Resituating al-Khansaʾ: “Kharq Qafraʾ” beyond the elegiac frame in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry

Long associated by Arab and Western critics with lamentation and “elegies for the dead,” al-Khansaʾ’s poetry has often been read through a narrowly elegiac and sentimental framework. While elegy remains central to her reception, this framework can obscure other dimensions of her poetry, including its attention to animals, landscape, and environmental experience. Drawing on ecocritical and animal studies approaches, this study offers a close reading of the conventionally titled poem “Kharq Qafraʾ” (“A Barren Wasteland”), presenting the Arabic text alongside an English translation and examining significant textual variants. Rather than treating the poem’s animals and landscape as evidence of a modern environmental ethic, the analysis asks how animal labor, desert exposure, vegetation, and bodily vulnerability structure its representation of movement and survival. The article argues that ecological attention can coexist with elegiac, heroic, and kinship concerns, while “Kharq Qafraʾ” makes the material conditions of desert mobility central to poetic meaning.