When I arrived in Australia in late 2014, my original intention was to research African American poetry. However, I soon broadened the scope of my project to consider the impact of African American poetry on Aboriginal Australian poetry. Accordingly, I decided to immerse myself more thoroughly in Aboriginal culture and society to better understand the relationship between Aboriginal politics and poetics. In 2016, I was invited by Lionel Fogarty to attend a poetry reading called “Lost Language Found” at the Queensland Poetry Festival in Brisbane. At this event, several established and emerging Aboriginal poets and activists participated, including Lionel Fogarty, Natalie Harkin, Ellen Van Neerven, Evelyn Araluen Corr, Alison Whittaker, Jeanine Leane, and Melissa Lucashenko. Listening to the readings of these poets, I was astonished by their moving poetics and political resilience.

In me, the event also initiated a transcontinental thinking. As a Middle Eastern researcher who had come to research in the West, I drew connections between the poetries of these poets at the event (and by extension the poetries I selected to study in my thesis) and the poetry of what is commonly known today as the “Arab Spring” or the “Arab Revolutions.” I arrived in Australia after a period in which many of the autocratic regimes in the Middle East had been overthrown by these public revolutions. I had watched its beginning and development while I was in Iraq. Many peoples from different parts of the Arab world had interconnected through social media (notably Facebook) and adopted a common slogan, namely “Al-Shaab Yurid Isqat Al-Nizam” (English: “The People Demand the Overthrow of the Regime”). The Arab peoples were united against a common enemy, oppression or dictatorship, adopting this newly created universal slogan despite the fact that each Arab people/country has distinctive cultures, beliefs (Islamic, Christian, and other religions), and even Arabic accent(s). The poetry of the Arab Spring was also a highly effective weapon which destabilized the autocratic Arabic regimes, in addition to its being used as a unifying force to unite all the oppressed peoples of the Arab world under one banner.