the erasure of suffering by transforming trauma into moral memory. Mubarak’s metaphors destabilize dominant narratives of progress, revealing the hidden architectures of violence beneath modern civilization.

In an era where atrocity risks becoming background noise, Mubarak’s poem insists on remembrance — and responsibility.

Poetry here is not consolation.
It is confrontation.

It does not heal history.
It exposes it.

–West Sumatra, Indonesia,2026–

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References (Indicative)

Benjamin, W. (1968). Theses on the Philosophy of History.
Mbembe, A. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture.
Forché, C. (1993). The Country Between Us.
Darwish, M. (2000). Unfortunately, It Was Paradise.
Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and Punish.

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A Martyr

By: Abdel Latif Mubarak

Sign me up, right here,
To a womb that defies history’s commute.
Inscribe my name.
Never did I nurse from the breasts of women in a slave market.
I could not trust mystics,
Nor did their bells ring recognition in my heart.
A million fears
My fears, multiplied a millionfold,
When I find death staring into my life,
When I see coffins stacked,
Black as the tears of rain.
May God grant you a long life,
To console homes filled with sorrow—
The bodies of the martyrs,
Whose lives gifted you freedom.
Beside the widows and orphans,
Gallows craft your dreams,
Selling your heart on the very first road.
Be a martyr.