Hatif Janabi chose the poem “Iġtirāb aš-šā‘ir wa šaqā’ al-qaṣīda” (The Alienated Poet – the Poem is Suffering) to be the opening of his first poetic book: Farādīs, ayā’il wa ‘asākir (Paradises, Deer, and Soldiers). This gives some indication of the great importance the poet attaches to the state of alienation, the experience of which is evidenced by the painful misery of his poems – the issue of exile, with its pain and suffering, is the leitmotif of the poems of the Iraqi poet in exile. All of his works, beginning from his earliest poems, are characterised by alienation penetrating the mind and the soul of the author. The voice of the poet strikes the back of the cold exile like a whip. It is like a July sun on a tiring summer day. This voice, penetrating deep into our souls, demands us to feel the pain of exile and the misery of alienation.

In the analysed collections, which include poems on various subjects written in different stages of the author’s life, the mood of alienation is dominant. This mood changes its power, it rises from one line to another and falls again like a flame that is slowly going out just to re-ignite. Already in the title of the first poem, “Iġtirāb aš-šā‘ir wa šaqā’ al-qaṣīda,” in the first poetic book, the will to accept the alienation of the world and oneself and to be immersed in loneliness, is clear. The poet writes:

At young age, during the early 1970s, Hatif felt alienated from this terrible world in which God is supposed to have created a man of the best stature, as the poet points out, alluding to what is stated in the Qur’an.6 However, this creature becomes mere ashes. Hatif confirms the feeling of an obsessive inferior human being who shrinks to nothing to become a mere bone in the hands of the butcher – a tyrant’s symbol.