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Book review: The Nectar of Pain

Book review: The Nectar of Pain

Last updated on: February 28, 2023 at 9:56 pm by Bader Saab

Book review: The Nectar of Pain 2023-02-28T21:56:59-04:00 Bader Saab

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I’ve wanted to read a good book of poetry for a long while. I wanted something I could enjoy, relate to, and a beauty of its own. After searching for a while, I found an option in an Arabic poet, a sensible reading I couldn’t put down from beginning to end: The Nectar of Pain, by Najwa Zebian.

Format: 320 pages, Paperback
Published: October 2, 2018 by Andrews McMeel Publishing
Genres and Tags: Poetry, Self Help, Nonfiction, Romance, Love, Canada, Islam

From Najwa Zebian—celebrated Lebanese-Canadian poet, speaker, and educator—comes a highly personal and moving second collection.

In The Nectar of Pain, Zebian sheds light on the feelings and experiences that emerge from a painful heartbreak. She writes that the process of cleansing oneself of that pain—day by day, hour by hour, and second by second—is the real work of healing.

With uncommon warmth and wisdom, Zebian empowers all who have lost to let go of anger and transform their suffering into the softness, sweetness, and beauty of nectar. She holds her readers by the hand as they heal.

Focused on loss, heartache, disillusion, and a search for healing, Zebian gives simple words to complex feelings and thoughts, sensations that anyone that has gone through a heartbreak has experienced and has found hard to describe. With an incredible awareness of her heart, her mind, her body, and ultimately her whole being, the author shows what it is like to heal.

She doesn’t hold back in The Nectar of Pain, but that doesn’t mean she is vindictive, violent, or remorseful. Contrary to what some might expect, she remains noble, kind, forgiving, while also reclaiming her place as the sole governor of her life, someone who understand that she’s too big to reduce herself to the expectations of someone who can’t appreciate her. And she stays humble all the time.

It sounds ironic, but the poems speak exactly about that. To heal and recognize one’s worthiness doesn’t have to go hand in hand with egocentrism and selfishness. It can be a path of kindness, reclaiming, awakening, lots of tears, lots of pain, but also lots of love and learning.

The language, while simple, describes all those experiences, all those realizations and discoveries, without belittling their depth or sacrificing the beauty they come with. The Nectar of Pain is direct, simple, and attractive by showing how attractive a few words can be. However, some of the poems were so repetitive they took me out of the reading, the same structure in every line, the same words as well, that they broke the spell. It was especially difficult to appreciate them when they were so close to each other. I initially thought that this was because the book was being translated from Arabic to English, but it is not the case.

That put aside, I enjoyed the majority of the book and will definitely look for another another one from this author. Calming, beautiful, and evocative in its simplicity, The Nectar of Pain is a reading to be enjoyed, savored page by page (although I read non-stop until I finished it, I have to confess). You’ll find it spell-binding.

About the Author

Photo taken from Goodreads.

Najwa Zebian is a Lebanese-Canadian author, speaker, and educator. Her passion for language was evident from a young age, as she delved into Arabic poetry and novels. The search for a home–what Najwa describes as a place where the soul and heart feel at peace–was central to her early years. When she arrived in Canada at the age of sixteen, she felt unstable and adrift in an unfamiliar place. Nevertheless, she completed her education, and went on to become a teacher as well as a doctoral candidate in educational leadership. Her first students, a group of young refugees, led her back to her original passion: writing. She began to heal her sixteen-year-old self by writing to heal her students. Since self-publishing her first collection of poetry and prose in 2016, Najwa has become an inspiration to millions of people worldwide. Drawing on her own experiences of displacement, discrimination, and abuse, Najwa uses her words to encourage others to build a home within themselves; to live, love, and create fearlessly.

About Bader Saab

I’m an Arabic witch and journalist, also with a master’s degree in digital research. I have worked as a book reviewer and written about pre-Islamic folklore. You can connect with me by Private Message on Instagram: @saab.bader. You can read more about the author here.

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