The Body and the Poetics of Pain in Sugar Nerves: A Narrative Approach

Abstract

This study explores Sugar Nerves by Kareem Matouq through a narrative approach that reconsiders the role of the body within contemporary poetic discourse. Rather than functioning as a biological or purely rhetorical element, the body is re-imagined as an active narrative agent that speaks, suffers, and fractures within the poetic text. The research argues that pain operates as a generative linguistic force capable of reshaping narrative time, destabilizing conventional modes of storytelling, and redefining spatial representation as an existential extension of the wounded body. Drawing on modern philosophical perspectives, including narrative identity, the wounded self, and conceptualizations of the body as discourse and trace, the study presents a multidimensional reading of poetic narration. Structurally, the research is organized into a preface and three main sections addressing the poetic self, the narrative dynamics of bodily fragmentation and expansion, and the poetics of pain as manifested through temporal disruption and narrative instability. The study concludes that Sugar Nerves constitutes an interpretive poetic project that reconstructs subjectivity from vulnerability, transforming pain, space, and the body into central narrative forces that redefine poetic language and existential expression.