The stranger is a prose poem that reveals many feelings of sadness and nostalgia for the past, written by the Lebanese poet and painter Suzanne Alaywan, who was born in 1974 to a Lebanese father and an Iraqi mother. Due to the Lebanese civil war, she spent her adolescent years between Andalus, Paris, and Cairo.

She graduated from the faculty of Journalism and Media in the American University of Cairo in 1997 and now she lives in Beirut. She has published nine collections of poetry, several of which have been translated.

The poet was living in estrangement between her and herself, which led her to search for her own affiliation, so she wrote a collection of poetry untitled, "Unique” in 1996. The Stranger is one of the poems in her collection.

Her poem "The Stranger" is more like an autobiography of the poet, through which she expresses her own experiences,  her lost childhood and her stolen life while she moved from city to city with her family to flee the war in search of a safe place. The poem tells the poet's past with all her hopes and pains.

Through this poem, Suzanne Alaywan expresses her feelings and writes her thoughts by using the most beautiful words to express her feelings.

Some parts of her poem “The Stranger” are as follows:

I hold

The coffin of my childhood

on my shoulder

And I walk

At the funeral of my dreams

My childhood follows me

Birds

My shadow

refuse to be

a shadow

of a dead girl