The Swimmer's Ascent is Perpetually Denied

By: Ahmed Al Ali

Published on the occasion of the inclusion of Jebel Faya, in the Mleiha region of Sharjah, on UNESCO’s World Heritage List, The Swimmer’s Ascent is Perpetually Denied stands as a poetic and philosophical meditation on humanity’s eternal dialogue with the land.

Written in the shadow of Jebel Faya, across several nights the author spent in the very sands that have witnessed human presence since the Stone Age, the book takes shape as a series of poetic fragments: brief, distilled sentences separated by lines, resonating with symbolism, metaphor, and wisdom.

Through this fragmented form, Ahmed Al Ali reimagines the first language of humankind, a time when words were sparse and sacred, spoken only when necessary for survival or understanding. In this ancient landscape, finding water was the priority, hunting was the priority. To speak to the stars, to question the mountain, to commune with the ancestors, these were not acts of madness, but humanity’s earliest expressions of consciousness and belonging.

The Swimmer’s Ascent is Perpetually Denied is both an ode and an echo, a lyrical reflection on the origins of speech, the resilience of existence, and the voice of the land that still whispers beneath our modern noise.