Love and writing: Two sides of renewal, multiplicity

Love and writing intersect in ways that reveal their shared nature: both arise from struggle, restlessness and a desire for renewal.
Authentic expressions of love rarely settle into fulfilment; rather, they thrive on tension and movement.
As the Lebanese poet Shawqi Bazi observes, love draws on the same forces that sustain artistic inspiration — impulse, obsession and passion — yet it requires absence to remain alive. In this sense, absence becomes the very condition that rekindles language and frees it from the dullness of habit.
This interplay of presence and absence is mirrored in writing itself.
Language, by its nature, cannot fully capture experience; meaning is always partial, deferred and open to reinterpretation, as suggested in the work of Jacques Derrida. Writing thus maintains a necessary distance between the self and what it seeks to express.
It is within this space that imagination operates, allowing longing to endure and creativity to persist.

Such a vision lies at the heart of the literary work of Abdullah Habib, whose book ‘As the Sea Erases’ offers a compelling exploration of love as a fluid, ever-evolving experience.
Love, in Habib’s writing, resists fixed definition; it unfolds through shifting images and personal reflections. This openness is reflected even in the book’s structure, particularly in a sequence of short fragments beginning with the phrase “Love is...”.
Each fragment approaches the idea from a different angle, only to acknowledge, ultimately, the impossibility of capturing it in a single form.
The final line of this sequence encapsulates the paradox: “Love is: not trying to finish writing this text”.
Here, incompleteness becomes essential. Love remains an unfinished project — constantly redefined, never fully grasped. As one fragment suggests, it is something to be rediscovered each time, only to reveal the futility of definition.
This perpetual incompleteness sustains both love and writing, offering the self an opportunity for continual renewal.
Habib frequently adopts the fragment as a form, using it to expand the possibilities of expression. Inspired in part by cinematic techniques of framing, this style allows him to capture fleeting moments and shifting perspectives.
Across the book, love emerges as a deeply personal experience, shaped by memory, imagination and the desire for transformation.

The closing text, from which the book takes its title, brings these ideas together through the image of the sea.
Just as waves erase and redraw what is written on sand, love and writing alike are acts of continual renewal.
In one of the book’s most evocative passages, Habib writes:
“I love you as they love the sea...
I love you as the sea erases”.
Here, love becomes a force of movement and change, reshaping existence while resisting permanence. Writing, in turn, mirrors this process — an endless act of erasure and creation through which experience is continually rediscovered.
When Abdullah Habib presented me with a copy of this book, he inscribed it with a remark that now resonates as a key to this reading: “In your case, son of the sea, it might be more fitting to say: as the sea writes”.
A reading of ‘As the Sea Erases’ by Abdullah Habib
Review by Jassim Al Tarshi and translation by Badr al Dhafri
(This is an adapted translation of the original Arabic article published in the print edition of the cultural supplement of the Oman newspaper on March 26, 2026)