SHAMA'S TATTOO

In Shama's Tattoo, poetry unfolds as an act of inscription, an intimate marking of the self through love, exile, and remembrance. The tattoo here is not merely an image but a lived experience: what is etched into the body of language by longing, loss, and devotion. Shama emerges not as a character alone, but as a presence, at once beloved, wound, and compass, through whom the poet measures his distance from the world and from himself.

The poems trace a restless movement between shores: ships appearing at the edge of sight, sails urged to endure, nights heavy with ink and confession. Migration is not treated as geography, but as an inner condition, where memory resurfaces with every farewell and the body learns to carry absence as a second skin. Within this space, verse becomes both resistance and refuge, a means of standing upright in the face of erasure.

A recurring declaration: "I am human", anchors the collection. It is not a cry for recognition but a quiet insistence on dignity amid fragmentation. The poet confronts grief, doubt, and moral exhaustion through rhythm, bending the alphabet into a language of survival. Love, in this work, is neither consoling nor complete; it is a force that burns, wounds, and yet grants voice.

Night occupies a central, almost sacred role. It is the hour of poets, seekers, and the sleepless, where ink and tears flow together, where metaphor wrestles with silence. In these nocturnal passages, Shama's name resonates like a hidden refrain, a mark that refuses to fade, much like a tattoo that time cannot erase.

The presence of dialect within the poems deepens their emotional register. These vernacular interludes function as laments and invocations, carrying the weight of communal memory and unpolished truth. In translation, they were preserved as rhythmic utterances, honouring their raw intensity rather than smoothing them into uniform lyricism.

Ultimately, Shama's Tattoo is a meditation on what remains after departure: the marks love leaves on language, the scars exile carves into identity, and the fragile yet stubborn hope embedded in poetic creation. The collection does not seek closure, but recognition, affirming that to write is to remember, to resist disappearance, and to carry the beloved's name as an indelible sign within the self.

Hassane Yarti
Barcelona - Spain