azu_etd_1336_sip1_m.... - The University of Arizona Campus

NIZAR QABBANI: FROM ROMANCE TO EXILE
by
MUHAMED ALKHALIL
_____________________
Copyright © Muhamed AlKhalil 2005
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF NEAR EASTERN STUDIES
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2005
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
GRADUATE COLLEGE
As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the
dissertation prepared by
MUHAMED ALKHALIL
entitled
NIZAR QABBANI: FROM ROMANCE TO EXILE
and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the
Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
_______________________________________________________________________
Date: 15 NOV. 2005
DR. ADEL SULAIMAN GAMAL
_______________________________________________________________________
Date: 15 NOV. 2005
DR. SAMIRA FARWANEH
_______________________________________________________________________
Date: 15 NOV. 2005
DR. DIBORAH MATHIEU
_______________________________________________________________________
Date: 15 NOV. 2005
DR. WILLIAM WILSON
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s
submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.
I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and
recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
________________________________________________ Date: 15 NOV. 2005
Dissertation Director: DR. ADEL SULAIMAN GAMAL
STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial
fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the
University of Arizona and is deposited in the University
Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of
the Library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable
without special permission, provided that accurate
acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission
for extended quotation from or reproduction of this
manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by
the copyright holder.
MUHAMED ALKHALIL
the world is love
oh lovers of the world unite!
the hateful sultan is still here..
yawning.. stretching..
on the pillows of this East
killing time.. enjoying
striking necks .. slashing breasts
oh lovers .. surge like raging seas!
oh lovers .. swell like rivers of passion!
make your beds on willow leaves ..
and sleep in the eyes of lightening ..
I am still here
standing
saying
nothing remains
but love
nothing
remains
but
Love
……….
Nizar Qabbani
!
..
! " #$ %
0 1 .. - . / * .. &' (
2
7 !8 .% 95 ..
> =? +
)* +
3 4 5% .% *6
% 8 .. ; <=<
3
7
@ # * A $ % 8B
CD E35 F+:C
C
F+:
E35
CD
.......
+G8 3G* 7 HG8
:
(,
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT .................................................................................................................. 6
CHAPTER I: THE ARAB INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT 1798-1923 ...................................... 8
BEGINNINGS OF CULTURAL DUALITY
THE MANY COLORS OF SYRIA ............................................................................................ 9
ISLAM UNCHALLENGED .................................................................................................. 12
WESTERN WINDS ........................................................................................................... 15
CHAPTER II: ROMANCE AND REBELLION 1923-45...................................................... 25
DAMASCUS
LEGENDS AND HEROES ................................................................................................... 26
SYRIA EMERGING .......................................................................................................... 31
A SETTING FOR PARADOX ............................................................................................... 36
THE SCHOOL YEARS ....................................................................................................... 44
THE POETIC AND THE HISTORICAL..................................................................................... 51
THE STUDENT POET ....................................................................................................... 57
CHAPTER III: THE DIPLOMAT POET YEARS 1945-66 .................................................. 71
CITIES EAST AND WEST
CAIRO 1945-48 REBIRTH ON THE NILE ............................................................................... 72
ANKARA 1949-51 LOOKING WESTWARD ............................................................................ 95
LONDON 1952-55 THE OTHER ENCOUNTERED .................................................................... 121
DAMASCUS 1955-58 THE DON JUAN NATIONALIST .............................................................. 141
BEIJING 1958-60 YELLOW EXILE ..................................................................................... 160
DAMASCUS 1960-62 LOVE AND TURMOIL .......................................................................... 176
MADRID 1962-66 LIVING A POETIC HISTORY...................................................................... 188
CHAPTER IV: ON TO THE BEACH… INTO THE JUNGLE 1966-82................................ 225
BEIRUT
BEIRUT 1966-73 A DREAM CLOSE TO HOME ...................................................................... 226
BEIRUT 1973-82 THE NIGHTMARE ................................................................................... 258
CHAPTER V: EUROPEAN EXILE 1982-98 ..................................................................... 281
GENEVA AND LONDON
RESTLESS PLACES 1982-85 RESTLESS TIMES ...................................................................... 282
GENEVA 1985-90 BITTER SWEET OLD DESIRES................................................................... 291
LONDON 1990-98 REBEL TO THE END ............................................................................... 296
REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 308
ABSTRACT
The subject of this dissertation is the life achievement of Syrian poet
Nizar Qabbani (1923-1998). The study follows two tracks, one literary focused
on the poetry and biography of the poet, and one historical focused on the
concurrent political and social developments in the Arab world in the twentieth
century. The two tracks contextualize and elucidate each other to form a
mega-narrative of Arab life in modern times. The narrative begins by
investigating the intellectual world in which Nizar grew up, continues on to
examine his unique personal and familial makeup as well as the social and
political context of the times, then proceeds to analyze his poetic achievement
as it unfolded. In so doing, a picture emerges of the Arab experience in
modern times as reflected in Nizar’s own creative experience and tumultuous
life.
The narrative concentrates initially on Syria, more specifically on
Damascus, being the birthplace and the breeding ground where the poet’s
character was first shaped. But once the poet leaves on his many journeys, a
wider perspective is adopted to highlight the many other influences that
ultimately went into his making, reverting back to Syria insomuch as it
continued to influence the poet’s unfolding narrative. Although a chronological
line threads through the work starting from the poet’s birth in 1923 to his
passing in 1998, this line is accentuated throughout the life of the poet by the
many places he lived in – cities that left their distinctive mark on his
consciousness and poetry. As such, the mega-narrative, much like a journey,
sets a background of progressive time against a foreground of places that
give meaning to the timeline. In general terms, this study views the life of
Nizar Qabbani in three interrelated and overlapping stages: a sensuous
period (1923-52) that can be poetically described as local, direct, masculine,
confident, and joyful; a period of social responsibility (1952-1973) that can be
described as mixed, confused, itinerant, transvestite (both feminine and
masculine), rebellious and conformist, happy and unhappy at the same time;
and an exilic period (1973-1998): committed, feminine, rebellious, esoteric,
melancholic and despairing.
CHAPTER I
THE ARAB INTELLECTUAL CONTEXT
1798-1923
BEGINNINGS OF CULTURAL DUALITY
The Many Colors of Syria
One of the first outstanding features that attracted the eyes of a
foreigner visiting Syria at the end of the 18th century -- as indeed it still does
today1 -- was the variety of clothes and costumes of its people both in colors
and styles. Some of these styles were strikingly different from each other,
while others differed only in shades or minor variations. But even the most
subtle of these variations were enough to distinguish a sect, an ethnic group,
a village, a class, a Sufi order, or a tribe. Thus it was not just guesswork to tell
from someone’s garb whether he/she were Druze or Alawite, Maronite or
Orthodox, Damascene or Aleppine, urban or peasant – it was an established
order of social categories. At times, even those who sought to bury
themselves away in the crowds to ward off prejudice were unkindly required
by the Ottomans to don a certain garb or label: yellow tags for the Jews and
red tapes for the harlots. Tasteless or not, these were the many colors of
Syria, ancient and decidedly Eastern.
But soon these clothes were joined by a uniquely Western product, superior in
quality and quantity. The industrial revolution in Europe in the 19th century
started knocking at Arab doors with materials too good to resist – even as it
was knocking off the foundations of the ailing Ottoman Porte with guns too
powerful to outgun. Some intrigued Arabs, at first Christians but soon Muslims
as well, quickly fell for the comfort of English Lancashire, exchanging their
flowing robes for better-fitting Western suits. Some turned their backs in
envious anger and old distrust, clinging to their religious robes with ideological
resolve, and chastising those who did not. But the majority wavered in
between, nodding to the diehards, while eyeing the smart attire of the “goneover” party. They did not buy wholesale, but coyishly picked and chose what
they thought fit with their old Arab garb.
What goes for the costume, goes for the mind. The intellectual universe for
most of the Arabs is built today on two competing frames of reference: a
traditional Arab Islamic trajectory and a parallel Western one. These
trajectories sometimes meet in agreement on certain ideas, but often blatantly
proceed in opposite directions. It is the existence of these two rival modes of
thought in the same mind that generates a conflicting duality toward many
issues in life, from personal affairs to social and political governance. It is a
duality which constantly produces inconsistencies as Arabs are prone to
appeal to one frame of reference on one issue, and then appeal to the other
frame on a similar or related issue. Take for example the right of women to
education and work: Apart from certain Western-oriented elites who genuinely
embrace these ideals, the majority of Arab peoples, from both genders,
grudgingly concede the need for educating women, but most, out of religious
concerns, restrict women’s work opportunities, undermining the purpose and
utility of education.
Albert Hourani, in his seminal work on the history of the Arab peoples,
alludes to this duality when he employs the title “dual society” for the section
in which he speaks of the stratification of Arab societies in the 19th century
into a class of European traders, settlers and associated local elites, and a
class of left-behind peasants and poor urban populations.2 Duality, however,
went further than just class stratification, as will become clear in the 20th
century; it began to seep further into the givens of most Arabs, save perhaps
for the staunchest of religious puritans.
Like the apparel analogy above, duality is not to be confused with
diversity of thought. Within the boundaries of contractual co-existence, many
societies have social groups that follow or appeal to a different system of
thought than the majority in that society. These groups are generally ethnic or
religious minorities that, given sufficient autonomy, manage to carry on their
individual intellectual traditions. They make the many strands of thought, the
costume colors if you wish, of a diverse society, but always within the set
order of a larger majority group – one with an overarching intellectual
framework that governs them all.
Islam Unchallenged
At least that was the case, more or less, for the Arab Muslim world
before 1798, the year Napoleon woke up that world to a surprising new reality
in the “land of infidels”. Before that date, the Muslim world, under the
Ottomans and well before, following centuries of expansion and conquest,
had settled into an intellectual and cultural “monolism”. For despite the many
frays and strands tucked away in the remote towns, villages, and hamlets
across its geographical expanse, the Arab world had developed into a
monolith of Sunni Islam. For centuries Islamic thought stood unchallenged;
the encounters with the Europeans of the Middle Ages, especially during the
Crusades, had only reinforced the Muslims’ initial assessment of the Firanja’s
intellectual and spiritual poverty. A common Muslim view through the Middle
Ages was to exclude from civilized mankind “the northern and southern
barbarians, of Frankish Europe and of negro Africa.”3 Thus before Napoleon,
Arab Muslims were never challenged in the true sense of the word. Most of
the peoples they conquered ultimately joined the multinational Islamic project.
The Persians truly enriched Islamic thought and culture, even in their
dissenting ways. Even those who entered the Islamic history as conquering
and ransacking hordes like the Mongols, there came a time when they too
were absorbed into the Islamic fold. For well over a millennium, Islamic laws
and the Islamic world view reined supreme in the lands of Islam.
Not that some Muslim scholars did not look somewhere else for
guidance. With the help of Christian Arab translators, Greek works of
philosophy were translated into Arabic, and Muslim philosophers found in
them a feast for the mind. They were explained, commentated on, and held in
high esteem by a new class of rationalist thinkers who deferred to Aristotle as
the “teacher.” The rationalist efforts culminated in the Mu
tazili movement
during the Abbasid times which advocated the superiority of the mind over
tradition. But the Mu
tazilis, who moved into the political arena to impose
their brand of thought, were ultimately suppressed and cleansed. The
traditionalists carried the day – and the centuries that came after. Some Arab
philosophers still rose to prominence in their own right, advancing rationalist
interpretations of life and religion, but they had to do so with caution, often
couching their words in multiple layers of meaning, something that dampened
the influence of their contemplations. In this regard, Ibn Rushd’s (a.k.a.
Averreos, 1126-1198) thought can be seen as an early shy attempt at curbing
the irrational in the religious mind and infusing it with rational, even secular,
bearings.4
By the late 1700’s, and after centuries of the rule of militaristic Turks,
the Muslim world was in a deep intellectual repose, if not stagnancy. The
Ottoman dynasty had not been as interested in intellectual ventures as they
were in military supremacy and taxation. A symbiotic relationship grew
between these power-frenzied rulers and the religious establishment: The
Turkish Sultan, as a universal caliph, derived his legitimacy from the consent
and backing of the Sheikhs of Islam; while the latter, through control of the
educational system, were given free hand in shaping, or misshaping, the
Muslim mind.5 The Sheikhs of Islam at times reached an apex of power as to
be able to deligitimize the Caliphate of the potentate, as indeed happened in
1876 when they deposed Sultan
Abdul
Aziz I for “straying away from the
customary, visiting foreign kingdoms, especially Western ones, attending
theatrical and dance performances,... [etc.]” 6
The world that Napoleon’s campaign shook and shocked, despite all its
inner tensions, had until then been by and large at home with itself, its past,
its traditions, its truths and its fantasies. There was not much intellectual
conflict in it, as all “subjects” subscribed to one knowledge system. Even
reformation movements like Wahhabism in the mid 18th century fell well within
the boundaries of that intellectual world, striving only to be more “authentic” to
tradition by targeting quietist dissenters like Sufis and Shiites. Thus the
Islamic scene seemed hopelessly different to unsympathetic observers like
Conte de Volney (1757-1820) who traveled through Turkey, Syria and Egypt
in 1782-85:
Ignorance was widespread in Syria just as in Egypt and Turkey. Some have
criticized this situation but to no avail; it was no use talking about establishing
colleges and spreading education, because these words mean different
7
things to them than what they mean to us.
Western Winds
The 19th century confronted the Muslim world with a new reality, an
aggressive and expanding Europe hungry for knowledge, land, markets, and
raw materials. The onslaught of Napoleon on the East would not have been
checked if not for the equal ambitions of Great Britain that soon destroyed his
fleet at sea and put its weight behind the Ottomans on land. But Napoleon left
his mark, not only because of the cold efficiency with which his modern army
vanquished the army of the sword-wielding Cairene Mamlukes, but because
of the linguists, cartographers, archeologists, printers, and other scientists he
brought with him to study Egypt. These scholars gave the Muslims their first
glimpse into the composition of modern Europe and the new reality attained
there after the Renaissance scrapped the old world of Christendom. The new
reality was so alien to Arabs, however, that when Napoleon, in an attempt to
win “the hearts and minds” of the populace, proclaimed with a flare the
liberation of Egypt from Ottoman despotism to bring “Liberté, Egalité, et
Fraternité”, the words rang so hollow with the people that he soon found it of
more utility to present himself to the populace as an Islamophil, at times with
the favorable rumors in Cairo of having converted to Islam.8
Soon after the French campaign, a new process began in the Muslim
world in order to understand and to come to terms with the new West. The
Ottoman government, and more importantly for the Arabs, the now semisovereign government of Egypt, scrambled to learn about and from the West.
New kinds of schools began to be established to train young officers and
bureaucrats, modeled on Western, especially French, academies. For the first
time in its history, the Muslim world began to send students to the West, the
first step in a long process of intellectual transformation to come. A scholar,
Rifa’a Al Tahtawi, who spent five years in Paris leading an Egyptian student
mission in the 1830’s published his observations to readers of Arabic back
home. His ambivalent writings signal the subtle beginning of an intellectual
conflict that would stay with the Arabs ever since. In his words,
The Parisians are distinguished among the people of Christendom by the
sharpness of their intellects, the precision of their understanding, and the
immersion of their minds in deep matters… they are not prisoners of tradition,
but always love to know the origin of things and the proofs of them. Even the
common people know how to read and write, and enter like others into
important subjects, every man according to his capacity… They deny
miracles, and believe it is not possible to infringe natural laws, and that
religions came to point men to good works… but among their ugly beliefs is
this, that the intellect and virtue of their wise men are greater than the
intelligence of the prophets.9 [Italics mine].
Yet, the challenge to traditional Islamic thought was getting much
closer to home. Early in the 19th century, the Muslim East, especially the
Levant, began to see another kind of Westerner: the tireless Christian
missionary. A new breed of bible-toting “soul-saving” European, and
especially American, men and women began to set up shop in the mainly
Christian areas of Lebanon. Eastern Christian communities in the Levant had
already established some relations with the West in the 17th and 18th centuries
thanks to a series of so-called Capitulations given by the Ottomans to a
number of European powers as privileged protectors of these communities.
But it was not until the second quarter of the 19th century that missionary work
gathered real pace when Jesuits, Congregationalists, Baptists, Presbyterians,
among others rubbed shoulders as they sought to spread “God’s Glory in the
Holy Land”.
The primary goal of these missions was purely religious; each church
trying to convert to its brand of Christianity as many Muslims, Jews, and
Eastern Christians (considered equally wayward) as it could in a tight
millenarian race. As one Reverend put it: “only the extension of Christian love
could bring nearer to humankind the millennium that would wipe out poverty,
injustice, and oppression.”10 Although many of them believed their work to be
“no less than a new Crusade, one that would rescue the land of the Bible of
Moslem backwardness,”11 their focus on charity and good works would soon
temper their religious zeal, and bring them closer to the indigenous
populations. The missionaries would discover, after years of proselytizing,
however, that the people of the Levant, Muslims or otherwise, were quite
intractable in their beliefs, a lost cause and a waste of their righteous breath!
But by the time they reached this conclusion, they had already developed
such an affinity to the place and the culture that the idea of retreat was never
entertained. “The Lebanon”, especially Beirut, became a beloved second
homeland to many of them, a place to be born in, live in, and die in.
With the dawning of the 20th century, the missionary movement,
reflecting the development of Western educational institutions, increasingly
took on a more secular outlook. Missionary schools and colleges, led by the
American ones, began to embrace liberal education, graduating Arab students
well trained in science and the humanities. The Americans, who were viewed
more favorably by the Muslim population for their observed neutrality (for
unlike the Europeans, at the time they had no imperial government
hoodwinking behind them) went even further than other foreign schools by
teaching their curriculums in Arabic, a move that helped foster Arab pride in
the language and its heritage among liberal Arabs. When the American
missionaries surveyed the lands around old Beirut for a lot on which to build a
new school they found a more welcoming environment among the Muslims in
the west side of the city than the Christian east side. That school became the
American University of Beirut of today, one of the most prestigious universities
in the Middle East.
The success of the new Western-modeled educational systems in
Egypt and Lebanon and their appeal to local populations prompted the
Ottoman government and the Muslim religious establishment associated with
it to try to modernize by building new schools of their own, especially in
Damascus and Aleppo. Their efforts were less rewarding for both ideological
and financial reasons. The Ottoman government provided far less funding to
education than what was being spent by any of the Western governments on
its schools in Syria.12 Ideologically, the Muslim religious establishment was
averse to embrace liberal education which it viewed, quite accurately, as a
threat to the intellectual order it maintained. Even a moderate reformer like
Mohammad Abduh (1849 – 1905), an influential imam of the Azhar University
in Cairo, could only see negative influence in the education offered by foreign
schools. During his exile from Egypt to Lebanon in 1882, he wrote to the
Ottoman governor of Beirut urging him to close these schools, protesting that,
All these religious offices were established only for two goals: to change
beliefs to Christianity and to incline the minds favorably toward the states
sponsoring them. The result is that they graduate people who are either
Christian in belief, Muslim in name only, or atheists with no creed! If I were
asked to explain the ways these schools corrupt the hearts of Muslims, I
would clarify them just as they are practiced.13
Abduh’s fears, however, were not merely phobias; a century later this
very city would pay an exorbitant price for the contradictions he hinted at. But
the alternatives that Abduh and other like-minded intellectuals offered fell
short of the challenge and proved inadequate to meet modernity’s demands.
Change was irreversible, and what had begun as sporadic educational efforts
now blossomed into a full-blown “awakening” radiating from Beirut and Cairo.
These two cities, with their relatively independent flourishing publishing and
journalism industries, became ideal grounds for the growth of Arab
consciousness. Cairo, a city safely removed from Ottoman censorship,
became the asylum of choice for Levantine thinkers and publicists who ran
afoul of Ottoman authority. In contrast, Damascus, save for some progressive
intellectuals who were educated in Beirut, remained complacent and strongly
pan-Islamic in its leanings. When Abu Khalil al Qabbani (1836-1903), a
pioneer in Arab theater and great uncle of Nizar Qabbani, opened his first
theater troupe in Damascus in the 1880’s, the city’s dignitaries complained to
the Sultan in Constantinople about the man’s ungodly ways, forcing him to
leave for Cairo where he found a more receptive and friendly environment.
Throughout the second half of the 19th century, and crossing into the
twentieth, a movement aiming at resurrecting the Arab civilization of the past
united a new class of Western-educated or Western-inspired Arab thinkers,
giving rise to a new intelligentsia made up of educated, liberal, and creative
men. Women, however, were still largely excluded from this new class, even
though influential intellectuals like Qasem Amin (1863-1908), especially in his
book Liberation of Women (1899), argued fervently for the liberation of Muslim
women, linking such liberation to the cause of national independence. Women
progress in the Arab lands would proceed slowly but assuredly at the hands of
such pioneering women as Nabawiyya Moussa, who in 1907 became the first
Egyptian woman to gain the secondary school baccalaureate (twenty-one
years would pass before another woman makes that achievement again!).
The sphere of action for this nahda (renaissance) movement was for
the most part intellectual and cultural, manifesting itself in modern education,
science, literature, translation, journalism, literary and scientific associations,
and libraries. With many of its leading thinkers coming from heretofore
marginalized minorities, especially the Arab Christian and Druze minorities,
the new elite exhibited remarkable tolerance for difference. Moreover, to
transcend fragmentary sectarianism, and with the rising prestige of the Arabic
language, several of these thinkers began toward the end of the century to
advance “Arabness” as a common uniting bond to substitute the Ottoman
pan-Islamic bond. From this point on, the Arab-or-Islamic orientation would
surface as one of the major manifestations of duality to dominate Arab
thought in the twentieth century; one projecting a modern secular nationalist
conceptualization of identity, the other emphasizing adherence to Islam’s
religious tenets and universal ideals as envisioned in its past. Needless to say
that both modes were, to varying degrees, constructs shaped to a great extent
by European ascendancy, one through analogy, the other through opposition.
Indirectly, this European ascendancy, however, gave boost to a
budding Arab consciousness that sought to assert itself in the face of the
beleaguered Turks. The first decade of the twentieth century saw an Ottoman
government trying desperately to salvage its territories from both European
colonial expansion – now at a fevered pace – and from national secessionist
movements sprouting all around the empire. In that spirit, the Turks launched
an ill-conceived program of Turkification in the Arab lands still under their
control, one that enkindled Arab desire for independence and dulled the
enthusiasm of pan-Islamists for unity. Although certainly suggestive of “Arab
nationalist” proclivities, some revisionists have recently suspected that the
“Arabness” in the “Arab awakening”, including the much touted Great Arab
Revolt during World War I, was in large part a romanticized historiography of
the making of Arab nationalists later.14
By the time the First World War ended in 1918, the geopolitical scene
in the Arab world was changed forever. European colonialism was occupying
most of the territories of the deceased Ottoman empire: the British in Egypt,
Sudan, Palestine, Iraq and the Arabian Gulf; the Italians in Libya; the French
in Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and soon to be in Syria. The Arabs who were
enticed by the British to join the fight against the Turks saw British promises of
independence turn into thin air, and more ominously for the Palestinians, into
a commitment to settling European Jews in Palestine, a dear and sensitive
spot in the Arabs’ long history with Europe. Such pronouncements of the time
as Lord Belfour’s declaration in 1917 to British Zionists that the British
government “viewed with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people”15 or the Zionist slogan “a land without people for
the people without a land”16 would be forever etched on Arab consciousness,
long after they were forgotten by the West, as a vivid reminder of the latter’s
“perfidy and ill-will.”
A century of contact, cooperation, and confrontation with the West
have by now ramified the Arab elites into three intellectual camps: The Islamic
puritanists; the liberal secularists; and the moderates in between trying to
reconcile the two disparate doctrines. To the first group belonged most of the
Muslim religious establishment under the Ottomans, including such revivalist
movements as the Wahhabis in the Arabian Peninsula or the Senusis in North
Africa, but few figures stood out. Among those who tend to fall into this line of
thought are Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) and Rashid Rida (18651935), even though they are viewed as reformers of a sort. To the secularists
belonged mostly Christian intellectuals at this stage, activists like Farah Antun
(1874-1922) and Shibli Shmayyel (1850-1917) who called for Arab
independence from the Ottoman Turks, but also Muslim reformists like Qasim
Amin (1863-1908) who called for the liberation of Muslim women. The majority
of Arab thinkers, however, filled the ranks of the third group; people who, to
variable degrees, sought to revitalize the Arab Islamic civilization by injecting
it with Western remedies – albeit ones diluted enough not to bring about
drastic change. Muslims like Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi (1854-1902) and
Muhammad Abduh made the bulk of the current, but there were arguably
some Christians as well like Georgi Zaidan (1816-1914). This accommodative
trend would emerge as the dominant intellectual paradigm in the twentieth
century, when between the triumph of liberal secularism in Turkey and the
eventual triumph of puritan Islamism in Iran, Arab thought, and the politics
born thereof, would remain in an equivocal gray area ever wavering between
clinging to tradition or embracing Western modernism. Gray would become
the hallmark color of Arab thought in modern times.
Notes
CHAPTER II
ROMANCE AND REBELLION
1923-45
DAMASCUS
Legends and Heroes
Narrow streets, bustling bazaars, laden caravans, few cars here and
there jostling with donkey carts… that was Damascus of March 21, 1923, the
day Nizar Qabbani was born. The town was little changed from five years
before when it was overrun by Prince Faisal and his camel-mounted Arab
irregulars in their desert revolt against Ottoman rule – that romanticized saga
of the T. E. Lawrence fame. In the vast sandy wastes of Arabia, the British
had promised the warring tribes the prize of Damascus if they rose up against
the Turks. They certainly did not have to do much convincing, for this lush
ancient oasis town had always been dear to the thirsty imaginations of desert
Arabs. In that elaborate scheme, Damascus suddenly became the ideal place
for a nation-building enterprise. Dream as Faisal might, the Byzantine reality
of this ancient cradle of civilization soon would sober him up. Her air of exotic
pleasures, the timelessness of her huddled adobe homes, labyrinthine halfcovered alleys, and the peeking of beautiful black eyes behind studded
doors… could well be a feast of history to the passing explorer. But to the
trained eye, Damascus was just a complacent bazaar town, timeless but
cheerless, faintly reminiscent of greater days. British and French secret
machinations and the Arabs’ chronic infighting soon doomed Faisal’s romantic
venture. As our poet would discover later, Damascus has always been better
to imagine than to experience.
Just a few alleys away from where the little boy was making his first
steps, French flags were flying high on the masts of the citadel at the heart of
Damascus. The French faced little challenge in governing the city proper,
which had been well-tamed by centuries of heavy-handed Turkish governors.
Apart from the revolt years in 1925-27, much of the resistance to occupation
was civil and took the form of strikes or demonstrations. At any case, when
violence threatened to get out of hand, the French ruthless artillery and their
feared African Legions were quite effective in bringing the agitating populace
back into order, as happened in the great Syrian revolt of 1925 when the
rebels from the countryside overran the city.1 In the relative viewpoint of later
disturbances, the quarter century of French rule in Syria was a quieter time, a
period for growth and building of democratic institutions.
Tawfiq Qabbani, the poet’s father, a tall imposing man with strikingly
white urban complexion, was a confectioner by trade. Like most Damascenes,
his trade was a family business which had been passed on from father to son
for generations. Damascus of the 1920s was still for the most part a town of
small merchants and craftsmen organized in tightly-knit guilds along family
lines. Rebellion and disturbance against the time-honored order was
anathema to the penny-wise merchants. Conservative and settled in their
ways, whether from the Sunni Muslim majority or the Christian minority,
Damascenes liked to mind their own business. Ever since the Arab Muslim
armies climbed down the city walls and chased away the Byzantines in 662
A.D., and perhaps long before that, the people of Damascus developed a
reputation for being among the most docile and obedient of Arab subjects.
Such was their reputation for obedience that, it is said, Mu’awiya (603-680
A.D.), the first Omayyad Caliph, led his Syrian troops in the communal
consecrated Friday prayers on a Wednesday without so much of a question
from his followers. From time immemorial, political control of Damascus, and
by extension that of Syria, almost always rested in the hands of outsiders:
Greeks, Persians, Romans, Peninsular Arabs, Mamluks, Turks, down to the
Assad family of today – rarely in the hands of a native Damascene.
For Damascus, even its moments of glory were at times spoiled with
shame. One of those moments came when the French sent their army on July
24, 1920 to capture Damascus and to impose their League of Nations’
mandate on the country. The Syrians had pledged allegiance to King Faisal, a
weak Hashemite monarch caught between the need to placate French
ambitions and the headstrong positions of some Arab nationalists in his court.
When General Gouraud outmaneuvered him and sent his troops to occupy
Damascus, Faisal, before fleeing the city, instructed his defense minister,
major Yousef al-Azmah to do all he could to defend the capital. Al-Azmah, a
valiant officer with distinguished past service in the Ottoman army, knew it
was to no avail. It is said that on that fateful night, when his family and friends
tried to dissuade him from confronting the advancing French, he famously
said: “I do not want history to write that Syria was taken without resistance.”
The next day he led a contingent of irregulars, and fought the far superior
French forces at Maisaloon, in the outskirts of Damascus. Predictably, the
Syrians were routed. Azmah did not flee, but continued to fire his rifle until he
fell.2 Azmah’s death still marks a great moment of national pride for Syrians, a
statue in his honor stands in a central square in Damascus today. Yet, to the
shame of an eyewitness, General Gouraud was given upon his arrival in
Damascus few days later a hero’s welcome by the city:
Strangely and unexpectedly, the young men of Al Tabba’ family surrounded
the general’s vehicle, untied the horses, pulling then carrying it, while the
general looked at the scene, his eyes disbelieving that Damascus, the city
3
that resisted him for two years, was receiving him with such fervor…
Azmah’s and similar stories of the exploits of Syrian nationalist figures
like Sultan Basha Al Atrash (1886-1982), the Druze chieftain who led the
revolt of 1925-27, and Ibrahim Hananu (1869-1935) of Aleppo, became folk
legends handed down to young Syrians to commemorate their fathers’
struggle for independence. When Nizar later gets carried away in the Arab
nationalist tide, he would invoke and draw strength from a romantic tale of his
own father’s fight for the independence of Syria. In a night raid on the
Qabbani house, the French-Senegalese gendarmes took away the boy’s
father amid the screams and wails of his wife and children. Like many middleclass merchants, Qabbani was contributing funds to the national resistance
movement. He even hosted some public meetings for the nationalist figures
campaigning for Syria’s independence in his own house. He seems to have
spent some time in the Tadmur prison4 in the Syrian desert for his activism.5
It is this environment of political activism and resistance that engulfed
the consciousness of Nizar the child. Yet the conflict and strife did not appeal
to him; it did not accord with his sensitive nature and it did not suit his poetic
sensibilities. A photograph of a political gathering at the Qabbani’s in June,
1928 catches the young boy in the middle of a sea of serious-looking men –
he looked innocent, sad, and totally out of place. It is a situation that will be
repeated throughout his life: being at the center of things but expressing a
yearning to escape.
Not much is known about Nizar’s childhood, but it seems it was very
sheltered, protected by his mother and sisters. His attachment to his mother
was intense; according to the poet, he was not weaned from his mother’s
breast until the age of seven. This special relationship would ultimately shape
most of his relations with women in his life.6 From the family pictures
available, one could observe the child was well-cared for, even pampered.
Nizar talks of his penchant as a child for breaking things to see what lay inside
them, which is a healthy childish occupation in learning about the world.
Syria Emerging
While it was true that in the case of Nizar the heroics of Syrian
resistance to France was no cause to fire up the boy’s imagination. For others
the tales and legends were significant because, more than just
commemorating the exploits of heroes and legends, they represented efforts
at forging a sense of national unity where there was little before. The Syrian
identity of today, just like most other Arab identities – Iraqi, Jordanian, Libyan,
etc - is in reality a cobbled identity, the fruit of a concerted effort between the
Western imperial planners who drew the maps of the Middle East and the
local intelligentsia who, while protesting the colonial “designs,” applied
themselves wholeheartedly to realizing a segmented reality on the ground. In
the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, the Western powers chose a division plan
that emphasized local and regional rather than pan-Arab aspirations, despite
earlier promises to the contrary. When the French tanks rolled into the streets
of Damascus on that hot day in July 1920, they in fact did away with a panArab project – for King Faisal was not “Syrian,” but a Hashemite from Mecca.
At any case, the urban elite in what became Syria of today’s borders did not
shed many tears on Faisal, whose Bedouin airs did not sit well with their citybred sensibilities. They soon accepted the Western terms of reference and
“national” (watani) was fixed as connoting “Syrian” (suri), not “Arab” ( arabi).
To denote the latter, Syrians – with other Arabs not far behind – soon adopted
the more bombastic “pan-Arab” (qawmi) a term whose extensive currency in
the mid 20th century would render it more rhetorical than real.
As the young poet was beginning to take in the world around him, the
makeup of modern Syria itself was being negotiated. A mildly distinctive
Syrian identity was being forged in opposition to foreign occupation, a process
that had already begun during the latter years of the Ottoman empire when
Syrian nationalists resisted the state’s Turkification measures. Over the
course of the twentieth century, unity of the intensely divided Syrian society
would largely be dependent on the existence of a foreign threat – one of the
biggest paradoxes of Arab nationalist thought.
Ethnically, Syrians are predominantly Arab, with some small Kurdish
and Armenian minorities. Strong and divisive sectarian and tribal loyalties are,
however, the main source of disunity. In terms of religion, while over two
thirds of Syrians are Sunni Muslims – Alawites, Christians, and Druze make
up large minorities. As will unfold later, some of these minorities at times
exercised disproportional influence over the political process in the Syrian
state.
While having some of the most ancient urban civilizational centers in
the history of mankind, Syria, ironically, is also home to an unruly tribalism
that cuts through urban, religious, and class loyalties. This Arab tribalism and
its manifestations in the political life of the Arabs will later become a major
focus of Nizar’s denunciatory criticism. Further complicating this mess of
human relations is the existence well up until the 1950s of a medieval feudal
system, in the farmland and rain-fed plains, which pinned urban landlords and
tribal chiefs against an exploited and disaffected peasant population.7
Syria is truly a country of amazing contrasts, of opposing elements and
natures precariously balanced, forever waiting to tip into conflict and anarchy.
For as much as this diversity enriches Syria’s social and cultural life, a long
history of distrust and hostility among the Syrians has always threatened the
state’s very existence. In many ways, Syrian history can actually be viewed as
an extended exercise in edgy co-existence interspersed by periodic bloody
outbursts of ethnic or religious violence.
As it seems, Syria’s cultural diversity also mirrors the varied diversity of
its natural landscape. Alternating green and arid mountains, valleys, plains,
deserts, rivers, lakes, forests and sea make one of the most contrasted
landscapes on the face of the planet; all in an area no more than the size of
the State of Washington. From the snow-capped peak of Mount Hermon –
which Arabs call “jabal al sheikh”, the old man’s mountain, a name evoking
octogenarian serenity in Syrian lore – and the black granite hills of Sweida in
the Southwest to the meandering Euphrates river in the northeast; from the
green plains of Hawran, long Syria’s grain basket, in the south to the cool
breezy forests of Antioch in the northwest; from the blue Mediterranean in the
west, through the green narrow valleys of the Orontes river – a stream
perversely flowing upland south to north – to the arid rolling plains of the
Syrian desert in the east… Syria is indeed a land of sundry beauties.
Strewn all across this landscape, alongside the hundreds of inhabited
towns and villages, are the weed-grown relics of hundreds of dead cities,
castles, palaces, and graves. They are a sobering, albeit forlorn, kaleidoscope
of edifices that attest, at one and the same time, to the greatness of man and
his pitiful vanity, a motif eloquently captured by a great Syrian poet, Abu alAlaa al Ma
arri (973–1057), when he said in a memorable poem dear to
Arab memory:
Walk gently, for I suppose that this soil is
nothing but our bodies
How many a grave became a grave over
and over again
Laughing at the crowding opposites!
A coffin on top of a coffin since ancestral
eras
My friend, these are our tombs filling the
land
Where are the tombs of the people of
Aad?
So walk gently in the air if you could
Softly, do not strut on the bones of
creation
BCDE FGHI JKI LM NOPQE RST
HLUVDE WXY JM Z[
ECEaM E]_Q CL\ ]^ ]_Q `C
HE]bDE FcEde JM fcLb
JghH LGLij klm JghH n
HE]VDE n NLjoE HPpm JM
BCDE qre LsCPt^ uXY vL\
HLm ]pm JM CPtiQE JGwh
E]GnC NEPpQE xh yz{|E }[ a|
HLtzQE ~LhC klm ZLg•TE Z
As Nizar was growing up in the 1920’s and 1930’s, modern Syria was
also growing up and changing. Despite the disturbances of the Syrian revolt in
the twenties, and the political wrangling of the thirties, the French mandate did
not face much of a serious threat to its control. The French reconfigured the
lands and the people placed under their mandate geographically, politically,
and culturally in a fashion reflecting their national interests and imperial vision.
Thus Lebanon was made into a separate state from Syria under a sectarian
constitution in 1926 giving political edge to Christians over Muslims (who were
slightly more numerous), and laying the groundwork for future civil strife.
Another portion of Syria, the Alexandreta region, which was also claimed by
Turkey was carved out and handed over to the latter in 1939 to buy Turkish
neutrality in the looming war in Europe, without regard to the wishes of the
area’s majority Arab population.8 Syria itself was divided into four “states”
along regional and sectarian lines, but the division proved impractical and
short-lived.
With the French exercising the ultimate political control on all things
Syrian, France and the French system of governance became the political
model Syrians strove to imitate. To their credit, the French fostered a budding
parliamentary democracy, albeit one dominated by the Syrian feudalist and
bourgeois families of the time. They also allowed a culture of political activism
and protest to develop, although, here also, they did their share of cracking
down on dissent when they felt it threatened their interests – at one point even
disbanding the elected Syrian parliament. But unlike Algeria, the French,
especially their left-leaning governments, did not seem to have long-term
interest in or future plans for Syria, and were quite ambivalent on their mission
in it. They in fact spent most of the mandate period negotiating with the Syrian
leaders over the country’s independence, which the Free-French government
promised to Syria in 1943 after wresting control of the country from the
German-installed Vichy regime. Yet, the French did not leave Syria before
“the cow peed in the milk,” in the words of a popular Syrian saying.
A Setting for Paradox
The Qabbanis were a middle class family with enough income from the
father’s confectioner shop to provide for the keep and education of all six
siblings, two girls and four boys.9 The father might have even earned enough
to give to charities or to the national cause of independence as his son later
boasted. The middling status of the family, situated between the Damascene
aristocracy and the poorer landless day-workers/peasants, would later prove
handy for Nizar in aligning himself over time with one or the other class in
Syria’s topsy-turvy political fortunes.
The family lived in a traditional Damascene house, a place that would
leave its permanent mark on the poet’s perceptions of place and people. Like
most native Damascenes, the Qabbanis at the time were still living within the
confines of the medieval Old City – physically, but in many ways mentally as
well. This house that Nizar opened his eyes to, one that he would frequently
evoke nostalgically in his later writings, was a typical Ottoman-era dwelling.
About this house, Nizar says, with his characteristic effervescent hyperbole:
A small wooden door opens. Your eyes glide on a kaleidoscope of green,
red, and violet vegetation. A symphony of light, shade, and marble begins.
The citrus tree hugs its fruits, the grapevine is pregnant, and the jasmine tree
just gave birth to a thousand white moons which it hangs on the window bars.
Swallow flocks choose no other home but ours to spend their summers in.
The marble lions sitting around the center fountain keep spouting water on
and on, day and night. Neither do they tire, nor does Damascus water ever
10
end…
Many such houses are still well-preserved in Damascus today, and are
still in use, although these days mostly by poor out-of-town tenants. The
family home Nizar describes was in fact typical of those inhabited by, then,
well-to-do middle class families: Two-storied, spacious with a large courtyard,
surrounded by high walls and rooms on all sides. A gurgling water fountain
was almost always to be found in the center of the courtyard, both as an
esthetic adornment and as a multipurpose water reservoir. Open to the skies,
the courtyard was often lined with citrus trees, small shrubs and flowers. With
its Mediterranean feel, leafiness in summer, sun exposure in winter, the
Damascene house was designed to mitigate the city’s climate extremes,
where temperatures can drop to zero Celsius in winter, and peak above 40 in
summer.
The architectural design of Nizar’s childhood home, and the way he
remembered – or imagined -- it in later years can tell us much about the poet,
his family, and the culture at the time. Architecture is said to be the most
salient cultural product in the human environment, one that both shapes it and
is shaped by it.11 Furthermore, there is such an affinity between architecture
and memory. For “architecture and memory, whether individual or collective,
have had a dialectical relationship throughout human history: architecture
frames memory, giving it shape and roots, while reflecting what memory has
stored in terms of images, concepts, and experiences, and what collective
memory projects into it of attitudes, feelings, and beliefs. Memory in its turn
uses the images of architecture, whether real or imagined, historical or nonhistorical at the same time, as means to express itself.”12 As we shall see in
the chapters ahead, Nizar will give great prominence in his poetry to place,
and the details of place.
If paradox can take shape, the Damascene house is a natural
candidate. When Nizar talks of his childhood home, he only describes its
homey snug inside, and for a good reason: most traditional Damascene
houses are unattractive on the outside. Except for few palace-like mansions
built by some of the city governors or notables in Ottoman times, most homes
in the city, even those built by the well-to-do families, are unassuming. In a
deeply conservative society, one that is obsessed with family privacy and the
segregation of women from the world of men, the houses were deliberately
made to look indistinct to ward off the inquisitive eye. Houses were
constructed shoulder to shoulder, or back to back, with no balconies, or even
street windows – just small high ventilation openings sometimes. The result
was the creation of drab streets and alleyways, cozy and secure, but crude
and unpleasant. For a poet sensitized to beauty like Nizar, the shabby alleys
beyond his family home merited no place in his later reminiscences.
Inside the walls, the Qabbanis’ world impressed itself on the child’s
memory as one of protection, comfort, beauty, and above all, blissful
femininity. With the father spending most of his waking hours outside, the
place was basically a women’s haven. Nizar’s mother, Faiza, was a typical
faceless Arab mother: submissive, caring, pious, and contented. Except for
some visits to relatives or shrines of saints, she rarely ventured outside her
home. Like all Arab mothers, she preferred boys to girls, surrounding the mildmannered young Nizar with adulating love and attention. From the beginning,
Nizar seemed to be different from his peers; he was an introvert with a very
impressionable mind. His mother’s overprotectiveness of him could only make
him shrink further from the world beyond the walls.
This beautiful Damascene house took over all my feelings, and took away my
appetite for going out into the alley, as kids are prone to do. From this point,
the desire to stay at home would remain with me throughout my life. Even
today, I feel a kind of self-sufficiency that makes loitering in the streets or
“swatting flies” in coffee shops full of men an act my nature spurns… This
house was where the borders of the world ended for me; it was the friend, the
13
oasis, and my winter and summer resorts.
Indeed, his loathing of the outside world was such that he was never
able to learn to find his way home from school by himself; his father had to
assign one of his apprentices to accompany the schoolboy to and from his
school everyday.14 His immersion in this feminine world, and his idealization
of it later in life, caused him, as is clear from the piece above, to develop an
antipathy to the world of men that he would soon be forced to join. It also set
off one of the first dualities in his mind: that between the warm and tender
feminine ideal he first experienced and the arid masculine reality he would
later grow up into. In due course, Nizar’s shy boyhood gave place to full male
virility, but not before the feminine world of his Damascus home left some
indelible gentile prints on his character. As one unsympathetic critic would
remark decades later, Nizar’s character was strikingly and mysteriously both
masculine and feminine at one and the same time.15
There was another world, however, that Nizar knew in his young years,
one that offered him a chance to escape the stuffy world of Damascus and
opened his eyes to wholesome possibilities of freedom and happiness. When
the heat of summer became too oppressive in the city, the Qabbanis often
traveled to the cool breezy mountains of Lebanon where they spent several
weeks in one of the country’s cozy huddled towns. Zahleh, a small city known
for its grape vineyards and sparkling meandering streams, was the family’s
favorite summer escape. There young Nizar became enchanted by Lebanon’s
pristine nature and its vibrant carefree social life. There among the vineyards
and the streams he had his first puppy loves. The adventurous girls he met
during these summer stays would prejudice him for the rest of his life in favor
of the liberal Lebanese women.
The young boy could not, however, escape the contrast between his
walled-in world in Damascus and the more open easygoing lifestyle he
experienced in Lebanon. He soon began to see and interpret the world inside
the walls in a more critical light. Increasingly he would begin to realize that this
comfort and beauty of the harem belied a sordid reality of control, oppression,
and even death. His cloistered world was finally and suddenly jolted by a
family tragedy. In 1938, when he was 15, his older sister Wisal, we are told,
“committed suicide” for “not being able to marry the man she loved.”16 There
is not much in his very brief autobiography about this incident beyond these
romanticized words that assign the blame to no one. As we shall see later,
Nizar always walked a fine line between traditional Arab, especially
Damascene, loyalty to family values and expectations and his desire to
expose social injustice. Balancing these two urges allowed him to claim being
both a devoted son and an admired rebel. Full understanding of the
significance and effects of his sisters “suicide” will have to come in the context
of his later eruptions of poetical fury in his revolts. But for the young boy, his
growing awareness of the moribund reality within the family walls, let alone
the city without, would eventually force him to leave in search of more ideal,
more beautiful homes and realities in the world… never to return.
The suicide of his sister, however, is a powerful sign of the social
changes that were taking place in Syria of the 1930’s. The fact that the girl
wanted to marry a particular man means the two were, somehow, able to
meet and to fall in love. Indeed, women of the aristocracy and upper middle
classes began to attain more freedom under the liberalizing spirit of the age.
More and more girls were being sent to schools, getting educated and
exposed to social life. Still, the idea that a girl would demand a particular
partner in marriage was almost unheard of for Nizar’s father, a stern and stoic
man to whom the girl’s declaration of love was tantamount to dissipation. To
him, the marriage of a child was a matter for the family to arrange. Fathers
had always perceived that as their religious right and any attempt at violating
it by unsanctioned individual choices had to be crushed.
But forces of social change were growing stronger in a world
modernizing at a breathless pace. When the French extended their domain
over Syria in 1920, there was scarcely a girl going out unveiled in Damascus.
Save for some Christian women in Lebanon, this was also the case for the
rest of the Arab world. But during the twenties and thirties women from the
aristocracy in Syria (following in the steps of Lebanon and Egypt) began to
flout that Islamic prescription, increasingly adopting Western styles of dress.
As far as clothing and fashions, Paris became their inspiration, not Mecca.
This phenomenon was decried as “sufoor” by its opponents, a name implying
both nudity and violation. By the time of Syria’s independence in 1946, almost
half of the bourgeois women in Damascus were “emancipated” in that sense.
The sufoor movement was so intense that it drew a backlash from the city’s
puritan conservatives who incited the mobs to harass and attack emancipated
women, leading to a strong clamp down by the Syrian government.17
Change, however, went much farther than appearances. Despite the
world economic crisis in the thirties, the period saw Syrians increase in
numbers as improving public health was lowering death rates and increasing
life spans, especially in the urban centers of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Hama
and Latakia. The advent of modern inventions in transportation, industry, and
agriculture transformed the lives of the people, creating many new jobs, while
rendering others obsolete. The motor car, for instance, forced most nomadic
pastoralists, who lived off raising camels for transportation, to turn to more
relevant occupations, such as land cultivation.18
Outside the walls of Nizar’s world in the Old City, rural migrants and
Damascus’s own burgeoning denizens began to force it out into its modern
sprawl, almost in all directions. The French administration carried out an
extensive topographical survey of the city, and laid out new mapping and
zoning schemes that ultimately gave the city its present look.19 The twenties
and thirties saw the city’s ruling wealthy class begin to move into the newly
built neat suburbs of Halbouni and al-Sha
lan, places that even today,
notwithstanding the general decay of the city, still have a faded Parisian air to
them. The new suburbs’ architectural design had very little to do with the
traditional architecture of the Old City. The new city was every bit European
with fairly wide streets, two- and three-storied apartment complexes with small
patios. The rush of Syria’s elite to embrace these new homes said much
about their disenchantment with Old Damascus and its world.
More importantly, the change overseen by the French, and zealously
adopted by Syria’s ruling intelligentsia, included two policies that were to have
far-reaching consequences on the future of Syria, especially the city of
Damascus, and more closely still, on the career of our poet. The first was
extending primary and secondary education into provincial towns and cities,
bringing it to the doorstep of Syria’s vast rural population. The second was
opening the army and its military academies to hitherto disenfranchised social
classes. Like other colonialists, the French made good use of poor peasant
recruits, especially from the Alawite and Druze minorities to fill up the lower
ranks of their newly formed Troupes Speciales du Levant which later became
the core of the Syrian army. For most Syrians, the misery of forceful
conscription in the Ottoman army was still a recent memory, but while the
mercantile class of city-dwellers could afford to stay out, Syria’s peasantry
were in sore need of paying jobs, and the army was most often their only
option.20 For better or worse, the army would turn out to be the king maker of
Syria’s future leaders.21
The School Years
Tawfiq Qabbani’s choice for the schooling of his children settled on the
Syrian Scientific College, a K12 school not far from his shop in the heart of the
Old City where a maze of bazaars intertwined and intersected. Nizar would
later commend his father’s choice as one that sought to reconcile traditional
Arabic learning with modern French education, saying “The Syrian Scientific
College was halfway between French-oriented Friar and Lycee missionary
schools […] and the Arabic-oriented Tajheez public high school.”22 Yet, all
curricula of these schools followed French educational norms and were
mostly taught by French or French-educated instructors; Arabic, in those
schools that offered it, was merely one class among the all-French classes.
Indeed, as we shall see later, the influence of the French language and
culture would be quite perceptible in Nizar’s style and thought.
In the school, the young Nizar was required to speak in French even
with his peers. A common punishment for ill behavior, he mentions, was the
memorization of fifty lines of French poetry, a punishment he seemed to have
relished. This education, however, introduced him to the greats of the French
literary tradition, among which Nizar named Racine, Moliere, Corneille, Hugo,
Dumas, Baudelaire, Paul Valéry and several others as having had an
inordinate influence on him. Soon their thought and taste began to shape his
intellectual and literary sensibilities. Critical thinking, the mainstay of Western
liberal education, would forever color the views and beliefs of young Nizar,
creating a permanent sense of incertitude toward matters other Arabs take for
granted. In contrast, traditional Arabic Islamic learning is a discipline of
certainties, of categorical divisions between black and white, good and evil,
man and woman, human and divine… of do’s and don’ts.
In those days, throughout the Arab world, Arabic education came
through two venues: the “kuttab,” and the school, public or private, where
Arabic was taught as a separate subject. The kuttab was a corner, often in the
local mosque, where the young received learning in the Koran and the basics
of writing and reading. It was taught by a sheikh (or sheikha in case of girls), a
man of religion, usually the imam of the neighborhood’s mosque. This basic
Islamic education orients the young to the Islamic world view, Islamic history,
and their roles and duties in their community. It grounds their young minds in
the certainties of Islam, its unquestionable truths, and its nonnegotiable
expectations. Many who receive such education at a young age find it hard to
shake off the grip of its immutables. Nizar did not receive that education. His
father, not a religious person himself, decided that only liberal education could
offer his children a chance in Syria’s changing world. The father was not
particularly avant-garde in mind, yet he had the merchant’s trained
perspicacity to sense where the winds were blowing.
The knowledge of Arabic that Nizar garnered came from one daily
period of Arabic instruction sandwiched between his many classes in French.
At best, this would have produced mediocre knowledge of Arabic, had he not
had the fortune to be mentored by an exceptional teacher. Khalil Mardam Bek
(1895-1959), at the time teaching at the Syrian Scientific College, was a poet-
scholar of great refinement, and later, a statesman and prime minister who
exercised great influence in the shaping of independent Syria. He was to
infuse in Nizar a love for poetry from the first lesson, sweeping away the
young boy’s heart and mind when he chalked these lovesome lines on the
blackboard:
She who claimed
your heart abandoned her
Was made for you
And you for her
Yet when she stopped greeting me
This I said to my friend:
Her hey’s seemed plenty
23
Yet were so few.
LplM €HE•h yrm‚ x•QE }[
LpQ yilT Lrƒ €EPY yilT
xtcL„Q ylih …Lp•g_e yz†M
Lpl^In …L†Q LYa‡ƒI }Lƒ LM
Translation does not come even close to the beauty of the motifs and
pathos these lines create in Arabic. Nizar remembered them vividly because
in reality they were an invitation for the poet in him to come out and join in –
an experienced poet’s subtle way of exciting the sensibilities of his young
audience to heighten interest and to draw out talent. Nizar was indeed
fortunate to have a poet for a teacher of Arabic, for as rich as the language is,
the Arabic teaching profession was, and still is, largely overweighed by its
long history in which the religious interferes with the linguistic. While Islam, at
its cultural peak, helped spread, develop, and preserve the language in its
long history, the decline of Islamic culture in recent centuries led also to the
decline and fossilization of Arabic’s teaching and learning methods.
A teacher who can sidestep such legacy to inculcate love for a
language besieged by well-serviced foreign languages was indeed an unsung
hero. Speaking four decades later, Nizar would say “I have to stress that
teachers of the Arabic language and its literature play a pivotal role in turning
on or turning off the appetites of the learners. There is that teacher who turns
the literature class into a period of torture and slow death, and there is the one
who turns it into a meadow of spring blossoms, one with whom lifeless texts
become a stroll in the moonlight…”24
Once converted, Nizar became an avid reader of Arabic poetry, in both
its long classical tradition and in its fledgling modern movement. Poetry for the
Arabs has always been considered the register of their culture and history, the
reservoir of their collective memory, in much the same way the Greek epics
were for the ancient Greeks. But with a major difference: The Arabic poetic
tradition exists as a continuum from around the second century A.D. to the
present day.25 Despite all the artistic and thematic modifications and
innovations introduced into this tradition over the centuries, a linguistic and
esthetic core has been preserved, one in which the poet of today partakes
with all the poets who came before. As rebellious as he can be, the modern
Arab poet is still shaped, in ways he cannot fathom, even in his rebellion, by
the thought and esthetics of his predecessors. As we will follow Nizar’s
progress, we will be able to hear the voices of many eminent Arab poets of
the past exercising a control on the modern poet’s language hard to describe,
let alone to break away from.
Between the tug of the rhetoric and esthetics of the Arabic Islamic past,
and the pull of European modernity in culture and literature, the modern Arab
poet is a torn being, conflicted and searching for a reconciliation yet to be
attained. It is thus symbolically significant that Nizar composed his first lines of
poetry in the middle of the Mediterranean on a sea voyage to Italy with his
friends in the summer of 1939. It seems as if he had to reach a point where he
could balance East and West to be able to realize selfhood -- to be clear out
of the walls of his ancient home-city, and heading for European harbors of
freedom so as to write Arabic poetry in a new lovely style all his own. The trip
was in a sense a prognostic metaphor of Nizar’s entire life: a paradox that will
keep pushing him farther and farther from Damascus into his many exiles.
A man with Nizar’s poetic talent may have considered dedicating his
life to it from the start. Yet, in pious Damascus, the timeless city of merchants
and traders, the prospect would have been considered frivolous and idle.
Even today, Damascenes often scoff at the word sha
er, for poet in Arabic,
using it sarcastically of someone who is jobless, woolgathering, or out of
touch with reality:
When I was thirteen, my father’s friends would ask him, “What does Nizar
want to be?.” When he answered them “A poet,” their faces would turn pale
with cold sweat and say “God save our souls! Nothing happens except that
He decreed…”. Listening to these awe-inspiring comments, I used to think
that poetry and catastrophe were one and the same thing, that I was
possessed by a jinni, and that to be cured, the evil spirit needed to be
26
exorcized at the hands of a righteous old sheikh.
This is not surprising, after all the Koran says “And the Poets, it is
those straying in Evil, who follow them. Seest thou not that they wander
distractedly in every valley? And that they say what they practice not? Except
those who believe, work righteousness…”27 Damascenes stick to the letter of
the verse: unless the anathemized poet redeems himself by taking up a
worthy vocation, they have no reason to regard him otherwise. So Nizar, ever
the loyal son, upon the completion of his secondary education in 1941,
decided on a such worthy vocation, fulfilling his family’s expectations by
entering Damascus University’s College of Law.
Of all fields of study, this was probably the dreariest and least poetic.
Yet, it was the most prestigious at the time, a specialization that opened many
doors to promising careers in government service as well as in private
practice. It is also the farthest you can get from frivolity and aimlessness that
stigmatizes the life of a poet. In choosing to bend to social pressure in
consideration of personal benefit, even against the demands of talent, Nizar
offered one of the first manifestations of his most outstanding characteristic:
his ability to reconcile the poetic with the pragmatic for the purpose of survival,
a quality he will draw upon over and over again throughout his poetic “career.”
For Nizar harbored no illusions as to the material value of literature as a
vocation – few years later, he would advise a friend who was considering
studying literature to take up political science instead “because the study of
political science will enable you to enter the foreign service which in turn will
nourish your horizons, your heart, and your pocket.”28
The solemn all-male study halls of the College of Law’s Barameka
campus, originally military barracks of the Ottoman army, proved too austere
for the young poet’s taste. He therefore passed much of his class time
doodling and scribbling his first poems in the margins of law tomes while his
old bespectacled professors were pontificating on such uninspiring subjects
as the Hammurabi Code, the Roman law, and the Islamic Shari a law. In his
old age, he would amusedly reminisce: “My famous poem, “Your Breasts,” for
example… I wrote it on the margins of the Shari’a law book, and when I sat
for the exam at the end of the year, my grade was one of the worst!”29 No
lifelong friendships came out of his four-years of college study, no
professional camaraderie, and no political activism at a time when Syria was
awash in it. Nor did he pursue a law career upon graduation. Nizar wanted
nothing of all that – he only coveted the access the degree offered, and the
structure it put in his life. A degree in law from Damascus university was much
more prestigious at the time than it is today considering the few who were
able to afford the education, and it surely opened many doors to its holder.
Although Nizar did not take law seriously, its study left one important lasting
positive impression on him: a keen awareness of justice and rights that would
permeate all his work and become more and more evident as he began to
confront the social and political order in the Arab world.
The Poetic and the Historical
The history of the Arab revival of the 19th and 20th century is in large
part a literary history. Of that, poetry formed the main genre typifying the
endeavor to attain contemporaneity with Western literary movements without
thinning out its “Arabicness” beyond recognition. As noted before, Arabic
poetry hailed from a long and proud tradition extending back over almost two
millennia. In a culture that prides itself of its pristine nomadic past – a
reconstructed memory of free range, chivalry, and poetical sublimity – it
comes as no surprise that poetry would always occupy a focal position in the
making of its consciousness. The rich Arabic poetry produced in the Arabs’
primordial past was jealously handed down from generation to generation until
it was collected en masse and recorded beginning in the 9th century. With
other art forms such as painting or sculpture officially discouraged under
Islam, poetry continued to be the art form par excellence, becoming a
magnificent record of the cultural, social, and political life of the Arabs at their
civilizational peaks, whether in Umayyad Damascus, Abbasid Baghdad, or
Arab Andalusia. Remarkably, it recorded their lows as well: their defeats,
disasters, and social ills. When Arab culture eclipsed under the Ottomans, so
did Arabic poetry, degenerating into a stultified banal tradition, one which was
described by a modern poet and critic as “repetitive, artificial, and full of
useless embellishments – nothing more than an exercise of wit and almost
wholly devoid of substance.”30
Devoid of substance? Maybe. But not lifeless. The fact that the Arabic
poetic tradition persisted in unfavorable times is indeed a sign of intrinsic
strength. All that tradition needed was a powerful shot in the arm, or more
aptly a reinvigorating reminder of its own heritage. The fact of the matter was
that few select had access to that heritage, most of which was still in the form
of manuscripts gathering dust in imperial and private libraries across Europe
and the Middle East. With the spreading in the 19th century of the printing
press in the urban centers of the Arab world, a quiet effort began – that
continues until today – to dig out the “mother” manuscripts and publish them.
At first it was undertaken by some bookish self-motivated orientlists who
recognized the human wealth in these ancient documents. But soon these
were joined by Arab scholars from Lebanon and Egypt zealously motivated to
put their ancestors’ achievements in the hands of anyone educated enough to
read. Such was the vigor the dissemination of these works produced that by
the end of the century, a remarkable poetical revival, later dubbed neoclassicism, was in full throttle.
The neo-classicists, led by Egyptian Ahmad Shawqi (1869-1932),
adhered to classical Arabic poetry in form, technique, and content. They stuck
to the classical poem’s two-hemstitch monorhymed arrangement, the one in
which the poem is composed of self-contained lines, all following one of
classical poetry’s sixteen meters, and each line divided into two hemistiches,
with the rhyme coming at the end of the second. A good example from
Shawqi is the following piece:31
The upshot of this was the creation of an atmosphere of symmetry and
equilibrium, balancing form and content, the subjective and the objective. It
allowed the neo-classicists to approach their subjects more directly in terse
expressions with oratorical tones. It was “a stable and well-ordered universe
where all evil came from the outside, a world well understood and respected
by the poets and their audience, with clearly defined ethical, moral, esthetic,
and philosophical values.”32 But the world they recreated in their poetry was a
world that, in effect, harked back to another, bygone era. As seen from the
Shawqi poem quoted above, it was a world that no longer existed.
By the end of the savageries and chaos of the First World War, with
European presence, both military and cultural, becoming a reality across the
Arab lands, the harmonious world of the neo-classicists seemed increasingly
anachronistic. Summing up the judgment of his generation, Nizar says: “ Until
the twenties of this century, the Arabic poem continued to don the ancient
Arabian cloak even as it was drinking whisky in the hotels of Cairo, Beirut,
Baghdad, and Damascus. There was a terrifying contradiction between its
garb and its behavior. Even laureate Shawqi was going about the Champs
Elysee in Paris while wearing al-Mutanabbi’s* medieval shoes… The Arabic
poem was suffering from acute schizophrenia, and I always felt when reading
poets of the Liberal Age that I was attending a masquerade ball where each
poet borrowed the mask he liked.”33
In the 1920’s and 1930’s, a romantic trend rose in reaction to the
rigidity and irrelevance of neo-classicism, under influence, for the first time, of
Western literary movements. The trend came about when two groups of
young poets, one made of Lebanese expatriates in the New World, especially
North America, and the other a group of poet-critics in Egypt – coalesced to
oppose neo-classicism. Most prominent in this trend was the Arab-American
poet, Gibran Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), whose influence exceeded his talent.
Gibran’s writings, more prose than poetry, introduced new language, imagery,
and, more importantly, a boldness to experiment. His fresh style, which drew
upon the Bible and painting among other sources, “was characterized by a
rhythm which fell on the ears like magic, intoxicating in its frequent use of
interrogations, repetitions, and the vocative; by a language which was at once
modern, elegant, and original; and by an imagery that was evocative and
imbued with a healthy measure of emotion.”34 Other poets associated with this
movement whom Nizar named for their influence on him included Ilyas Abi
Shabaka (1903-1947), Bishara al-Khouri (1890-1968), Iliyya Abu Ma i (18891957), and Sa
id
Aql (1912- ), among others.35 Each and everyone of
these poets had his own distinctive style, but they all somehow diverged from
neo-classical norms by stressing the imaginative and the subjective. Their
poetry expressed a will to freedom, not only on the national level, but, and
here is the difference, in the life of the individual. Keenly aware of the
exuberance of Western life in the “roaring twenties” and the Jazz Age, they
began to bemoan the dreariness of their loveless lives, their stolen youths,
and wasted years, somehow, linking their personal misery to the complacency
and regressiveness of the home society with its outmoded inhibiting traditions
and its many contradictions. These were the poets in whose style and spirit
Nizar began to write in the early 1940’s.
Before Nizar, Syria had produced or inspired many poets over the two
millennia of Arab civilization. There was the panegyrizing al Akh al (c.640–
c.710), a proud Christian poet in the Umayyads’ court in Damascus, famous
for his acrid lampoons of their opponents. There was the tragic Abu Firas al
amdani (932-968), a celebrated knight who warred against the Byzantines in
Syria’s north, spending years in their captivity, a reality that mellowed his
poetry with nostalgia for freedom and family – only to be killed later in a power
struggle by that very family. There was Abu al- Alaa
al-Ma
arri, quoted
earlier, a blind poet famous for composing poetry of timeless profundity, and
for his Treatise of Forgiveness, a work, it is said, inspired Dante in the writing
of his Devine Comedy. And above all, there was Nizar’s fascination Deek alJinn al im i (778-849), a tragic love poet who, maliciously led to doubt the
faithfulness of the woman he loved, killed her in a fit of jealous rage, and
spent the rest of his life bemoaning his deed.
None of them, however, came from Damascus. As central as this
capital city has been in the life of Syria, Damascus produced few poets over
its long history, certainly none in the league of the poets mentioned above.
And as much as it inspired outsiders and visitors into verse, Damascus cannot
list among its many honors the kind and number of poets Baghdad or Cairo
produced. There is something about the quaint self-absorbed culture of
Damascus that inhibits poetic energy. The premium put on conformity and
complacency in Damascene society seems to work against the poetic
impulse, which by nature has to be somewhat dissentious if it were to be
creative. In contrast, the city has always been either the birthplace or the
favored adopted abode for some of Islam’s greatest religious scholars,
theologians, and Sufis.
The Student Poet
In 1944, whilst still a student at Damascus University, Nizar published
in Damascus his first poetry collection, provocatively titled The Brunette Told
Me. As publishers were averse to taking responsibility for such “irreverence,”
Nizar was able to print only 300 copies. Remarkably, it was his mother who
footed the bill for the cost of publication. The booklet was pertly designed with
bold striking colors, yet with a predictive and judicious introduction by a family
friend (a respectable critic and a one-time minister of education). It proved an
immediate hit with Syria’s younger and trendier generation, one that was
striving for modernity and change. Today, one of those original booklets is a
collector’s dream!
The publication of The Brunette Told Me, in 1944 signaled a new poet
on a new mission, no more so than in the declaratory title. From the outset,
Nizar put three elements in the title that would be the hallmark of his rhetoric
throughout the years to come. First there is the woman, hitherto silent,
unheard, marginalized. Al-samraa
(brunette) is the typical Arab woman, in
her bashful darkish beauty. Then there is the act of telling, of uncovering, of
rebelling against the silence. Finally, there is the transmitter, the interpreter,
the poet who will be the spokesman for her, with the ego of a man who
believes in her. The phrase sounds poetic and sweet in the ears of Arab
readers curious about what women had to say. On another level, the phrase
carries within it the seeds of a paradox that dogged Nizar for the rest of his
life, the conflict between being an avant-garde poet seeking to liberate the
Arab woman, and being a male Arab poet with an ego to satisfy and a sexual
role to live up to.
The Brunette Told Me is a collection of 28 poems two to three pages
each on average. The collection begins with a general dedication, which is
more of a challenge, addressed to his female reader:
My heart’s an ashtray…
If you stir it, you will burn
My poetry and my heart are one
Unfair to me are they
Who do not see
36
My heart on paper written
LsI ..HLMaQE ˆ‰S†rƒ xtl^
x^a•_e ..Šgh LM x‹t†e }[
x†rl•Gn ..xtl^ LsI uazŒ
ŽCPQE klm xtl^ •aG Z JM
Warning her of the risks of reading his poetry, Nizar alludes to his
intense subjectivity, that it defines his self and being. For the Arabs, the heart
is not only the seat of life and love, but also of infinite knowledge. And for
Nizar poetry comes from the heart, not the mind. Interestingly, from such an
early stage, Nizar indicated that he would invest all his being in his poetry,
foretelling the place of this art throughout his life. Years later he would say
“My poems are the only photograph that looks like me.”37
In what will become a custom for him, Nizar begins the collection with a
“manifesto” poem, one that would orient the reader to his thought and state of
affairs at the time. In this case, the poem presents two sides of him, two kinds
of love that are difficult to reconcile. In the first part, there is the Sufi lover, the
self-abnegating seeker walking infinitely to God, whose very existence is in
this effort; a romantic seeker who sees God in the natural world around him.
Like the echoing wails of minarets, I
walked
To God, etching my path on His
~a| …}•‘rQE NL’j “‡Mn
•]rQE P_\ vaVI ”E kQ[
skies
I am a sail unwilling to arrive
I am a loss unwishing to end
My letters are flocks of swallows
Their black coats extending
38
Across the heavens.
•P\PQE –g{G Z LsI —EaŒ
•]pQE ]GaG Z LsI —Lgb
]re …PsP†UQE —PrV …xhnac
EHP|DE LpS{zM …P_„QE klm
The other is the sensual lover hungry for sexual experience, a selfasserting man whose ego takes god-like dimensions.
Sex is a nimbus I carry in my bones
Traveling from primeval shores
There is hunger woven in my limbs
Yearning for the other
The hunger of a hand reaching
You think you are unlike me?
You then have lost your way
Our essence is but one
Your beauty is part of me
If not for me, you wont exist
39
Nothing will you be.
uaYPV xh “rcI ˜†™QE PY
E]•trQE š›LŒ JM WZPgY
J_G —PV xrUV œgƒa•j
E]gQE ]rG —PV ..aTo
yllb •uagž fsI œU_eI
E]cnDE a„†zQE L†Q }Ÿh
fe FQ uZPlh ..x†M fQLrV
E]VPe JQ uZPQn ..L gŒ
Much of Nizar’s early poetry reflects the struggle between these two
forces in him: the romantic poet in search of the ideal who finds contentment
in the search itself and the poet hungry for the woman, for consummation to
give meaning to his own manhood. A unique characteristic of the lines above
is the ambiguity of the gender of the speaker. While it is certain that the
speaker in the first lines is Nizar himself, the voice at the end begins to
address a male persona, giving the impression of a female speaker. This is
one of the first examples of Nizar’s use of his transvestite style that moves
freely between the two genders.
Nizar composed the poems of this collection between the ages of 16
and 22, a period reflected in the poem’s themes and textures. There is a
somewhat juvenile obsessiveness of describing a girl’s body and
paraphernalia; this is even apparent in the titles of many of the poems: “The
Terrified Dress”, “Before Her Mansion”, “Her Name”, “Her Room”, “HazelEyed”, “Mouth”, “Long Earrings”, “High-Bosomed”, etc. As such, most of the
poems are in essence variations on the same theme: yearning for female
love. The focus on and candid dedication to this theme in a quite accessible
language presented Nizar’s young generation with a much-welcome
freshness and youthfulness that is still being felt half a century later. It was a
time when for the first time a young Arab generation began to see itself as
collective and separate from their parents’ outdated order. Nizar gave voice to
the emotional yearnings and sexual frustrations of this rising generation.
The 1940’s saw the gap widen between the aspirations of Syria’s
young, and the restrictive social and political order they grew into. The
Western-inspired ideals of freedom, democracy, and equality had by now
seeped into the consciousness of social masses beyond the urban elites of
Damascus, Aleppo, ims and ama. Agitation, thus, came in two currents:
first, there were the young of Syria’s urban classes who were seeking more
personal freedom and justice, and who believed this could be attained by
merely reforming and modernizing along Western lines without really bringing
the whole system down. Then there was also a more radical current with
mostly rural and peasant base who saw no saving grace in the current elitist
order and wanted to replace it by a populist one. In effect, the two trends
coalesced to chisel at the foundations of Syria’s long traditions, political,
social, and cultural.
The populist trend was just beginning to gather steam, and to make its
voice heard. Politically, it manifested itself in three distinct movements: the
Syrian Communist Party, which had been growing since its formation in 1924,
led by Khalid Bakdash (1912-1995); the Youth Party (later Arab Socialists) led
by the indefatigable and charismatic Akram al-Hourani (1911-1996) since its
establishment in 1939; and the Ba th Party, formally established in 1945, but
already shaping in the activities of its two teachers-turned-ideologues Michel
Aflaq (1910-1989) and ala al-Din al-Bi ar (1912-1980) and their students
since 1939.40
Nizar, pinning hope on an attractive career in the foreign service upon
graduation, made a point of avoiding the populist political activism which was
rampant on campus in the 1940’s. Despite the jangling noise of these
movements, there were no signs they could one day displace the aristocracy
in the new Syria, especially since French troops were still camped on Syrian
soil. Indeed, it would be quite some time before any of them made it to the
higher echelons of power.
Turning his back on the mundane world of street politics, Nizar applied
himself to what would become his cause celebre: bold celebration of feminine
beauty. Ghazal, that tender genre of Arabic poetry dedicated to love themes,
has always held a special place in the poetry of the Arabs. By far, Nizar is not
the first Arab poet to dedicate his poetry to celebrating love of women.
Omar ibn Abi Rabi a (644-712) is often cited as the ultimate paragon of
ghazal poets, a man with whom Nizar is often compared. Yet, mirroring the
decline of Arabic social life in general during Ottoman times, ghazal had lost
the intensity and youthfulness it enjoyed during the highs of Arab Islamic
culture. There were commendable attempts in the first half of the twentieth
century at reviving ghazal to its previous glories by such poets as Lebanese
Bishara al-Khuri (1884-1968), and Egyptian Ibrahim Naji (1898-1953). Still, in
the romantic spirit of the time, most of the poetry produced came out very
personal, introverted, lackluster, and sometimes downright sentimental.
Walking a fine line between their poetic impulses and societal mores, the
romantic poets were always mindful of the ponderous Arab social taboos
against a too open or overly direct treatment of love and sexuality. In general,
their poetry lacked classical ghazal’s vitality, freshness, and sensuality.
Furthermore, the fact that most of these poets dabbled in other kinds of poetry
beside ghazal, such as poetry on nature or politics, certainly took away from
the energy of their ghazal.
Over the next twenty years, Nizar’s dedication to ghazal with his fresh
sensual approach would revive this genre to dazzling heights in art and
popularity. The Brunette Told Me contains the three aspects that will define
most of his love poetry: a bold defiant celebration of the female body; an
avant-garde criticism of the position and treatment of women in Arab society;
and the conflict that rises between his own male sexuality and the social
message of liberation he is advocating.
Right from the very beginning, Nizar sang the praise and the joys of the
female body, its beauty, sexuality, the freedom it deserves, and the freedom it
offers. In poem after poem, he came to idealize feminine beauty and all things
that enhanced it. At times, Nizar’s fascination with the physical reached a
level of fetishism yet unheard of in modern Arabic poetry. The frequent object
of this fetishism was the woman’s breasts; for Nizar the firm breast came to
represent womanhood, youth, pleasure, and feminine defiance:
Brunette, thrust your bronzed breast
into my mouth, my world
Your breasts are but two springs of
pleasure, burning in my blood.
Two rebels against the heavens
Two rebels against the silken shirt
Two ivory idols heaving in a sea on fire
Idols.. I worship idols
41
And know I have erred.
xrh LgsH xh ar|DE €]ps xt\ ...NEar|
xMH xQ “z‹e NEarc ¡XQ Lzts €E]ps
¢griQE klm ..NLrUQE klm }EHar•M
Fz†rQE
£a‰M a_tj LVLM ]^ ..}LgVLm }Lr†\
xr¤we FžC £L†\DE ]tmI xs[ ..}Lr†\
This occupation with the sexual is not so much the result of sexual
experience as perhaps the lack of it. Much of the narrative in the poem above
is indeed the work of a sexually-deprived imagination, for, as Dr. Khristo Najm
psychoanalyzes, “it goes without saying that behind this chasing after sexual
pleasure lies a sexual hunger that manifests itself in most of the poems of this
period – a period of repression which every adolescent has to go through in
our Eastern society.”42 There was little change in moral attitudes to pre-marital
sex in Syria of the 1940’s – as indeed is still the case in Syria of today –
despite the change in other aspects of social life. Young women were
expected to be virgins at the time of marriage, and to remain strictly faithful to
their husbands afterwards. Female sexuality defined to a large extent the
determinant concept of honor ( ir ) for the entire family. As the story of the
suicide of the poet’s sister suggests, there was not much chance for women
to choose their husbands, let alone carry on intimate relationships before
marriage. The closely-watched family environment worked so efficiently to foil
such affairs. In the extreme, women from reputed families risked losing their
lives if they were to be discovered in illicit liaisons.43
In contrast, young men did not have to live by the same rules. Although
Islam urges both men and women to be chaste, Arab patriarchal cultural
norms have always allowed much more leeway for men to exercise their
sexuality, while keeping the lid on that of women. A man’s sowing of his wild
oats, before and after marriage, did not essentially tarnish his family’s honor;
on the contrary, it often brought a favorable sense of virility and dominance.44
But the control exercised on women’s sexuality indirectly affected men’s
freedom and choices; there were simply no clean young women available
outside marriage. In line with this reality, in the past, men and women often
married young, the women in their early teens, the men not far beyond.45 But
the new demands of education, careers, and travel made it increasingly
necessary for, especially, young men to postpone marriage a bit longer.
During this time, young men in the prime of their sexual drive had no recourse
but to seek relationships with “fallen” women: social outcasts, unfaithful
housewives, or straightforward prostitutes.
The last five poems in The Brunette Told Me hint at Nizar’s experience
with these types of women, and show a young man wrestling with the conflict
between his raging sexual desire and the socio-moral bearings he inherited.
There is such a paradox between the various roles that the poet assumes in
these poems. In “wake up” he admonishes and lectures scornfully a young
woman who shared his bed the night before. In “To a Night Visitor,” he speaks
in the voice of the typical Arab male, a man who puts down his mistress as
immoral and dissipated while boasting of his virility and dominance:
Stop huffing and puffing
Rattling like a snake, wicked girl
From your kin, you crept unashamed
On your belly to my room, the poet’s
room
…
Oh girl with titillating scent, beware
I am a jinni, break not my flask
You, your breasts are nothing
If my storms guffaw, my urge unfold
Raging flood knows not
What God prescribed, what God
46
forbade.
ŠrprpQEn ¥S†QE EXpj xtUc
ŠMa™M LG ..}Ltz‡QE ˆ‹mC LG
x_•Ue FQ flYI JM yiQ‚
ŠrplrQE x•haž kQ[ LSc‚
...
HCLM LsI a{zQE ˆgpŒ
Šrir^ uaU’e }I uC•L_h
ypip^ }[ •€E]ps LM •ysI LM
Šr™lrQE xePpŒn …xS\EPm
ŠhaV xh }LhP{QE ¦azG Z
..ŠMac LMn ..”E “lc LM
In “Vile Milk,” Nizar assumes the role of a man watching an adulterous
act between a married woman and her lover. In vivid but revolting imagery,
the man describes the scene of a woman fornicating while her baby is
crawling nearby – an unwitting recollection perhaps of the great pre-Islamic
poet Umru al-Qais’ boasting of a similar conquest. Moralizing and selfrighteous, the male voice sets the entire blame on the shoulders of the
woman being a mother and the seat of honor:
Feed him … of your breasts, feed
him
And pour the dirtiest of milk in his
mouth
…
Your simple-hearted man is far
From you, his honor, his children’s
47
mother.
Šgrz›E fG]YLs JM ..Šgrz›I
ŠgSj œgl_QE a’mI xt’|En
...
]gzj ..§gUtQE œg{QE fVn‚
Šg†j £In Šbam LG …f†m
In “The Prostitute,” his longest and perhaps best poem of the
collection, Nizar tackles the individual and social implications of prostitution in
a puritan society that deigns not to admit it even exists. Nizar here seems to
be speaking rather from personal experience. As an adolescent he had
certainly visited the brothels of Damascus or Beirut where he felt tormented
with guilt and self-chastisement:
In the face of the prostitute, I used to feel endless human pain, as if I were
carrying humanity’s sins on my back. Every time I left a prostitute’s boudoir, I
would apologize to my body and cry in front of it like a guilty child that it might
48
forgive me.
Thus Nizar begins by painting an intimate picture of the whorehouse:
tawdry and diseased; the madam of the house, old and shriveled; the pimp,
worthless and pandering. He then describes the prostitutes young and old as
both victims and victimizers. Suddenly he switches voice from that of a male
viewer to that of an old trollop, speaking in the first person singular lamenting
her life and years. The woman then switches to the plural “we” speaking for
her oppressed kind, where, in this voice, Nizar delivers a sharp criticism of the
duality of the society which only blames and punishes the female while turning
a blind eye to her male partner:
She is held responsible for adultery,
But how many a villainous man
answers for his share?
Together in one bed they were
49
The girl is fallen, the man is free.
Fƒn ..xsde E•[ k‡sDE •wUe
•wUG Z ..LsdQE xMEH £a™M
Lrprb ...]cEn aGa|n
“VaQE kr_Gn ..y†tQE §iUe
In his treatment of the sordid in life, Nizar seems to have fallen under
the influence of Elias Abu Shabaka, a romantic poet bedeviled by the
“vileness” of human sex in his Christian worldview. But whereas Abu Shabaka
presents sex as sordid and inherently irredeemable, Nizar begins to
distinguish himself in singling out duality and inconsistency in social attitudes
to sex as the source of evil and the cause of his anger. He does not condemn
the act of love as much as the social and moral distortions that surround it,
showing more development toward the end of the collection. Furthermore,
behind his young moralizing platitudes, one perceives a measure of
pleasurable voyeurism throughout the poems. Nizar’s uncovering of beauty in
the unlikeliest of places is one of the most powerful elements of his poetic
style. For him, truth, even in pain, is beautiful, and beauty always redeems.
This romantic belief will stay with Nizar till the end, and will color his style with
an innate optimism even in his darkest moments. It is perhaps this unique
paradoxical ability to bring up and challenge the moribund while inducing a
sense of optimism that galvanized his huge audiences and made his poetry a
joy to read.
Notes
CHAPTER III
THE DIPLOMAT POET YEARS
1945-66
CITIES EAST AND WEST
Cairo 1945-48 Rebirth on the Nile
Two months after he celebrated his twenty-second birthday in the
spring of 1945, Nizar graduated from Damascus university with a valuable law
degree. Law was perhaps the most attractive profession in the Arab world at
the time, still largely the domain of the scions of upper-middle class families.
Top government jobs were dominated by lawyers: “My father wanted me to
join [Cairo University’s] School of Law ,” remembers the late Addul Rahman
Badawi, a prominent Egyptian philosopher, “because it was the college that
graduated cabinet ministers, and he was hoping I became a minister one
day… the belief that the School of Law graduated ministers was common
among the students and most of the populace, because they saw that most of
the ministers were men of law; for the control by these men of the ministries
was such that the Ministry of Justice was never in the hands of an outsider,
whereas they took over ministries far and apart from law…”1 This fact of the
prominence of civic and well-educated men of law in power positions will
stand in sharp contrast in the eyes of Nizar later when military boots begin to
trample the Persian carpets of the halls of power.2
On April 25, 1945, one month before his graduation from university,
Nizar joined the Syrian ministry of foreign affairs in Syria’s fledgling
government. Under the French mandate the Syrians did not have any foreign
representation other than in Paris, so when they took over the running of their
country after the 1943 elections, the Foreign ministry was naturally small,
inexperienced, and thoroughly dominated by the Syrian aristocracy.3 New
posts needed to be filled quickly abroad and educated recruits like Nizar,
energetic and well-connected, were much in demand to staff the diplomatic
missions opening rapidly. Nizar’s eyes were set on Cairo, a city he had visited
less than a year before in a training tour along with his classmates. Ever since
that visit, he wished to spend time in Cairo where most events and
developments of note in Arab life were happening. His wish was soon granted
and on August 2, 1945, just three months after the start of his employment,
Nizar was hurriedly dispatched to the Syrian embassy in Cairo, the cultural
capital of the Arab world at the time and a must pilgrimage for any Arab poet
searching after the holy grail of fame.
Cairo was and still is by far the most populous Arab city, sprawling,
lively, and hectic. But Cairo of the forties was more than just a big city, it was
the dominant cultural and literary capital of the Arabs. The city of Ahmad
Shawqi, Naguib Mahfouz (1911- ), Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898-1987), and
countless others who lay the groundwork of modern Arabic literature. Its
universities and academies had now for half a century attracted some of the
most distinguished scholars and researchers in Arabic studies, native-born
pioneer academicians like Taha Hussein (1889-1973) and great foreign
Arabists like Louis Massignon (1883-1962) and Martin Lings (1909-2005).
Cairo of the 1940’s, the capital of a corrupt but liberal monarchy orbiting in the
British sphere of influence, was also at its zenith as a cosmopolitan center of
independent journalism, theater, cinematic arts, and singing. This was the
golden age of liberal culture in modern Arab history.
Cairo was also a city undergoing tremendous social transformation, a
process that would ultimately be replicated in other major Arab cities and with
similar consequences. Poor jobless rural migrants were amassing in shanty
slums not far away from some of the poshest neighborhoods anywhere,
where the advantaged aristocracy lived in oblivious abandon. Egypt was a
country where about 5% of the population owned 95% of the land and its
resources. It was a land of Beys and Pashas – feudal lords in control of the
country’s wealth and, less assuredly, its politics. Adding insult to injury was
the fact that almost all of this feudal class was foreign in origin, mostly
Circassian, Turkish, and Greek. The lively cultural bandwagon masquerading
this treacherous reality was actually heading to a sudden breaking point that
would soon drown the liberal movement in another false euphoric dream.
It is into this maelstrom that Nizar plunged wholeheartedly in the late
forties, with high expectations for adventure and success. For the first few
months, the young poet loved the change from Damascus. But it was his first
extended stay abroad, and life in Cairo did not prove as happy as he
expected. Young, single and overworked in the Syrian consulate, he felt
lonely and challenged despite the many connections he made. So when his
family pressed him to settle into married life, he offered little resistance to the
idea. His parents, in a manner so very Syrian, hand-picked for him a young
girl from a related family. The bride was Zahra Iqbeiq, a family girl whose
name is never mentioned in Nizar’s vast works. In January 1946, after a brief
engagement, the couple were wedded in a family celebration, and soon after
the poet took his bride with him back to Egypt. In this unpretentious marriage,
once again Nizar followed the model of a good son living up to his family’s
expectations.
Nizar’s diplomatic post in Cairo insured him easy access to Egypt’s
best and finest. And he made the most of it. He attended the salons, met the
celebrities and read his poetry wherever he could. But the reception at first
was, not surprisingly, cold and condescending. He was not known yet in
Egypt, and was viewed by many as a protégé of his post, an amateurish
rhymester at best. Despite this image, he managed to get to know some of
the shakers and movers of the literary world of Cairo such as playwright
Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898-1987), journalist Muhammad Hasanein Haykal, and
poet Ibrahim Naji; he especially struck friendship with those closer to his age
from Egypt’s rising generation like lyricist poets Kamel al-Shinnawi and
Ahmad Rami. It was at that time that Nizar made the acquaintance of the likes
of Muhammad abdul Wahhab, the greatest Arab musician of all time, with
whom he began a lifelong friendship. Nizar wished to have Abdul Wahhab put
into song one of his poems, but the young poet felt awed to ask an artist
whose songs were still in the thrall of Ahmad Shawqi, the poet laureate of the
Arabs.
Nizar’s real break to fame was not to be in song, but in the form of a
sobering slap, when he was denigratingly attacked by Ali Tantawi in March
1946 in al-Rissala, Egypt’s premier weekly magazine of the time. Tantawi was
a well-known Syrian writer and “Islamangelist” who contributed regularly to alRissala. Somehow a year had passed before he even took note of Nizar’s
publication of The Brunette Told Me collection. The buzz that Nizar was
beginning to make in Cairo’s literary scene seems to have raised the hackles
of this traditionalist advocate, who was particularly vexed when the Radio of
Cairo hosted the poet as a voice from Syria. Tantawi attacked him and his
poetry as immoral and inferior:
A year ago, a booklet was published in Damascus, with a soft colorful cover,
wrapped in gift wraps such as what you find in weddings, tied with red bands
like those that the French, early in their occupation of Syria, asked the
prostitutes to put on their hips for distinction. The print looks like poetry with
hemstitches of the same length, if measured in centimeters! It includes a
description of that which goes on between the lovesick profligate and the
brash experienced whore, realistically with no imagination because its
composer is not an imaginative man of letters, but a spoiled rich boy dear to
his parents, a school student read by students in their schools, boys and
4
girls.
The attack was clearly moralistic and unfair. Nizar’s poetry showed
imagination – not as much as in his later works, but the budding talent is quite
perceptible in his early work as noted before. Of Nizar’s transgressions, it is
the openness with which he tackled the sexual in Arab life that really miffed
Tantawi. Consequently, the bulwark of the latter’s attack is framed in sexual
terms, in emphasis of the weight of sex and its mores in Arab life.5 What is
important about this scathing attack is how lasting and useful its arguments
would prove to be. From that point on, the “rich libertine mama’s boy”
accusation would accompany Nizar, forming the mainstay of the discourse of
most of his riled-up critics. The truth of the matter, he may have been wellconnected, young, and dashing with a taste for the exquisite in life, yet he was
never what he was made to be: neither rich nor rakish. The son of a
confectioner, he mainly lived off his employment salary and it would be some
twenty years before he made any good financial gains from his publishing.
Like any healthy young man, he was experiencing love in its ups and downs,
but he was quite discrete about it – so discrete in fact that it is rather difficult
for the biographer to track. Although he was disturbed at the vehemence of
the attack against him, it was not entirely surprising to him. He knew his
hometown and its ancient moral pieties all too well to be surprised. On the
contrary, he soon learned to relish his growing Byronic reputation. He realized
it added warmth and mystery to his yet uneventful life. And this only endeared
him more and more to the young and restless crowd, an audience to whom he
would soon start playing.
Tantawi’s comment about Nizar’s readers being students was largely
accurate. Outside literary officialdoms, his fresh style and daring themes
appealed mainly to students, his generation, and that proved a strength, not a
weakness. Mohammad Yousuf Najm, an academic and critic, remembers
how, as a young student, he first came to know about Nizar Qabbani through
a poem published in a Lebanese literary magazine called al-Adeeb [The
Humanist] in 1943: “I remember that my friends were taken by this poem
which did not look like the poetry of any of the poets we were reading. We
were taken by the modernity of its words, the freshness of its imagery, the
effortlessness of its flow, the lightness of its meter, and the fact that it was free
of preaching and moralizing, and had no fear of taboos.”6 The poem was
“Olive-Colored Eyes” a gentle melodious composition. Three years later, now
a professor of Arabic at the American University of Beirut, Najm took note
again of Nizar’s rising star when he was vacationing in the Syrian coastal city
of Latakia. Sitting in a sahra, the traditional Arabic late-night concert, he was
pleasantly surprised to hear the audience calling on the singer to sing that
very poem! The singer readily obliged, crooning its soft measured lines to the
accompanying happy tunes and heaving with the typical sighs and ahs of the
night-mellowed listeners! Then the singer followed by other poems from the
Brunette collection. This incident is just a foretaste of what is to come, and an
early indication of the lyrical potential in Nizar’s poetry that easily yields to
song.
Although the young poet may have begun to find his footing among his
peers, in more sophisticated circles his tender poetry, rather than garnering
the critical acclaim he craved, seemed always to bring controversy and
trouble. A simple poetry reading could very well turn sour with disapproving
comments from some patriarch, as happened at a friends’ tea party in Cairo
early in July 1947. After reading some of his late poems, Nizar was criticized
by some pedants for not vocalizing the endings of his words, a requirement of
eloquent speech in classical Arabic but commonly ignored in modern times.
The ensuing discussion between those who approved and those who
disapproved overshadowed his recital and reminded him of his still precarious
position as a poet.7 To be a great poet of the Arabs, he had to convince them
of his worth and to bear their polemics in the meantime.
Arab life was getting more complicated by the end of the nineteen
forties – irrevocably. The Great War was over, and a new reality was setting
in. As the exhausted European colonial powers began to shrink back to
Europe, they left the running of the newly-formed Arab states in the hands of
their closest allies: the secular Arab aristocracies. These elites were now in
charge of maintaining and developing the democratic institutions set up in the
previous quarter century and, more importantly to the people perhaps,
developing the struggling economies of these societies.
The cultural life of the Arabs was itself changing, especially in relation
to women. The extension of education to women in the previous two decades
now began to show results as the voices of young educated Arab women
started to be heard and recognized. The 1940’s saw for the first time the rise
of a young generation of female creative writers: authors like Widaad
Sakakeeni and Samira Azzam, and poets like Fadwa Touqaan and Nazek elMalaa’ika. Their names began to grace such widely read literary magazine as
Al-Rissala and al-Adeeb.
With change came social tension and conflict. The increasing public
participation of Syrian women, especially those from the upper classes, was
met with grumblings and protests from Syria’s religious purists who saw it as a
Western corruption of their sanctified way of life. The tension was such that
even as the country was struggling for independence from France, civil strife
would sometimes erupt between the traditionalists and the liberals over
matters as simple as a woman’s right to go into movie theaters, as indeed did
happen when some religious zealots incited Damascus’s rabble into
harassing and dragging out women attending public cinemas. The backlash
from the liberal camp, who controlled the government, was swift and
overpowering. For the first time, the new state flexed its muscles in support of
its emancipative agenda. Nizar’s nemesis, Ali Tantawi, wrote expressively
lamenting the new state of affairs:
… And the result was that Damascus, which used to veil the girl at 10 years,
saw on the day of independence girls 16 years and older walking in the
parade showing their thighs, their breasts shaking, almost eaten with
degenerate gazes… It also saw a beautiful girl adorned with the best of
ornaments, dressed as a bride, and riding a car among young men – they
said she was the symbol of Arab Unity! They did not know that Arabness
meant respect for moral values, not breaking them. The bride’s procession
moved on along with her father, a shameless unrepentant man. Another girl
was said to be Syria Unchained… and such meaningless hallucinations
which aim only to exploit the national day of independence to undermine
8
virtue and tear out its veil…”
It is these women – Westernized, upper-class, and accessible – who
were the sole focus of Nizar’s love poetry at this stage, celebrating their
beauty and fussing over every detail of their lives. Unlike other poets who
mostly invoked models of femininity stored in the collective memory from long
bygone eras in the deserts of Arabia, Nizar wrote poetry on modern city
women. These were “real women living now and not far from him in urban
settings, they had bodies to be seen, breasts, behinds, and legs.. The girl who
Nizar saw and fell in love with was a city girl whom he saw in front of fashion
windows shopping for her clothes, even her lingerie… in the city where she
took the bus.. the wind fluttering her clothes.. or on the beach in swimsuits. A
girl who met her lover secretly and openly..”9
To be sure, other than some girls from dauntingly aristocratic families,
few of Nizar’s idealized women resided in Damascus. Nizar’s beauties lived a
hundred miles across the border in nearby Lebanon, a far more relaxed and
cosmopolitan place than the tight-necked Damascus. Ever since his boyhood
summers in Lebanon with his family, Nizar spared no opportunity to visit
Beirut and to savior its freedom. Whenever he returned from Cairo, Lebanon
was a must stop for him to refresh his soul in that country’s famed mountain
resorts. Soon he built himself a coterie of friends: journalists and writers with
similar interests in art, literature, and joie de vivre, some with more abandon
perhaps than he could afford. Foremost among those friends was Suhail
Idriss, a young journalist with big ambitions. The two first met on the pages of
al-Adeeb in February 1943. When Nizar’s poem “Olive-Colored Eyes”
appeared in that issue, it was right next to a short story by Idriss. And
beautiful Lebanon was there in that early poem:
My Blonde… this heart has no use
If not in love with you
Are these your eyes? Or eyes of
Lebanon
Its groves in green budding season
Or are they the sun-sheltered grapes
of a Zahle vineyard?
Oh pastoral picture of a village
10
praying in the east.
FQ fl‡M xh }Lƒ }[ ŠzSs LM œliQE EXY ..NEaiŒ
–lzG
Šr|PM xh f_‰e ŠVEacI ..}L†tQ £I ..f†gm
ŽCPrQE
˜r‹QE xh LYHPi†m x’•G "ˆglc‚" ˆMaƒ £I
Ža_G FQ
xh ©ƒae ˆGa^ JM ycªPQ ˆgSGC ¡CP\ LG
Ža‹rQE
Toward the end of 1947, Nizar worked hard to bring to publication his
second collection. He oversaw the booklet’s design personally, choosing for
its cover “a sensuous picture that rouses interest and compels purchase,” as
a friend put it.11 To add to the appeal, he entitled the collection, A Breast’s
Childhood, aptly reflecting its themes. With such a sassy title and a bold
cover, the booklet proved an eye-catcher at a time when few publishers,
beyond popular magazines, gave much attention to book design. But by
adopting this insouciant attitude, it was clear that Nizar had made up his mind
which audience to endear himself to, and which audience he was willing to
lose. Yet, he did not leave it merely for chance. In what would become a
standard practice of his, he sent out autographed gift copies to all those who
mattered to him in the world of Arab journalism and book publishing.
Part fresh talent, part strategic planning, A Breast’s Childhood was
well-received, perhaps even more than Nizar himself expected. Several
Lebanese magazines, which by and large were more liberal than those in
Egypt and Syria, gave it a thumbs-up. Not the kind of man who turns the other
cheek, Nizar had somehow also managed to break into the ranks – of all
places – of al-Rissala, the very magazine on whose pages he was belittled
two years before. Several months after the publication of this collection, Nizar
met Anwar Ma’addaawi, a young literary critic writing for the magazine, at a
social event and read some poems for him then sent him a gift copy of his
new collection. Ma’addaawi actually found the poetry quite appealing and
perceived great promise in the poet. He could only nod in agreement when he
read the Nizar’s prescient prophecy of his own future in the first poem of the
collection.
Light I made.. but many’d come and
gone
As if they’ve never been
The reading world will come adore
Toasting rose and wine
Few buds today.. there will be more
Each year the leaves will grow on
12
vine
EP‰Mn EPeI «–lT Fƒn ..~wbI xs[
..EPilT LM BCDE `LUc xh Fpswƒ
xsIai•Q Lgs]QE ]‹•_•| E]ž
ŽazQEn ..HCPQE Cn]G uazŒ œ¬sn
•aTI Lptiz•| ..CEC‚I ˆz‰j £PgQE
ŽCPQE ©l{G £Lm “ƒ xhn
The critic wrote an enthusiastic review of the poems, but in a
somewhat comic twist, he had to change the title of the collection from that of
A Breast’s Childhood to that of A River’s Childhood. For when he submitted
the review to the chief editor and owner of the magazine, Ahmad Hassan al-
Zayyat, a respected writer and journalist of enduring renown, the latter asked
him to replace the “d” of nahd (breast) with the “r” of nahr (river) so as not to
offend the prudish sensibilities of his readers! The story, funny as it is, shows
Nizar was really pushing the limits of propriety in the Arab world one word at a
time. Yet, in the eyes of earnest discerning people like Zayyat, his talent was
his saving grace.
In putting his weight behind Nizar, Ma’addaawi was aware of the
significance of his backing in legitimizing the poet and the poetry. He wrote in
the May 3, 1948 issue of al-Rissala that when Nizar read some poems for
him, he was not sure if the poet was only trying to impress him with his best
poems, but after reading the collection, he said, “now I can confidently
introduce the poet and his poetry to people.”13 He then goes on to defend him
on both content and form:
Those who do not understand the message of art will say that the collection
is but the prayers of a mind’s worshiping the body… I would say these are
prayers for art… this is not defense of the man behind this poetry, but
defense of art itself. True art knows no constraints, and when art starts
wearing even the flimsiest layer of social hypocrisy, it would have surely
14
strayed from its true mission which is to reflect life in all honesty.
I am with Nizar Qabbani, even if I had to stand alone beside him, and I will
listen to him with all my heart when he whispers in his poem “Nipple”:
CP{m x•ƒaj xh -jL| CLs ¦ac LG
CP†j ˆjP•’M ˆ|PrpM ˆrlƒ LG
uCPzŒ LpsªPQ “j …NEarc “j …NEar|
•ag®„QE €]ps xh ~]r™e ˆlt^ £I
[...¥QE]
Thus goes his meters and rhymes, in harmony with the ambiance in which he
breathes his poetry, the ambiance of short meters, and dancing rhymes;
where his descriptive images draw strength from the fertility of the poetic field
and its potential; and where his poetic leaps draw their strength from two
15
other leaps: emotional and musical leaps.”
The Breast’s Childhood collection is made up of 37 poems that Nizar
wrote between 1944 and late 1947. The dedication poem is addressed to the
ever anonymous female lover who is the inspiration, the subject of the poetry,
and the interlocutor.
These are love leaflets
On your lips they grew
They lived years in my heart
16
To return to you.
œc ~LiGCn uXY
fg•SŒ klm yrs
L†g†| uC]„j yŒLm
fgQ[ HPze x’Q
The poems do not differ much in themes from those in his earlier
collection, as is clear from such titles as “On the Clouds”, “Whisper”, “On
Harvest Grounds”, “Black Braids”, “Candle and a Breast”, “A Green Eye”, “To
a Yellow Dress”, “Lip”, “Her name”, “The Tryst”, “First Kiss”, etc. In these
poems, Nizar is still in the grip of the Romantics: the poetry is very personal,
self-absorbed, and timeless:
Colored amphorae just broke. Our tryst
is in the clouds, under the windows of the
east.
To ports of emerald we journey
along the west’s blue drapery.
With fragrance, our carpet wafts
in pink sweet-scented flaps.
We nourish on rose petals
17
and what’s in the night of love and tunes.
Ls]mPM .}PlQE CEaV ~aUƒ
Ža‹QE XhEPs y_e …Fg®QE xh
L†•lcC ..‚nagSQE šhEarj
ŽCdQE `a®rQE CP•| klmn
L†•Œah vPUe agtzQE ©Mn
..–S¬QE ˆGa{m ..ˆGHCn
LMn ..HCPQE ŽCn L†MLz›n
–‹m JMn F®s JM “glQE xh
The only perceptible difference from his first collection is perhaps the
intensity with which he yearns for a distant world of the imagination infused
with pleasant fragrance and bright happy colors, a motif that dominates most
of the poems in this collection. For despite his small successes, Nizar after all
was not really happy. The reality of having to work and live in a constraining
environment went against his nature as a poet. He was beginning to suffer
from what he would later call “the duality between the life of a diplomat and
poetry, between my masks and my real face.”18 But the advantages of being a
diplomat and the promise of future professional advancement outweighed for
now the yearnings of the poet inside of him. He coped with this unpleasant
reality by escaping into a poetic universe all his own, part fantasy:
I do not wish for clarity.. be a shawl
Of smoke… a tryst that never arrives
Live like a vision in my mind
Be a legend or be nothing at all
Let me build you.. a poetry.. a heart
Oh soft woman, if not for me you are dust
I live so long as you are a whisper in my
veins
19
When you come real… I disappear..
LcLŒn xsPƒ ..vPbPQE ]GCI Z
Jg_G Z E]mPMn ..}LTH JM
x†gtV xh ±g¬e x‹gz•Qn
}P’e Z ˆhEaT xsP’•Qn
EC]\n ..EazŒ fg†jI x†gƒaeE
Jg› ..ˆSgzb LG uZPQ ysI
LUrY x^nam xh ²yMH LM LsI
!}PƒI Z Lz^En ²y†ƒ E•Ÿh
And part poeticized experience. There are several poems in A Breast’s
Childhood, such as “Savage Lips”, “Vixen”, and “With a Woman”, that were
certainly occasioned by Nizar’s topsy-turvy relations with women in his life,
presumably before his marriage. But as the poem above indicates, poetry and
the universe it creates is beginning to supersede women, and indeed love
itself, for Nizar. The poet is beginning to see, not only his beloved, but himself
as well – his own existence – in terms of this fantasy, with all the implications
of this on his relations with people around him.
Nizar’s velvety fantasy world, however, was jarring with the stormy
political events ravaging Syria and the region, events that found little echo in
his poetry so far (apart from an idyllic poem entitled “My homeland”). For
Syria’s procession to independence was not entirely peaceful. At first Syria
benefited from the weakened position of the French mandate after the fall of
France itself to Nazi Germany. The Free French government, eager to secure
as much support as it could in its own war of liberation, then pledged Syrian
independence in 1943 in line with a 1936 bilateral treaty which the French
parliament had refused to ratify before the war. But as the French soon
emerged “victorious,” they were quite reluctant in the end to relinquish control
of Syria without securing some concessions in the form of another treaty tying
Syria to France. The Syrians, under the able leadership of President Shukri
al-Quwwatli, had somehow maneuvered themselves into membership in the
United Nations – largely by declaring war on Germany as that country was
falling to the Allies – and demanded to be accorded their full rights under the
organization’s charter. A confrontation developed that culminated in a countrywide uprising and the French bombardment of Damascus on May 29, 1945
which left scores dead and injured. The action was resoundingly condemned
by Britain, for reasons of its own, and with a nod from the United States,
Winston Churchill issued an ultimatum to the French and sent British troops
into Damascus to restore calm. The last of French forces left Syria on April
17, 1946, the day of independence in Syria.20
Needless to say, Syrian and Arab passions ran very high during these
times, and neo-classical Arab poets, as their wont in the Arabic poetic
tradition, gave eloquent expression to these passions. Nizar, however, was
nowhere to be heard. His silence was not really noticed at the time as he did
not possess the stature of a great poet yet, but it would be remembered in
times to come.21
Another more marked absence from Nizar’s poetry of the time was any
reference to the human disaster unfolding in Palestine at the time which
galvanized the Arab streets east and west. The Arab-Israeli conflict had been
festering for over a quarter century now, and by the late forties it had entered
a climactic phase. Arabs, almost to a man, saw the problem of Palestine in
conspiratorial terms, and they had good reasons to. The land, holy to the
three Abrahimic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, was rich in
symbols. After all, had Palestine not been at the center of nine Crusades
since the 7th century? For the Arabs, history just kept repeating itself.
Furthermore, the Zionist project of establishing a homeland for the Jews in
Palestine, to which the Western powers committed themselves, was indeed
problematic and involved some transgression against the indigenous
population of Palestine. The Palestinians saw their land slyly hustled through
the contrivance of rich Jewish organizations, a complacent, if not colluding,
British authority, and some greedy Arab landowners. It was but natural for
them to see outrageous injustice in the UN partition plan of 1947. How could a
religious community which was just 3% of the population at the turn of the
century and which swelled to 30% through unmitigated immigration be given
60% of the land, dispossessing a people who lived on it for thousands of
years?
The Arabs saw the Palestine issue in terms of right and wrong, two
moral concepts that are relative and subjective. They somehow misconstrued
the complex new international reality after the war, and did not grasp the
effect of the Holocaust on Western support for the creation of the state of
Israel, especially in the United States. The war of 1948, in which four Arab
ramshackle “armies” attempted to save Palestine – or whatever was left of it -turned out to be a war of ineptness, betrayal, and self-deception. The Jewish
forces, which were depicted in Arab media as no more than cowardly gangs
that would be squashed in no time, proved to be a well-organized wellequipped and determined fighting force.22 There was the scandal of the deals
of dysfunctional weaponry provided to Arab armies, an episode that would be
branded in the memory of fighting officers like Jamal Abdul Nasser and Adeeb
al-Shishakli. There was even outright betrayals that only recently came to
light, like that of Fawzi al-Qaawiqji, the general commander of the Syrian
forces in Palestine, and the proclaimed hero of earlier Arab wars and revolts.
Declassified Israeli communications of the war reveals how Qaawiqji
acquiesced to secret Israeli requests not to intervene to relieve the besieged
Abdul Qader al-Hussaini, the commander of the Palestinian forces. Husseini’s
urgent calls for ammunition went unanswered. Qaawiqji, who was wellsupplied by the Arab League, left him to die, and went back to celebrate his
made-up heroics to a crowd eager to believe.23
The reality was that the Arab armies did not do much fighting. They
lacked the training and the equipment. One Syrian official of the time
remembers how the Syrian minister of defense called the director of the public
telephone company at 3:00 AM on May 15, 1948, the first day of the war,
demanding that he provide the army with battlefield telecommunication
equipment that did exist. When the director replied that the company had no
such equipment, the minister would not listen and threatened to execute him
at 6:00 AM if he did not come up with the equipment. The director had to run
for his life. That is how the war was being fought.
Above all, the Arab leaders lacked the resolve to fight and win the war,
and did not have the courage to admit it publicly to their people. The decision
to go to war in the first place seems to have been a political one, not based on
sound military assessment, but just to live up to a false image of power and to
bend to popular expectations. Egypt’s king Farouq decided on the war against
the counsel of his prime minister Nuqrashi Pasha. Nuqrashi warned the king
that the Egyptian army was not prepared for the war, and advised instead to
help the Palestinians through other means such as guerrilla warfare, but it
was not in the king to accept that.24 Even as the war was being fought,
political decisions continued to undermine the military effort. When the Syrian
chief of staff, brigadier Abdullah Atfa, drew a solid offensive plan against
Israeli forces, it was turned down by the civilian minister of defense. Atfa’s
plan was to attack, not from the Syrian border with Palestine where the
Israelis were amassed expecting the attack, but from Lebanon by occupying
the Palestinian seaport cities to cut off Israeli supplies. But the civilians
overruled Atfa’s plan because they did not want to take the war inside the
areas of Palestine given to the Israelis under the U.N. partition plan. They
basically wanted to prosecute the war to a certain point and then stop and
conclude a truce. In contrast, the Israelis had no such scruples as they
invaded Palestinian areas: they were determined to acquire as much land as
they could. The Syrian offensive from Syria’s border fizzled, just as Atfa
predicted, in the face of the fortified Israeli positions. Ironically, general Atfa
was made to pay the price. He was removed as the chief of staff, and in his
place, the government brought in brigadier Hussni al-Zayim, a man who would
soon play a short, but very important role in the shaping of Syria’s – and
perhaps the Arab region’s – future over the next half a century.
In the end, the Palestinians were in effect left to their own devices, and
ultimately to the mercy of their enemies. The Israelis, possessed by the fresh
horrors of the Holocaust, did not have much room for mercy. It took them only
few acts of brutality, such as the one committed in Deir Yassin on May 17,
1948 to terrorize 700,000 Palestinians out of their homes, villages, and
orange groves, into the deserts of neighboring countries. And that was only
the beginning.
Few Arabs at the time grasped the real implications of the 1948 nakba
or “disaster,” as it will be referred to. The suffering and misery of the
Palestinians would soon become a home issue for the Arab populations
among whom the refugees were dispersed in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt,
and later as farther afield as Kuwait and Iraq. In time, the Palestinian
diaspora, in great part because of their predicament, would become one of
the most educated classes in the Arab world, ultimately diffusing into
educational institutions across the region and helping to shape the new Arab
consciousness – even institutions like the American University of Beirut would
fall under their sway.
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its fallout would soon become one
of the most detrimental influences on the way Arabs viewed the West,
especially America. For, as mentioned earlier, until the eruption of the conflict,
the United States had been seen in positive light due to its non-governmental
educational history in the region, and the absence of an imperial past with the
Arabs. But the unexpected role that the United States played in pushing for
the creation of Israel at the U.N. (mainly by coercing the vote of weak member
nations) and its constant buttressing of the new state created a sudden wave
of hatred and animosity toward this far-off nation, a passion that only
intensified with time. Arabs could not comprehend the intricacies of American
domestic politics and the position of the Jews in the American psyche and
social fabric. Arabs always asked, How could a nation so based on freedom,
human rights, and secular ideals, possibly throw its weight behind the creation
of a religious, racial state while turning a blind eye to the rights and suffering
of the indigenous population, both Christian and Muslim?
Not that the Americans were not aware of the implications of this
conflict on their relations with the Arabs. In fact, the diplomats and specialists
in the U.S. government most familiar with the region were quite opposed to
the partition plan. Loy Henderson, the director of the State Department’s
Office of Near Eastern Affairs wrote in September 1947 that the “partitioning
of Palestine and the setting up of a Jewish State [is opposed] by practically
every member of the Foreign Service and of the Department who has been
engaged… with the Near and Middle East.”25 Bayard Dodge, the president of
the American University of Beirut since 1919, writing in the April 1948 issue of
the Reader’s Digest had this to say about the results of the American support
for Israel: “All the work done by our philanthropic nonprofit American agencies
in the Arab world – our Near East Foundation, our missions, our YMCA and
YWCA, our Boston Jesuit college in Baghdad, our colleges in Cairo, Beirut,
Damascus – would be threatened with complete frustrations and collapse…”26
He was right, Arab relations with America would never be the same again.
For successive Arab governments, the misery of the Palestinian
refugees and the festering conflict in Palestine would become both a burden
on their political programs and a useful political card to be played when
needed. From now on, the Palestinian cause would become the centerpiece
item on every leadership summit with constant demands for action to alleviate
the suffering of the Palestinians, both refugees and those living under
occupation, and to prepare for some action to help them recover their lands.
From the vantage point of the present, it seems that one of the gravest errors
that the Palestinians committed was to delegate their fate to their fellow
Arabs, and not engage directly with the U.N. or the Israelis. Had the
Palestinians accepted the partition plan, unfair as it was, they would have
probably saved themselves much more misery.
The very absence of any references to these political turmoils gripping
Syria and the region in Nizar’s poetry of the time is in fact representative of
the dominant Arab intellectual state of mind then. Nizar was not simply “silent”
when others were loud. Apart from few persisting neo-classicists like
Mohammad Mahdi al-Jawahiri (1899-1997), most of the leading poets of the
time were drifting along the Romantic current. They generally shunned the
immediate and the mundane in their poetry for the remote and the ideal.
Some like Saeed Aqal delved into ancient Phoenician myths creating a world
of their own, some like Ibrahim Naji wrote passionate poetry with great
tenderness, others wrote purely subjective poetry that confined itself within
the poet’s personal concerns.27 Nizar was very much part of this Zeitgeist. He
defended his choice eloquently in the introduction he wrote to Breast’s
Childhood:
Poetry engulfs all being.. and issues in all directions depicting the beautiful as
well as the abominable, tackling the refined and trivial, the sublime and the
humble.. They are wrong those who believe it is an ever-rising curve,
because the call to virtue is not for art to make, it is for religions and ethics. I
believe in the beauty of the abominable, the pleasure in pain, the purity of sin
28
– which are all true in the eyes of the artist.
One could easily hear an Oscar Wilde in these lines. To be certain,
Nizar’s art-for-art’s-sake argument is but an echo of the views of such
influential critics as Abbas Mahmoud al-Akkad (1889-1964) and Ibrahim alMazini (1889-1949) who had argued the case with vehemence for the
preceding two decades. Nizar advanced the argument to defend his poetry
against those who questioned his motives in writing so solely and openly
about women in a fashion that violated Arab moral givens. Nizar believed his
mission was to create a pleasurable poetic experience even if he had to
trespass moral decorum. Like many Romantics, he still believed that
nationalist and overly political activism did not accord with his mission.
Yet, Nizar’s stance created two paradoxes for him that he was yet to
resolve. For one, does not the poet’s concern with the abominable, even in
the context of pleasure, put him in a position to expose society’s ills? How
long could he go on ignoring the fact that the vast majority of women in his
homeland were not the free Westernized woman he is celebrating? The other
paradox was whether treatment of war in all its human complexities could be
approached within the bounds of the abominable? It would take Nizar many
years before he could resolve these conflicts.
Other than these literary reasons, however, Nizar might have had
other, more personal, more pragmatic reasons to avoid political activism: his
job and his family. Anyone who saw how tumultuous political life was in Syria
in the late 1940’s would naturally think twice before tying his fortunes to the
swinging politics. Governments lasted only for few months and careers were
ended overnight. As a young diplomat whose livelihood depended on his job,
he knew very well safety was in keeping it professional. He is now a family
man shouldering the responsibilities of a soon-to-be father – his wife was
already pregnant with their first child. From the very beginning, it was clear
that Nizar had much to say about the sordid condition of women in Arab
society, but he was afraid not only of what voicing his views would do to his
career, but also of how these bold critical views would be received by his own
family. If the happy and amorous poetry he wrote was causing all this
brouhaha, what would happen if he started truly agitating against the
contented world of Damascus, the world of his family and friends?
Ankara 1949-51 Looking Westward
Cairo may have put Nizar on the right path to fame in the Arab world.
But the poet was not a happy man in Cairo. “I used to cry in Egypt during my
first stay abroad” he later told his friend Suhail Idriss.29 Something about Arab
life frustrated him. He could not explain it yet, but he could feel it. He yearned
for a more ideal world: freer, greener – a less contradictory world. As the days
of his mission in Cairo, that most Eastern of cities, drew to a close, his eyes
were turning North in search of that world. A post in Europe was his dream,
but the time was not ripe yet. Posts to Paris or London were coveted by more
powerful or senior colleagues. So when he was offered a post in Ankara in
Turkey, he thought it was close enough. A step in the right direction.
It was winter 1949 when he and his young wife journeyed north by train
from Damascus to Ankara. The poet’s eyes looked unkindly at the great
desultory expanses of the Syrian desert that the train was chugging through.
Like all Damascenes who grew up in the lush green oasis of Damascus, he
never saw the great Arabian deserts the way Bedouin Arabs saw them. Nor
did he ever see the timeless serenity which bewitched European travelers and
adventurers. To someone like Nizar who loved the exquisite in urban life, the
desert was a sordid harsh reality, more an emblem of bankruptcy than of
purity. He hated the dust and loathed the shifting sands. So he naturally
beamed as arid lands slowly gave way to the rolling green mountains of
Anatolia. Turkey must have seemed a perfect place for him: captivating
landscape, majestic metropolises, quaint villages, a great Eastern golden
past, and a decidedly Westward-looking present. It would have been perfect
…had only the people spoke a language he knew. Yet, Turkey seemed like a
cozy resting stop on his stagecoach journey to the discovery of Europe.
Turkey did not inspire Nizar so much as it provided him with a peaceful
place to sit and write. In January, the poet’s spirits were raised by a generally
positive review in al-Adeeb of the Breast’s Childhood collection. The author of
the article compared Nizar for the first time with the famous 8th century love
poet Omar ibn Abi Rabeea. According to this critic, Nizar was only “the
second “women’s poet” in the world of Arabic letters.”30 He went on describing
how Nizar’s fascination with and dedication to the petty concerns of the
modern woman put him on par with Omar. He then concluded “that Nizar
Qabbani has opened new horizons in Arabic poetry, moving love life from its
renewed modern reality to its proper poetical expression.”31 Ever alert to his
position, no sooner had he read the review than he penned a thankful
response to the critic, whom he had met in Beirut few months before. His
piece, which appeared in the following March issue of the same magazine,
came out a masterpiece in Arabic prose. It revealed a poetic sensibility that
went far beyond the measured lines of his poems. Nizar simply lived in a
poetical universe that sustained the romantic in his life:
I am a man who lives off the flutter of a shawl.. drinks from the spill of
perfume.. I live in a woman’s wardrobe.. I flow with the undulations of velvet..
and crinkle with the crinkles of a waving evening dress. You may look for me
32
and find me in the depths of a buttonhole in a diaphanous summer gown.
In answer to the critic’s remark that the poet’s emotion was rather flat,
lacking the extremes of passion so often born of devotion, Nizar nodded in
agreement:
Do not expect emotional depth of me.. I cannot stand being pinned down to
one woman, for whom I would write an “epic of devotion”.. because devotion
leads to crying.. and mourners are a plenty in both Arabic and Western
33
poetry.
Indeed, Nizar’s mood was thus far happy, at times triumphant. But
because Nizar blurred the lines between his poetry and his real world, it is not
hard to see the implications of these last thoughts on his marriage. As his
popularity rose, the dashing young man felt more and more limited by the
moral constraints of matrimony and the natural demands of a possessive wife.
He was beginning to feel caged and restless.
In Turkey, Nizar had the chance to witness firsthand the results of a
cultural revolution. For by 1949, the Turkish republic had already taken wide
strides in shaking off its Middle Eastern and Islamic past. The country’s
modern founding father, Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), had seen through some
drastic modernizing measures that had included “abolishing the caliphate,
which embodied the religious authority of the sultans, and all other Islamic
institutions; introducing Western law codes, dress, and calendar; using the
Latin alphabet; and, in 1928, removing the constitutional provision naming
Islam as the state religion.”34 In Ataturk’s vision, there was no room for gray
areas. Leaping over Turkey’s great yet cumbersome Islamic past, Ataturk
chased after the advanced European modernity, secularizing state and
country with little resistance.
Ataturk realized his ardent vision for Turkey in the throes of a vicious
national struggle for sovereignty and unification following the country’s defeat
in World War I. His distinction as a soldier on the killing fields of that brutal
war, his famed defeat of the Allies at Gallipoli, and his ultimate triumph
against his internal enemies gave him an indomitable power to shape the
future of his nation. Ataturk’s example hung high for Arab nationalists to
imitate. Few would ever attain his stature or personal combative qualities born
in the heat of battle. Still some Arab adventurers believed they got what it
takes to reshape the future of their nations.
One such pretender suddenly popped on the Syrian national scene on
March 30, 1949. That day, General Hussni al-Zayim, the army chief of staff,
led a coup d'etat that overthrew the elected government of president Shukri
al-Quwwatli. It marked the first time in modern history an Arab army
intervenes and successfully topples an elected government. Al-Zayim was just
the first in a long line of military adventurers to wrest the helms of power in the
weightiest Arab states, Syria, Egypt, and Iraq.
Al-Zayim and his officers had their reasons to make such a daring
move. Of immediate relevance was the Arab debacle in Palestine the
previous year, the deep humiliation the military felt at the defeat, and the
indignation at the blame lobbed on them. Of more relevance, however, was
the officers’ opportunism and desire for personal advancement. Al-Zayim
himself was a man of humble origin who rose through the ranks thanks to
French open-door policies. So were also most of his officers and those who
would follow them in the coming decades. At a deeper level, the rise of the
military marked the first clear sign of the cracking and crumbling of the Arab
aristocracy’s dominance of politics. It marked the appearance on the scene of
socially mobile segments of the population who had hitherto been ignored and
discounted.
General Al-Zayim was a strange man, an inscrutable character who
proved an ill-choice for the shoes he stepped into. Born in Aleppo in 1889 to a
Kurdish family, he received his military training in Turkey and served in the
Ottoman army. He later joined the Syrian forces under the French mandate,
siding with the Vichy forces against the Free French in the battle for
Damascus in 1941. In one of his famed betrayals, he forsook the defending
French forces and disappeared with weapons and a half million franks. He
was later captured, tried and imprisoned until he was set free after Syria’s
independence in 1945. Afterwards, a jobless Al-Zayim leeched himself to a
powerful and popular member of parliament who then intervened on his behalf
with president Quwwatli to rehabilitate him into the army. He ingratiated
himself with the president by such unsolicited acts of devotion as waiting
outside the presidential palace every morning to kiss the hands of the
president, open the car door for him, and escort him to his offices. An officer
of his generation said “Al-Zayim had no political creed, nor any national goal
beyond his personal interest. He did not follow any moral or religious values.
He was weak and lowly against the strong, powerful and arrogant against the
weak. This is how he was regarded by the vast majority of the officers who
knew him.”35 His tactics, however, gained him the trust of the president and
the government, and moved him up into the highest ranks. Such was the trust
he gained that a warning from some officers of his impending coup was
dismissed as mere envious intrigue.
Brash and politically naive, Al-Zayim had a knack for self-important
grandstanding postures and proclamations. Worse, the general was unstable:
changing his mind so too often that he left those who worked with him baffled,
frustrated, and, at times, amused. But, apart from insiders, these qualities
were not immediately recognized by most Syrians. Ever the loyal subjects,
Syrians came out en mass to celebrate the general’s takeover. The chanting
waving masses and the militaristic pomp he surrounded himself with made
him feel heady and real. He believed what he saw, and the people thought
they finally got their Ataturk.
Like most of his countrymen, Nizar, young and inexperienced himself,
was apparently fooled by the show. Sitting in Ankara, “the great city of
diplomacy and the meeting point of the ambitions of the world’s greatest
powers”36 as he called it, he decided to put his poetry to good use. Along the
several love poems he wrote that summer and which were published in
Beirut’s best magazines, he published a poem panegyrizing the “new great
leader” in Beirut’s Evening Post. In a letter to his friend Idriss, he requested
that several issues of the magazine be sent to him, perhaps to press a point
against his rivalrous colleagues. Nizar may have written the poem to boost his
never-too-solid position in the foreign ministry, but the move, nonetheless,
departed markedly from his avowed practice of not subordinating his poetry to
vile politics, especially the pandering to a dictator in the making.
Nizar soon realized his panegyric was just as ill-conceived as the
general’s own venture. In the short span of four months, al-Zayim went from a
“liberator” to a “mini-dictator” who was miraculously elected to the presidency
by 100% vote – a presidency he came to reform! His surrender of Anton
Sa’aada, the Lebanese head of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, to his
executioners in Lebanon revolted even the closest of his allies. Sa’aada, with
al-Zayim’s help, had attempted to overthrow the Lebanese government, taking
refuge in Syria when his bid failed. Turning him over was seen as a repulsive
unArab betrayal of trust. In the wee hours of August 14, 1949, general alZayim was awakened by the roar of tanks surrounding his palace. Some of
the very officers in his coup joined in another coup to get rid of him. He was
led away in his pajamas and driven to the outskirts of Damascus. Next to a
deserted French graveyard, he and his prime minister went down in a hail of
bullets. There lay the man who just recently had at a party auctioned off his
pen for 60,000 Syrian pounds, a fortune at the time, to the Tapline oil
company.37
The unexpected bloody end of al-Zayim sent shudders up the spines of
the ruling classes in the Arab world. There was particular disgust at the
uncalled-for killing of the prime minister. To all observers, however, this much
was clear: that Syria’s political fortunes were now being steered by an
adventurous band of officers who stopped at nothing when their egos clashed.
A vicious cycle of intrigue and revenge started that will see most of its actors
killed or exiled in the coming years. The shockwaves from these events were
strong enough to reach Nizar’s clement outpost in Ankara, where the
ambassador was recalled after the fall of the government. “I am sorry for not
writing to you throughout this dark period,” he wrote to Idriss on August 22,
“the embassy and Syria had weathered such events as you know. I am now
charge d'affaires in Ankara… and if I say to you that I run the embassy it
means that I write memos, conduct interviews, seek out news, talk to the
press, and do the typewriting on top of that… I now work seventeen hours a
day and I never finish. Despite this, I find great satisfaction in serving my
country.”38 Yet Nizar did not forget his own career – while conveying a
request by the outgoing ambassador to Idriss to have a good word published
in Beirut Evening Post about his farewell party in Ankara, Nizar requested that
his name not be mentioned “in order not to be tainted career-wise.” 39
The arrival of a letter from Idriss in which he admonished him gently on
his al-Zayim poem disturbed Nizar:
I do not want you to gloat over me at the death of al-Zayim. I praised him
because I thought he would serve my country and bring abundance to its
lands… but he failed me and failed all the people. He planted thorns in place
of myrrh. If I drifted along in his current, so did many… And I thank the
40
circumstances that revealed the essence of this man quickly..
Nizar ended his reply with an important promise to his friend “never to
talk except of the breast that which is as rounded as a silver pot.” Nizar will
talk of other things of course in his future, but he would never again praise or
panegyrize a living ruler, even when it would be very popular to do so. He
would disown the al-Zayim poem, never including it in his complete works.
From this experience he learned that dictatorship was intrinsically evil
because dictators were intrinsically unpredictable.
Yet his friend’s candid words made him think of doing something more
positive to safeguard his career. In a postscript, he addressed Idriss: “Brother,
I want you to write a word in your beautiful style pointing to my undertaking
the responsibilities of the Ankara mission, and to my success in my work
during this eventful time… And if I may ask, please put along a photo of me
from the ones I gave to you.”41
Beside this concerted effort to polish his professional image, Nizar was
involved in another operation more to his liking. He was very aware of his
talent and was determined to publicize it. Apart from the time he spent
composing his poetry, the poet spent considerable time making sure his
poems found their way to publication. He sent his poems to Beirut’s best
magazines, thanked the editors when they published them, and followed up
with them if they did not. His romantic/erotic poems graced the pages of these
magazines almost on a monthly basis.
Nizar was experiencing one of his most productive periods. By the
summer of 1949, he had written a long poem he called Samba, to be
published by itself, and had enough poems for the publication of a third
collection. Out of a belief that “the work of art should be brought out to people
the way a bride is brought out in a wedding”42, he sent specific instructions to
his friend Idriss in Beirut on how Samba should be designed, opting to receive
his pay in 300 (out of 1500) copies to give out to friends and acquaintances
rather than in cash.
Nizar believed so strongly in the value of his poetry and his place as a
poet; and whereas he worked hard at advancing his diplomatic career, the
effort was no where near his investment in poetry. Whereas his job
guaranteed him enough income to live comfortably and gave him the
opportunity to see the world, his heart, indeed his whole being, was
consumed by the writing and publishing of his poetry. Samba is a good
example of how seriously he took his poetry and how actively he promoted it:
“When you receive Samba, move your plume in its name” he asked his friend
Idriss, who was now at the Sorbonne in Paris working on a doctorate in
literature, “you are the closest critic to my heart, whether you praised or
lampooned.”43 Just a week later on the first of December, he wrote to his
friend again “I do not know when Samba will come out. Are they going to send
me my copies here so that I send you your copy? I am sure Samba will win
some touches from you, especially now that you are living in its burning
atmosphere!”44 Still ten days later, he was questioning and prodding his
friend:
Do you like Samba? I have been waiting your opinion for weeks, the opinion
of an artist whom Paris envelops with the warmth of the samba, its nudity,
and its madness.. If you are going to write about it in Beirut’s Evening Post,
then please ask your friend Qadri Qalaji to write about it in more detail in alSayyad magazine… Would you think I should send some copies to Paris so
45
that you distribute them to those whose taste you trust?”
As soon as Idriss wrote an ebullient review of the poem, Nizar was no
less ebullient in piling praise upon him in his characteristic beautiful
lighthearted prose:
Dear Suheil,
If Nizar Qabbani’s Samba fired up your nerves, and awakened in your waist
the desire for dancing and swaying.. your criticism of Samba has shaken my
waist, drained my strength, and made me like the Indian Buddhists’ snake
which knows nothing but writhing and twisting… I like your criticism of poetry
because you live this poetry, and merge in it to the point of Sufi annihilation.
You melted in the chord’s being, in the humming of the drums.. you colored
with your wounds the wounds of the violin… suddenly we no longer turn to
Brazil where this sinful dance was born, but to our insides where Samba is
46
pouring down in the color of a blazing instinct and a savage desire…
As much as Nizar enthused over this poem at the time, Samba is not
one of his most remembered poems. Still, Samba stands out in his work as it
signaled a conscious effort on the part of the poet to break away from the set
patterns of Arabic poetry in which he had so far been orbiting. From this
perspective, the poem is unique, different from any Nizar wrote before and
after in both theme and structure. It is composed of 41 haiku-like short
stanzas, each made of 4 very short lines (from 1 to 4 words in length). It
recreates in pulsing imagery the lively impassioned atmosphere of a wild
samba dance that the poet observes then joins in toward the end.
They melted away
Body joints melting in body joints
Bones immixing
And clothes..
Did you see her..
In the eagle’s clutch?
Her waist.. collapsing
And her strength..
A thousand sighs
Condensating.. a thousand pangs
A heart sucking a heart
rapaciously..
LjE• yl^
“„SM –„Q xh ±„SM
..“®l®•e LML•mn
..LjLg¤n
..LY´C JM
..aUs ˆ‰t^ xh xYn
.a„T BLisI ..LYa„T
..LYEP^n
..ŠY´ RQI
Š™lT RQI ..•]†•e
That’s Samba..
A step.. then.. a bow
As the lighted lamps
Fall in love
Try it..
Four steps..
Always together..
47
And then…
Š™pM ¢•re ˆ™pM
..ŠYEa‹j
..LtML| fle
WNL†_sE ..F¤ ..ˆlis
WNL‰rQE -gjL„rQLh
..kt„•e
..LpgjaV
..LzjCI ~EP{T
..LzM x‰re ..E]jI
..Lpglen
As the last stanza alludes, Nizar creatively re-arranged the twohemstitch line into four “choreographic” sequences that matched the steps of
the dance, achieving a briskly accentuated dance cadence by manipulating a
highly rhythmic poetic meter called al-ramal. Nevertheless, in form and theme,
the poem evokes the Muashshah, a lyrical genre which flourished in Arab
Andalusia and beyond and which was closely associated with Arabian dance.
It is clear that Arabic’s classical heritage in this area weighed on Nizar’s
choice of words and images, infusing his poem with such archaic but loaded
words as:
Coquettishness, shawls, incense,
jewels, unbonded women, drink
mates, courtesans, camel-seats,
carafes etc.
…kME]†QE …aµEac …aYEPV …œg› …C‚‘M …¶†ž
…xsEP®QE
..¥QE …ª]^ …–·c …¸HPpQE
While the poet was trying to poeticize a modern Western dance
experience, he quickly found himself overwhelmed by the tug of Islam’s
greatest dance experience, Sufism, especially the Mevlevi tradition and its
famous whirling dervishes. The mystic life of Turkey, birthplace and center for
the Mevlevis, must have contributed to the poets inspiration. Sufi influence
appears in such concepts as:
Touching, signaling, sin,
yearning, mosque corners,
attraction, liberation,
pleasance, paleness, etc.
…LGEndQE …ŽP‹QE …ˆ g{¬QE …¡CLŒ¹E …˜rQE
…ˆg„zrQE …¡P‹†QE …ŽL•zs¹E …`X™QE
..¥QE …`P_‹QE
Some of this Sufi imagery is trite, but no less inspiring to his readers,
as in:
Of wine and dancing
I feel I am dying
ªdYn ..a’| JM LsI
“g•iQLƒ
The ending of the poem has in fact more to do with the Sufi concept of
pleasurable annihilation than with the sudden open-eyed ending of the
samba.
So what if
We danced together..
And buried our bones
And died away?
If we danced..
Our nights away.. till nothingness
And were carried off
48
In funeral like butterflies..?
•L†glm LM
..LzM LYL†„^C }[
LzlbDE L†hHn
L†gS{sEn
..L†„^C PQ
xŒ±•QE k•c ..L†lgQ
L†lrºcn
..»EaSQE ~E‚L†™ƒ
Samba is a poem that best shows the East-West conflict in the poet’s
mind. Setting out to poeticize a Western dance with a conscious effort at
renovation, the poet finds himself constrained by his stronger-than-he-thought
attachment to his literary and cultural heritage. The result is a hybrid exotic
“mulatto” poem, novel yet traditional, heretically modern yet reverent of the
past. This enchanting paradoxical mix will become one of the most distinctive
marks of the poetry of Nizar Qabbani.
Nizar’s failed attempt to break away from Arabic’s literary heritage was
not an isolated episode. It was in fact part of a whole revisionist movement
that was just beginning in the late forties to revolutionize the Arabic literary
scene, especially poetry. A concerted effort was launched by new poets to
force Arabic poetry into a modernism which paralleled the Western
modernism already established earlier in the century by such poets in the
West as Ezra Pound and T.S. Elliot. The Arabic movement was spearheaded
by two young Iraqi poets, Badr Shaker al-Sayyab and Nazek al-Malaeka, and
it will reach its zenith in the following decade as we shall see.
October 1949 saw Nizar a happy father with the birth of his first son.
He wrote to Idriss “On the twenty second of October, I became a father for the
second time with a boy whom I named Tawfiq, auspiciously after my father’s
name.. a beautiful blond boy with blue eyes..”49 Again by naming his son after
his father, Nizar reasserted a traditional Arab custom which honors the family
patriarch. Family life may have had its rewards, but the poet was in fact
growing increasingly restless, yearning to free himself from its bounds. Nizar’s
poetic creativity rested in great part on renewed experience in life, and
marriage was hindering that experience. He yearned to travel and to explore
other realities, he dreamed of Paris, that “good land,” that “soil rejoicing in
luminance and pleasures,”50 as he said when he learned that his best friend
was about to set out to France for higher studies. The allure of Paris and what
it could do for his poetry was very much on the poet’s mind. No sooner had
his friend settled in the city of light than he wrote him wishing and advising:
How much I want to be with you, to show you how I can turn Paris into a tune
right out of our eyes and a poem inscribed with our wounds.. I would acquaint
you with Paris before I knew her myself.. because I knew her with the hands
of mind, the imagination of imagination.. and the feet of fantasies.. I alone will
show you how to wrest fire out of darkness.. the date out of rejection, love out
51
of hate, and perfume out of malodor..
Nizar was going through a period of intense curiosity for adventure,
sexual and otherwise; marriage was limiting his experience, while the titillating
tales his friend Idriss was telling from Paris served only to highlight the poet’s
predicament. Idriss, as in his later writings, was a frank bold writer whose
writing sometimes bordered on the pornographic. Early in 1950, he wrote
Nizar saying that the Polish girl he was bedding in Paris had said “my breasts
have grown and became rounded because of your constant rubbing..” then
went on to confirm “This is actually what happened, Nizar, because I
remember that when I played with her breasts two months ago they were
rather small, soft, and droopy… But now, they have grown, firmed up, and
risen in defiance.”52 The idea fires up Nizar’s imagination as he humors his
friend in an unreserved man-to-man fashion:
Yes, Suheil, a woman’s limbs took their final shape only because of man and
his massaging of them.. A woman’s navel is nothing but an old bite – left by a
mortally desperate man.. a woman’s armpit is just a vagina installed in the
wrong place.. i.e. upside down! and such facts that will not elude your
53
intelligence..
Nizar’s thoughts may have wandered off in pursuit of a wilder existence
away from family duties and middle class decorum, but these were just
thoughts. The poet would open up his new collection, Anti Li (You Are Mine),
which he published in the fall of 1950, with these meaningful lines:
They say in our village
You are the one I am choosing
A rumor for which
I am singing and clapping
And claim it with a mouth
54
Torn with boasting..
º-ªVCI x•QE ²ysI
L†•zgb xh }nnaG
º-ªt¼UM …½–ªS„M
L¼¼¼pQ LsI ½ˆzµLŒ
º-¼¼™t•QE ºŠ^ªdM
«FSj Lp¼¼¼gmªHIn
Indeed, many of the 32 poems included in this collection show a poet
increasingly aware of his rising star, his worth. Several in fact go on to capture
narcissistic obsessions with the poet’s own physical attractiveness. In a poem
that evokes his “alter ego” in Arabic poetry, Omar Ibn Abi Rabia, Nizar retells
a conversation between two girls, where she who is head over heals in love
with him says:
Oh Hind do tell me
Should I go to him
Ardent with passion, my face
beaming
I already envision him, waiting
His forehead broad and clear
His garments warm and shining
His mouth perfervid like the
55
seasons.
ŠQ x‰MI “Y º]†Y LG ·ˆrcC
..Šzi•rM ..½¡CPptM LsIn
Ls]mPM kQ[ ..}oE Šs[
ŠzSeaM ..½ˆT•Lj ..½ˆptV
·•PV ˜r‹QE ]„_G ½NEHCn
ŠzjCDE •P„SQE }PQ ½Fhn
As in the lines above, Nizar began adopting the female persona more
frequently, allowing the female to speak for herself. But the voice is that of an
Arab woman who, despite her boldness in voicing her feelings, still accepts
her subordinate role versus the man, looking up to him, even deriving her very
own feminineness from him:
“How sweet you are” He said,
waking
the female in my veins, unlocking
a window of light thru me
His voice is manly, soothing
His eyes are kind, like a prophet
Light travels on his brow
auspiciously
His mouth is proud, coercive
He takes his kisses irresistibly
It is beautiful to be kissed
56
seditiously.
k‡sI ¾iGIn •¡Plc LsII
WªPƒ CP†lQ –Œn …x^nam xh
LrgTC ECEa^ ŠeP\ xh }[
WªPt†QE –Gaj .. Š^E]cwjn
CP†QE vaUsE Lrƒ ..¡ac ˆptV
WPU^n HE]•mE Šgh a®¤n
kbCIn ..LjL„•žE ˆltiQE œ„®G
WP†m a®‡QE XT•G }I “grVn
Echoing the Biblical/Quranic story about Eve’s creation from Adam,
and taking a page out of the book of Arabic’s greatest poet, al-Mutanabbi,
Nizar talks of prophethood and approaches the woman from a religious and
patriarchal higher ground, with a masochist-sadist tone which certainly clicked
with many male egos in the Arab world. But while endearing him to Arab male
readers, such poetry would later be cited by some feminists as evidence of
Nizar’s fickle commitment to women rights. The poet’s position here could be
seen in two ways. The first is Nizar’s unparalleled talent for capturing people’s
– men and women – feelings, attitudes, actions: admirable and not so
admirable, and turning them into poetry of great beauty and significance. The
collection indeed includes some very well-written poems such as the one
entitled “My Love” where an enchanted female voice talks to the readers
about her feelings; (the poem was later made timeless by the voice of
Fairooz, the famed Lebanese singer.)
Lebanon and the exuberant Lebanese style of life shows clearly
between the lines of the poems. His early happy memories of Lebanon and
the more recent wild summer breaks he spent with his friends there seemed
to offer him a well to draw from to moisten the dry air of his uninspiring
marriage. For this reason, many of the poems in Anti Li are recollections of
adolescent adventures and happier times in a rural setting that, with its
scrubby shrubs, almond groves and grape vineyards, is more like the
mountains of Lebanon than leafy Damascus. Whether it was a childhood
flame that he remembers in “Near the Wall”, or the beauty of a Christian girl
who had taken the orders in “The Golden Cross”, or the shapely Amazon
glistening on the sands of the Mediterranean in “Blue Bikini,” Nizar was
speaking of a more carefree reality than the one which existed in his
hometown.
Although all his models were still upper-class and from the more welloff strata in society – the girl in “Rose”, for instance, even sends her rose
through a servant! – Anti Li brought some hints of change as the poet matured
in life. Some of the poems showed the poet beginning to savor non-conformity
in his woman in ways that went beyond passive appearances. Now Nizar
seems to notice women who were more proactive in diverging from the
received conservative views of womanhood. His new tendencies generated a
conflict in his mind between what he had been used to until then and what he
was beginning to admire, between the contented advantaged Arab male in
him and the revisionist intellectual. In “Wild Cat” Nizar looks with both
approval and consternation at this woman’s untruthfulness, seeing it naughty,
challenging, and strangely attractive. The result is mixed feelings of
bewilderment and confused desires, climaxing at the end in a paradox of love
and hate:
I love this wickedness in her eyes
Her lies
When she lies
…
Eyes of wolves are so deceiving
lovelorn falsehoods waft around
…
My hatred loves her, how I
wished
57
As I hugged her… to kill her..
Lp†gm xh £•lQE EXY œcI
LpQP^ ~Cªn‚ }[ .. LYCn‚n
...
½ˆQL•_M …œµXQE Jgzƒ Jgm
LpQPc •PpQE œG•LƒI yhL›
...
LrQL› LGn ..u]ic Lpt_G
Lpl•^ .. Lp•^ªP› •[ ~HHn
In “To a Bitch” the conflict escalates: the woman is on the attack,
daring to call him a “coward”! The Arab man in the poet – or is it the husband?
– is clearly on the defense, sounding irrational and chauvinistic when he
replies:
Coward am I?
My soot is snow
58
Depravity chaste..
uHEP| !}LtV LsI
º¦LSm uapmn ..½¶l¤
These last few poems toward the end of the collection foreshadowed
the coming change in the life as well as in the poetry of Nizar. The most
significant of these poems is the one that Nizar placed at the very end, one
boldly bearing a French title written in Latin letters. Nizar was hesitant before
to use non-Arabic titles for his poems. Commenting in a letter on a short story
his friend Idriss had published, he said:
I liked your boldness in writing the title of the short story in French and
quoting some French poetry.. I think you will be targeted… I have to admit
that you beat me to it because I had wanted my poem “The Painted Nail”,
which I sent to you in Beirut, to be titled “Manicure” [a French word] but I
59
balked and retreated.. So you were braver than me in this one only!
“A La Garconne”, which he wrote in Istanbul and published in the
August 1949 issue of al-Adeeb, is a beautiful poem about the poet’s
disappointment when he discovers his woman has cut off her long braid of
hair. Infused with sad pathos, the poem describes an act of rebellion, a
woman taking an independent decision to grow beyond her girlhood. Short
hair was even a stronger sign of rebellion at the time than today (epitomized
in English literature in Hemingway’s revolutionary Maria in his masterpiece
For Whom the Bell Tolls, a character also famously played by an Ingrid
Bergman with close-cropped hair in a 1943 classic). In Arab culture, a
woman’s femininity is not complete without flowing long hair – the longer, the
blacker, the slicker it is, the higher is her mark for beauty. So to Nizar, the
long hair represented more than just a girl’s hair, it was a sign of Arab identity
and heritage, a culture developed and nourished century after century, and
now being suddenly abandoned:
Cutting that braid of hair
You cut a swing traversing heaven
And dropped me mourning to the ground
…
These black tents of fragrance are no
longer there
Lost are the deserts of Arabia.. and their
winds
You cut your hair.. which was my planting
Broke your word.. defiantly
…
Do not come near.. you are dead
60
The glory of hair is my glory..
²]\aQE ˆcPVCI ..Lp•z{^I
u]†m LM ªdmwj x†•z™hn
...
±h .. agtzQE ~±•M y•’|
²]™s Lt\ Zn .. ºyrrb E]™s
u]G —C‚ PYn .. €azŒ ²~]„cn
²]pzQLj ²~aSƒn .. x†•g„mn
...
½ˆ•ªgM ysI x†gjaie Z
.. u]™M LY]™M RQEPUQE }[
This is one of the earliest signs of Nizar’s ambivalence toward change
and rebellion: How much of it was healthy, and how much of it was not? As
much as he liked to rebel himself, he could see how slippery a path it would
be. Indeed, it could well be the advantaged male in him worrying about his
endowments when he laments in the same poem the hair as:
My roof.. my grove.. my stove
My bed of roses
xewh]Mn .. xsL•Ujn ..xSi|
HCn JM •n]™rQE xŒEahn
But the pathos of the poem could be welling from a deeper side of him;
it could perhaps be the poet seeing his country torn and ravaged by military
juntas, coups, and conspiracies. “We are now suffering from a dysentery of
coups..” he wrote to his friend “I am not optimistic about our future, Suheil..
Because we are midgets when it comes to ruling ourselves.. for so long as the
corporal wants to suddenly become a general.. our prosperity is illusive.. and
our future is bleak.”61
It could well also be the poet in him who was vacillating between
sticking to his style and themes, or taking a risky leap forward by revolting
against Arabic’s literary tradition as his young contemporaries were beginning
to do. He confessed to his friend Idriss in a letter on the second day of
January 1951: “I have no new projects, just the lines and colors of a new path
agitating in my mind, and which I hope will agitate on paper soon..”62
The new path was not agitating in Nizar’s mind only, a search was
already underway by his peers for a new path – and role – for Arabic poetry.
This time, however, the first signs of change came from Iraq, a country
endowed with a highly educated middle class and a rich poetic tradition. Iraq
was also where the influences of English were strongest because of the
country’s British links. By this time, the poetry of Iraqis Nazek al-Malaeka,
Badr Shaker al-Sayyab, and Abdul Wahhab al-Bayyati was already deviating
from the accepted fixed norms of Arabic poetry in both style and themes. It is
a matter of contention in Arabic letters between al-Malaeka and al-Sayyab on
who was the first to break away with Arabic’s two-thousand-year poetic
tradition. But it is clear that a collective awareness was building in Iraq as to
the need of change in response to the Arabs’ recent troubles and in light of
the reign of modernism in the English literary world. All the poet’s were wellread in English, either directly or through translation.
Naturally, the new poets reflected the style and treatment of modernist
poetry in English. They liberated themselves from the two-hemstitch verse
requirement, and started writing foot-based “free verse.” Their themes also
underwent change, showing in particular an obsession with the dark evil side
of human existence. Introspection and fear dominated their poetry along with
a prevailing sense of fragmentation and disillusion. As such, their poetry came
out in sharp contrast to Nizar’s exuberant, lively and lucid poetry.
The new poets were not sure of their footing yet, and were mostly
reacting, somewhat shyly at first, to the sordid social and political realities in
the Arab world. In the face of these realities, Arab intellectuals were more
susceptible than ever to outside influences. But now along with Western
influences, Arabs began to feel the tug of communist ideas coming from the
Soviet Union and the countries in its orbit. Arab media was increasingly giving
coverage to news, political and cultural, of the USSR which some saw as a
welcome balance to America and Europe. The Middle East, in fact, was fast
becoming a premier battleground for the Cold War, initiated with president
Truman’s Doctrine in 1947. Although Truman declared “I believe that it must
be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting
attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressure,”63 this
pledge invariably came to mean two things in the context of Arab affairs: the
propping-up of pro-Western Arab regimes inherited from the British, and the
unconditional support of Israel. As a result, battle lines in the Arab world were
quickly forming between four key contenders for the loyalty of the people: The
pro-Western monarchies and pseudo-republics, the ascendant nationalists
(especially the Baathists in Syria and Iraq); the ascendant communists; and
finally the rather latent Islamists (mostly the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and
Syria).
By the early 1950’s, new leftist ideas of social responsibility,
redistribution of wealth ,and empowerment of the working classes were
increasingly in vogue among the young and educated. The Marxist idea of a
literature that contributes to the fight against social injustice and Western
imperial designs was beginning to appear in the writings of a young
generation of writers and poets grappling with the post-World War II realities.
The voices of these angry newcomers began to be heard loud and clear in
Arab media. A new tone for action and rebellion began to appear in
newspapers and magazines that were known for their sedate measured
positions. The editorial for the January 1951 issue of al-Adeeb magazine, for
example, was given to an hitherto unknown young woman from Iraq who
spoke eloquently for her generation. Under the title of “A New Creed,” the
angry writer screamed:
Brother.. My Arab brother!
What do your eyes see on these dark horizons, the horizons of the Arab
world? Torn bewilderment and callous distraction are the ugly heritage of
generations of darkness, ingratitude, and submission: the ugly reality, our
reality… Before this reality, this chronic tragedy, stand negativity and
positivity, one leading you to despair, surrender, and complacency, and one
pushing you to move, to rebel, and to fight. On this crossroad… the Arab
youth, who have been agonized in their humanity, in their sanctity, their
essence, their heritage, their land, and their homeland – the Arab youth stand
to make a decision… The Arabs will not be liberated unless they cleanse
themselves of all kinds of greed, fanaticism, and selfishness; unless they
remove all the idols of tribalism, sectarianism, and feudalism. We need a
64
creed aware of itself, a good constructive nationalist creed…
Such calls and proddings filled the ears of Nizar who was a keen
reader and regular contributor to these magazines. For the next year he would
continue to publish in them poems typical of his carefree style. But he must
have surely noticed with chagrin that poems like “Suspect Lips” and “White
Fur,” which he published in al-Adeeb in December 1951 and February 1952
respectively, now always earned him second place in print order after those of
Nazek al-Malaeka, who invariably occupied the top slots. His poetry was
beginning to look amateurish in style and theme in contrast with the solemnity
of al-Malaeka and her like-minded poets. The pressure on him to join the new
movement was stronger than ever.
But another pressure arising from his poetry was wrecking his
personal life and ruining his peace of mind. His wife was growing more fretful
with the sensual aspects of his compositions. She felt that his passion for his
poetry was taking him away from her. She rightly perceived of his poetry as a
rival to her husband’s affections. Furthermore, the popularity of Nizar’s poetry
among his female fans was stirring in her feelings of feminine jealousy. The
couple’s life in Turkey had so far shielded them from those fans and from the
prying eyes of the curious. This, however, came to an end with the end of
Nizar’s mission in that country; the couple returned to Damascus early in the
summer of 1951.
Back in Damascus, the couple moved with Nizar’s family who had
recently relocated to one of the newly developed neighborhoods of the capital.
Al-Najma Square, the location of the new home, was a beautifully designed
neighborhood with four-story apartment blocks overlooking wide tree-lined
streets. Even today, with the hustle and bustle of the city, the inner streets of
the neighborhood retrain a precious air of peace and tranquility. The place
was more upper-class then than it is now, putting the poet in close proximity
not only to his work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs two miles away to the
north, but also within easy reach of all the locales important to the refined
Damascene society: places like the Orient Hotel, Socrates (restaurant), the
Arabic Club, and the foreign embassies in the capital. It was a time when
Nizar, young and stylish, enjoyed the society’s attention as the “Don Juan”
poet of Damascus, as one journalist dubbed him. He spared no chance to
read his poetry, be it at poetry evenings, parties, dinners, or at about any
social gathering. Doors were wide open for him; women loved to cozy up to
him, and he could not resist the flattery. Certainly, that did not go well with his
young wife who felt the more estranged from the whole environment. By early
1952, barely nine months after the couple’s return from Turkey, their marriage
was breaking down. Damascene society is a closely-knit community deeply
averse to scandal, and divorce is always seen as a scandal. Thus it was quite
common for such incongruous relationships to persist a lifetime in hushed
misery, often for the sake of the children or merely for keeping appearances.
Nizar wisely decided to cut his losses and to save himself, his wife, and his
children the trouble of a failed relationship. In March 1952, the couple filed for
divorce.
The failed marriage left deep bitterness in the poet’s mind, a sense of
loss and wasted years. “It was a period of my life very painful to remember;”
he would confide to a friend years later, “all attempts at happiness in it ended
in failure.”65 His bitterness and pain as well as his desire to forget and move
on soon inspired his poem “You Shall Not Quench My Fame”, a poem that
tells of the disconnection between the two, the incompatibility, the arguments,
the jealousy, and the price of it all:
Too much chatter… leave me!
Something is wringing my mind
My life’s infernal.. yet you see not
my suffering
…
Do not ask me how our story ended,
do not ask
It was a story of stressed-out
nerves, opium, blood, and
madness
You tore away my beautiful writings
and were jealous even of my
doubts
You broke my paintings.. and set
fire to my peace
…
I’ve crossed you out from my book
of memories
66
Never to be there again..
xQ ŽdrG NxŒ x†gƒaeLh .. E]V ²~a¤a¤
x†gtV
x†Ga•zG E•LM JGC]e Z ysIn .. Fg_™QE xh LsI
...
x†gQwUe Z …yp•sE L†•„^ Rgƒ x†gQwUe Z
}P†™QEn £]QEn }PghDEn …`L„mDE ˆ„^ xY
xsP†K JM k•c ²~ažn yt•ƒ LM “rVI y^dM
xh –µEa_QE yMabIn .. xeLcPQ ~aUƒn
xsP’|
...
xsP’e JQn ~LGaƒXQE `LUc xh L gŒ y†ƒ Z
Nizar would never mention her again publicly or in his writing for the
rest of his life.
London 1952-55 The Other Encountered
Liberated from the bonds of his ill-conceived marriage, Nizar was ready
for a transformation in poetry and in life. The young poet was a talented
prognosticator of future trends; he would sense the hissing sounds of
imminent storms and would make sure to weather – if not to ride – them. So in
the spring of 1952, Nizar felt the rising tide of the Arab left and decided to
make a move to claim his position as a vanguard poet, yet without really
reneging on his achievement over the previous decade. Love poetry was his
bastion, and love indeed transcended class, religion, and politics. He had
made the celebration of womanhood and the feminine in life the sole purpose
of his poetry, and he was not going to throw away that most enduring of
human emotions for a political fad. He realized, if he was to be true to himself
and still be relevant, he had to politicize his love poetry – not just celebrate
womanhood, but to defend it, to agitate against the subjugation and
exploitation of women, against the many social ills that plagued Arab women
since time immemorial. Although there are signs he wanted to do this from the
beginning, as evidenced in some of his early poems, he had to wait to
establish himself before he dared engage in such confrontation.
Nizar surprised Arab readers with the publication of a daring poem
entitled “Pregnant” in the June 1952 issue of al-Adeeb magazine. It was a
shockingly impressive poem told in the defiant voice of a girl telling the story
of her pregnancy and her subsequent abandonment by her wealthy lover.
Confronting her abuser, the girl rejects the money offered by this “scoundrel of
a lover” and opts for that most “feminist” of options – abortion:
So this is my price?
Price of loyalty, putrid scum?
I came not for money, your rotten hoard
Thanks..
I’ll drop the child..
I do not wish to give him..
67
An ignoble father..
•x†r¤ }•[ EXY
² SzQE ¡C•j LG LhPQE Jr¤
J
J•†QE fQLrQ f VI FQ LsI
.. "Ea’Œ"
.. ±r_QE fQ• §i|w|
..ZXs LjI ŠQ ]GCI Z LsI
In this poem, and in those that would follow over the next decade,
Nizar would match some of the dark shocking images of evil, dissipation, and
death that were so generously invoked in the poetry of his modernist
contemporaries, but only insomuch as to generate a feeling of shock,
challenge, and rebellion – never a feeling of hopelessness or futility as poets
like al-Bayati did for example. Nizar’s was an overly joyful and optimistic
vision at this stage; he was confident of the ability of his poetry to elevate and
transform.
The poem brought in an immediate approving response from some of
his detractors who were suddenly persuaded of his “poethood.” One of those
who commented was Hussein Marwa, a leftist Lebanese writer (who decades
later would be assassinated by Islamic extremists at the age of 77):
Nizar, the first time I realized you were a poet was in your recent poem
“Pregnant”. Do not get angry, you were not a poet before then […] even
though your hands made a thousand worlds full of perfumes, dews, tunes,
colors, and lights. […] You were not a poet before then, because a thousand
“pregnant girls” were screaming around you in the face of a thousand rascals
in your own words: “You planted your shame inside of me / and broke my
heart.” But you heard not even one of them; and did not feel any of the pain
in their hearts. You did not see in your world neither humiliation nor defeat,
neither depravity nor tyranny, neither rape nor aggression. […] Today you
rebel against your own chains, and free yourself from the emptiness of your
egotism to join your fellow citizens – listening, seeing, feeling, and thinking.
68
Thus as of today, you are a poet.
Marwa issued from a Marxist perspective that put the social and
collective ahead of the individual and personal, ultimately reducing all human
conflicts to a class struggle between rich and poor, and dismissing as
frivolous, even treasonous, all literature that did not support that fight. While it
is true that Nizar took a swipe against bourgeois decadence, he did it purely
out of genuine solidarity with women, out of a “feminist” motivation if you like,
attacking a social evil that transcended class and citizenship. Ironically, critics
like Marwa attacked Nizar as if the poet had lagged behind his
contemporaries in confronting the social ills of his society. The fact is Nizar at
the time was the first poet in the Arab world to confront such taboos so
openly. As we shall see, Nizar would go on dedicating a great deal of his
energy to the plight of Arab women in the patriarchy. “Pregnant” was in fact
written more than a decade before the high tide of feminism in the West in the
sixties and seventies (hence my quotes in citing the term above).
Nonetheless, Nizar wrote a polite rebuttal in which he defended his
choices and his positions, insisting on his right to choose, individually, his own
way:
I did not turn my back on humanity with its tears, aches, and wounds […]. I
just chose my own way, my colors, my direction, taking a path out of a
hundred paths in life […]. Yes, I fashioned my own letters with my own
hands, and expressed the reality of my times; I broke the “coffin” of this
chewed poetry that sits like death on the chest of Arabic literature. […] I was
interacting with life when I wrote my first poetry, not lagging behind it, nor
running away from it. […] I put to poetry the thoughts of a wide young
generation who saw these sensations every day and every hour in their daily
life, but found no art expressing them. […] You may say, well, there are other
angles on the theater of life that you “should” spotlight. And I say, this
“should” is the death of art and artists. I do not believe in directed literature no
69
matter how noble its aim is.
Nizar’s poetry and his ardent defense of it stirred up the perpetual
question of the role of art: should art be an esthetic end of itself, or should it
be a means for effecting change and progress in society? Nizar’s
pronouncements triggered a heated debate about this among the new poets
of the fifties that lasted for years afterwards. Several of the new poets had no
fondness for Nizar, particularly his single focus on the man-woman
relationship and his obsessiveness with the physical. Some of them, like alBayyati, did indeed resent Nizar’s ever-rising popularity which dimmed their
fame. Still some avant-garde poets like Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, and later Nazek
al-Malaeka, were quick to rally to his defense. Jabra, citing Oscar Wilde and
Percy Bysshe Shelley, asserted that art was the expression of the artist’s
individual creativeness, and that it was this creativeness that allowed for
natural progress – the genius of a nation being the plurality of the geniuses of
those creative individuals. If art is subjected to the strict norms and
expectations of society, it stops being creative and dies.
Most societies are uncomfortable with the innovator because he is not
satisfied with what his society offers him. So he is often viewed as a rebel or
a madman. But the tension between the artist and his society is often in the
70
interest of the artist; it challenges him and motivates him.
No statement would prove as accurate in Nizar’s case as the last
sentence: The more challenged and harassed, the more successful he would
become. He would thrive in tension and controversy.
And no change of course would prove as timely as that which Nizar
took with the publication of his poem “Pregnant”. For one month after he
published it, the deep seismic shifts in Arab politics that he sensed began to
hit the surface. In the early hours of the twenty-third of July, 1952, a group of
discontented army officers, led by Colonel Jamal Abdel Nasser, took control
of the state apparatus in Egypt and declared a new reality in the old
monarchy. Few days later, King Farouq, whose name was synonymous in the
West with gluttony and debauchery, was put on a ship to Italy after abdicating
the thrown. Nasser moved cautiously at first, choosing to remain in the
background behind a more docile and elderly figure, General Mohammad
Neguib. But the unexpected public show of support for the new military
leadership would soon embolden Nasser to abolish the monarchy a year later
and to declare Egypt a republic – in two years time dismissing Neguib entirely
and taking over the presidency himself. This “revolution” and the Arab
nationalist course of action it would follow would set the tone and the tunes of
a new pan-Arabist zeitgeist.
Nizar the diplomat did not pay much attention to the new arrivals; his
poetic mind was occupied with other concerns more relevant to his sole
passion: poetry. All this talk of Wilde, Eliot, and Yeats by the modernists on
the pages of the magazines he was reading and publishing in had sharpened
his interest in the English world. Whether by contrivance or sheer luck, in the
summer that year the Foreign Ministry assigned him to London for his next
three-year rotation abroad. In a letter he sent early in 1953 to a Lebanese
friend in Venezuela, he said:
In our walk together to my warm green room in Damascus, I had whispered
to you that the next shore on which I wished to rest my tired sails was
Europe… And God answered my wish… Today I am writing to you from
71
London where it’s been foggy for the past five months…
Nizar took up his new position in the Syrian embassy in London in the
Fall of 1952, where he had the chance to experience the full sway of the
country’s long wet weather. But nothing appealed more to his brooding
reclusive nature than a long cold winter. An image that would recur over and
over in his subsequent poetry is how the English winter washed the centuriesold Arabian dust off his body and mind. While other expatriate Arabs
complained of how gloomy and depressing the weather was, longing for their
homeland’s shining suns and clear skies, Nizar “basked” in London’s winter
and found it quite inspiring. Referring to this weather, he would later dub the
years 1952-1955 the “Gray Period”, a phrase that also hints at how his
English experience discolored his native thought.
The weather was not the only thing he liked about Great Britain, Nizar
quickly took to the culture and the people. He settled in a cozy flat in the
Nottingham Gate area, joking that his friends were loathe to visit him on
account of tabloid news of a serial killer haunting the neighborhood. In his free
hours after work, he applied himself wholeheartedly to the study of the English
language. Soon he was spending most of his time reading and studying
English literature at a pace that took away from his time devoted to the writing
of his poetry. In the same letter to his friend in Venezuela he told him “I am
now busy reading English fiction… and my biggest project is learning this
language and mastering it fully. These days I am generally producing less and
reading more…”72
Despite being thus occupied, Nizar did not completely detach himself
from the happenings in the Arab world. By the end of 1952, the leading two
Arabic literary magazines in Egypt, al-Rissala and al-Thaqafa, closed down,
citing sagging sales and lack of interest. The going out of business of these
two conservative outlets was just another sign of the ongoing shift in Arab
culture at the time, which seemed to have coalesced to retire the older
generation of aristocrats-bureaucrats, who were now being associated, fairly
or unfairly, not with independence and liberalism but, to their misfortune, with
colonialism and defeat. Their retirement was in favor of a more dynamic,
vocal, ambitious, and idealistic young generation who were set to take
advantage of the post-World War II bi-polar international reality. One such
idealist was none other than Suheil Idriss, Nizar’s journalist friend. Fresh from
France, and armed with a doctorate in Arabic literature from the Sorbonne,
Idriss set about filling the vacuum left by the two defunct Egyptian magazines.
He soon tapped Nizar for a slot at the editorial board of his new magazine, alAdaab (Belles-lettres). Nizar agreed with enthusiasm and submitted for the
first issue his poem “The Jasmine Wreath,” written in his typical loving style.
Besides Idriss and Nizar, the editorial board and contributors to the first issue
of January 1953 included some young names that would later play pivotal
roles in molding Arabic culture: Munir Ba’albaki, Qustantine Zurieq, Ahmad
Zaki, and Tawfiq Yusuf Awwad. The January issue also featured some writers
from the older generation who were radical enough to fit into the young crowd:
veterans like Maron Abboud, a king-maker critic, and Saate’ al-Hussari, a
tireless pan-Arabist thinker.
“At this dangerous juncture in modern Arab history,” the new
magazine’s mission statement asserted, “There is a growing feeling among
the educated Arab youth of the need for a literary magazine that carries a
serious self-conscious mission.” The statement then went on to declare that
its goal was the creation of “an active literature that echoes society and
interacts with it, influencing it as much as it gets influenced by it.” Moving even
further into the political arena, the statement, echoing Baathist and leftist
manifestos of the time, proclaims:
The present condition of the Arab countries necessitates that every patriot
enlist his efforts to work, each in his field, to liberate these countries and to
raise their political, social, and intellectual standards. […] Based on this, the
literature that the magazine calls for and encourages is the “committed”
73
literature which wells from the Arab society and flows into it.
To those readers who wondered about this “committed” literature,
Nizar’s friend Anwar al-Ma’addawi contributed an expansive article that
explained this Sartrian novelty:
If the committed writer is able to live to the fullest the experience of his age,
an experience that emanates from the problems of his society and leaves its
marks deep in the consciousness; then if he is able to convey this experience
just as he truthfully felt it, as he deeply registered it, and as he emotionally
received it; then again if he was able to enflame your emotions and to stir
your feelings psychologically and intellectually… If he was able to do all that,
then he would have pushed you to share in the experience and to think about
the problem and to revolt against your conditions. That is when it can be said
that he carried out in the best way possible the mission of committed
74
literature.
So here he was, thousands of miles away studying and exploring a
Western culture, yet finding himself in the intellectual company of some of the
most ardent Arab nationalists of his time. His distance, however, would enable
him to balance the need to join this powerful current against the need to be
true to his talent and free thinking. Life in England gave him the opportunity to
look back at his homeland in a rather new light; for he could not but contrast
the progress and freedom in the West with the backwardness and repression
in the East. The experience began to confirm his deep doubts that, despite all
foreign meddling, it was the Arabs themselves after all who were the primary
cause of their own predicaments, their humiliation and their defeats. About
this time, he would later reflect that “London gave me intellectual security, its
rains washed off my thirsty Eastern grass, its endless green open meadows
gave me my first lessons in freedom.75
Mid-fifties London was a thriving dynamic center of post-war revival in
the arts and culture. The poet immersed himself in this rich welcoming
maelstrom. At the time London was the favorite educational destination for of
many of Nizar’s peers, like poets Jabra Ibrahim Jabra and Tawfiq Sayegh,
shaping their intellectual perceptions and influencing their cultural tastes.76
In the context of this heady cultural experience, Nizar came in contact
for the first time with the Western woman: a free, independent, responsible
counterpart of man. What struck him most about this woman was her
simplicity and honesty in revealing her emotions. His positive impressions of
the women he met, befriended, or dated led him to review and modify his
perceptions of womanhood:
I was quite loyal to the heritage of the “tribe” in my early poetry; I only
managed to set myself free from this heritage when I was able to sit in 1952
on a seat in London’s Hyde Park and engage the opposite sex in dialogue..
77
away from the headache of sex and the passions of the tribe.”
Nizar was quite discrete when it came to talking of his sexual relations
with women, preferring to keep such personal matters away from the prying
eyes of friends and foes alike. Although he had already embarked on a course
of critical revision of gender relations in Arab society, the intimate contact with
Western emancipated women cast that relationship in an entirely new light.
Thus in “A Letter from a Spiteful Lady,” a poem published in al-Adaab in July
1953, Nizar redefined positively the right of a woman to hate and rebel in view
of her man’s betrayal. Remarkably, the woman’s concern in the poem goes
beyond her anger at the man’s betrayal to feelings of solidarity with the other
woman, her rival and fellow victim.
The poet’s experiences with Western women now prompted him to
revisit his earlier relations, and to see them in a new light. But Nizar might
have also been inspired by the writings of others in his favorite magazine. For
throughout 1953, in article after article Dr. George Toumeh, a Syrian
psychologist drawing heavily on the writings of American psychoanalyst Erich
Fromm, attacked what he saw as the “negativity in Arab life.”78 Another
enthusiast who joined this campaign was poet Nazek al-Malaeka who now felt
the need to bolster her rather ambiguous poems with lucid critical articles –
publishing in November of the same year a powerful piece under the title “The
Woman between Two Extremes: Negativity and Morals” in which she
bemoaned the state of ignorance and backwardness prevailing among Arab
women. As if in tandem, Nizar’s next poem “Vessels of Pus,” which appeared
the following January, took his earlier revisionist position to a new level of
acrimony. The poem daringly raises the taboo subject of female sexual
frustration in arranged unequal unhappy marriages of Arab society. None
before him had ever approached this touchy subject in such openness and
acerbity. The poem begins by depicting a slothful man turning down the
amorous attentions of his wife, but the woman’s frustration is soon directed at
the entire male patriarchy:
What do I want?
Oh heir of Turkish Sultans
Of Ottoman seats
Of lazy narghiles groaning and
wheezing
Of slaved Circassian maids gliding
Around your sumptuous bed
At your feet.. falling
One by one..
…
The Caliphate never disappeared
For the Sultan lives in you
…
We women are your slaves
79
No, lower than slaves we are..
•]GC[ E•LM
]gr_QE ]tm L¤CEn LG
xƒa•QE k’•rQEn
]gzen J e klU’QE ˆlgVa†QEn
Šz™‰M •Pc LGLtUQE ~LgUƒa‹QEn
]gžaQE
]g™h E]gV .. Š›LUj ŽPh J{iUG
...
]gr_QE ]tm yrG FQ Z
]gr_QE ]tm F’gh ¢rie ]ilh
...
]gtm F’Q NLU†QE J_s
.. ]gtzQE —EPsI §cIn
In adopting such a plural attack, Nizar went beyond the confines of one
class to target the entire society, a society that he saw riddled with faults and
contradictions. Thus, adopting a female persona, he spoke for all the Arab
women who, even the most outspoken among them, would not have dared
raise such issues at the time.
During the first year, Nizar took every opportunity he could to travel
around England. He loved the open green meadows of the English country,
the country manors, the small reclusive English towns. Later he traveled to
Ireland and Scotland. He even took trips further afield to Denmark and
Sweden, and crossed the channel to France several times.
Amidst this poetic crusade and amidst the joys of his English
adventure, family responsibilities caught up with the poet. Early in 1954 his
young daughter fell sick and it was determined that she had to undergo an
operation. Nizar decided to bring her to London for that purpose. As he was
tending to her in the hospital, a more serious tragedy hit his home: his father
died in Damascus. Nizar was torn between staying next to his daughter’s
sickbed as she went through the operation, or returning to Syria to attend his
father’s funeral, a serious duty in Arab society. After making arrangements
with some friends to take care of his daughter, he traveled to Damascus to be
with his mother and siblings.
Despite his view of the father as a bearer and transmitter of much of
that was amiss in Arab culture, at a time of loss he could not but have love for
his father, the man who spent his life working for his family, as indeed most
Arab fathers do. In May that year he published a moving elegy for his father in
al-Adaab.
But Nizar’s was a very resilient nature, and life and its attractions, not
death and its fears, was what occupied his poetic mind. Soon he was back in
London and back to his poetical explorations. His father’s death, and the
attending surge of filial emotions may have temporarily softened his critical
stand against the Arab patriarchy. For despite his clear sympathy with Arab
women, he felt they should not be completely exonerated from responsibility
in their own plight. He realized that some women, by accepting to live by the
social terms of the patriarchy, and by accepting to play man-made roles, only
served to perpetuate their gender’s miserable condition. His poem “To a Paid
Mistress,” spoke directly to this. In the poem a man boasts to a woman of
buying her love with his money, dominating and humiliating her.
With money
Not sugared whispered talk
I broke your mighty pride
With money, my money
With golden gifts and dreamful silk
You just obeyed
And followed me
Like a blinded cat, believing all my
80
claims..
xrYEC]j
FmL†QE ¿G]_QLj Z
xrYEC]j Lplƒ ˆzg†rQE fedm ºyrª{c
FQL_QE aGa_QEn ˜µLS†QE JM ylrc Lrjn
x†•z›wh
x†•zten
xrmEdM “’j ˆ†M•M …NLgrzQE ˆ{iQLƒ
London gave Nizar the freedom to observe such social phenomena in
Arab society from a safe distance. But Nizar’s life in London also exposed him
to a certain sexual permissiveness hard to access or observe, as easily, in an
Arab context. He thus reacted to incidents and events that he experienced or
observed in England, writing of subjects of wider human scope. One such
topic was the hush-hush issue of lesbian love which he dealt with in “The Evil
Poem”, one of his most (in)famous poems. In it he describes in lurid poetic
imagery – and in a breath-taking feverish rhythm – the sexual consummation
of two women. Nizar, however, does this with a certain ambivalence as to his
position regarding the relationship: At one point a voyeuristic male voice
refers to the two women as “a wolf suckling her wolf”, yet at another, one of
the women voices a defense of lesbian love in the absence of a satisfying
heterosexual relationship:
Sister, fear not.. have no fear!
I am a shoulder to you.. I am your
wings
Why! Was I made a woman
For ghosts to chew my breasts?
Deviation?
Is it deviation, sister, when
xja{‰e Z .. Z …x•TE LG
ºvL†Vn C]\ fQ xs[
¡IaME ysªPºƒ xsEaeI
ºvLtŒDE u]ps À‰re xƒ
LM E•[ WL•TI ..½•nXŒI
Apples ripe kiss apples sweet?
We are women.. we have peaks
81
We have storms.. we have winds..
º LS•QE ÁvLS•QE F‡Q
v
½Fr^ L†Q .. }LeIaME J_s
ºvLGCn .. ½NEPsI L†Qn
As good as he was in composing fresh, lively and innovative poetry,
Nizar was not very good at molding his emotions into consistent ideological
frameworks and boundaries. This explains the sometimes paradoxical nature
of his poetry; he would respond poetically and spontaneously to situations and
events that he ultimately would find hard to fit into one stringent ideological
standpoint. His attention was always more on the esthetics of his poetry than
on the conflicting ideas it may carry, leading many critics to accuse him of,
well, of everything! If the words of a poem taking shape in his mind were
captivatingly beautiful, it mattered less to him if the ideas behind these words
conflicted with another poem of his. Nizar was aware of this, but could not
help it. His love for poetic language overrode any checks his intellect might
have imposed. He realized early on that the only constant in his life was
poetry. The only way for him to cope with this predilection for selfcontradiction was to try to hover, intellectually at least, around the middle
ground as much as he could. In the end, even this would prove difficult to
maintain.
Another of al-Malaeka’s critical articles came out in May 1954 under
the title “Fragmentationalism in Arab Society”, “fragmentationalism’ being alMalaeka’s own coinage for “our tendency to isolate social phenomena,
studying them separately from one another with the assumption that our life is
made up of conflicting domains that were haphazardly mixed together.” alMalaeka maintained that this ‘fragmentationalism’ manifested itself in such
phenomena as the Arabs’ inclination to hyperbole and exaggeration of events,
e.g. the aggrandizement of political activism; and also in the fact that “Arab
society is at its core a conservative society, despite all the outward signs of
development.” She concluded that:
Thus conservativism turns into a challenge to life and a violation of it,
because when it imposes an ossified thought on a developed human life it
immediately paralyzes the mind and throws it into inertia. It only achieves this
by separating the one person into two parts, a part with a blind group
impulse, and another with a dust-covered retired mind.
With all the irritation Nizar’s recent poetry was causing to
conservatives, the poems were still largely seen in the context of his earlier
prurient poetry – the view best summarized in the witty words of Abbas
Mahmoud al-Akkad, a respected critic, who once said “Nizar entered the
women’s harem, but never left!”82 Now such articles as those of al-Malaeka
enflamed his emotions and convinced him of the need for a full frontal attack
against the conservatives who spared no opportunity to chew his reputation at
every turn. In the past, considering his precarious position at work, he was
rather hesitant to take such a daring step, although it was probably on his
mind all along. But in view of his widespread recognition as a poet, his good
relation with his superiors at work, and the generally liberal atmosphere in
Syria of the mid-fifties, now once again under the kind presidency of Shukri alQuwwatli, Nizar decided to launch a serious attack against what he saw
wrong and backward in Arab culture. In March 1955, just two months before
the end of his mission in London, Nizar published his landmark poem “Bread,
Hashish, and a Moon.” Al-Adaab magazine, anticipating the explosive effect
of the poem, put it on its editorial page for maximum impact:
To my land..
The land of prophets..
The land of simple hearts
Tobacco chewers and opium lords..
What does the moon do to us?
That we forsake our pride..
And live beseeching heaven..
What does heaven have
For slothful drones and lounging
loons?
Who turn to walking dead
In the moonlight..
Wailing at the graves of long-dead
saints..
So that they give them rice.. and boys
83
The long-dead saints..
• ÂNLgb Ãa^ ŠlzSG uXQE LM
.. uH±tj
.. ÂNLgtsDE H±tj
.. NL{UtQE H±jn
.. C]¬QE CL™en Àt•QE x®bLM
• ÂariQE L†gh ŠlzSG uXQE LM
.. NLGat’QE ©g‰†h
.. NLrUQE u]™•U†Q Ägzsn
• NLrUQE ]†m uXQE LM
.. NLSzb .. kQLU’Q
.. ariQE »Lm E•[ kePM kQ[ }Plg_•UG
.. NLgQnDE CPt^ }ndpGn
CPt^ .. ZLS›In .. E‚C Fp^‚ae Lplm
NLgQnDE
Even Nizar did not expect the extent of the backlash the poem would
generate. There was an uproar in Arab media in general, but more so in his
hometown of Damascus, where conservatives had still a voice in the media.
He was immediately attacked as a lewd, depraved man who had now topped
it off by losing his religion in England! Most of them did not see the genuine
concern that lay behind the harsh criticism, a concern for the welfare of his
people and a desire to see them transcend all that he saw as impediment to
their progress. In the angry words of one critic, Nizar “has attacked East and
West, Islam and history; he has belittled our sacred truths, despised our
beliefs, and accused us of something we are innocent of…”84
Over a month’s time the storm snowballed into a “revolt” on Nizar
Qabbani, climaxing in the introduction in the Syrian parliament by MP Mustafa
al-Zarqa, also professor of Islamic and Civil Law at Damascus University
School of Law, of a motion to fire Qabbani from government service. When
this motion failed, Zarqa headed a delegation which met with the Minister of
Foreign Affairs, Mr. Khaled al-Azem, to protest and push for some
penalization of the poet. Nizar later retold with pride and joy how al-Azem
asked for his file and examined it, then said to his guests, “I would like to
inform you that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in fact has two Nizars: Nizar the
employee, whose record is professionally good, and then there is Nizar the
poet, on whom I have no authority; if the latter lampooned you with a poem,
then you can do the same to him and even it out!”85
While most “progressive” writers held back from entering the fray for
fear of the “ungodly” association and the backlash, there were in fact some
who rallied to his support as evidenced in the intense debates that raged in
the aftermath of the poem. Several prominent critics took his side, defending
the need to reexamine many of the beliefs and assumptions taken for granted
as uncontestable truths – if true progress were to be achieved. Some of his
most vocal defenders, however, came from the student corps, the largest
contingent of his readers. One such student spurred to action was Muhyi alDin Subhi, a sophomore at Damascus University’s Faculty of Letters and
Humanities, who would soon become a close friend of his. Subhi wrote an
effusive article entitled “At Your Command Nizar Qabbani!” and submitted it to
none other than al-Manar newspaper, the mouthpiece of the Muslim
Brotherhood in Syria. Despite its ideologically regressive Salafi1 positions, and
in a sign of the openness for debate that characterized Syria of the 1950’s,
the newspaper decided to publish Subhi’s article, albeit with the disparaging
swipe in the sub-title: “Nizar’s boys are up defending his Hashish and
Hashish-induced Poetry!”86
In the end Nizar withered the storm, but the experience showed him
how dangerous it is to challenge accepted norms and beliefs, and how
precarious it can be for someone like him dependent in his livelihood on a
monthly salary. As much as his job offered him the chance to travel and
expand his horizons, ironically it also put breaks on his freedom of expression.
There being highly educated and cultured people at the top of the government
at the time played no small part in his survival, in an otherwise merciless and
competitive politically-charged environment. Nizar again remembers how the
Syrian ambassador to London, seeing his dejection over the disturbance his
poem caused in Damascus, invited him to his office to lighten him up,
produced a blank check and asked the poet to name a price for his poem!87
Such acts of solidarity and magnanimity from higher ranking officials
may have lifted the poet’s spirits and helped him cope with the hardship. But
there were moments when he was challenged in the course he chose for his
life, especially the poet-diplomat dichotomous reality he was living. Nizar
would later recollect a meaningful incident that took place one day in his office
at the Syrian consulate in London. A Moroccan man requested to meet him
after he had received his visa to Syria. The man, seeing the signature of Nizar
Qabbani at the bottom of the form inquired of the secretary if this was Nizar
Qabbani the poet. Answered yes, he requested to see him. Nizar accepted,
expecting to hear praise for his poetry from just another fan. The man, who
looked like a hard-up student, refused even to sit. He stood in the middle of
the room and addressed Nizar: “Dear Sir, could you explain to me what on
earth is a poet like you doing behind this desk?” The visitor berated him that
any one could do this cumbersome tedious job of filling forms and stamping
applications. This was not the job of a poet. He was quite right; nothing could
be more distractive to creative genius than the drudgery of office work.
William Faulkner, after being fired as a post office clerk for gross negligence,
is said to have commented: "I reckon I'll be at the beck and call of folks with
money all my life, but thank God I won't ever again have to be at the beck and
call of every son of a bitch who's got two cents to buy a stamp."88
It might be that, unlike Faulkner’s job, being a diplomat has a certain
prestige and glitter that is harder to dismiss as easily. Nizar would continue
doing his work, but the seeds of doubt as to his future as a diplomat were
growing in him.
At the end of his stay in England, Nizar decided to visit Spain,
especially the places there dear to Arab imagination. Arab Andalusia is
engraved in the heart of every Arab poet; the glory of its Arab past comes
alive from the lush literature that Andalusian Arabs left behind. Nizar, like
other Arab poets fed on their poetry, and like all other Arab poets who went to
Europe, he had to make his pilgrimage to Spain and its history-haunted
places. He chose to do so in August 1955 spending the better part of the
month sightseeing around the country. During this time he wrote his first free
verse poem “Andalusian Memoirs”, a two-page poem punctuated by the cities
he wrote in and dominated by a subtextual conflict between a confident West
and a diffident East.
Damascus 1955-58 The Don Juan Nationalist
Nizar returned to Damascus in the Fall of 1955 a changed man looking
to live independently of his family. Between the desire to maintain his privacy
and the need to be close to his family and children, he found a good
compromise in the purchase of an apartment in an adjacent building next to
his family’s. He furnished the rooms to his taste, and adorned the place with
the many antiques and art pieces he brought with him from his travels. For the
poet was also a hopeless lover of art and an addicted collector of beautiful
works of painting, sculpture, artwork, and handicrafts. He soon purchased a
car, certainly a luxury at the time, and settled back again to life in Syria and its
politics.
But Nizar returned to a society that was increasingly showing clearer
signs of social and political rifts between the old aristocracy and the middle
and lower classes. The educated from the latter had been heavily swayed by
leftist and nationalist ideas of social equality and class power. People of this
bent now made up the rank and file of such ascendant parties as the Baath
Party, the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP), and the Syrian Communist
Party. While Nizar was in London, rural Syria had shown its growing muscles
in the revolt that ousted the dictatorish rule of colonel Adeeb al-Shishakli.
Although the restoration to power of president Shukri al-Quwwatli meant
continued rule of the traditional aristocracy, it was the socialists and leftists,
many of them seated in key positions in the army, who now pulled the strings
of power in Syria. They were now most vocal in the parliament under the
leadership of mavericks like Akram al-Hourani – and in the streets in which
they demonstrated ever so frequently at the bidding of their parties’ leaders.
Yet by the mid-fifties, the rivalry between the leftists reached its zenith,
leading to power jostling between the three main parties. The murder on April
22, 1955 of colonel Adnan al-Malki, a Baathist from a prominent Damascus
family, at the hands of an alleged member of the SSNP, brought the
aristocrats to an alliance with the Baathists to outlaw that party. The witch
hunt that followed ultimately purged Syrian Nationalists from the government,
and effectively made the SSNP a history.89 This development only raised the
profile of the Baath and gave it more say in Syrian politics. The Baath alliance
with the aristocracy would last for some time while it consolidated its ranks;
nevertheless, the Baathists were still right on target. Most Baathists hailed
from either poor rural areas in the Alawite or Druze mountains, or from the
teeming poor slums of the cities. They did not fool themselves as to the
economic gap that separated most of them from the rich powerful residents of
Abu Rummaneh, the upscale neighbored of Damascus where Syria’s rulers
resided. Sulaiman al-Issa, the Baathist poet par excellence, summarized
these feelings, as he walked in that neighborhood on one cool summer
evening:
This is Damascus, my green city,
luscious with scents
The well-lit street is a river of sunset
legends
…
Is this silk-enriched city really mine?
Is this city with shining fragrance
really mine?
No.. No.. I am the son of the fallen
wall.. the worthless hut
“hae .. NEa‰¬QE x•†G]M .. –‹MH uXY
`Pg{QLj
`Pg®QE ag›L|I JM aps .. NLªbPQE —CL‹QEn
...
•aGa_QE ~LªSpj y^až x•QE uXY x•†G]MI
•agtzQE ¶Yn klm xS®e x•QE uXY x•†G]MI
ÅP’QEn …£n]prQE §µL_QE JjE LsI ..Z ..Z
agi_QE
k•c .. Š†g› Š†M ªaVI .. –Ga{QE Jj[
Son of the streets.. whose mud
sleeps on my bamboo rug..
Son of the darkness…that turns our
village into graves
…
So I turned around.. and made an
oath to the night
That I will never befriend a street
That a country was wrenched for it to
be paved
That a nation be denuded
For a monkey to be wrapped in
90
luxury.
uag„c
CPtiQLƒ .. ·NLUM L†•Ga^ HaG .. £±•QE Jj[
...
E]pm “glQE Jgjn x†gj ·LƒCLe .. xjCH yGPQn
Eª]rºG xƒ WH±j ~a„m LmCLŒ }HLYI Z }I
EHa^ ¸LtG]QLj Rl•Q ˆMI •ªazºe Z }I
Nizar could never be the author of such poetry. While it was true he
was not born into the aristocracy, he was not a pauper either. His white-collar
career and his princely status in Damascus’ velvety society on account of his
poetry naturally disposed him against socialist egalitarianism popular with the
disadvantaged. He believed in work, and in cultivating peoples’ friendships.
He appreciated wealth, even when not in his hands. So in his feelings, he fell
somewhere between the advantaged aristocracy and the disadvantaged
working classes. Not able to exactly fit in either, he was the ultimate outsider.
The developing socio-political struggles in Syria were, however, soon
pushed under the surface by the flare-up of passions for developments
beyond the Syrian borders. The bloody fight in Algeria for independence from
France had just started; and there was no question where all the Arabs stood
in that fight. Closer to the poet’s home territory, Arab nationalists of all stripes
lined up behind Egypt in condemning the “all-evil” Baghdad Pact of 1955, a
regional alliance of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan devised by Britain to
create a “northern-tier” shield to forestall any Soviet inroads into Middle East
oil. Nasser’s Egypt, naturally, felt marginalized by the pact, and decided to
undermine the alliance by closing ranks with Syria and Saudi Arabia in
opposition. Egypt and Syria went on to conclude toward the end of the year a
mutual defense treaty and to create unified military command for the two
countries. These actions seemed to have gotten on the nerves of the Israelis;
sporadic military confrontations soon erupted between Israel and its Egyptian
and Syrian neighbors. The charged atmosphere led Nizar to write his first
poem on the Arab-Israeli conflict: The Story of Rachel Schwartzenburg,
published on the first page of al-Adaab issue of February 1956. Again here,
he found it difficult to leave women out of even this straightforward political
topic, choosing to approach it through the vilification of a Jewish immigrant
woman and the celebration of the martyrdom of Palestinian women. Writing in
his own voice, and adopting a Pan-Arabist stance, Nizar addressed the young
Arabs:
Let the young remember..
The Arab young.. wherever they are
The young today.. the young for years
to come
The story of a terrorist recruited
woman
Named Rachel..
Who took the place of my mother
My mother who lies in her blood
In our green orange grove in Hebron
My slaughtered martyred mother
Let the young remember
The story of the land the grownups lost
91
Thanks to the United Nations..
.. CL®„QE aƒXglh
}n]VPG ¿gc .. CL®„QE `azQE
}n]QPg| JMn .. Fp†M En]Qºn JM
.. ¡]†™M ˆgjLYC[ ˆ„^
.. “gŒEC LpsPm]G
.. WH]rrQE xMI “_M yªlc
.. “gl¬QE xh NEa‰¬QE L†eCLªgj BCI xh
.. ¡]Áp‹•UrQE ˆ_gjXQE LsI xMI
CL®„QE aƒXgQn
CLt’QE Lpzgb x•QE BCDE ˆGL’c
.. W]_•rQE FMDEn
“The Story of Rachel Schwartzenburg” was one of the last poems
Nizar added to a new collection of poetry he put together that summer. For
between his work at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, social evenings with his
friends, secretive intimate dates, and weekend getaways to the freedom of
Beirut, Nizar managed to bring to publication a new collection which he gave
the self-assured title of “Poems from Nizar Qabbani.” The collection was the
first fruit of al-Adaab Publishing House, a new joint publishing venture which
he established that year with his friend Suheil Idriss. The booklet included all
the 39 poems he had written since the publication of his last collection in
1951, some of which already appeared in al-Adaab and other magazines over
the past years. In their majority, the poems were typical of his romantic style:
lyrical, passionate, and unabashedly full of life. The “Poems” unprecedented
success with the public sealed Nizar’s status as the leading poet of his time.
Many still consider it today the best collection he ever published.92
But in writing such “committed” poems as “The Story of Rachel
Schwartzenburg”, Nizar was trying to appease the pressure on him to put his
poetry to good use. Even some of those who lauded his love poetry, always
nudged him forward toward a more politically responsible poetry. In an article
entitled, “Nizar Qabbani: Poet of the Sensual Artistic Gazal”, distinguished
critic Dr. Ahmad Zaki Abu Shadi wrote:
In all we read from his poetry, we found excellent talent with bouncing
imagination, innovative allusion, and magical musicality – all so attractively
integrated in his various depictions of “womanhood”. But regardless of our
poet’s trend at the moment, we are quite confident that his patriotism,
humanism, and the inherited patriotism of his family, will blossom out in his
poetry in the future as he grows more mature and as he gains more in
93
experience.
Nizar was certainly oscillating under the tug of the two contending
forces in Arabic letters at the time, the one calling for art to be politically
involved and the one calling for art to transcend the topical and momentary in
pursuit of its own esthetics. Although he had already written what could be
termed “committed” poetry, a poetry dedicated to a clear social and political
cause, the poet was not comfortable with what he did. In an editorial in alNuqqad magazine in September 1956, Nizar wrote in protest:
I was given the task of writing the editorial. I am supposed, then, to be useful,
to carry on my back to the reader bread, honey, and flour. […] I am supposed
to wear the robes of imams and preachers, to gurgle out a sermon that would
send the pulpits yawning. […] If this is the benefit you are expecting from me,
then I am afraid I cannot be of benefit to you. I carry to you in my hands a
bunch of lilies.. beauty trysts.. a small flock of stars that I plucked from the
snows on my beloved’s neck.. from the sun touching her shirt. I am a carrier
of perfume – an ambassador carrying lilies to your vases. […] We are asking
of beauty more than it could deliver. We are no longer satisfied with the lilies,
we want to eat the lilies. Committed writers, regardless of their causes, are
but preachers for the eating of beauty.. nothing but lilies-eaters. This is where
we go separate ways; for beauty has to stay apart from “industrialization” and
94
“nationalization” and social service centers.
The poet was aware of the paradox he was creating by trying to
reconcile his free poetic urges with his fans’ expectations of him to sing of
their “other” passions, to go along with them in all their emotional ups and
downs. His defense of artistic freedom, however, was the more significant
because he wrote it amidst the extremely charged air of the developing Suez
Crisis. That July, the Americans, after giving up on bending Nasser their way,
had suddenly reneged on their earlier promises of financing the Aswan Dam
project. Nasser, to whom the project was a matter of personal pride as well as
a matter of national economic necessity, declared in a fiery speech on July
21, the nationalization of the Suez Canal company to finance this vital project
for Egypt. No speech had ever – or would ever – rivet Arab minds as that
delivered by Nasser that hot summer day. Starting with his endearing
“Brothers!”, he, without a script, eloquently laid his case to the eager crowds
in front of him and to the millions of Arabs tuning on the radio -- ultimately
whipping them to a frenzy as he defiantly told the West: “Drop dead of your
fury, for you will never be able to dictate to Egypt! We will not allow the
domination of force and dollar.”95
Nasser seemed all that Arabs aspired to in a leader. Modest, tall and
benevolently good-looking, he exuded manhood and honesty. Add to that a
strong command of Standard Arabic and a knack for crowd-swaying oratory,
the man quickly acquired mythic appeal among Arabs the world over. Nizar
was one of those who soon fell for Nasser’s charms and his Pan-Arabist
proclamations; as a diplomat, he had seen enough “midgets” in his time to
recognize a giant. But despite his admiration for Nasser and his stances,
Nizar did not forget his pledge to his friend Idriss to never be the stooge-poet
to any leader, no matter how great he was.
So at a time when the skies were clouded with the glooms of war
against Egypt, and at a time when Arab passions ran sky-high against France
for its slaughtering of Algerian Arabs in their drive for independence, Nizar
published in August in al-Adaab his poem “Existentialist Girl” about a lovable
young woman living a free life in the night caverns of Paris – a precursor of
the hippie girl of the nineteen sixties and seventies. In choosing to publish a
poem about a French girl at such a sensitive time, he knew he was not only
challenging the usual Arab taboos about the role of women in society, but also
the gaining simple us-versus-them view of the confrontation with the West. He
wanted to emphasize at just such time that there was much to be appreciated
in Western civilization, even as Arabs were battling Western powers for
national independence and freedom. To Nizar, the need to separate the two
sides of the West was pivotal for both the success of any true Arab political
revival and, more importantly perhaps, for preserving the humanist nature of
Arabic poetry:
Her name was Janine..
I met her in Paris some years ago
In a gypsy grotto..
She was French
In her eyes
Cried
The gray skies of Paris
She was existentialist.
…
She tells the music: fall like the rain
I want to roam
Islands forgotten.. unknown
…
She was existentialist
Because she’s alive
Wanting to choose what she sees
Wanting to rip her life apart
96
Out of love for life.
... JgsLV Lpr|E }Lƒ
Jg†| JM ˜GCLj xh – aƒ•I – Lp•giQ
... PjL•QE ¡CL®M xh aƒ•I
ˆgUsah xYn
x’te Lp†gm xh
ˆGHLMaQE ˜GCLj NLr|
ˆGHPVn xYn
...
arpsE J_lQ •Pie
HnCI }I ]GCI
ˆgU†M BCDE xh EaµEdV
...
ˆGHPVn ysLƒ
ˆgc ˆsLUs[ LpsD
WEae LM CL•¬e }I ]Gae
WLg_QE Ždre }I ]Gae
WLg_QE Lptc JM
Nizar’s use of the word “jaza’er”, a plural of “jazeera”, (tr. island) was
no coincidence. He wanted to intimate that the girl’s quest for freedom in
those “jaza’er” and Algeria’s quest were one and the same. Indeed, many in
France at the time were opposed to French imperialism. As a woman, he
applauded her thirst for life and her choosing her own way of living it, and that
included her “boyish haircut” which he had issues with in the past. The poem
became a sensation, and the poet got some searing criticism for both the
theme and style, notably from veteran critic Maron Abboud, to which he
defended himself rather well.
But the fuss around his latest poem and his ambivalent protestations
on the role of poetry soon were all drowned in the tidal wave that followed the
outbreak of the Suez War. On October 31, the British joined the French and
the Israelis in an ill-conceived attack to regain control of the Suez canal, each
with a grudge of their own against Nasser: The British were sore at losing
their access, profits, and prestige when Nasser nationalized the canal
(moreover, prime minister Eden personally detested Nasser, likening him to
Hitler); the French had it in for Nasser for his active support of the raging
insurgency in Algeria; and the Israelis, always happy to lend a hand against
their unfriendly neighbors, did not mind some land grabbing. The attack
proved a tragic miscalculation; the Egyptians defended their homeland
valiantly, other Arabs rallied to their support, and the war proved quite
unpopular in the West, and especially in Great Britain itself. The Allies risky
venture soon was doomed when the USSR, taking advantage of the chaos in
the Middle East, invaded Hungary to crush an anti-communist revolt. The
U.S., unconsulted on the Suez operation, could only condemn it. President
Eisenhower, no fan of Nasser for sure, still found it necessary to declare that
“the United States could not insist on one code of conduct for its enemies and
another for its friends.”97.
In the heat of the first few days of the war, Nizar did not have the luxury
for artistic deliberations. At such a moment of truth, there was no question
where his loyalty was. Like most Arabs, he was enraged at the Western
aggression against Egypt. And as expected of him, he promptly wrote and
published in a daily newspaper three short poems, each in the form of a letter
from an Egyptian soldier to his father:
Just now.. we finished the last of the parachutes
Father
If only you saw them falling
Like the fruits of an old apricot tree..
Falling..
Dangling..
Under their ripped chutes
Like the hanged dangling in silence..
Hunted by the rifles of this great people
98
Hunting them the blue-eyed..
Jg{jLpQE •Plh L†g†hI ..}DE
ºWL•jI
}P{^LU•G Fpe]YLŒ PQ
.. ‚P™m ˆ‹r‹M CLr‡ƒ
.. }P{^LU•G
.. }P_VCw•G
ˆ†gz{QE ~±•rQE y_e
.. }P’| xh kQ]e ŽP†‹M “‡M
FY]g„e …Fg•zQE œz‹QE ŽHL†jn
}PgzQE ŽC‚
Nizar could not be more “Arab” than in these lines: harping on the sonfather macho relationship dear to patriarchies, and lumping the invaders
together as a “blue-eyed” monsters, when ironically, he himself had blue
eyes!:
I can see them..
Father, I can see them.. the blue-eyed
With black conscience..
Father.. the blue-eyed
Their pirate leader’s eyes
99
Are crystal-cold..
.. FYECI xs[
.. }PgzQE ŽC‚ …xjI LG
.. aµLr‰QE HP|
}PgzQE ŽC‚ xjI LG
¡]MLV …CPlltQE JM Jgm …FpsL\a^
}PS™QE
When the dust settled after the Allies’ grudging retreat, Nasser
emerged from the ruffle as the unchallenged leader of the Arabs, a reality that
unsettled the ruling aristocracies in many an Arab country. The man after all
had an anti-feudalist agenda: his agrarian land reforms in Egypt had all but
emasculated the traditional ruling class. But looking at the editorials and
articles in the Arab press at the time, it was clear there is no stopping this
“Nasserite” groundswell. Even the pan-Arabist Baathists in Syria were
alarmed at the extent of Nasser’s reach beyond his borders, realizing that
they either had to ride the crest of the wave or risk drowning to the bottom. As
a minority party, they soon decided to join the pan-Arab bandwagon clamoring
for uniting Syria with Egypt.
Nizar did not know what to make of the new reality, on the one hand he
sincerely wished to see progress in the Arab world, on the other he had learnt
to be suspicious of the concentration of too much power in the hands of one
man. But if Nizar was not sure, other Arab poets soon made up their minds to
rescue poetry out of this unpoetic activist quagmire it had been dragged into.
Several prominent Arab poets from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria, Iraq, and even
Egypt launched in January 1957 a new avant-garde quarterly they named
“Shi’r” (tr. Poetry). The group gravitated around the American University of
Beirut and almost all of its members had strong Western education. The poets
later became known as the “Tammouzi group” (Tammouz being an ancient
Near Eastern fertility myth central to their poetical vision). They included poets
Yusef al-Khal, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Adunis (a.k.a. Ali Ahmad Said), Badr
Shaker al-Sayyab, Khalil Hawi, Tawfiq Sayegh, and several others.
These young Western-looking poets were tired of what they saw as the
excessively hortatory nature of the leading literary journals in the Arab world.
Indeed, a cursory look at the table of contents for al-Adaab issue of January
1957 is enough to illustrate their point; some of the titles bellowed: “Victory is
Ours!”, “Torch of Liberty”, “Rhetoric in the Service of Political Goals”, “Elegy
for the Martyrs”, “The Arab Pyramid”, and “To a Rapist Soldier: I Will Kill
You!”, the latter was a poem by none other than Salah Abdul Sabour, an
otherwise soft-spoken romantic poet. The dramatic events in the region may
have had their effect on the ferocity of passions exposed, yet the Tammouzi
poets decided they had enough of that and wanted a journal that projected an
entirely different approach to literature. They attempted to articulate this view
in the first issue of Shi’r by rather confused – or confusing – quotes from
American poet Archibald MacLeish (1892-1980), who was at the time at the
peak of his fame:
Those who practice the art of poetry in a time like ours should not write
“political” poetry or try to solve the problems of their age with their poems.
Rather, they should practice their art for the purposes of their art and its
needs…
While MacLeish’s quote nailed what the Tammouzi poets wanted to
emphasize, MacLeish himself, well-known for self-contradiction and
inconsistency – was not exactly the right role model to follow, having spent a
great deal of his talent writing “public” poetry in support of liberal democracy.
At any case, Shi’r was soon able to define itself in the context of the larger
human quest for answers to life’s perennial questions. Furthermore, by
invoking ancient Syrian and Babylonian myths closely linked to the Biblical
tradition, the Tammouzi poets saw themselves as the cultural origin of
Western civilization, not an extension of it nor in opposition to it. Thus, the
movement did not shy away from lionizing leading Western poets of the time,
some of whom later even contributed to the magazine. The Fall 1960 issue of
Shi’r, for example, featured contributions from such renowned poets as Louis
MacNeice, Philip Larkin, Elizabeth Jennings, and W. S. Merwin.
Needless to say, Nizar did not fit into this new venture. By occupying
himself with modern Arab affairs whether in the social or political spheres,
even through harshly critical positions, and despite Western influences on
him, he firmly defined himself from within the Arabic Islamic poetic tradition.
He was quick to see that the Tammouzi poets took a wild historical leap by
jumping over the Arab Islamic past to delve into dead Near Eastern or
European civilizations. A poet like him so tuned, even attached, to his
audience could not take such cultural leaps as the Tammouzi poets did
without losing his relevance.100
It was no coincidence then that Nizar was the subject of a harsh critical
attack in the first issue of the magazine. His poetry was criticized as
hopelessly “adolescent” in both theme and language. It seems that some of
the Tammouzi poets, like Jabra, felt that the attack was too emotional, and
Nizar was soon invited to contribute to the magazine. But he had only to
publish two love poems in Shi’r to realize that his exuberant poetry jarred
loudly with the intense sardonic and torn contemplations of the Tammouzi’s. A
poet given to the enjoyment of the pleasures of life, he naturally steered away
from this movement and its laborious ruminations of death and resurrection.
Apart from his nature, the 34-year-old poet had a very good reason to
rejoice. For the first time in his life perhaps, he was truly in love. His new
flame was Collette al-Khouri, granddaughter of Faris al-Khouri, a prominent
Damascene politician, one of the architects of Syria’s independence and
several-times prime minister. She was 22 and had just graduated with a
Bachelor’s in Law from St. Joseph University and a degree in French from the
School for Belles-lettres, both in Lebanon. Young and vivacious, she has
already published a collection of poetry in French. Her black eyes, dark hair,
and slim figure worked magic on the poet’s imagination. A privileged daughter
of society, she fascinated Nizar with her suave cultured conversations. The
poet quickly realized this was not just a blabbering fan of his poetry, but a
poet in her own right.
Collette found a soul mate in Nizar, a poet who shared her exquisite
tastes in life. She was attracted to him the first time she saw him. Tall, polite,
well-dressed, and surrounded by the aura of a great poet who drew women
like a magnet, she could not resist his appeal. As a poet herself and as a
woman, she coveted the association with him, although she knew how risky it
was for her, at her young age, to possess him and to be in his possession.
The couple hit it together well, and quickly became the talk of the town. Her
family, however, was concerned for what the relationship could do to her
reputation. Although Christian by faith, and thus more liberally inclined than
many Muslims in Damascus, the family had a certain status in the city and
wanted to preserve it. But relatives soon realized that there was nothing they
could do about the love-smitten couple.
From the moment Nizar met Collette, his poetry became about her and
to her. She became his inspiration and his valued reader. Along the letters to
her went his poems. Some of these poems expressed his feelings of love and
desire for her, but from the beginning Nizar also turned the thoughts and
emotions she expressed in her letters to him into poetry. He loved to see
himself through her eyes: a loved man in total possession of a young woman
helplessly in love. This is quite clear in “Little Things”, one of the first poems
he wrote to Collette, dated February 28, 1957, and which he published in
“Shi’r” soon afterwards:
fMLMI P‡VI JT]e Jg_h
Štg{QE f•{iƒ
}LMI xlƒn
Št™zM ¡PYdM –cZI
}LT]QE OPgT
}L’rQE •Pc ysI Lpm‚Pe
.. aµEnH
.. aµEnH
x†m “glQE aT´ xh “caen
.aVLpM œg{ƒ …F™†ƒ
As you smoke I sit watching
Like your sweet loving cat
All comfort and admiration
Following with my eyes
Your smoke undulating
Around the place
Circles..
Circles..
Leaving me at the end of the
night
Like a star setting.. a bird
101
migrating..
Nizar published little of this intimate poetry at the time to allow as much
privacy as possible to a relationship already in the public eye. But he did not
go out of his way to hide his love to Collette, nor did he hide the value he saw
of this love for his poetry – and of his poetry for this love:
The stones in Arabia would
have remained stones had these
not been touched by the animating
fingers of Arabic poetry.. giving
each stone a shade of nostalgia..
watering each grain of sand from
the redness of a wound.. from the
veins of a tryst:
(I passed their home / windswept
remains in the hands of time / I
turned my eyes and walked away /
My heart and stones behind)
This is how a stone can
live.. this is how it gets covered with
grass and buds.. this is how the
stone becomes a realm.. So what
would the small things of my
beloved be.. the small things.. her
vials.. her piano.. her books.. her
new dress copied from the
blossoms of a peach tree.. what
would all these things be if I did not
give them a soul.. if I did not feed
them my poetry?
And the eyes of my love..
those hazel-colored lamps lighting
and burning my life.. What would
they be without poetry.. without a
song to water them? How
miserable the big eyes are if they
find not someone to say something
to them or about them!
kite ysLƒ ‚L™_QE BCI xh ¡CL™_QE
ŠlMLswj xjazQE az‹QE Lp_UrG FQ PQ ¡CL™c
..ŽPŒ ˆQ±ž a™c “ƒ PU’gh .. ˆ‹z†rQE
JM ..vaV ¡arc JM “MC ¡C• “ƒ xiUGn
..]mPM JgGEaŒ
kltQE ]gj LpQPl›n FYCLGH klm ~CaM ]iQn
œps
•Pl{QE x†m
ygST Xrh x†gm y•Slen
œliQE ySle
L‹g‹c xU•’G EX’Y ..a™_QE ÄgzG EX’Y
..NLr| a™_QE -t„G EX’Y ..FmEajn
Lp’l•re x•QE ..¡ag®„QE .. ¡ag®„QE NLgŒDEn
LpjP¤ ..Lpt•ƒ ..LpsLgj ..LYaGCEP^ .. x•tgtc
..¡aYdM ŽECH ¡a™Œ Jm •Pi†rQE ]G]™QE
vnaQE ¥SsE FQ PQ }P’e E•LM NLgŒDE WXY “ƒ
•u]µL„^ Lprz›I FQ PQ ..Lpj
}LcLt„rQE }EXY …œcI JM L†gmn
..xeLgc }±z‹Gn }±z•‹G }EXlQE }LglUzQE
ˆg†žI ag®j ..azŒ ag®j LrYag„M }P’G E•LM
£PG ¡agt’QE }PgzQE kiŒI LMn ... •LrpgiUe
.L gŒ Lp†m •PiG nI LpQ •PiG JM ]™e Z
The thoughts above are from a speech the poet gave at the American
University of Beirut in March by invitation from his fellow poets at “Shi’r”. The
turnout of people wanting to listen to Nizar Qabbani astonished the organizers
who did not envision such numbers. Simply, there was not enough space in
AUB’s West Hall where the reading was planned, so it was decided to move it
to the university Chapel grounds. Nizar’s extreme popularity was now evident,
not just in sales or press coverage, but in the unprecedented crowds that
trekked from all around to listen to his poetry. The extent of this success in
Beirut, however, highlighted the painful reality Nizar was living in his pious
city. For Damascus was now not only frigid to his poetry, but also resentful of
his unmarried relationship with Collette. That same happy night, a pensive
Nizar whispered to a friend: “It is really unfortunate that I have been
composing poetry in my country for fifteen years only to be rewarded with
curse words – and then I receive such a warm welcome outside.”102
But Nizar’s troubles were just beginning. The next month Collette
traveled to the United States for a month; her absence left a sudden vacuum
in the life of the poet who, in the short period of time they knew each other,
grew used to her lively presence, a presence that somehow shielded him from
the attentions of other women. In the same Adaab issue that Baathist
Suleiman al-Issa published a poem entitled “To Her Fiancé On the Front”,
Nizar wrote of his longing to Collette:
My friend,
My beloved friend,
With estranged eyes.. in the town
of strangers..
A month has passed..
…x•iG]\
…ˆtgt_QE x•iG]\
.. ŠtGa®QE ˆ†G]rQE xh .. Jg†gzQE ˆtGaž
.. k‰M ½apŒ
Not a word.. not a letter to rejoice
No trace..
No news
From you to lighten
103
My frightful isolation..
Štg‰T ˆQL|C Z .. ½¦ac Z
½a¤I Z
½atT Z
ŠtgYaQE x•Qdm Nx‰G f†M
In a poem with such a clear reference, Nizar preferred to speak of
Collette as a “friend” or a “girlfriend”, but not as a “beloved”, let alone a
fiancée. Many factors worked against their relationship: age, experience, and
above all wealth. Registering a conversation that took place between the two
after a dance, Nizar summed up this tension beautifully,
As we dance he tells me words..
Words unlike any other words
…
He tells me I am his gem.. worth a thousand
stars..
He tells me I am his treasure.. the best he’s seen
of paintings
He mentions things.. that dazzle me.. I forget the
dancing and the steps..
Words.. that turn my history upside down..
Words that make me woman in no time
He builds me a palace of illusions
In which I live fleetingly
I turn.. I walk to my table
There is nothing in my hands
104
Nothing but words..
x†„^EaG Jgc x†zrUG
~Lrl’QLƒ yUgQ ..~Lrlƒ
...
Š•S_e xªsI xsat¬G
~Lr™†QE ¦Z´ unL|In
xswjn ..d†ƒ xswjn
~LcPQ JM ]YLŒ LM “rVI
x†ºTªn]e .. NLgŒI unaG
~EP{¬QEn ¢^arQE x†gU†e
x¬GCLe œlie .. ~Lrlƒ
~L•_Q xh ¡IaME x†lz™e
FYn JM Ea„^ xQ x†tG
~L•_Q •P| Šgh J’|I Z
x•QnL{Q HPmI ..HPmIn
~Lrlƒ Z[ .. xzM NxŒ Z
The impression Nizar liked to give of himself as a man of control of his
woman was merely a façade behind which hid a dependant child in need of
constant attention and love. The fact that Collette was able to travel and leave
him behind unsettled him and even hurt him. He realized that the young and
emancipated Collette was not going to be at his beck and order. For all his
experience and aura, Nizar was awed by Collette’s personality. Whether to
spite her, to assert his dominance or merely to fill up the vacuum, the poet
started flirting with other women. Upon her return, Collette fumed with anger
and jealousy. She was not the kind to put up with this kind of behavior. And
although a repentant Nizar was able to calm her and ultimately to get her to
forgive him for now, a crack appeared in their relationship.
National events soon caught with Nizar’s personal life. Throughout
1957, the coalition government headed by veteran president Shukri alQuwwatli and dominated by Baathists and populists was edging ever closer to
union with Egypt. Finally, after intense negotiations, Syria joined Egypt in a
merger union on February 1, 1958 to form the United Arab Republic (UAR),
but not before Nasser’s demand for the dissolution of all political parties,
including the Baath party, in Syria was realized. President al-Quwwatli gave
up the presidency to Nasser, and went into retirement becoming the first Arab
leader to leave power voluntarily – but not before giving Nasser his famous
prophetic warning: “You don’t know what you have taken on. You have taken
on people of whom every one believes he is a politician. Fifty percent consider
themselves national leaders; twenty-five percent of them think they are
prophets; and at least ten percent believe they are gods. You have taken on
people of which there are those who worship God, and there are those who
adore fire, and there are those who idolize the devil.”105
Following the merger, Nizar found himself in a new foreign ministry,
one that was no longer administered from Damascus, but from Cairo. Not the
Cairo he knew in the late forties, but a new Cairo led by self-styled
revolutionaries he did not meet. As such, he did not have as much influence
on the consular selection process as he used to. So he was sorely surprised
to find out that he was to head to China to join the UAR’s cultural mission
there. Communist China was the last place on his mind at a time when he
was madly in love with Collette. But as he pondered the complexity of his
relationship with Collette: Their differences, their clashing natures, his distrust
of marriage in general, and his desire to remain free for poetry – China, and
the possibilities of another foreign adventure, this time in the exotic worlds of
the East, did not seem entirely unappealing to him. He thought that time and
distance could surely heal him from such a hopeless affair.
Beijing 1958-60 Yellow Exile
Boarding the Aeroflot flight headed to Moscow, Nizar still had the
hopes of a poet looking forward to a new experience to enrich his poetic
imagination, just as his European travels did few years before. His prolonged
lonely wait at the Russian city of Irkutsk, in the middle of the forbidding
freezing Siberian wilderness, soon began to dampen these hopes. The
arduous long journey and the arrival at Beijing’s featureless windswept airport,
to which only a handful of Soviet flights were allowed, gave the poet a
depressing idea of the life he was to lead in China. In the memory of an
Egyptian colleague who waited for him in the airport, when Nizar was received
by a grimly uniformed Chinese official, the poet looked inquisitively at his
friend; his friend quickly whispered: yes, a woman!
On the way from the airport to the foreigners compound, in which we barely
managed to get Nizar a small apartment to himself, I tried to lessen the
effects of the shock on him by “ideologizing” it. I talked to him about
revolutionary dedication, about purity, about sacrificing self, love, and feelings
for the revolution, the homeland, the party, and the leader. I explained that
the uniform which all men and women wore in China motivated them to care
more for work and production than for instincts and emotions. The people of
China had decided to postpone love, to store emotions, and to freeze
instincts until they finished building their country. Nizar did not say a word. He
remained silent in a gloom that at the time I thought was caused by the long
106
hard trip he endured.
What his friend was saying and what he was seeing confirmed to Nizar
his worst fears: the strict communist revolutionary system, with rigidity and
cultural uniformity, rendered society unwholesome for life, let alone creative
life. Poetry, with its inherent tendency for dissent, could not prosper in such a
controlled setting. The real misery, however, of Nizar was perhaps that he
realized that under such circumstances, his life of the mind would have to
draw upon his past, not his present, that life in China offered no distraction for
his lovelorn heart. Indeed, little of China would find its way into his poetry of
this period, a period he would later dub, suggestively, “the yellow period” or
“the yellow exile”:
I was not happy in my work in China, I was besieged by the yellow color: the
sky was yellow, the fields were yellow, the trees were yellow, the smiles were
yellow, the language was yellow, the tea was yellow, and the rice was
107
yellow.. down to the chopsticks… these were yellow too.
Twenty years later, an American who was among the first to tour
Beijing in 1978, would write of his experience that “it was like being dropped
onto another planet. Westerners had been forbidden since 1949, and the
culture had evolved separately, like the wildlife of Madagascar when it
separated from continental Africa. There were no signs in English; we were
forbidden to speak with or touch a non-official Chinese person, even to shake
hands. […] It was an interaction with a slice of a culture now lost to time.” 108
And it was a slice thirty years after Nizar’s ordeal in the country!
Nizar however, saw one old sign in English the Chinese left standing at
the entrance to what used to be an upscale European residential area, near
the British Embassy -- the sign read “Dogs and Chinamen Not Allowed.” It
was a reminder of a century of humiliation by the West following the Opium
Wars when the latter forced the Chinese to open their borders – and their
minds – to opium. A century of domination and foreign occupations left the
Chinese extremely suspicious of anything foreign. The communists, who
fought their way to power in 1948 in the face of Western hostility, merely
played on those fears.
Thus the movements of all foreigners were meticulously watched and
recorded, even those foreigners from “progressive” countries like the UAR.
Every time the poet had to leave his apartment to go to work, to visit a friend,
or just to take a stroll, he had to sign out, and then sign in when he returned.
There were minders everywhere, and he was often shadowed with little effort
at discreetness. He could not speak to Chinese people, let alone make any
friendships. Even those assigned to help him in domestic chores were
forbidden to develop friendships beyond the requirements of their work. After
a trip to Hong Kong, he bought a lighter as a gift to his cook, seeing how the
man sometimes burned his fingers with matches to light up the stove. Days
later he noticed that the cook was still using matches, so he asked him why
he did not use the lighter. The cook told him he had to hand the lighter over to
the authorities, as every good comrade in his place should!109
Nizar’s time in China was his first taste of exile. In it he experienced an
austerity and hardship in life he was never exposed to before. Even the
weather struck him as harsh and dreary. An eternal winter with restless
Siberian winds and subzero temperatures that at times reaching -30. A drab
spring with slush and mud everywhere. And a rainy summer that sometimes
flooded the poorly-drained streets and left pools of muddy water to wade
through. The meager social life that existed completed this dreary picture. The
poet’s evenings were mostly long hours of reading, writing or listening to the
shortwave radio. Sometimes he would meet with his colleagues; but most
were married with their own family cares, leading him to often feel himself the
odd one out. Occasionally, he joined other foreign diplomats in watching a
film, the only window to arts and entertainment, shown once a month at the
British embassy, or spending an evening at the only social club the
community had, an old European building where they played billiards or
listened to a ragtag music band play. A friend of his describes how there was
always a group of young Chinese men and women sitting in a corner
observing the “barbarian” foreigners but never engaging them in conversationonly to discover later that they were there for practical training as translators,
diplomats, and tourist guides!110
The China which Nizar saw in the late fifties was not the real China as
he himself realized:
The China I saw is the one we were “allowed” to see.. it was merely a circle
centered around Beijing and merely 30 miles in diameter. As to other cities,
we only visited them in official trips organized by the Chinese foreign
ministry.. We moved in them like pupils walking behind their headmaster in a
picnic. […] I wanted to see the Chinese in their normal lives, how they laugh,
how they sing, how they paint their beautiful pottery, how they drink their
111
jasmine tea, [...], but I have failed, and I am very sad at my failure.
Needless to say there were no women for Nizar to gallivant with, no
beauties to fire up his muse. The cultural revolution which was in full sway at
the time looked down on courting and manifestations of love as “bourgeois”
habits that distracted away from the more “noble” goals of revolution. Thus
Chinese women were off limits to Nizar, but what really saddened him was the
estrangement of love even among the Chinese themselves. Sitting one
pleasant summer day with a friend in a leafy Beijing park, he noticed that for
an hour none of the young couples around him dared to hold hands or look in
each others eyes. Moving his eyes between the flocks of ducks necking and
caressing in the ponds nearby and the motionless couples on the benches, he
said:
It’s a shame to have all this beauty and forbid the young to enjoy it. It’s a
shame for these young men and women to come and go through life without
tasting or knowing love. And how could they when the girls are forced to wear
the same blue uniform men wear, to cut their hair up to their ears, and to go
112
around in rubber shoes made for walking not swaying.
For the first time in his life, Nizar felt as if poetry would desert him in his
new “unpoetic” reality. For quite some time after his arrival in China, he was
unable to write any poetry. When he ultimately overcame his block, it was at
first through the invocation of his times with Collette. The dryness in all things
feminine in his life forced him to “drink from the underground waters of poetic
memory,” as he put it. He continued to think of Collette, their happy moments
together, and what went wrong in their relationship. He wrote several poems
remembering their conversations, their questions and retorts, their petty fights.
The first poem he wrote in China was his famous “What does he think?”,
which will be dealt with in more detail later as a song. Another was his poem
“River of Sadness” in which he tries to come to terms with his leaving Collette:
Your eyes are two rivers of sorrows
Two rivers of melodies
On which I sailed to times beyond time
Two rivers lost meandering
My lady, disorienting..
…
My ships at harbor wail,
Disintegrate in foreign bays
My yellowed fate is breaking me
113
Breaking faith in my soul..
}EdcI uap†ƒ ..€L†gm
xs±rc kig|PM uaps
}LM‚DE NECn NECPQ
LmLb ]^ …kig|PM uaps
xsLmLbI F¤ ..xe]g|
...
ˆgƒLj wharQE xh x†S|
}L™l¬QE ŽPh Ždr•e
x†rª{c aS\DE uag„Mn
xsLrG[ uC]\ xh Fª{c
Loss of love and isolation from his fans soon began to weigh heavily on
his mood. His sadness soon descended into depression that took him by
surprise. He may have left an impression of reserve, politeness and
pensiveness with those who met him for the first time, but to his friends, Nizar
was not a sad person by nature, and feelings of depression were new to him:
“Sorrow struck me for the first time in South East Asia like a seagull with wet
wings. I have not met this bird of sorrow before, nor did I ever allow it to nest
in my eyes…”114
He became more introverted and started seeing life in a darker light.
Sadness became the hallmark of those poems he sent to Collette, like his
poem “Three Cards from Asia.” Indeed, a sense of deep deliberative sadness
appears on his face in almost all his photographs from this period. Nizar tried
to break the hold of this “bird of sorrow” on his life by taking trips to nearby
places like Hong Kong, Thailand, and Japan. He took every opportunity to get
out of China, and these seemed to have mitigated the effects of his dejection
behind the Great Wall.
China’s Great Wall seemed to Nizar “not a historical or symbolic wall,
but a real wall behind which only the Chinese were allowed.” This
impregnable Wall, however, reminded him of other walls which he escaped
from, incomparably smaller walls, but comparably prohibitive and stifling: the
walls of old Damascus. His city has long grown beyond its ancient stone
walls, but other walls continued to encircle the life of its people. Women in
China at least fared as badly as men, in collective misery. In his country, it
was women who were mostly corralled behind the walls of history and
tradition. It was during long dreary nights of his “yellow exile” that Nizar wrote
his seminal epic “The Diary of a Blasé Woman.” Written in the voice of a
frustrated rebelling Arab woman, the poem was a searing criticism of the
position of women in Arab life in all its aspects. Unlike the snapshot poems
that Nizar wrote before about the subject, this one grew into 41 stanzas that
stretched over 65 pages when published ten years later in 1968. For ten
years, Nizar kept the poem secret for personal and professional reasons.
Personally, the poem touched the story of his sister’s suicide, a sensitive
matter for his family. Professionally, the publication of the poem could surely
cause a firestorm that would cost him his job. So he preferred to wait until
such time as he could publish it with minimum damage to his life.
In its 1968 edition, the poem was prefaced by five exhortative lines by
Nizar which summarized his position:
Rebel! I love you rebelling..
Rebel against the East of slaves..
incense.. and sheikhs
Rebel against history
Against mystery
Fear none
Who but eagles approach the sun?
Rebel against an East
For which you’re just a feast
115
Of bed-time fun..
..uCP‡e }I ftcI !uCP¤
CP¬tQEn .. LGL’•QEn .. LGLtUQE ŽaŒ klm uCP¤
FYPQE klm ua„•sEn …¥GCL•QE klm uCP¤
agt’QE
CPU†QE ¡atiM ˜r‹QE }Ÿh …E]cI xtYae Z
..aGaUQE ŽPh ˆrgQn €EaG «ŽaŒ klm uCP¤
Then he divided the poem into two sections: Five numbered stanzas
under the title “A Letter to a Man” in which the diary woman addressed men in
a sarcastically apologetic tone:
Do not be vexed..
!¶md†e Z
My dear Sir.. at my lines..
Do not be vexed..
If I broke out of this flask stoppered
from ancient times
If I removed this leaded seal off my
chest
If I escaped
From the palace dungeons..
If I arose against my death..
Against my grave.. against my roots..
Against this massive
116
slaughterhouse..
uCP{| JM .. dGdzQE u]ªg| LG
!¶md†e Z
..CP„m JM Hn]UrQE FiriQE ~aUƒ E•[
uagrb Jm ÃL\aQE FeLT ºymds LsI E•[
ºyjaY LsI E•[
..CP„iQE xh FGa_QE ˆgt^I JM
..xePM klm º~Hªare E•[
..uCnXV klm …uat^ klm
...agt’QE ¥lUrQEn
The second section, made up of 36 numbered stanzas, narrated “The
Daily Journal,” in the form of monologue by a woman who no longer cared
about her life. It is a kaleidoscope of her thoughts, questions, reveries,
reflections on certain events she lived, and at times outbreaks of frustrated
anger. In some fashion, the “Journal” could be construed as the final journey
in a suicidal mind – in essence a retelling of the poet’s sister’s descent to selfsacrifice.
The section begins with the woman deciding to write, with no hope for
publication (Nizar’s own voice is clear here), but just to chart her own destiny.
Yet, ever the optimist, Nizar could not accept such a dead end. The woman
soon sees a rebellious potential in her beautiful words that can touch the lives
of her fellow-sufferers:
These are letters I will scatter
Like red pomegranate seeds
For every woman imprisoned..
And living with me
In my greatest jail
These are letters I will plant
Like a dagger in the flesh of our lives
To break in rebellion
Hardened ice.. thought
117
unbreakable..
ˆTP¬QE œliƒ Lp›ahI ¦P| ¦nac
arcDE
Lg_e .. ˆ†g™| “’Q
atƒDE x†™| xh xzM
a™†T ..L†eLgc F_lj LY‚ažI ¦P| ¦nac
LYHare xh aU’•Q
..aU’G Z }Lƒ E]glV
Just as in the above quote, suicide is a recurrent motif in the images
and themes of the poem. Some of the images are certainly welling from
Nizar’s memory of his sister’s last days:
Living in my black clamshell
Sunlight hurts me
Our heartless mindless clock
Is chewing me.. spitting me..
My magazines are on the floor
My music is boring me
I live with the dead
118
With relics and graves..
NEHPUQE xeCL_rj LsI
x†zVPG ˜r‹QE NPb
NLpltQE L†•gj ˆmL|n
.. x†i„ten …x†’lze
.. ¡a‡ztM xe±™M
xsa™‰e uLig|PMn
LsI ÄgmI .. kePrQE ©M
JM]QEn •±›DE ©M
The poem also contains a bitter attack on the father as the phlegmatic
guardian of all the selfish and regressive elements in Arab culture. But it is not
only the Arabs, with an allusion to his own Turkish family kinship, Nizar
attacks those atavistic characteristics he sees common in all Middle Eastern
cultures:
My father is a subspecies of his own
A mix of Turkish folly..
And Tartar rage..
My father is an old relic..
119
A coffin made of stone..
..a‹tQE JM R†\ xjI
..€a•QE NLtž JM ¶GdM
..a••QE ˆgt„m JM
..CL¤oE JM ½a¤I ..xjI
..a™_QE JM ~PjLe
In the eyes of Nizar’s woman, nothing is more unfair and humiliating
than the double-standard with which her society deals with her vis-à-vis her
brother. The brother, as a man, is entitled to all kinds of shameless behavior,
for the healthy “sowing of his wild oats” does not really tarnish his reputation:
My brother returns from the whorehouse..
At dawn… drunk..
Strutting like a king..
Who made him a king?
Yet he remains in kinfolk eyes
The loveliest.. the dearest.. of us
And remains – in his whorish robes –
.. CPTLrQE JM xTI HPzG
.. LsEa’| a™SQE ]†m
.. º}L{lUQE Šswƒ HPzG
•LsL{l| WLr| JM
“YDE }Pgm xh kitGn
..Ls±žIn .. L†lrVI
The cleanest… the purest.. of us
120
– apzQE `Lg¤ xh – kitGn
.. LsLisIn .. Lsap›I
Thus the poem moves from one aspect of the injustice afflicting Arab
women to the other: the shame associated with their behavior, their
imprisonment, lack of love in their lives, etc. In it, Nizar manages to
communicate a long impassioned complaint against what many women saw
as an unjust social system designed to put them down. While it is true that the
1950’s saw the rise to prominence of several Arab female poets, none of
them, however, had the courage to take on the social system in such a direct
and hostile manner. As women from mostly conservative families, they also
cared about their and their families’ reputations. It would be many years later
before a new generation of Arab feminist writers – but not poets – like Fatema
al-Mernisi, Ghada al-Samman, and Nawal al-Sa’dawi, assumed such task.
Few women of his time could really venture to celebrate in their poetry
such very private matter as menstruation. In deciding to venture thus far,
Nizar’s poetry came close to the pornographic, but managed still to retain that
esthetic sublime quality that characterizes literature. The following lines still
make most Arab readers uncomfortable:
This morning.. something startled
me..
My first sign of womanhood
I muffled my pain..
And stood watching.. the beauty of
the stream..
…
A joyful fountain here..
A bridge of velvet there..
Ships like tulips here..
Dreaming of beauteous journeys..
A wound is here .. that brings no
death..
..xswVLh £PgQE vLt\
•nDE x•¤PsI “gQH
..x^dre yr•ƒ
•n]™QE ˆmnC œ^CI ~XTIn
...
kQXV ¡CPhLs .. L†Y
“r¬rQE JM aUV ..L†Y
.. œgQP•QE JM JS| ..L†Y
.. “rVDE “rVDE PVae
“•iM Zn ½vaV L†Y
Š†M “™TII
Should I be shamed?
Is the sea shamed of its heaving
waves?
I am the mother of fertility
I am its hand..
121
I am its loom.
•“™¬G ŠVPM ¡dzj a_j “Y
WC]„M œ„¬lQ LsI
W]G LsI
•d®rQE LsI
The contradictory complicated attitudes to sex in Arab culture always
puzzled and frustrated Nizar. He believed these rose from an unhealthy
condition, often calling it “the headache of sex” in Arab life. On the one hand,
Islam sees no sin in sex itself, and indeed it encourages marriage to the point
of polygamy, with prophet Muhammed himself as a model of love and
passion. The erotic has always been an integral part of Arab history. On the
other hand, the entire concept of individual and collective honor, and the
status born thereof, is built on the sexual record of female family members.
Any other honor factor is subordinated to female sexual purity. Blood relation
with the female, a sister, a mother, a cousin, etc., binds both male and female
in a relationship – closely watched by the rest of the clan – in which all work to
safeguard the female’s sexual purity, before and after her marriage. Thus
female virginity acquires premium value, the premarital loss of which could
cost the girl her life. At the end of her diary, the voice of the woman becomes
a thin veil for the voice of his sister who challenged her society’s codes and
was pushed to pay with her dear life for it:
A woman’s virginity
Is still this East’s obsession
Before its alter
We slaughtered and feted
Our sisters in the temple
Like sacrificial lambs..
All the while yelling: Oh honor!
The headache of sex is gnawing us
A hateful chronic headache that stuck with
us
From desert times
k‡sDE ¡CL’j “•e
L†UVLYn L†e]im Ža‹QE EXpj
.. L†_µLj• L†Mª]^ £PYPrQE LYCE]V ]†zh
.. L†rµZn L†rQnIn
L†iµLiŒ Lpl’gY ]†m Lsa_s
!"L†•MEaƒEn" L†_\n .. L†gjEa^
L†rVLrV Ça•SM .. ˜†™QE —E]\
NEa_„QE JM ©‹j JMdM —E]\
L†ihEC
It blinded our eyes.. it blinded our
122
conscience.
LsaµLrb LsLUsIn …L†eag„j LsLUswh
By adopting a “we” voice at the end of these lines, Nizar assumes a
confessing collective tone in the name of the whole society. It is an effective
device in Arabic poetry taking strength from the fact that, in the Arabic literary
tradition, the poet has always been the spokesman for his tribe. More
importantly, Nizar somehow includes himself in this admission of responsibility
-- has he not also obsessed over sex and the erotic in his poetry? Nizar knew
very well that by being the voice of the Arabs, he carried in him almost all their
contradictions whether he liked it or not. He never addressed his people as
“you” -- as an outsider -- but always from within.
In the summer of 1959, Nizar returned to Damascus for his vacation.
He soon picked up where he left with Collette. He was anxious to see her;
thinking he could mend their romance. But it was already too late, Collette had
moved on with her life. Again, he let his poetry chronicle their relationship:
poetizing his sad hurt feelings, and voicing her thoughts about him in all
fairness. Thus it is her voice in “My Angry Cat” screaming at him:
For the twentieth time, you asked
“Is there another man in your life?”
Yes.. Yes..
Did you think
I was a lonesome deserted graveyard?
…
Wasn’t I but a neglected chair
Amongst your gilded possessions
A farm you stripped bleak and bare
Unscrupled.. undeterred..?
…
If you’d been a good man with me once
123
There would not be this other man.
LpeCaƒ JGa‹zQE ¡arlQ
"•aT´ “VC xeLgc xh “Y"
x†eCP„e “ph .. Fzs .. Fzs
aµE‚ LpQ ˜gQ ¡atiM
...
±rpM E]ziM Z[ y†ƒ “Y
•aTLSQE f¤L¤I Šr‰G
LpeEagT ytps ˆmCdM
aVE‚ Zn kp†e ˆM• Z
...
¡aM xzM LsLUs[ y†ƒ PQ
aToE “VaQE EXY }Lƒ LM
Remarkably, poem after poem he lets her denounce him just as she
said or wrote to him. It is not easy to explain why Nizar, a man very much
conscious of himself and his standing in society, chose to allow himself to be
denounced in his own poetry. It could be that he saw truth on her side, so he
wrote these poems in sympathy and in remorse. It is more plausible, however,
that his dedication to his poetry superseded his dedication to her or to his own
self. As a poet, he knew their love letters, quarrels, and exchanges were great
raw material for the creation of superbly beautiful poetry of universal and
timeless appeal. This is the poetry that will last when changing times and
politics render all his other “activist” poetry irrelevant or out of date. Despite
the fact that the following lines, from his poem “The Other Man,” were born in
a certain time and place in reference to a certain love affair, it is hard to see
how they will ever lose their poetic appeal:
I am here.. One year
After our separation..
Do you not extend.. a hand..
After my return..
Do you not ask.. what news brought my
ships?
I have sailed aimlessly in your eyes
From China I have brought you
A caravanful of merchandise
And came to feed two sleeping birds
…
I left your breasts childish in their looks
I now return and see their innocence gone
…
Oh grave of snow.. who rivals me?
124
Is my bed of love no longer free?
L†•zg{^ JM £Lm ]zj .L†Y LsI
•E]G —PVaQE ]zj xQ JG]re ZI
•x†S| LYCLtTI LM .. JgQPie ZI
•]Y }nH fg†gm xh ahLUrQE LsI
·ˆlhL^ Jg„QE ~Ltg› JM ylrc
E]^C ]^ JGCPS„m Fz›I y Vn
...
·E]Qn Š_g•Se xh €C]\ yƒae
E]Qn ]zG FQ .. ŠgQ[ ~]m Jgcn
...
•x†rcEdG uagž “Y .. ¶l‡QE Jh]M LG
•EHaS†M HLm LM •PpQE aGa| “Yn
This talent of Nizar’s of using his own love woes to weave melodious
poetry caught the eyes of musician Muhammed abdul Wahhab, the great
Arab composer, who said “When Nizar goes through emotional suffering,
another Nizar separates from him to watch him and to record his actions…
then the two re-join in the poet who puts into poetry what he’s just
observed.”125 In 1960, Abdul Wahhab himself decided to put this talent to
music. His friendship with Nizar went back to the poet’s days in Cairo, a
friendship that only grew with the years. Although Abdul Wahhab was Nizar’s
senior by sixteen years, the two shared many personality traits: both were
famous kindred artists, debonair, loved designer suits, loved to wine and dine,
and loved to summer in the breezy pine-scented mountains of Lebanon.
The two friends were aware of each other’s potential for the other’s art,
but they never broached the subject of working together. It was Kamel alShinnawi, a poet and popular lyricist and another Egyptian friend of Nizar’s,
who suggested one day in the spring of 1960 to a young aspiring singer, Najat
al-Saghira, that she should perhaps go into the singing of songs in Standard
Arabic rather than Egyptian colloquial for a change and to distinguish herself
from the crowds of singers in colloquial. He then suggested to her Nizar’s
poem “What Does He Think?” No sooner had she read the words than she fell
for their charm. The two met Abdul Wahhab soon afterwards and asked if he
could put the poem into music. Before agreeing, he telephoned Nizar in
Beijing asking him if he would approve the song: the poet could not be
happier.
Nizar had written “AyaZunnu” in one of the low points of his depression
after his posting to China. For the first time in his life and for several months
he felt blocked by his surroundings. Then one night he sat thinking about
Collette and remembered a time when they were able to overcome their
differences. In the sweetness of these thoughts, he wrote the poem. Later
Nizar reminisced, in his spicy style, on his excitement at the return of his
muse even in China: “I went out at night into the streets of Beijing looking for
one Chinaman I could read my poem to. But all those I approached ran away
from me for fear of my being, perhaps, a CIA agent distributing anticommunist propaganda!”126
The poem, like many Nizar wrote of his affair with Collette, is a poetic
rendering of a remembered episode between the two lovers. The fact that the
poem is about reconciliation and forgiveness in love added to its popular
appeal:
Does he think I am a game to play?
I will never go back to him
Today he came as if nothing ever
happened
With childish innocence in his eyes
Saying I am his friend in the journey
That I am the only love he has
…
How I said I will never go back to him
Then returned..
127
How sweet it is to return..
•ŠG]gj ˆtzQ xsI J•GI
ŠgQ[ —PVaQE xh a’hI Z LsI
J’G FQ L gŒ }wƒ HLm £PgQE
Šg†gm xh •LS›DE ¡NEajn
ŠjCH ˆighC xs[ xQ •PigQ
ŠG]Q ]gcPQE œ_QE x†swjn
...
ŠQ ¡]µLm agž xs[ yl^ Fƒ
ŠgQ[ —PVaQE klcI LM ..ºyzVCn
Few months later the song filled the airwaves. It proved an immediate
hit with the Arab masses, bringing to Nizar a new kind of popularity he had not
hitherto enjoyed. The success of this song began a new stage in his life in
which sung poetry carried him beyond the elite circles of the educated and
literate into the lives of even those who could not read. Even the illiterate
across the Arab world now began to taste and value a new kind of poetry
written in a rather sublime Standard Arabic but still accessible to them, a
poetry able to touch their lives and to move their passions. “AyaZunnu”
brought unprecedented fame and popularity to Nizar.
Later that year, after his return from Beijing, Nizar visited Cairo and met
his friends, including the new singer. The poet left an unforgettable impression
in Najat’s memory:
I met Nizar when he came to Cairo, I met him in the house of Muhammed
Abdul Wahhab. I saw a handsome man, like a chivalrous noble from the
Middle Ages… He was a poet even in the words of his normal conversation.
He was wearing his moustache in the fashion of American movie star Clark
128
Gable…
For the remainder of his time in China, Nizar waited patiently for his
days to pass, slowly and uneventfully. A friend at the Syrian consulate
remembers how Nizar for much of his time at work stood looking wistfully
outside his window at the never-changing shabby scene of a metal plant. He
would watch with amazement how the Chinese workers operating the ovens
and the pits kept going at their work all day long patiently and silently. It is an
aspect of China he could only admire:
I would do China a great injustice if I talked about it as a poet, but I would
enwreathe its neck with laurels as one of the greatest human achievements if
I looked at it as an intellectual. […] I was taken with the grandeur of the
Chinese miracle which was able to free one billion people from the claws of
disease, hunger, opium, and imperialism. […] He who wants to understand
China has to discard all his preconceptions and approach the questions with
129
Chinese logic, not his own.
Nizar’s mission in China finally came to an end in October 1960.
Leaving his “yellow exile” behind him, the tired poet traveled home looking
forward to a good time with his children, family, and friends.
Damascus 1960-62 Love and Turmoil
Damascus in the Fall of 1960 must have seemed the most welcoming
city to Nizar. For a time, he forgot about his critics and their harsh judgments.
He was finally among his family and friends. He made peace with Collette,
who was now engaged to a young Spanish heart-throb, although his love for
her never waned. Yet overall, he was soon able to restore himself to his preChina splendor, enjoying the glamour of society gatherings and starring in
cordial poetry evenings. Now that China was behind him, Nizar sought to
make the best of his experience: to poeticize it. To the people who sat
listening to his poetry, Nizar retold a story of love, longing, and adventure:
Like a tired ship, I return to you today to rest my brow against the brow of the
smallest pebble in my homeland. Three years have I been roaming! The sun
ached at my ambitions, and my hands were burnt hunting the stars. […] For
three years I have been floating like an adventurous log that sank the ocean
yet did not sink. I planted my tent near the Great Wall of China, I slept in tea
plantations, in lotus fields.. I washed my face with tropical rains in tropical
forests where women’s arms have a taste like tobacco and an aroma like
130
roasted coffee beans..
Nizar’s listeners in Damascus’s high class and literary salons must
have really enjoyed such romantic visions, a welcome distraction from their
frustration at their political situation at home. After three years of union with
Egypt, many Syrians, especially those from the privileged class, were now
quite disillusioned with their lives in the UAR. Apart from the fact that
Damascus receded into the status of a second-class provincial capital,
overshadowed by the all-mighty Cairo, many Syrians, still fresh from the
chaotic liberty they enjoyed in the 1950’s, could not stomach the stifling
restrictive environment of Nasser’s police state.
In the span of three years, Nasser’s regime managed to alienate many
of Syria’s powerful actors to his own detriment. From the outset, Syria’s
capitalists were not really warm to Egyptian control of their economy, and only
joined the merger bandwagon led by Baathists and populists for fear of a
communist takeover as happened in Iraq. They soon discovered that the lion
they sought refuge with was rather a man-eater himself. Nasser’s land
reforms were extended to Syria and the aristocracy saw their wealth and
power ever so more eroded. Many had either to flee the country with their
capital, or subsist and endure under a system they began to regard as
“foreign”.
What really, however, undermined Nasser’s venture in Syria was not
his treatment of the country’s traditional notables, but his dismissive behavior
toward the Baathists who were the driving force behind the deliverance of
Syria to him. The Baathists, who excitedly dissolved their party at Nasser’s
bidding in hopes of becoming partners in the new system, quickly found out,
to use the jungle metaphor again, that the lion they crowned was not about to
give control of his pride to lesser predators.
By the end of 1960, Nasser, through an intrusive mukhabarat
apparatus dominated by Egyptian officers, cleansed or neutralized any likely
Syrian opponents from his government – or so he thought. Many Syrian
politicians and military officers with radically different ideological orientations
ended up either in prison, exile, or in the case of the luckier ones, in far away
foreign missions. The really wily ones went underground plotting, including a
young ambitious major by the name of Hafiz Assad.
Despite his ordeal in China, Nizar never saw his sending to Beijing as a
political exile. He was no aspirant politician and never saw himself as anything
but a career diplomat. In his eyes, his “yellow exile” was only so on account of
his ultra-sensitive condition as a poet and a man in love. Furthermore, the
many friends he had in Cairo, his surging popularity in that country after his
recent poem was turned into song, and his deeply felt belief in Pan-Arabism
as embodied in Nasser – all kept him from seeing or experiencing the source
of resentment that was beginning to unite his fellow Syrians against the UAR
regime.
A powerful poem by Nizar that appeared on the first page of al-Adaab
in March 1961 hinted indirectly at the poet’s position. “Love and Petroleum”
launched a searing attack against the Arab “princes of oil” in Saudi Arabia and
the Arabian Gulf. The poem railed against the nouveau-riche Arab Sheikhs
and Princes squandering their money on women and booze in the nightlife of
Western capitals when the rest of the Arab world, and indeed their own
societies, were desperately in need of these resources. Written in the voice of
a woman rejecting the advances of one such Arab Sheikh, the poem despite
its rhetorical strength, at times bordered on vulgarity and name-calling:
Will you understand?
Oh unbridled desert camel
Oh man pocked of face and hands
That I shall not be.. ashes in your
trays..
One head in a thousand on your
•FpSe k•M
F™lºG FQ NEa_„QE JM ±rV LGI
F„zrQEn ŠVPQE f†M uC]™QE “ƒwG JM LGn
feECL™| xh EHLMC ..L†Y }PƒI JQ xswj
feE]¬M klm ÇnÈaQE ¦Z´ Jgj L|ICn
pillows.
…
when will you know that you cannot
sedate me
With your wealth or sheikhdom
That you will not own the world..
With your privilege and petroleum
With the stench of oil from your robes
With countless cars bestowed on
paramours..
Cars!.. Wherever did your camels
131
go?
...
nI fYL™j ..xsC]¬e JQ fswj FpSe k•M
feECLM[
feE‚Lg•MEn f{S†j ..Lgs]QE flr•e JQn
feENLtm JM –tzG •na•tQLjn
feLig‹m xM]^ klm Lpca{e ~LjazQLjn
•feL^Ls CPpK JGwh ..H]m ±j
Such vitriolic ridicule, while true in some of its observations, was likely
inspired by the charades of the Voice of the Arabs, Cairo’s far-reaching
propaganda radio. At the time, the UAR was battling what it dubbed the
retrogressive forces in the Arab world, especially the traditional Arab
monarchies in the Arabian Peninsula which were propped up by Western
support. The poem, however, signals the beginning of an important shift in the
geopolitics of the Arab world in the aftermath of the discovery and increasing
production of oil in the Arabian Gulf. The disproportionate economic power
and thus political leverage that oil was now accruing in the hands of Arabs of
the desert was certainly upsetting the Arabs of the more urban north who had
traditionally dominated Arab politics. Oil wealth was changing this equation in
favor of Peninsular Arabs to the chagrin of their “revolutionary” brethren to the
north. But with such political change, came a social change that personally
irritated Nizar. The diplomat, who himself is no stranger to the nightlife in
Europe, felt both powerless and ashamed at the squandering of unimaginable
wealth on prostitutes in Western capitals by some of the new Arab upstarts.
Such scenes certainly disgusted the sensibilities of Nizar’s refined and
delicate nature. But what irritated him most was the contradiction between the
princes’ behaviors abroad and their treatment of their own women at home—
hence the woman’s revulsion and revolt in the poem.132
In the same month as the publication of this poem, Nizar published
through al-Adaab Publishing House his sixth collection, “My Beloved.” The
collection included many of the poems he wrote to Collette and which were
already published in magazines. Collette, now married, made no objection to
the publication; she herself had two years before published a thinly veiled
account of their relationship in a novel entitled “Days with Him.” Not least for
these reasons, curious readers quickly snatched the collection off the shelves!
In the morning of September 28, 1961 Syrians were awakened to the
all-familiar chaos following a military coup in their capital. Some secessionist
right-wing Syrian officers had stormed the headquarters of the Egyptian
commander in Damascus, took control of the city, and declared the
restoration of the Syrian Arab Republic as an independent and sovereign
entity. The real coupe to Nasser was when a majority of Syrian politicians -an unlikely mix of capitalists, Baathists, communists, and democrats, almost
all those who cheered him three years before -- met and published a signed
document in the newspapers declaring their support for secession from the
UAR. Nasser threatened to use military force to regain control, and indeed did
attempt a half-hearted airborne mission in the seaport city of Latakia, but
seeing a united front against him, he soon accepted the new reality on the
ground (but never dissolving the UAR officially until 1970). He was indeed sick
and tired of the unruly Syrians, who were now left to their own devices.
Naturally, and despite the seemingly united stand against Nasser,
secession from the UAR plunged Syria into political turmoil. The disturbance
began almost immediately as the newly elected rightwing government
attempted to rescind the nationalization and land reform measures instituted
under Nasser. The Baathists, aware of the advantage of these measures to
their powerbase in the rural and working classes, opposed the move and a
fierce power struggle followed.
Nizar was not too far away from the burgeoning events. A poet who
associated with the aristocracy in his daily life and who championed
progressive causes in his poetry was all too conscious of the seriousness of
the clash. On the night of March 28, Nizar was among a group of well-wishing
friends who accompanied Lutfi al-Haffar, an ex-prime minister and one of
Damascus’s notables, to see him off at the airport for a trip to Spain only to be
turned back by the military authorities. Several of these notables were
rounded up later that night in a coupe by some Nasserist officers; the coupe
lasted for only two weeks, but it again demonstrated to Nizar the dangers and
absurdities of his country’s politics.
In the face of such politics, the poet found himself torn between the two
sides; on the one hand he identified with the democratic ideals of Syria’s
traditional notables but resented their parochial position toward Pan-Arabism.
On the other hand, he was attracted to the more romantic and idealistic in the
revolutionary agendas of the Leftists; but then again he was put off by their
authoritarian inclinations. Ever the wise diplomat, he decided to play it safe,
by not taking sides publicly, preferring instead to shun the political jostling in
the capital for the more redeeming world of poetry.
But the world of poetry itself was witnessing a conflict that mirrored the
political conflict being waged in the Arab world’s halls of power. On poetry,
Nizar, however, could speak with more liberty, feeling more secure to take
sides. That spring he published a rambling piece entitled “The Battle between
the Right and Left in Our Arabic Poetry.” In it, he characterized the Right in
poetry as “the dignified resigned side who believes in the sanctity of the old,
for which it dedicates rites and burns incense. It is the side who has become
attached, mentally and by inheritance, to modes of speech and expression
which it considers final and fit for every time and place, and thus
untouchable.” In opposition to this side, “stands the Left in its childish
innocence, rashness, and madness. It is a generation whose lungs are open
to clean air, bedazzled by all these new intellectual currents blowing its way
from everywhere teaching it to rebel, to reject, and to carve with its nails a
new destiny. It is a generation that reads history, but refuses to be swallowed
by history’s mausoleum.”133 By the end of the long article, Nizar is more on
the side of the poetic innovations of the Left, but not without a certain
measure of fear and ambivalence. As with politics, Nizar idealized the
“madness” of the Left, but he was not quite sure if he was ready to pursue it
all the way, as indeed some of his contemporaries, like Adonis, had already
been doing. It is one thing to sing of madness, and another thing to live it. The
risk involved in extreme measures, whether in poetry or politics, Nizar began
to realize, is in the pleasure of destruction. In a letter to a friend few months
later, he would say that “We are as good at charting history as we are at
erasing it. It might be that our pleasure in destroying things is much stronger
than our pleasure in creating them.”134
Focusing his energy on poetry, Nizar embarked in the spring of 1962
on a “poetry tour” in Arab cities far and beyond. In Zahleh, a Lebanese city
famed for its grape vines, he recited poetry to packed audiences. Unlike other
poets, Nizar knew how to win the hearts of his audience even before he
began reciting his love poems. To the pleased ears of his audience, he almost
always began by personifying the city he was visiting, turning it into one of the
women whose beauty he was singing. Arabs are very tribal and territorial
people who took great pride in their cities and towns regardless of how
squalid and neglected these might be. No other Arab poet could adapt his
poetry to click with his audience in such a meaningful fashion:
My date today with Zahleh is the most beautiful date I ever gave in my life.
Could a poet be offered to sleep on a pillow of vine leaves and hesitate? […]
In Damascus, I left behind all my inkpots and colors; for in Zahleh there is no
need for inks or dyes. The red and black grape clusters which are nourished
with light and sugar in your vines are the natural inkpots which a talented
person can only wish to dip his letters in, and to take a bath in their golden
135
bleeding.
Before he read his poetry in any city, Nizar thought well about the most
remarkable symbols of that city, things that the people took pride in, and
grafted them into his speech or poetry, be these the Nile or pyramids in Egypt,
the cedars and vines of Lebanon, or the Jasmine and street cats of
Damascus.
On March 5, 1962 Nizar traveled to Iraq for the first time, a trip that
would change his life for good. The Iraqis are perhaps the most impassioned
poetry enthusiasts among the Arabs, which is not surprising: Baghdad has
boasted some of the best and finest poets in Arabic literary history since it
was built by the Abbasids more than a thousand years ago. At Baghdad
University, Nizar gratified the ears and imaginations of the crowds of students
and faculty who gathered to listen to him. Among the poems he read was a
new one written specifically for the occasion, and in the manner just described
above, in it he sang of his love for the tall abundant Arabian palm trees, the
mosque domes, and the women’s jewelry -- all images dear to the hearts of
Iraqis:
Baghdad.. I flew to you on silken robes
On the braids of virgin girls
I flew like a sparrow going home
At dawn when minarets sing
Till I saw a hoard of jewels
136
Hidden among vines and palms.
¡NLtm aGac klm ~a› HE]®j
`LjCn œ†G‚ aµLSb klmn
Š‹m ]„iG CPS„zQLƒ y{tYn
`Lt^n }•‘M Çam a™SQEn
aYPV JM ˆz{^ f•GIC k•c
`L†mDEn “¬†QE Jgj vLeae
He went on to read the poem on Iraqi TV in a special program about
him, bathing in the glory of his fame and popularity. The luminaries of the
Baghdad society vied to host and fete “the great love poet of the Arabs”. He
obliged with joy in as much as he could. On the evening of March 5, he joined
a reception in his honor in the house of a friend. Among the guests was an
attractive 22 year old girl with lovely green eyes and long blondish hair
sweeping down her back. As the two met and conversed, a spark was ignited
inside of them. His interest in her only grew as he slowly knew more and more
about her. Her name was Balqees al-Raawi, and she was there listening to
his poetry and attending the reception with her brothers. Balqees had the
enthusiasm of a devoted reader expressing her admiration of his poetry with
virginal innocence. She was a family girl surrounded by the care and comfort
of a prominent Baghdadi family. Educated and with a refined taste, she
captivated the poet all the more with her clear distinct Iraqi accent. Even her
name was poetic: Balqees in Arabic is the name of the famed Queen of
Sheba, and the poet could not escape the reference.
Nizar knew he had not much time to maneuver. He was soon to leave,
and he decided he could not leave this gem behind. The next day he told his
friends that he had just met the woman of his dreams, the woman he would
love to be his wife, and asked for help. Sudden marriage proposals are not
uncommon in Arab society; as women do not enjoy much public space, men
have often to take advantage of any small window of opportunity that allows
interaction between the two. Nizar was confident, Balqees showed great
interest in him – he felt that a man of his experience could not be mistaken
about such vital signs. He was 39, but he was still in his prime and looked
maturely handsome. More importantly, his name was Nizar Qabbani, the
loved poet and secure diplomat, a man who lived in the fantasy of thousands
of women across the Arab world.
The next day, Nizar’s beliefs turned to illusions: Balqees’ father
rejected him against his daughter’s wish. For the Arab father, a poet who
devoted his poetry to love and women is no good match for his daughter. It is
one thing to read and enjoy the pleasures of Nizar’s poetry, it is another to
give your daughter in marriage to a poet with such a profligate reputation, he
reasoned. The father held his ground despite the entreaties of many friends
who vouched for Nizar’s character -- to no avail. The poet left Iraq with a
heavy heart, realizing that old worn out traditions and customs were prevalent
in almost all Arab cities. Two days later, he wrote Balqees his first letter:
My dear,
I venture and send this letter to you, like a bird dipping his wings in the
turquoise of the skies for the first time. […] Can my letter to you survive the
thieving hands, the pirate ships, and your father’s dagger? I do not know, I do
not know. For our city assassinates love letters like it kills peach blossoms
that have just bloomed. Our city slaughters the letters of love’s alphabet like it
slaughters and savors the blood of sacrificial sheep on the morning of the Eid
days. […] Because I write poetry, my friend, because I turn your braids into
fields of corn and gold, people thought I was insane and chased me away.
[…] I am insane in their view because I removed the curtains off your green
eyes… I am insane because I wrote your name on the walls of the city to
which spring never comes… I am insane because I carried rains to a city
forgotten by the rain. I am insane in the logic of a city not refined by
madness, not perfumed by madness. My poetry is like pure sins that people
137
embrace and curse.
Despite his setback, Nizar took courage from the fact that Balqees
liked him. The poet who sang for Baghdad as an imagined woman was not
going to give up easily now that his lines acquired a more real reference than
the imagined beauty of a city:
I am that sailor wasting his life away
Searching for love and lovers
Baghdad.. oh song of jewels and ankle rings
Oh store of light and incense scents
…
You were my love long before we met
138
You will remain my love long after we part.
Warm –S†G CL_tQE fQ• LsI
`LtcI Jmn œc Jm ¿_tQE xh
xl_QEn “T±¬QE ¸aY LG HE]®j
`Lg›DEn NEPbDE }d¬M LG
...
x•tgtc y†ƒ Pl_QE NLilQE “t^
xjLY• ]zj Jgite x•tgtcn
In a fateful note at the end of his letter to Balqees, Nizar asserted to his
newly-found love “Your destiny is to be my beloved. You cannot run away
from this destiny, because just like the violet color of your eyes, it gives you
no power to choose.”139
Madrid 1962-66 Living a Poetic History
With several of Nizar’s friends now in key positions in the Syrian
foreign ministry, the poet had no difficulty securing a foreign post more to his
taste. Ever since he toured its cities with their ancient Arabian airs, Spain was
on his mind. He longed to live in it, to relive its history, and partake of its
vivacious culture. In the summer of 1962, the poet-diplomat got his wish when
he was transferred to the Syrian embassy in Madrid.
Rather than going straight to Madrid, Nizar flew on July 26 to Rome
and then to Paris where he spent several days in the City of Light touring and
sightseeing. He loved the city’s arts, haute couture, and cafes, – so an
opportunity to visit Paris was never to be missed. After recharging his passion
for life in Paris, he flew on the 31st back to Rome and then to Madrid, where
he started his work at the embassy the next day.
Spain of the 1960’s was still in the Hemingwayesque realm, a place in
Europe, but not exactly in Europe. Not only because the country was still
under the authoritarian grip of General Franco’s regime, but also because
Spain did not as yet transform itself into the best tourist market in Europe.
There was still some rustic innocence about the culture, and it is this rustic
innocence, both self-conscious and welcoming, that captivated the hearts of
the likes of Hemingway and Nizar. Life in Spain, Nizar would soon find out,
was the closest he could get to Arab culture while still in Europe.
Nizar had already discovered in his trip to Spain few years before that
there was much of Damascus, the proud capital of the Omayyads of yore, in
the old cities and palaces that their progeny built in Andalusia after they lost
their reign in Damascus. Fresh in Nizar’s mind, as indeed in all Arabs’, was
the prolonged escape saga across the North African Sahara of the last
Omayyad prince (literally the only one who survived his family’s massacre at
the hands of the Abbasids), the “Meccan Hawk” in Arabic lore, chased by
death at the turn of every dune all the way to Spain. Arabs look back with
admiration and nostalgia at how the prince and his heirs were able to rebuild a
Damascus anew in every city they ruled in Spain. To this Spain, half real and
half imagined, the poet came with a strong desire to re-trace that golden era
so much alive in the hearts of the Arabs of today – an era which continues to
inhabit a realm of its own in the sprawling tomes of Arabic literature. Nizar
described these emotions succinctly when he said:
For the Arab, Spain is an unbearable historical anguish. Under each stone of
hers sleeps a Caliph; and behind every wooden door of hers there peak two
black eyes; and in the gurgling sounds of every water fountain in Cordoba’s
houses you hear a woman’s weeping for her knight who never returned. The
travel to Andalusia is a travel in a forest of tears. Not once did I go to
Granada and stay in Alhambra Hotel but I found Damascus sleeping with me
140
on my Andalusian pillow.
But Damascus also came with the poet to Spain, not only in his
thoughts and emotions, but in the company he had in the Syrian embassy in
Madrid as well. The ambassador, his wife, his two assistants and their
families, were all “shwaam” as Damascenes like to call themselves in Arabic.
Their uniform composition was one of the last remaining vestiges of the urban
aristocracy’s domination of the Syrian government. Between them, they
recreated the snug family-centered social life of Damascus – in a way a little
Damascus of their own right in the midst of the Spanish capital. Although a
bachelor, a status which for Syrians normally warrants exclusion from the
family life of married couples, Nizar was exceptionally welcome, one because
of his talent, another is because he knew the ambassador rather well, ever
since the latter was his professor of Penal Law at Damascus University in the
early forties.
The welcome to the ambassador’s house, however, came not so much
from the ambassador himself, as from his wife, an accomplished fiction writer
(and a poet of sorts who wrote in French). Salma al-Haffar al-Kuzbari was
about Nizar’s age, well-educated, attractive, energetic, and a socialite with
unflagging vitality. She was the daughter of yet another of Syria’s leaders
before independence. Her father Lutfi al-Haffar was several times minister,
prime minister and member of parliament. Whether in birth, education, or
marriage, Salma was the ultimate aristocrat.
Although he was not yet cured from his failed love to Collette, and
although he was beginning to invest some of his emotions in his long-distance
affair with Balqees in Baghadad, Nizar found in Salma a real friend and a
literary soul mate who genuinely admired him and prodded him forward. The
detailed diary she kept for the year she knew Nizar in Spain and their
correspondence afterwards are two of the most enlightening sources on the
poet’s life from up close. These she published recently in a nostalgic,
somewhat sanitized, book of memoirs of this period. In a passage from that
book, she gave a telling description of Nizar’s character as he impressed her:
Those who knew and befriended Nizar discovered beautiful humane traits in
him: his great modesty in dealing with people, all people, self-assuredly yet
not arrogantly; his solid education; his affability in private gatherings; and his
respect for others. […] Nizar was de luxe in his dress and bon vivant at the
dinner table. He loved the complex Syrian dishes I prepared […] like kebbeh,
fatteh, pastries, and fish -- especially the sayyadiyya dish he loved. He had a
141
joyful presence at the dinner table that could only sharpen appetites.
Salma describes a perfectionist man, one who ordered and furnished
his own living space with meticulous, at times fastidious, care. The
atmosphere of a cozy and comfortable home had always been essential for
his poetic muse; he was at pains to recreate, wherever he went and as much
as he could, the privacy, seclusion, and warmth of his old family home in Old
Damascus. To his new apartment in Madrid he brought with him some of the
artifacts he collected from his travels as well as his library complete with his
books and music LPs. Salma lists some of the books she observed: timeless
Arabic reads like the diwans of al-Mutanabbi, Abu Tammam, and Ibn alFared; French staples like Baudelaire and Jack Prévert; and English poets T.
S. Elliot and St. Jean Pearce.142
The poet soon settled to the rhythms of life in Madrid. Through Salma’s
social soirees and through the cultural activities of the embassy Nizar quickly
made the acquaintance of several Spanish writers and littérateurs, including
such renowned Arabists as Dr. Emilio García Gómez, Dr. Pedro Martínez
Montávez and poet Joaquín Benito de Lucas. Over the next four years, these
friendships would prove of tremendous benefit to Nizar.
Life and work in Madrid gave the poet his two most desired wishes: a
lively cultured circle of friends in an inspiring cultural setting, and the privacy
of a home away from the prying eyes of gossiping friends and neighbors.
Damascus could offer him the first, but never the second. Nizar’s relation to
people was certainly paradoxical: he loved women, and he involved himself in
people’s affairs, their habits, their faults, their defeats, and their triumphs; but
he could not agree more with Sartre’s famous dictum: “Hell is other people,” a
quote which Nizar would use as an epigraph in one of his collections years
later. He accepted people of all kinds, and he took easily to children who
always reciprocated, as Salma noted how fond the poet was of their children
and how these were of him. But at the end of the day, Nizar had this primeval
urge to run back away to a walled sanctuary all his own in total privacy.
If he wished, Nizar could be a great host. Salma remembers how the
poet, after furnishing his apartment, invited his friends to a house-warming
dinner of his own cooking. Not only did they find the food delicious, but also
they looked with amazement at how elegant and neat the table and the room
were, “as if ordered and managed by a very skilled lady of the house.”143 The
description is yet another example of the gentle feminine streak in Nizar’s
character. Not only did he speak in the voice of women in some of his poetry,
but, as noted earlier, his fascination with the feminine influenced the way he
saw and ordered his world around him. It brought a certain kind of beauty to
his life.
Apart from these “guided” tours of his life at home, the poet drew an
iron curtain, to use an expression from the times, around his private life. He
was determined not to repeat his mistake of living in the public eye as
happened in his affair with Collette, especially after his rejection by Balqees’
family. Thus little is known of his amorous relationships with Spanish women.
Even Salma had to admit that “In truth, he was secretive in his love
relationships in Spain, where the beautiful women he knew and dated inspired
some of his best poetry. He became known, during his long stay in Spain, for
his privacy and secrecy to safeguard his good reputation.”144
As he began to make friendships with Spaniards, Nizar realized his
need to learn their tongue. And just as he did in London, he soon applied
himself diligently to studying Spanish, achieving enough command of the
language to allow him to converse and read in it. Helped by his knowledge of
French, in the span of one year he would begin to quote Spanish verse in his
letters to Salma and share thoughts about the Spanish books he was reading.
With Spanish added to his reservoir, Nizar became conversant in three
Western languages in addition to his native Arabic – quite an achievement in
an Arab world with soaring rates of illiteracy. Armed with these tools and with
a perceptive mind constantly on the lookout for the beautiful, exotic or
insightful, Nizar’s knowledge of the world began to take encyclopedic
dimensions – never too specialized, but far-flung and encompassing.
As the year 1962, drew to an end, Nizar immersed himself in his
friends’ active social life: visiting the famed El Escorial – Madrid’s magnificent
monastery, palace, and best-stocked library; visiting museums and art
galleries; or just walking around with his friends in Madrid’s old town
alleyways. There in the La Moreria, the city’s Islamic quarter, toward the end
of December, the bunch discovered a quaint bar serving drinks and delicious
Spanish tapas – the place quickly became their favorite haunt.
For New Year celebration, Nizar joined his two friends, professor Pedro
Martínez Montávez and poet Joaquín Benito de Lucas for a night at a
flamenco theater. The atmosphere was quite merry, and the littérateurs
enjoyed their time. But as he sat there drinking, chatting, and watching the
dancing, Nizar could not keep his thoughts away from Collette. Later that
night, he wrote his plaintive poem, “If You Were in Madrid…”
If you were in Madrid in the New Year
We would have stayed late together alone
In a small tavern
Us alone in the place
Our hands searching
145
For our hands in the dark..
ˆ†UQE ÇIC xh ]GC]M xh y†ƒ PQ
Ls]cn Lsap| L†ƒ
¡ag®\ ˆsLc xh
LsEP| Lpj ˜gQ
LsE]G Lp‰zj Jm LpM±K xh ¿_te
Despite his longing, Madrid was offering him the best distraction he
could have in the many friends he had made and in the beautiful women he
was meeting. Apart from some sad lapses, Nizar would generally come to
think of his time in Spain as one of his happiest times, especially in light of
later phases of his life. And of that happy time, the period he spent with the
Kuzbaris was the happiest.
In January 1963, Nizar published his first non-fiction work, a book
entitled “Poetry is a Green Lantern.” The book was a collection of critical
essays and articles, many of which had already appeared in various
magazines and newspapers over the past decade, in addition to several
introductory speeches and two anonymously-addressed letters. Discursive
and discordant, by far this book did not rise in critical standards to the level of
Nazek Al-Malaeka’s “The Case of Contemporary Poetry,” a critical work
published the previous year. As a prose work, it however contained some of
the most imaginative and colorful prose written in the Arabic language,
proving that Nizar was more of the painter that he had wished to be than a
coherent literary critic. Nizar himself was not enthusiastic about publishing the
materials, but it seems his friends in Beirut prevailed on him to produce the
book, as he indicated in the introduction.146
On March 8, 1963, an event in Syria cast its long shadow on Nizar’s
life, as indeed on the lives of all Syrians and Arabs. That morning officers
affiliated with the Baath party staged a successful military coup which brought
the Baathists to power, capping a two-decade campaign to realize that goal.
Having consistently failed at the polls, and having been outmaneuvered by
Nasser, the Baathists finally achieved their goal through the infiltration of the
officer corps in the Syrian army. After years of moving up the ranks, their
young recruits from the impoverished classes were now in key positions in the
armed forces. 147 Finally, the moment came for them to take the reins of
power from the notables and aristocrats who had been in control of Syria
since time immemorial.
In their first highly-charged communiqué, the Baathists took the higher
ground of defending Pan-Arabism, and launched a scathing attack against the
secessionists who separated from the UAR. The fact is the Baathists were as
much responsible for secession as the others (and Nasser for one would
shortly launch a bitter propaganda campaign against their regime). Steering
the events was a coterie of politicized army officers who were mostly
members of a secretive military committee formed in 1959.148 Among the first
members of the committee was the ambitious Hafez Assad, a quiet
inscrutable soldier who preferred to work in the shadows – for now.
Two important points in the coup’s communiqué No. 1 must have
drawn the attention of people like Nizar: the strange attack on democracy,
even as a principle, and the direct singling of Damascene aristocracy as evil:
Today’s morning, the voice of truth rose to declare the truth. Falsehood was
vanquished and its proponents fell on the sides of our Arab nation’s path […].
Defeated were the proponents of secession who veered Syria away from
unity’s rightful path, established a secessionist regime, and tried to place
democracy instead of unity, the democracy of the enemies of the people and
advocates of opportunism and anti-Arabism. […The regressive regime] put
on the garb of legitimacy – the legitimacy of Abu Rummaneh, the farce of
149
history and democracy – persecuted free students […etc.].
In one strike, the Baathists struck down not only parliamentary
democracy, but any pretenses as to legitimacy through democratic means.
From that point, Syria began a steady bloody descent into one of the most
repressive and totalitarian rules in its history. Although the coup and
disturbances would continue throughout the sixties, these were for the most
part inside the Baath corral, often reflecting personal confrontations as well as
ideological rifts within the party itself.
The communiqué singled out Syria’s notables and capitalists as
represented in Abu Rummaneh in particular. Finally, the wish of Suleiman al-
Isa, the Baath’s mouthpiece poet cited earlier, to overtake that neighborhood
and subjugate its wealthy inhabitants was beginning to be realized. Nizar
could not have missed these signs of the social and political upheaval
wracking the delicate synthesis of his city. Following these events, the poet
and his friends in the Syrian embassy had now a new boss; the head of the
new cabinet and foreign minister was none other than Salah al-Din al-Bitar,
the co-founder of the Baath party. A physics teacher from humble Damascene
origins, al-Bitar was an idealist ideologue who found himself in the midst of
forces neither he nor his friend Michel Aflaq could control anymore. One of the
first measures of the new military-dominated regime was the declaration of
martial law on April 1, 1963, a law that is still in effect in Syria today as of the
writing of these lines. The law confiscated the peoples’ civil rights: their rights
to free speech, congregation, demonstration, or any form of political activism
that contradicted Baathist views. It put Syrians directly under the mercy of
ruthless military courts that made mockery of the judicial process.
Despite these portentous signs, Nizar and his friends carried on
business as usual in Madrid. Nizar himself was not at risk, after all, and
despite his cultivated aristocratic image as a love poet, he could always fall
back on his middle-class roots and the progressive side of his socially-minded
poetry. On his mind weighed other cares and concerns. That March Nizar
celebrated his fortieth birthday with his friends, but deep inside the occasion
was not really a happy one for him. Signs of age were beginning to crawl into
his hair and he was growing more aware of the widening gulf between him
and his young lovers, as is suggested in the following poem, which he wrote
around this time and in which he addresses a nubile admirer who sought his
autograph:
Oh Girl with the small diary
Forgive me
He has lost his touch, your old Jinni
Where thence, oh most beautiful of readers,
you came?
I am just an old flameless lamp
…
I fight with letters and visions
Of smoke I made all my scenes
Many were the temples I built for elegant love
150
Only to be killed in front of my temples..
uCXmI ..¡ag®„QE ¡a’SrQE ~E•
HCLrj FG]iQE €HCLM HLm LM
x†•geI ~LµCLiQE klcI •JGI JM
]MLT ¸Ea| JM a‡ƒI yUQ LsI
...
•ÈaQLjn ¦na_QLj `CLcI xs[
u]YL‹M “ƒ yz†\ }LT]QE JMn
E]jLzM –gsDE œ_lQ ~]ªgŒ
u]jLzM £LMI ..ZP•iM y{i|n
Nizar was certainly going through a mid-life crisis. For despite all his
success, he was not even sure about the value of that success. Here he was
in a foreign land, a second-class diplomat representing a volatile government
steered by maverick officers and ideologues; his very source of livelihood and
adventure is the one gagging him and curbing his thought. Nothing could be
more hurtful to a poet with Nizar’s imagination than the feeling he cannot say
his mind. He had failed in love, and came out of his love affair with Collette
feeling somewhat of a villain. Not merely so, he went on to boast about that
villainy in his poetry until people began to believe it. Was that not the reason
why Balqees’ family rejected his marriage proposal? And here he was, a fortyyear-old divorced father of two, his daughter almost the age of the women he
is writing his gazal to. These were some of the thoughts weighing on his mind
when he wrote:
My Dear
At moments of honesty with myself
I feel that our love is a crime,
I feel I am just an old clown
Booed and cursed and whistled down
I feel I am a thief
Snatching a precious pearl from a crown
…xedGdm
xUS†Q ˆ•_Q ºyzVC E•[
..ŠrGaV L†ªtc }I azŒI
‚P™m ¸ªapM x†sIn
agS„QLj CPpr™QE ŠhXiG
Šrg•‹QEn
…
I am like a slave trader..
Selling his conscience to every woman he
meets
Deep inside I feel
That placing my hand in your small hand
151
Is piracy: plain, obscene.
ŽCL| xsI azŒI
ŠrGaƒ ¡PQ•Q klm P{UG
...
.. –g^aQE aVL•ƒ x†sIn
Wagrb ¡IaME “ƒ ©gtG
xeCEa^ xh azŒI
.. Wag®„QE €]G xh u]G }I
.. Wagic ˆ†\a^
But what tormented Nizar most was a ravaging sense of alienation
from place and time, of not truly belonging to a place with an embraceable
identity. Nizar felt estranged from the cultural complacency and backwardness
of Damascus, and by and large from that of all the Arabs. He yearned for the
emotional certainties and permanent loyalties of the common people. He
could not fit anymore in Arab life and his inability to criticize it only added to
his frustration; (let’s remember that his denunciatory epic “The Diary of a
Blasé Woman” was still collecting dust in his drawers). Yet as much as he
rejected the flaws and failures of Arab life, he felt an unbreakable affinity to it
– often paradoxically drawn to its very flaws. He would tell his daughter that
an Arab man should not marry a non-Arab because only an Arab woman
knew how to be a good wife and mother.152 Such beliefs that he carried
around the world with him, his attachment to his family back in Damascus, to
Damascus itself with all its faults, and his unyielding love for the Arabic
language and its literature – all kept him from turning his back on his culture
and immersing himself in the West to the point of evanescence, as indeed
happened to some of his frustrated contemporaries.153
These opposing passions and tendencies were battling for Nizar’s
mind, and the conflict soon took its toll, culminating in a health breakdown.
Nizar fell ill shortly after his fortieth birthday, and had to spend a week
convalescing at home. During this time, he wrote a sad poem with a selfevident title: “Travel Bags Full of Tears.”
Against all these forces of melancholy harrying him, Nizar always found
in the writing of his poetry a rather cathartic salvation for his psyche. He never
allowed his depressive conditions to bring him to the brink of despair. His
poetry would always pull him back from drifting too close to the edge of the
abyss. This is the time when he began to see poetry as the only force in his
life to keep him going, yet the “we” in the following last lines of one of his most
quoted poems, “Painting with Words,” signifies a conflict that went beyond the
self to describe a societal crisis:
All roads are blocked in our way
Our only salvation is in painting with words..
154
¡Hn]UM L†MLMI `nC]QE “ƒ
..~Lrl’QLj F|aQE xh ..L†\±Tn
Nizar’s belief in his poetry and the immense interest of others in what
he was writing is perhaps the reason behind the poet’s remarkable resilience
in life. Throughout his life, whenever his detractors declared him finished, he
would come back with a poem that would drown them in its storms.
On May 12, 1963, Nizar traveled to Cordoba with several of his friends
to take part in a one-week festival organized by Cordoba’s municipality in
collaboration with several Arabic and Islamic studies institutes. The festival
was to mark nine hundred years after the passing of the distinguished
Andalusian Arab philosopher and author Ibn Hazm al-Andalusi (994-1063). It
was an opportunity for Nizar to let poetry and the celebration of literature
whisk him away from his depressive mood. Many Arab and Spanish poets,
writers, scholars, and critics flocked to the the festival. There were scholars
from the Arab universities of Damascus, Cairo, Alexandria, and Rabat; and
there were Arabists from the universities of Leon and Paris. The Spaniards
were headed by the minister of higher education, the mayor of Cordoba, and
scholars came from the universities of Madrid, Cordoba, Barcelona, Granada,
Salamanca, and the School for Arabic Studies in Madrid.155 Nizar could not be
in a better-informed and refined company.
In Cordoba, Nizar stayed at the Rusafa Hotel, whose name evokes the
famous Rusafa palace of the Umayyad kings of Damascus, a palace they built
in the Syrian desert -- its ruins still standing today as a witness to their days of
grandeur. Taking a stroll outside the hotel grounds, Nizar came upon a stone
slab half-covered by the hanging branches of a big shady tree. On the slab
were engraved some lines from a famous poem by king Abd al-Rahman I, the
legendary prince who established the Umayyad dynasty in Spain in 755 A.D.,
making Cordoba his capital. Nizar stood there for quiet a while reading and
contemplating some verses the prince composed when he saw a lonely
Arabian palm tree there in the Rusafa of Cordoba:
Here in Rusafa I saw a palm tree
Far away from the land of palms
Oh, she is like me in distance and alienation
In severance from sons and kin
You grew a stranger in a strange land
We are both equal in exile and isolation
ˆl¬s ˆhL\aQE §|n L†Q ~]te
“¬†QE ]lj Jm `a®QE BCwj ~NL†e
•P†QEn `ªa®•QE xh xpgtŒ ylih
xlYI Jmn x†j Jm xµL†•QE •P›n
ˆtGaž Lpgh ysI «BCwj ~w‹s
xl‡M •w•†rQEn NL„^¹E xh fl‡rh
Under these lines were engraved the prince’s name, the dates of his
rule, and the following dedication that moved Nizar: “From the city of Cordoba
to its great Prince Abd al-Rahman al-Dakhil, in memoriam). The mayor of
Cordoba later told him that the palm tree mentioned in the lines had grown old
and died away, and that a new palm tree they planted in its place did not live,
so they planted the tree with the hanging branches instead. The poetry and
the story instilled deep pathos in Nizar for the estranged Arabian palm tree
and for himself – for he must have seen in the story some premonition of his
own destiny.
The festival began with the unveiling of a life-sized statue for Ibn Hazm
in front of the house in which he was born in 994 A.D. Not long afterwards, the
festival program began in the NH Amistad de Cordoba, one the city’s
landmarks, with readings by Spanish poets singing the beauty, diversity, and
richness of their country’s past. Nizar, with Dr. Pedro Martínez Montávez
providing instant translation, joined in with three poems of his celebrating love,
Damascus, and Spain to the great approval of the audience. The Spanish
enthusiasm and liveliness that surrounded Nizar that evening and the
following evenings of the festival filled him with a joy he had not experienced
since his days in London. The harmony he saw in the festival between the
Eastern Arab civilization and the Western Spanish civilization convinced him
that it was finally possible to reconcile the two civilizations if people
recognized each other’s humanistic achievement.
After several days and evenings of poetry, dances, theatrical
performances, and other festive activities, the festival wound down to a social
dinner in Cordoba’s Alcazar palace to the soothing music of the Spanish
philharmonic orchestra. Salma summed up the atmosphere and feelings at
the end of that last evening:
When we returned to the Rusafa Hotel we and a group of joyful participants
sat in a circle in the hotel’s large veranda talking and chatting until the
morning, ignoring slumber’s sway. We drew from the days and evenings at
the festival some thought-provoking wafts precious in our times, thanks to the
strong Arab-Spanish friendship, and the Spanish people’s faithfulness to a
common past that saw the flourishing of a civilization whose linguistic,
scientific, architectural and artistic remains still live on the Spanish land, in
156
the Spanish history, and in the Spanish heart until today.
The next day after the festival, Nizar traveled with the Kuzbaris to
spend the weekend in Granada. There they visited Alhambra, the famed
Moorish palace. Salma provides the details into the writing of one of Nizar’s
most loved poems about the history of the Arabs in Spain and their present
predicament. As he walked with his two friends in the halls of the palace late
in the afternoon, the mansion and its grounds seemed magical in the golden
rays of a setting sun. He turned to his friends and said that “there is a certain
radiant beauty in this graceful palace; it emanates an ethereal magic that
refreshes the soul.” Nizar said these words and sauntered away from his
friends and soon disappeared in the palace. Salma noted to her husband: “I
believe he had a revelation this evening and that we will shortly hear a poem
from him about Granada.”157 She was right. At dinner in the hotel Nizar sat
quietly with his friends as if in a trance. It is the same trance that his friend
Subhi described before, and the one his daughter Hadba would describe
years later.
That evening Nizar had the feeling that if there were a place where
East met West in peace and harmony it would be Arab Spain. He felt that a
residual effect of that peace and harmony still filtered through the centuries
right to the present moment. Nizar stayed up late that night writing his
signature poem “Granada”, a poem that quickly found its way to the
curriculums of Arab schools:
We met at Alehambra’s gates
Best encounters are those unplanned
Two black eyes, in their irises
Dimensions are born of dimensions
Are you Spanish? I asked
Yes, Granada born and raised
Granada!
Seven centuries stirred
In those eyes, after long sleep
The Umayyads… their banners flying
Waves of horses after horses, charging
History
Ever surprising
Has united me
With a brunette descendant of mine
A Damascene face
In which I saw
Balqees’ lashes,
2
And Suad’s neck
I saw our old house
My room
My mother laying my bed
I saw the jasmine tree
Blossoms and stars
I heard the fountain
Singing golden songs
And Damascus, where is it? She asked
I said there
In your hair
Flowing like a river in the dark
In your Arab face
In your mouth that still holds
The suns of Arab lands
3
In the Areef gardens
Their fragrances and springs
In the Arabian jasmine, basil and citron
trees
She walked beside me
Her hair panting
..LsÈLiQ }Lƒ " NEar_QE " “T]M xh
HLzgM ±j L¼gilQE œg¼›I LM
LrpGa™c xh ..}EnEHP| }L†gm
HL¼¼zjI JM HLz¼jDE ]QEP•e
L¼p•QNL| .. •ˆgsLt|[ ysI “Y
uH±¼gM ˆ¼›Lsaž xhn :yQL^
ˆzt| }na^ y_\n !ˆ›Lsaž
HL¼^C ]zj ..Jg†gzQE f†ge xh
ˆ¼¼¼mPhaM LpeLGEC .. ˆgMIn
HL¼¼g™j ˆQP\PM LYHLgVn
xsHLmI Rgƒ ..¥GCL•QE `ažI LM
uHL¼ScI JM ..NEar| ¡]gS_Q
Š¼¼Q±T yGIC .. xi‹MH ŠVn
HL¼z| ]gVn .. ˜gilj }LSVI
¡a™cn .. FG]iQE L†Qd†M yGICn
uHL¼¼|n ]re xMI Lpj ysLƒ
Lp¼MP™†j yz\C …ˆ†gr|LgQEn
HL¼¼‹s¹E ˆgtYXQE ˆƒatQEn
***
Lp†Gae : yl^ •}P’e JGI .. –‹MHn
HEP| aps `LU†rQE €azŒ xh
uXQE a®‡QE xh …xjazQE fpVn xh
uH±j ÇPrŒ Lsd•¬M •E‚ LM
LpµLMn " RGazQE ~L†V " œg› xh
HLªt’QE xh …}L_GaQE xh … “SQE xh
LpSlT ¿plG az‹QEn .. xzM ~CL|
HL„c ag®j yƒae “jL†Uƒ
L¼¼¼Y]g™j “GP{QE OaiQE –Qwen
H±¼¼grQEˆl¼glj —Pr¼‹QE “‡M
x•lgQH RlT “S{QE “‡M yg‹Mn
HLMC £Pƒ ..¥GCL•QE xµECnn
Lp¼‰ts ©r|I HLƒI ~LhaTdQE
uHL†e ¦PiUQE klm ~L‹ƒCdQEn
LsHn]V PY‚ .. NEar_QE L†Y : yQL^
uHL¼¼¼™MI LpsEC]V klm Ia^Lh
Like unharvested wheat
Undulating
Her earrings gleaming
Like candles on a Christmas eve
I walked like a child
Behind my guide
History behind me
But a pile of ashes
The frescos almost pulsing
Ceiling ornaments calling
She said: This is Alhambra
The pride of our fathers
Read my glories on its walls
Her glories! I wiped a bleeding wound
And yet another in my heart
Oh my beautiful heiress!
If only you knew
Your fathers are also mine!
L¼h‚Ls LcaV y_UMn !!LYHL™MI
uHE•¼¼Sj LgsL¤ LcaV y_UMn
y¼ƒCHI ˆlgr™QE x•¤CEn ygQ LG
uHE]¼¼¼¼VI Fp•†m JGXQE }I
***
L¼¼p•mHn LM]†m Lpgh yisLm
" HLG‚ Jj ŽCL› " k¼¼rUG ±VC
We parted and hugged
In her I also hugged
A man called
4
Tarek ibn Ziad .
“Granada” tells of an encounter at the gates of Alhambra between
Nizar and a Spanish young woman who then guides him through the wonders
of the Moorish palace. The grandeur of the place explained through decidedly
Spanish eyes stirs nostalgic and mixed emotions in the poet: He thus begins
to contrast Spain’s European present with its Arab past, tracing the make-up
of its unique identity. In the young woman’s eyes and features, he suddenly
sees things dear to the Arabs both past and present: triumphant armies,
details of feminine beauty dear to the Arabs, lush gardens, etc. Damascus
can hardly be distinguished from Granada here, the East ever closer to the
West.
In the second part, the poem undertakes to retell structurally and
symbolically the story of the rise and fall of the Arab civilization, constantly
contrasting that with the poet’s present time. Despite the sad pathos that
permeates the poem, its overall effect on its readers, however, has always
been a remarkably optimistic one. This cannot be readily explained by the
poem’s lamentations of the loss of Arab grandeur, but by its symbolic
structure which presents a narrative with a cyclical rather than linear view of
history. This view opens the possibility for renewal, rebirth, and reconciliation
with both the Arab past and the West. The poem thus hints at the present
condition of the Arabs by a question (Damascus, where is it?) symbolizing the
Arabs’ current reality of loss and purposelessness. It then reinforces this motif
by the image of a black river -- another image symbolizing the Arabs’
sorrowful state of affairs today. Then it flashes back to the beginning of the
cycle with the luminous energy in Arab deserts (suns of Arab lands), an
energy whose effect and potential continue to be felt today (still holds). This
period is followed by a green period of blossoming and fruition (the Arabian
jasmine, basil and citron trees…). But the Arab Islamic civilization falters and
regresses (panting) before it could reap the fruits of its endeavors
(unharvested wheat). Here the color changes from green to yellow foreboding
corruption and dissolution. The Arabs’ civilizational peak did not last for long
(like candles), and was soon to decline into a black period (pile of ashes). But
in the cyclical view, death could be where life begins (Christmas), and the
modern Arab man (child) is reaching back to his revived history (frescos
pulsing, ornaments calling). He does so though by following in the footsteps of
the West (the Spanish guide) who shares in his past (heiress), but who is not
aware of that very heritage (if only you knew). Despite the conflict and its
wounds, the poet is able to cope with these wounds, and he arrives at the
present with an optimistic wish for reconciliation (hugging), embracing the
best in both East and West, (the guiding girl and the triumphant commander).
Nizar’s impressive invocation of Arab Islamic history in the context of
the East-West duality is not entirely new in modern Arabic literature, even as it
achieves new highs of imaginative creativity. Ahmad Shawqi of Egypt, whom
the British forced into five years of Spanish exile (1914-19), was also visited
by his muse as he toured the Arab Islamic monuments of Spain, producing his
famous poem, the “Siniyyah”. In an analysis that could be readily applied to
Nizar’s “Granada”, one critic observed that Shawqi’s poem transformed “erotic
desire into political sentiment by projecting it onto the masterworks of
Andalusian architecture. [He] turn[s] the monument into a “narcissistic” object
that signifies the poet’s self and its desire, as well as the nation through which
this desire is fulfilled.”158
“Granada” symbolized Nizar’s growing conviction, and that of many
writers and intellectuals of his generation, that the relationship between the
Arab world and the West need not be confrontational, despite all the historical
wrongdoings on both sides. But that conviction rang hollow with those at the
helms of power in the Arab world, especially the ones riding the nationalist
tide. The latter were reacting instinctively and realistically, but not without a
measure of paranoia, to what they saw as a new imperialist campaign to
replace the old discredited Western colonialism. Despite the ebbing of
European colonialism, the expanding American role in the region in pursuit of
Arab oil and the dogged American support of Israel only made Arab
nationalists more frantic. Of late, President Kennedy working against the
advice of his State Department had decided to provide arms to Israel,
acknowledging a “special relationship” with the nemesis of the Arabs and
further declaring that “This country is really interested in Israel. We are
interested that Israel should keep up its sensitive, tremendous, historic
task.”159
But if there is going to be blame, Nizar always reserved it to the Arabs
themselves. He believed that it was the Arabs’ failure to unite, to modernize,
and to build a just prosperous society that was responsible for their
humiliation by their enemies. He did not as yet dare say so in public, but it is a
belief that he confided in his friends with angst and bitterness, as he did after
a dinner on April 22 in the house of one his colleagues. The friends were
debating the Arab state of affairs in light of what they had seen in Europe
when Nizar, in answer to the rationalizing words of one of his friends, said:
How do you want me to make light of our backward decline that is caused by
the constant infighting between the so-called “Arab brothers”, this epithet that
we boast of but never live in spirit, this epithet that our states shamelessly
attribute to themselves in speeches and communiqués while they are busy
conspiring against each other. […] Have we not failed in building our states
160
and in managing our own institutions after independence?
Not to be disproved, Arab politics soon caught up with Nizar in Spain.
No sooner had the festive Spanish spring pulled him out of his depression
than the ripples of the Baathist “revolution” began to reach the peaceful
shores of Spain. On May 31, a cable came from Damascus removing the
ambassador and sending him into early retiremen! The Baathist purges of
party foes had begun and the ambassador’s dismissal was just the tip of the
iceberg – career officers, professional and well-trained, were being detained
or thrown out of service in droves. The tactics would soon spell dire
consequences for the well-being of the Syrian army at the time of war.
Nizar was spared, and practically, he benefited as he was quickly
promoted to the rank of charge d'affaires. Despite his genteel airs, he was not
considered one of the fat cats of Damascus, nor could his public views be
interpreted other than those of an ardent Arab nationalist. If he did not fawn
up to the new regime, so did he not oppose it for now. In public, Nizar
maintained his complete neutrality toward the events in Damascus, but inside
he was growing more and more anxious at how things were turning out.
The departure of the Kuzbaris in the summer of 1963 must have left
some vacuum in the life of Nizar, especially for the close friendship he had
with Salma. He compensated with work, writing poetry, socializing with his
Spanish friends, or hosting visitors from out of town:
Today, I went with Haifa to the Coronia, Bardo, and Casa de Campo streets.
We found our way over the breaking yellow leaves. How beautiful it is for
man to walk on bullions of gold. Your memory was written on every autumn
161
leaf burning on the ground like a copper lantern aflame.
As in the lines above, Nizar had a remarkable ability to write beautifully
and to convey his feelings to his reader spontaneously and in poetic prose.
The poet began to value his talent in professional terms, seeing it as the only
alternative he had to the affected life of a diplomat, a life he was now more
than ever becoming estranged from:
This is my kingdom.. a white paper whose flesh I claw with my nails.. an
ashtray whose ashes mix with my ashes.. and a flock of black letters.. flying
in the skies of my notebook.. like a homeless flock of house martins.
I do not believe in a bread other than this bread made of the spikes of words..
I do not believe in any good wine other than the wine distilled in our inkpots..
The word is the only god who deserves to be given our oil and candles. It is
the last window remaining on a shipwreck which has lost its bearings and its
captain.
There is no surviving except in the letter and by the letter. I personally believe
that all I am practicing in this life – save for my paper-bound destiny – is a
sideshow.. to which I extend my hand like I do to an old dowager, one of the
162
marquises, perhaps, that I meet at a cocktail party..
With this determined embracement of writing as a way of life, Nizar
applied himself more than ever to the literary life of Spain. In a letter to Salma
on March 1, 1964, he told her that in the past month alone he had attended
three plays, La Casa de Bernarda Alba by Frederico Garcia Lorca, Los
Verdes Campos del Edén by Antonio Gala, and Los Arboles Mueren de Pie
by Alejandro Casona. He also told her he was reading two books in Spanish,
the first Monólogo de Una Mujer Fría by Manuel Halcon (1900-1989), -- a title
that would morph into his “Diary of a Blasé Woman” four years later -- and the
second was Todos los Ombligos son Redondos by Alvaro de Laiglesia (192281), a humorist writer he knew personally. Of the Spanish poets, he was
reading Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870), a poet that Nizar considered
the closest to him in style and spirit, to the point that he thought about
translating into Arabic his Rimas y Leyendas. He would not get around to
doing this, but he would manage to push the Instituto Hispano-Arabe de
Cultura of the Spanish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to commission an Arabic
translation to which he wrote an introduction in January 1965.
All this while Nizar was writing prolifically, as he noted in a letter to
Salma in January 1964 “My poetry is falling like the January rains.. it is
torrential and tense like life in Spain. Winter always does this to me..
whenever it bleeds, I bleed.”163 His poetry was now mostly about himself,
Spain, and Balqees, his young lazy lover in Baghdad. Balquis was on his
mind, but her sparse letters fell far short of his expectations, he who was
revved up by the Spanish joie de vivre:
Oh those lazy letters of yours…
It is better if you do not send
If words cost you so much to write
Then write not, love is not a donation
…
Words are constant bleeding in my heart
164
For you they barely touch the fingers..
L††gj ˆQPU’QE ~LjL{¬QE fle
Lz{ie }I .. LpQ agT .. LpQ agT
¡a¬| €]†m ~Lrl’QE ysLƒ }[
Lmate ˜gQ œ_QLh …xt•’e Z
...
FµEH RGds xtl^ xh ¦a_QE
Lzt\¹E •]ze LM .. €]†m ¦a_QEn
In his letters or poems to his beloveds, Nizar always exhibited a certain
degree of impatience and earnestness. This contrasted sharply with his lighthearted jocular style in his letters to his friends. Nizar did not strike people as
a particularly cheerful person; indeed all his photographs show a somber man
always in the grip of a meditative poignant mood, never laughing. But many of
his friends knew a lighter side to him, a side that shows in his letters to his
close friends. In these letters he often used a spontaneous merry style
interspersed with quips and winks. Here is how he told his friend Salma of his
move to a new house in Madrid in March 1964:
I have been forced to leave the house of Maria de Molina, the place with that
beautiful poetic name, because the landlady wants to marry off her daughter
in it.. I said to her, bring your daughter first to see if she deserves for me to
give up the house to her. When the daughter came and I saw her ravishing
beauty, I quickly gathered my papers and junk and said to her what poet
165
Bishara al-Khouri said before: Thus beauty hath commanded.
In April Nizar made a trip back to the Arab world, this time to Tunisia in
North Africa. His reputation had long preceded him there, and the visit only
solidified his self-confidence as a pan-Arab poet. As had happened in
previous trips, people crowded the streets to hear him: “the whole of Tunisia
descended to hear me; I have seen a love from the Tunisian people that
brought tears to my eyes.”166
On the way back from Tunisia, Nizar spent time in the island of Palma
de Majorca, visiting among other things the house Chopin and George Sand
lived in during Chopin’s convalescence on the island. He noted with interest
Chopin’s piano, his musical notes, and Sand’s memoirs. The contrast
between his reception in Tunisia and his status in Spain did not elude him. In
Arab Tunisia he saw his glory as the great poet of the Arabs; in Majorca he
was just another tourist poring over Western icons’ lives. His Arabist friend Dr.
Pedro Martínez Montávez had suggested translating some of his poetry into
Spanish, and the suggestion raised in Nizar’s mind the question of audience
and belonging. No matter how widespread his poetry can become through
translation, he did not expect to gain one tenth of the popularity he already
had among his fellow Arabs. More importantly, how would a prolonged stay in
the West affect his presence and contact with his Arab readers? His ideas on
this aspect of creativity across cultures came to surface when Salma sought
his advice on translating her new novel to Spanish. He was quick to advise
her to focus on Arabic first because “you are an Arab writer, and your readers
are Arabs.” He continued, “When we write, we write to a certain reality and to
a people who look like us. Our language is the bridge we use to cross over to
them. When an author – any author – creates his literary legacy, he never
thinks of it in translation, and if he does, then he is taking away from the
precedence of his mother tongue. This causes the work to lose its national
flavor.” It seems Nizar was really thinking of his own condition. At the end of
the letter, he poses some quite suggestive questions: “Is it in the interest of
the artist to move away from his own habitat? Will the audience remain faithful
to an artist who has turned his back on it? These are questions that are
racking my mind these days without answer.”167
Despite his hesitations, Nizar soon began to collaborate with Dr.
Montávez on the translation. By the end of January 1965, the two had
translated 30 poems of Nizar’s picking, and two months later the collection
came out in a neat book under the title Poemas Amorosos Arabes. The
reception of the collection was flattering to Nizar, and it consequently abated
his worry “whether or not it [was] possible to transmit our emotions to Europe,
and still retain the Eastern warmth in these emotions.”168 After he saw how
successful the work was in introducing him to Spanish readers, he came to
realize, as he admitted to Salma, that the publication of a collection of his
poetry in Spanish was the most important achievement of his stay in Spain.
He further concluded:
What I am sure of now is that the human heart is one, whether this heart is
from India, the Congo, or Majorca. I am very proud of this work; I can now
leave Madrid at any moment knowing that I am leaving behind me words
169
planted in the land of Castina along the olive trees and the grape vines.
Indeed, Nizar was ready to go back to the Arab world to reconnect with
his people and his culture. On his mind was also a new venture, one that
could guarantee him the political and financial independence he needed. For
he had been thinking for a while of establishing a publishing house in his
name, one in which he could publish his own poetry without having to
concede fat cuts to the publishers. His savings from years of foreign service
would allow him to set up a decent business, especially now that he had
accumulated enough new material in his drawers for the publication of a new
collection of poetry.
As late as January 1965, Nizar was still thinking of going back to
Damascus, and maybe to set up his business there, asking Salma if she had
had any difficulties in clearing and bringing in the furniture she had shipped
from Spain to Syria. Despite his uneasy past in Damascus, the poet was
struck with nostalgia after he became, practically, the only employee in the
embassy, telling Salma that for four months he had been “roaming the
embassy’s long corridors as if [he] were roaming a cavern haunted by
ghosts.” Being alone made him all the more nostalgic to his family and friends,
to the comfort of his childhood home, and most of all to his mother. Tired and
pining, in September 1964 Nizar wrote one of his most emotional poems, a
poem entitled “Five Letters to My Mother”:
I am lonely..
My cigarette smoke is languid
My seat is bored
My sorrows are birds looking for a harvest
field
I’ve come to know women from Europe..
I’ve come to know the passions born in
cement and wood
I’ve come to know the civilization of fatigue..
I roamed India and the East..
I roamed the Yellow World..
But I could not find..
..u]cn LsI
Âa™‰G uaµL™| }LTH
Âa™‰G u]ziM xª†Mn
Jm ]zj Ī•Se …aghL„m xsEdcIn
ÂC]gj
..LjnCnI NLUs yham
œ‹¬QEn y†r|¹E R›EPm yham
..œz•QE ¡CL‰c yham
]†UQE yS› …]†pQE yS›n
..aS\DE FQLzQE yS›
A woman who could comb my childhood
hair
..a‡mI FQn
aiŒDE uazŒ §ª‹re ¡IaME klm
The fifth letter in the poem crescendos into a climax of yearning and
self-denunciation, another signal of Nizar’s afflicted love-hate relationship with
his city:
Damascus.. Oh Damascus..
You are poetry..
We wrote on our eyes..
You are a beautiful child
We crucified, hung from his braids
We sat at his knees
Melting in his love..
170
Till our love killed him..
–‹MH .–‹MH
..EazΠLG
..WL†t•ƒ L††gmI ~L^]c klm
±grV ±S› LGn
WL†tl\ WaµLSb JM
Š•tƒC ]†m LsP‡V
Š•t_M xh L†j•n
..WL†l•^ L†•t_M xh }I kQ[
These last lines also suggest Nizar’s belief that the excessive love and
protectiveness of Damascus only led to a closed culture, a culture that
essentially undermined the city’s vitality. He ultimately came to believe that
the establishment of a viable successful publishing business required a liberal
political and economic environment, one that was now lacking in Damascus.
His thoughts naturally turned to his beloved Beirut, then the cultural capital of
the Arab world and the abode of most of his literary friends. He began to plan
for his move there, spending his last year merely waiting for the end of his
mission, telling Salma “I have exhausted the purposes of living in Madrid. The
loved old atmosphere has gone. I am no longer comfortable, nor am I wishing
to continue, in my diplomatic career because it has turned into a torture to
both my soul and pride.”171
In his last vacation, he traveled by car to Lisbon in Portugal and from
there he drove up the coast visiting such sea-side cities as Porto, then
crossing into the Spanish north to visit a string of cities beginning with Vigo,
then Santiago, La Corunia, and Santander. He was struck by the beauty of
the pine-covered mountains lining the west of the Iberian Peninsula, declaring
that “Portugal is to Spain what Lebanon is to Syria, for the minute the car
crosses the Portuguese borders there begins the pine forests, the green
mountains, and the clean beautiful villages.”172
As if testing the Arab waters before he plunged right back, two months
later Nizar accepted an invitation by the Writers’ Union of Morocco to visit the
country and to do several poetry evenings. There he spent ten days that only
filled him with determination as to the new path he should take, one that the
young Moroccan student had urged him to take ten years before in London.
He spoke profusely of the trip to Salma:
It was a trip of a lifetime. The glories I enjoyed in it topped those I knew in
Beirut and Baghdad. I delivered my poetry in all the Moroccan cities: Rabat,
Marrakech, Fez, Miknas, Tatwan, Tangier; my poems have led me to the
Atlas Mountains and the Berber regions. Everywhere I stood, earth turned
into gold underneath my feet. The police had to protect me on more than one
occasion. Morocco has confirmed my destiny as a poet. […] All of which
173
makes me re-think my future
Few years later, Nizar would remember Spain as the place which
taught him to go to extremes in tasting life and in expressing it. He would
pointedly say “Spain is the land of dynamism and tension; no man can ever
pass or live in it and still remain neutral.”174 As he boarded the ship taking him
to Beirut, Nizar was no longer a neutral person. The first thing he did when he
visited Damascus was to tend his resignation. Along with his furniture, books,
and artwork collections on board that ship, Nizar carried with him the sweetest
of memories of his time in Spain. His Spanish friends did not let him go
without registering their love and appreciation. On February 13, 1966, the
leading Spanish daily A.B.C. came out with a tribute on its first page with the
title Adios a un Poeta Arabe! To Salma, he wrote " Salma, we are full of pride
that we have left behind us in Spain a ray of light and a lingering fragrance.
Notes
"Atatürk, Mustafa Kemal," Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia 2005
http://encarta.msn.com © 1997-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
CHAPTER IV
ON TO THE BEACH… INTO THE JUNGLE
1966-82
BEIRUT
Beirut 1966-73 A Dream Close to Home
As his ship slowly approached its anchor on that placid April day in
1966, Nizar began to make out the skyline of Beirut, a familiar and lovable
sight to his eyes. After all, this was his favorite city among Arab cities, a place
which he had frequently visited since childhood, and a place in which he had
many cherished memories of love and friendship. Yet this time he was here
because he had decided to make Beirut his permanent home, a kind of a
sweet chosen exile.
The time was the golden age of Lebanon, a country that despite its
deep ethnic and religious fissures had so far forged its way in the Middle East
as an oasis of success, freedom, and pleasure. Beirut the capital was now the
cultural capital of the Arab world, having since eclipsed Cairo -- where
Nasser’s repressive clout had turned the once-vibrant city into a large
lackluster socialist ghetto. Beirut, or the Paris of the East, as it was
nicknamed, was thriving in a spectacular fashion, partly through the famed
Lebanese entrepreneurship, and partly through the migrant capital making its
way into its coffers whether from Arab businessmen fleeing the turmoil in
Syria and Iraq, or from the growing investments by the oil-rich Arabs of the
Peninsula.
The Lebanese who knew Nizar all too well were quick to make the poet
feel at home even as he was going through the customs clearance at Beirut
harbor. From Madrid, he had brought with him the complete furniture of his
home, which, he discovered, was to be subjected to Lebanese import tax. But
this was quickly waived when he made an appeal for a waiver – the director of
the customs service recognized the famed love poet and even invited him to a
cup of coffee. It was his passport as the great love poet of the Arabs, not his
diplomatic passport, which eased his way into Lebanon. Standing there at the
city’s harbor, Nizar felt a rush of love overtaking him:
I watched the anchored ships in the harbor, and saw the small ferryboats
ferrying people, the seagulls with wings that smelt of travel.. of seaweeds.. of
freedom. I felt a strange pleasance, and felt that the winds had carried me to
a beautiful destiny, to an island inhabited by moons, gardenia flowers, and
1
poetry..
Nizar wasted no time; after he secured his cargo in the basement of a
friend’s house, he spent the next few days searching for a house and an
office. Shortly after, he settled on an apartment in West Beirut, and an office
in Ma’rad street, in the heart of the business district where all major publishers
were based. Ever the home-loving person, he took special care and pleasure
in arranging and personalizing his Beirut apartment with all the artwork,
handicrafts, and vestiges of his two decades of travel around the globe,
turning it into the comfortable sanctuary he loved. His office was simpler: two
small rooms, one for him and one for his secretary. He started modestly with a
table, two chairs, and a painting by a Spanish painter of horses running in the
wild. The painting could not be in a better place, for despite his stature as a
poet, Nizar must have felt like an inexperienced pony among the big
seasoned publishers of Beirut, who among them largely dominated the
publishing industry in the Arab world. Wisely, he was quick to allaye his
neighbors fears when he declared that he would dedicate his new publishing
house, the Nizar Qabbani Publications, only to publishing his own poetry and
writings. He was warmly welcomed to the club, especially that among the
publishers were several of his friends already, including the mighty Idriss of alAdaab.
That fall of 1966 Nizar produced and published his landmark diwan
“Painting with Words,” a collection in which Nizar sang of love, beauty,
passion, anger, and Spain. And Spain was where most of the collection’s
poems were composed, although some were certainly written before when
Nizar was courting Collette in Damascus, like the one entitled “A Woman of
Glass”. These latter poems differ in spirit from the rest of the collection: they
are angry, challenging, vengeful, and even morbid – poems like “The Zero
Hour”:
Your husky voice is savage, instinctive
A dagger eating my flesh..
Please speak no more
You’re but a headache that lived in my
head
For years… and years..
Oh my headache..
2
Why did I not kill you five years ago?
JgsaQE ªudGaž …Êx‹cn vP_trQE feP\
Jg•’Ue ±ph .xr_Q JM “ƒwG a™†T
x|IC xh »Lm LmE]\ LG
..Jg†|n ..L†g†|
..xmE]\ LG
•Jg†| ˜rT JM fl•^I FQ Rgƒ
Yet morbidity reached its zenith in his well-written poem “Deek al-Jin
the Damascene”, which retells in dark macabre imagery and sadistic emotions
the story of Syrian poet Deek al-Jin of Hims (a city in central Syria) who fell
madly in love with a Christian girl, married her, and then killed her in a fit of
jealous rage over suspected unfaithfulness – only to discover that he was set
up by one of his rivals for her heart. Deek al-Jin agonized in his poetry over
the murder, yet Nizar re-tells the gory story in the first person minus any hint
at his woman’s innocence:
I have killed you. I am free
Oh cheapest woman I have known..
I plunged my knife in your breasts..
And washed my body with your blood..
…
I have killed you scores of times..
But I have failed..
…
I carried your small corpse
Way down in my depths
And walked around looking for a grave in
the dark
But I found not
I ran away from you.. in horror
3
Finding I was running to you..
yca•|En ..f•l•^ xs[
..yham ¡IaM[ ¢TCI LG
x†g’| ..fG]ps xh ~]ržI
..ylU•žE fMH xhn
...
~EaM a‹m f•l•^ ]iQn
yl‹h .. x†’Qn
...
¡ag®„QE f•‡V ylrcn
~a|n x^LrmI x›
..LpQ at^ Jm y‡_jn
~]Vn Lrh £±•QE y_e
x†mECn .. f†M yjaYn
yjaY LsI ..fgQ[ xsI
But the majority of the fifty-four poems in the diwan decidedly belong to
the Spanish period; many with a distinctive Spanish flavor, such as his poem
“Five Letters to my Mother” and those lumped together at the end in a section
called Spanish Papers, including his “Granada”. One of his best known and
most controversial poems was however the first in the collection, the title
poem “Painting with Words”. This poem gives a complex view into Nizar’s
state of mind as he was trying to redefine his mission and his priorities at this
juncture of his life. There is first the fatigue, the resignation, mixed with
insolent bragging:
My bags are tired of traveling
I am tired of my horses and conquests..
I left no breast, white or black..
That I did not plant my flag on its plains..
There remains no nook in the body of every
beauty
That I did not overrun with my chariots..
I made a robe from the skin of women
4
And built myself pyramids of nipples..
xtµLic “GP{QE aSUQE JM Âytze
..xeEndž JMn xlgT JM ºytzen
ËgjI nI HP|I ..]ps –tG FQ
..xeLGEC ŠbCwj ymC‚ Z[
ˆlgrV FU™j ˆGnE‚ –te FQ
..xeLjam Lp^Ph ~ªaMn Z[
¡NLtm NLU†QE ]lV JM yl„h
~Lrl_QE JM LMEaYI yg†jn
These wild pronouncements quickly brought the wrath of Arab
feminists, of all his critics. Some feminists saw in these lines what they had
suspected all along: a male chauvinist in the garb of a pro-women advocate!
In the next part of the poem Nizar professes a confession of defeat, of
emotional impotence, of self-adulation – not that these confessions helped
improve his image in the eyes of his critics:
Today I sit like a thief on a ship
Looking for a way to survive
I turn the key to my harem
And see nothing in the shadows but
skeletons..
…
Sex was a sedative I have tried
It did not end my sorrows or my plights
All loves are one in similitude
As close as leaves in the forests..
I am unable to love as much as an ant
A cloud.. or a pebble..
I practiced a thousands ways of worship
5
Yet found self-worship the greatest of all..
x•†gS| -{| ŽPh ˜lVI £PgQEn
¡L™s –Ga› Jm ¿_jI ..¢lQLƒ
•CI ±h ..FGa_QE vL•SM aGHIn
~EPMDE FVLrV agž “•QE xh
...
Š•jªaV L†ª’UM }Lƒ ˜†™QE
xeLM‚I Zn xsEdcI Š†G FQ
LpjL‹•M Šlƒ -t\I œ_QEn
..~LjL®QE xh ŽECnDE ŠjL‹•ƒ
ˆlrs ˆGI –‹m Jm dVLm LsI
¡L„c uI –‹m Jm ..ˆrgž nI
¡HLtmn ¡HLtm RQI y|CLM
xeE• ¡HLtm Lpl‰hI ~]VPh
Narcissus himself could not probably come up with a more selfincriminating confession. In a sense, this absorption with the self had always
been part of the personality of Nizar. He had always struggled with it. It had
always been the undertow that swerved him from his romantic ideals of
political and social justice. But it would be a mistake to regard his predicament
as strictly personal; in no small part, Nizar’s conflicts were derived and
sustained by the very culture he was struggling with. A telling symbol which
he invoked, quite creatively, for the first time was the image of the great Arab
Caliph Haroon al-Rashid (763-809):
The tragedy of Haroon al-Rashid is a bitter
t
d
¡aGaM ]gŒaQE }nCLY ¡L|wM
tragedy
If only you knew how bitter it is..
I am like a street lantern, my dear
6
I cry but no one sees my tears..
¡L|wrQE ¡CEaM JgƒC]e PQ
x•iG]\ ..–Ga{QE vLt„rƒ xs[
..xeLzMH •aG ]cI Zn ..x’jI
Throughout Arabic literature and by extension world literature, Haroon
al-Rashid, eternalized in the Arabian Nights, stands for glamour, limitless
pleasure, power, and sexual potency. This most famous Caliph has always
been the epitome of happiness for the Arabs, the most masculine Arab king
sitting at the summit of their Golden Age. Nizar, in a broadside against the
entrenched Arab patriarchy, takes al-Rashid and turns him into a tragic figure,
a helpless misunderstood character. To press his point, in another poem
entitled Shahryar’s Tears, Nizar takes a similar patriarchal figure, King
Shahryar, the wife-killing king of the Arabian nights, and again turns him into a
tormented figure, one with whom he identifies:
No one understands me..
No one understands the tragic life of
Shahrayar
When sex turns in our lives
Into a kind of escape..
A drug day and night we sniff
A tax we pay
Involuntarily..
When your spice-empowered breast
7
Becomes my guillotine.. my suicide cliff..
..x†rpSG ]cI Z
CLGapŒ ¡L|wM LM FpSG ]cI Z
L†eLgc xh ˜†™QE ag„G Jgc
..CEaSQE JM LmPs
..CLp†QEn “glQE xh Šªr‹s EC]¬M
Lpzh]s ˆtGab
..CLg•TE LM ag®j
CLptQLj }P™zrQE €]ps ag„G Jgc
..uCL_•sE ¡a¬\n ..x•l„iM
In Nizar’s view it all comes down to sex. Without a true sexual
liberation, the Arabs would continue to suffer from “this headache of sex”,
would continue to be distracted, frustrated, and contradicted. He was also
coming to suspect that the whole process of social and political development
was being undermined by sexual repression, which turns women into
prisoners and men into jailers, wasting up the energies of both genders.
Again and again, this fits with Nizar’s view of himself and of Arab
culture in general. Nizar had never set himself outside this culture, always
speaking and ranting against it from within, often ending up turning against
himself as a prime example of its faults. As much as he tried and would still
try, Nizar -- the poet consumed by a love-hate relationship with his people and
their culture -- could not break free from the chains of that culture, could not
disown his fellow Arabs, and thus could not resolve his contradictions, which
in essence derived from their contradictions.
Recognizing his deadlocked situation, Nizar who was now fully aware
of the promise of Beirut resolved to stay and fight. In the last four lines of
“Painting with Words”, he hinted at his response on both the personal and
political levels:
Your sweet-scented mouth is no solution
for my plight
For my plight is in ink and paper
All roads are blocked before us
Our salvation
8
Is in painting with words..
x•g‰^ “_G Z ..œªg{rQE frh
xeEnHn ua•hH xh x•g‰ih
¡Hn]UM L†MLMI `nC]QE “ƒ
..~Lrl’QLj F|aQE xh ..L†\±Tn
Speaking first in the first person singular, then in the plural, Nizar
alluded to his new chosen path, that of activist writing and publishing in liberal
Beirut away from the redlines of a government career or the constraints of a
closed society. At forty three, the aging poet was beginning to realize his
limitations and was now searching for new paths other than love poetry to
sustain his relevance.
Nizar’s resignation from the Syrian foreign ministry raised many
eyebrows among his friends and colleagues. Shortly after he established his
office, he was visited by his colleague Omar Abu Rishah, the poet who briefly
vied with him for Collettte’s attentions nine years before. Abu Rishah, who
was on his way to submit his credentials to Jawaharlal Nehru as Syria’s new
ambassador to India, could not but ask Nizar what he did to himself. How
could he leave the glories and comforts of a diplomatic career to cloister
himself in that office? “What glories are you talking about?” Nizar quickly
answered. “My real glory is poetry, just as it is yours Omar.” The two did not
see eye to eye; they had different views and divergent paths. They never met
again.9
Nizar wanted nothing to do with his diplomatic past, nor did he want
anything to do with Syria’s present. By the time he tended his resignation on
July 26, 1966, Syria seemed hopelessly in the grip of the Baathists whose
ruthlessness toward their enemies took on mythic dimensions. And despite
the fact that Sunni Syrians from the urban elite were still occupying the
presidency and other high profile jobs, the fact was that these had been
rendered merely ceremonial positions – real power in the Baath regime lay in
the hands of two officers, both Alawites: Salah Jadid, a mysterious army
general, and Hafez Assad, the equally cunning and laconic officer, who by
1966 had clawed his way to become Syria’s minister of defense. Each had his
support base, and each had his eyes on absolute control of the regime. But
for now they had agreed some form of symbiotic co-existence to eliminate the
common enemies of the Baath. The regime and the undemocratic
government felt sadly alien to Nizar. This was no longer the Syria in whose
service he spent twenty years of his life.
Nizar, however, continued to visit Damascus on some weekends or
holidays to see his mother and family, finding the constant contrast between
Beirut and Damascus inescapable. About this Beirut he would later reminisce:
Beirut was in its finest youthfulness, freshness, and civility. And we were in
our finest days, full of energy, productiveness, and freedom. In twenty years,
Beirut gave me all the raw material a poet needed in order to write his name
10
in bold letters on the walls of the Arab world.
The poet found Beirut the only Arab city to be hospitable to his views
and convictions. Ever since it drifted away from Ottoman control in the
nineteenth century to become the cosmopolitan outpost of Western influence
in the Arab East, Beirut had boasted of having the best in both East and West.
Its multicultural composition, its diverse liberal educational institutions, its
laissez-faire business environment, and its love for life offered Nizar the
hometown he always desired, at only two-hours drive from his real hometown
of Damascus. Nizar was more at home in this hybrid modern-ancient city than
anywhere he had been, for as his friend Salma put it “Nizar was an Arab poet
in his roots, his makeup, and temperament, and was at the same time
Western in his way of thinking, organizing his work, and developing his life.”11
The East-West mix was one of the sources for conflict in Nizar’s life, but in
Beirut it was an emblem of harmony between the place and its people at that
juncture in time. One of the windows on this harmony survives in the memoirs
of those who lived in Beirut of the time and still yearn for that lost period. Like
Nizar, Riad Najeeb El-Rayyes, the veteran journalist and publisher (and a
vociferous Nizar basher) hailed from Damascus and came to Beirut in the
early nineteen sixties in search of freedom and professional fulfillment. In his
reminiscences about Beirut of the nineteen sixties and seventies, East was
rubbing shoulders with West even in such pedestrian subject as street and
place nomenclature:
Our social, intellectual, and cultural mecca at the time was the area around
the American University of Beirut, starting from Faisal’s restaurant opposite
the university’s main gate, passing by Uncle Sam’s café just few meters away
on the corner with Jean Dark street, down to Ras Beirut bookshop on Palace
street. For matters cultural we went in two directions, west to the Ras Beirut
bookshop which was a small store stacked with books and managed by a
handsome young man from the South [of Lebanon] […etc.]. The other
direction was east to Roxy Bookshop next to Roxy Cinema in al-Burj square
[…etc.]. We moved from the bookstore to the restaurant to the café. Faisal’s
restaurant (which today has become a MacDonald’s, as a sign of the bad
times we live in) was the other virtual university we studied in next to the real
university. From this restaurant graduated a number of Arab political and
intellectual personalities which have played various roles in their countries –
more perhaps than graduated from the American University itself. […etc.].
Few meters away from Faisal’s was Uncle Sam’s at the corner of Jean Dark
St. […etc.] which was the first restaurant to introduce American food such the
hamburger, the club sandwich, American coffee […etc.]. Uncle Sam’s was a
place where writers, poets, and artists met, with Faisal’s being a primarily
political place. For our generation, Uncle Sam’s was the place of choice for a
guy to invite a girl he liked, a girl he was trying to seduce, or an aspiring
poetess wanting to read one of her worthless poems. We used to listen
politely, then we would start sucking up to her to win her heart. Uncle Sam’s
had a youthful atmosphere and was the meeting place for all Arab men of
letters who passed through Beirut. For the night, our meeting place was the
Dolce Vita in the Rousheh part of Beirut. This café used to fill up from 10 PM
until the early morning. There met Lebanese and Arab politicians, journalists
who just finished their work at the newspapers after midnight, all the artists,
singers, night owls, and date seekers, as well as some diners and
12
nightclubbers from nearby restaurants and clubs.
In his first year of continuous residence in Lebanon, Nizar could not be
happier. He enjoyed a level of popularity and admiration unattained by any
other poet. Twenty years of fame had made him the only Arab poet whose
face people instantly recognized on the street. He surely loved the shows of
affection he often encountered. In Unknown Papers, Nizar remembers a
telling incident in December 1966: As he was making his way one snowy night
to Damascus through the perilous Anti-Lebanon mountains, his car’s engine
suddenly started to falter and soon the vehicle came to a stop in a sparsely
populated area. When the blizzard set on burying him and his car under piles
of driving snow, the poet began to panic. Then he saw flickers of lights
approaching him amidst the raging storm. As it turns out, a border patrol
stationed nearby saw the lights of his car from a distance and came to the
rescue. No sooner had they laid their sight on him than one of them shouted
to his friends “Guess who is stranded here! It is Mr. Nizar Qabbani!” Nizar
remembers how elated he was to be so discovered. The men pushed the car
to their station and did not hide their joy at rescuing and hosting the poet who
had for years touched their hearts.13
In Lebanon of the late sixties, Nizar lived the free life he always
coveted. With his children studying at the American University of Beirut, the
poet divided his time between the writing of his poetry, the pursuit of his
amorous adventures, and the management of his publishing house – with the
latter two activities serving his first passion. Nizar linked his existence to
poetry, choosing only those activities that complemented its inspiration and
development. He continued to be his own rebellious erotic self, such as
evident in poems like “The Savage Poem” and “To a Pair of Conceited
Breasts” written in his own boastful male voice. But a distinct Lebanese, and
particularly Beiruti, flavor begins to seep into the poetry he produced during
this stage, most of which would appear in the three collections he published in
1970. Elements of Lebanese life, urban symbols of Beirut, as well as motifs of
sea and mountains inhabit such poems as “The Cup Reader,” and “With a
Young Lady from Beirut.” Even a wistful poem written to Balqees, his
smoldering flame in Baghdad, invokes conflicting imagery from Beiruti life:
Your love has taught me.. how the night
Enlarges strangers’ sorrows..
It taught me.. to see Beirut
A woman.. luscious.. seductive..
A woman who every evening
Wears her most attractive outfits
Sprinkles perfume on her breasts
For sailors.. and princes..
Your love has taught me to weep with no
tears
Taught me how sadness sleeps
Like a legless homeless child
14
In the Hamra and Rousha Streets..
“glQE Rgƒ .. ftc x†rlm
.. ÂNLja®QE }EdcI Fª¬‰G
Â~nagj •CI Rgƒ ..x†rlm
.. ÂNEaž¹E ˆgžL› .. ·¡IaME
ÂNLUM “ƒ ˜tle .. ·¡IaME
ÂNLG‚I JM flre LM “rVI
LpG]ps klm a{zQE »aen
.. ÂNEaMDEn .. ¡CL_tlQ
ÂNL’j agž JM x’jI }I fªtc x†rlm
Â}d_QE £L†G Rgƒ x†rlm
.. JgM]iQE —P{iM £±®ƒ
.. ÂNEar_QEn ˆŒnaQE Ža› xh
Nizar and all Arabs were rudely awakened in June 1967 to the
smashing collapse of the Arab nationalist project under the powerful bombs of
the invading Israeli army. Twenty years of Pan-Arabist passionate euphoria
ended in a sudden disastrous disgrace. What made such a wakeup call
particularly rude and noxious was not only that it was utterly unexpected but
the fact that it did not happen immediately on the morning of June 5, when the
Israelis began their massive onslaught on their Arab neighbors, but only after
six days of charged delusory Arab propaganda that was gullibly and
enthusiastically digested by the Arab masses, including even otherwise
skeptical minds like Nizar. Ever since the Arab nationalist high points in the
mid fifties, Nasser and the Baathists in Syria and Iraq had fed their Arab
masses a legend of invincibility not merely against Israel, which they
dismissed with supercilious condescension, but more ambitiously against its
American patron.
The Arab concession to defeat on the morning of June 10, with the loss
of Sinai by Egypt, East Jerusalem and the West Bank by Jordan, and the
Golan Heights by Syria fell like an icy shower on the Arab masses. Arab
intellectuals were incredulous of the new reality they were suddenly exposed
to; Arab newspapers of the time filled up with questions like “How did that
happen?” “Why did we not see it coming?” and “Who is responsible for this
ignominy?” But rather than providing answers or reflecting on their failures,
the Arab regimes, whose grip on power suddenly seemed so tenuous, quickly
restarted their propaganda machines to spin the events in a more palatable
way. Nasser, whose bravado had cost him the war, stage-managed a
resignation bid in which the heart-broken masses were led to rally around him
in a show of solidarity and unity. A prominent general of his took the blame
along with a bullet in a “suicide”. The Baathists in Syria, led by the military
junta put the blame squarely on the “traitors and conspirators” with Israel and
America. The Arab leaders who met in an emergency summit following the
defeat only agreed to dissimulate the term “defeat” by the euphemistic
“setback”.
In the nights following the Arab defeat, Nizar suffered great emotional
distress. His strong sense of belonging to the Arab nation and its destiny only
worsened his feelings of shame and inadequacy. He had his doubts and
suspicions about Arab politics all along, but he did not envision the extent of
failure that would lead to such a disgraceful end of the Arab nationalist dream.
Seeing how the Arab regimes began to rationalize the defeat, Nizar felt it was
time for him to go out with what he really thought. Working under one of the
most intense emotional moods of his life, Nizar registered his emotions, and
indeed the emotions of most Arabs at the moment, in one of the angriest and
most denunciatory poems ever written in Arabic: his “Writings in the Margins
of the Notebook of Setback”. Free from the constraints of his past career, and
feeling relatively safe in his great stature among the Arabs, Nizar, for the first
time, took on the entire political system in the Arab world along with the
complacent culture that made it possible. He began his poem with an acrid
obituary of Arab nationalism, a very early judgment on the movement, but one
that would prove so prophetically accurate – for the Six Day War, as the
Israelis call it, was the beginning of the end of the Arab nationalist tide:
To you my friends, I mourn
the ancient books and our mother
tongue
like battered shoes
our speech is full of holes
smut and scorn and whorish words
To you, I mourn
the end of thought
15
that brought defeat.
ˆrG]iQE ˆ®lQE …xµL^]\I LG …F’Q xzsI
ˆrG]iQE œ•’QEn
:F’Q xzsI
ˆrG]iQE ˆGXcDLƒ `Pi‡rQE L†M±ƒ
..ˆrg•‹QEn …NL™pQEn …apzQE ~EHaSMn
..F’Q xzsI
..F’Q xzsI
.ˆrGdpQE kQ[ HL^ uXQE a’SQE ˆGLps
In these first lines, Nizar’s tone is subdued, addressing the Arabs as
“friends” using the first person both in its singular and plural forms. Fresh in
his memory was still the travesty of truth played on Arab radios, especially the
despicable language he must have heard – and believed – on Damascus
radio during the war: Lines like “Cut throats, cut throats, and let Washington
bark!” from an exhortative song.16 The sad irony for Nizar was that it was the
Arabs who did -- and were still doing -- the barking:
It pains me to hear the news in the
mourning
It pains me to hear dogs barking
vLt„QE xh NLtsDE ©r|I }I x†zVPG
..x†zVPG
..vLt†QE ©r|I }I
For Nizar, this dissimulative crowing – one which he himself
contributed to – was at the heart of the Arabs’ defeat, and was indeed the
secret of their tragic predicament:
Losing the war after all is not so
strange
in the East, we flame into battle
armed to the teeth
with words.
…
Enigma of our tragedy:
our howl is deeper than our voices
ˆjEaž Z `a_QE LsaUT E•[
LplT]s L†sD
ˆjL{¬QE œYEPM JM x^a‹QE Š’lrG LM “’j
...
L†eL|wM xh aUQE
L†eEP\I JM F¬bI L†TEa\
The fact that the Israelis were better equipped and better armed by the
West was not relevant to Nizar. The Israelis won the war not because they
were stronger, but because the Arabs had failed to rise up to the challenge
despite their vast potential, and that is the side that mattered to him:
Enemies never crossed our
border
like ants they surged
from our infamy.
LsHn]c JM HPpgQE “TH LM
..Lrs[n
..L†jPgm JM “r†QLƒ EPjaUe
Without mincing words, Nizar then exposed the faults and the fault
lines in the Arab Islamic civilization. First there was this obsessive occupation
with tradition that had turned the Arabs into an anachronism in the modern
age. Hinting at a powerful image from a story in the Quran17, Nizar lashed out
against living in the past:
For five thousand years
we lived in a cellar
our beards are drooping
our currency is unknown
our eyes are haven for flies.
..ˆ†| ¦Z´ ˆUrT
`EHaUQE xh J_sn
ˆlGP› L†sP^•
ˆQPp™M LsHPis
..`LjXQE šhEaM L†sPgm
From this arises the other more serious problem of education and
learning. Without active involvement in the making and absorption of
knowledge and science, the Arabs were doomed to remain in this historical
“cave” of theirs. And without genuinely reaching out to the West, the Arabs
would continue to live in a disconnect with modern civilization, ignorant and
ignored:
My friends,
try breaking a door
or washing clothes and washing your
thoughts
try reading a book
try writing a book
try growing words with grapes and
pomegranates.
Try sailing to lands of fog and snow
where people do not know you exist
outside your holes
they take you for a breed of wolves.
:xµL^]\I LG
..`L•ƒ EnIaie }I EPjaV
..`L•ƒ EPt•’e }I
..¦na_QE EPmCde }I
..}LªMaQEn
..`L†mDEn
`Lt‰QEn ¶l‡QE H±j kQ[ Ena_te }I
..F’sPlp™G ÇL†QLh
`EHaUQE ¸CLT xh
F’sPtU_G ÇL†QE
..`LµXQE JM LmPs
When it comes to responsibility, Nizar spared no one, ruler and ruled,
including himself. Speaking from a “we” point of view, he characterized the
Arab problem as that of a people given to violence, impulsiveness, hypocrisy,
duality, and sheer laziness. These were certainly harsh words to describe a
whole culture, but the poet was in no mood for nuance. The first to take the
blame, he believed, should be the society itself that produced such horrible
rulers:
We run through a street
with ropes under arms
dragging me tied by their feet
smashing glass, blowing up locks
like frogs
we praise, like frogs
we swear, we make
heroes of midgets
knaves of nobles
we improvise our feats.
We settle down in mosques
idle and benumbed
—CEP‹QE xh ˃as
ZLt_QE L†{j[ y_e “r_s
a„te ±j “_UQE ÇCLrs
ZLS^DEn ¸LVdQE F{_s
—HLS‰QLƒ v]rs
—HLS‰QLƒ F•‹s
ZL{jI L†MEd^I JM “z™s
ZEXsI L†hEaŒI JM “z™s
ZL™eCE ˆQP{tQE “™eas
©MEP™QE xh ]zis
kQLUƒ …±jL†e
Then there were those Arab regimes sustained in power through
repression and fear. Nizar was convinced that no leadership so detached from
its people could confront foreign threats. He believed that a ruler who
humiliated his subjects and turned them into legions of “croaking frogs” would
lose touch with reality, no longer able to see his own failures until its too late:
Your Majesty, your wild dogs
have torn my clothes
your spies hound me
…
Your Majesty
just for having been in the vicinity
of your deaf walls
and for attempting to uncover my
grief
your soldiers kicked with their
boots
}L{lUQE u]g| LG
xµEHC y^ªdM ~L|a•SrQE fj±ƒ
xµECn LrµEH €nat¬Mn
...
}L{lUQE ¡a‰c LG
..NLr„QE €CEP|I JM yja•^E x†sD
xµ±j Jmn xsdc Jm R‹ƒI }I yQnLc x†sD
..NEX_QLj yjab
Ultimately, Nizar declared, a culture that immobilizes its women and
turns them into prisoners of walls and ignorance could only produce weak
conflicted societies. Rulers who sat on top of this state of backwardness could
never dream of victory on outsiders:
Your Majesty
Twice you lost in war
because half of our nation lost its
tongue.
What is a people’s worth
without speech?
Half the nation is trapped
like bugs and rats within the walls.
}L{lUQE u]g| LG ..u]g| LG
JgeaM `a_QE ~aUT ]iQ
}LUQ ŠQ ˜gQ L†tzŒ R„s }D
•}LUQ ŠQ ˜gQ uXQE œz‹QE ˆrg^ LM
}E•a™QEn “r†QLƒ a\L_M L†tzŒ R„s }D
}EC]™QE “TEH xh
Yet at the end of the poem, Nizar mixes his feelings of disgust at the
debunking failure of his generation with hope in the young Arabs. Even at this
darkest of moments, Nizar had still hope in living to see change in the new
generation of young Arabs – but only if they radically departed from the
“rotted” ways of their fathers:
We call for a generation rising
with new faces
forgiving no mistakes
forfeiting and stooping never
-M±rQE Rl•¬M LMHL^ ±gV ]Gas
-MLUG Z ..NL{TDE aS®G Z
..ŽLS†QE ¦azG Z ..x†_†G Z
more
not knowing a broken word.
A generation of staunch
pioneers.
…
Children pure as dew as snow
do not read of our generation
courting defeat
a hopeless case we are
worthless
watermelon rinds
soles riddled with holes.
..Ž±rm …E]µEC …±gV ]Gas
...
•LS›I LG …£ndprQE L†lgV Jm EnIaie Z
}PtµLT J_†h
}PphLe …¥g{tQE ¡a‹^ “‡M …J_sn
..}nCP M J_sn
..•Lz†QLƒ }nCP¬†M
Despite its discursive nature, the poem has become one of the most
powerful documents on Arab nationalism and the June 1967 war. In evidence
of its continuing value, a recent reader in English of the texts that shaped the
history of the modern Middle East selected it, the only poem in the book, as
the sole document on the June War.18 The poem has also recently found a life
of its own on the Internet where young Arabs frequently quote it to comment
on the continuing strife, failures, and defeats in their world.
On the personal level, “Writings in the Margins of the Notebook of
Setback” marked Nizar’s transformation into open political activism; the
moment of abject failure transformed him, as he put it in the poem, “from a
poet writing poetry of love and nostalgia / to a poet writing with a knife.” But
this new unreserved and sweeping critical stance put him on a collision
course with both the heavy-handed Arab regimes and with the traditional
custodians of the Arab Islamic culture. He was right when he warned his
friend Suheil Idriss, who was enthusiastic about publishing the poem in his
Adaab magazine, that the magazine could suffer hardship, even closure, if it
were to publish the poem. Indeed, when Idriss published the poem, the
magazine was officially confiscated and forced off the newsstands in several
Arab countries. The Arab furor over the poem was unprecedented and this
time it was not limited to Damascus; Nizar was lambasted in several Arab
capitals. Many Arab intellectuals took offense at the attack on their culture as
denigrating and exaggerated, especially coming from someone whose main
credentials lay in the writing of love poetry.
The backlash against Nizar was most intense in Egypt, where official
media banned the poem and unleashed a smearing campaign against its
author. There were calls in Egyptian newspapers to declare Nizar persona
non grata in Egypt and even to burn his books. Nizar felt quite alarmed to see
his image being deformed into that of a psychotic self-tormenting Arab-hater.
What alarmed him most, though, was that, unlike the other attacks he faced in
the past, this defamation campaign originated in the most part from official
media and seemed to be officially sanctioned. Considering the unfriendly
critical attitude towards him in most of the Arab private media, he saw real risk
for his reputation and decided to counteract. Making the most of the Arab
authoritarian system, he quickly penned in October 1967 a complaint letter to
non other than President Nasser himself. Nizar knew that if anyone could
have immediate and suppressive influence, it would be Nasser. He appealed
eloquently to Nasser’s sense of fairness, responsibility, and above all,
authority:
If my scream was sharp and loud – and I admit it was – it is because the
deeper the wound is, the louder is the scream, and the more is the bleeding.
[…] My poem was an attempt to reevaluate ourselves as we really are, away
from bravado, bluster, or emotions; it was an attempt to start a new Arab
thought that differs from the thought before the fifth of June. […] What is the
value of literature when it chickens from confronting both the bright and dark
sides of life? And what kind of poet is he who turns into a clown groveling and
fawning his society? […] Mr. president, here is my poem in front of you,
please read it with the open-mindedness and farsightedness we have come
to know of you, and I am sure you will be persuaded, despite the poem’s
bitter and salty words, that I was only depicting reality in all truthfulness,
painting an identical picture of our pale and tired faces. I could no longer stay
19
neutral while my homeland was burning – literature’s neutrality is its death.
Nasser’s response was certainly favorable to Nizar, resulting in
abatement of the official media campaign against the poet. Nizar even relates
in My Story with Poetry that he was told by a Nasser confidante that the
president read the letter and the poem and wrote in the margins that he had
seen no offense in the poem and that he ordered a halt to the censorship and
harassment of the poet.20
Nizar’s successful appeal to Nasser as the ultimate arbiter of Arab
affairs is yet another example of his controversial pragmatism: his ability to
balance his activist popular position as the voice of the disenfranchised Arab
masses with the privileged elitist access to power that he had cultivated. The
apparent paradox certainly dismayed some of his more idealist readers and
provided fodder to his doubters: How could the rebel poet be venerated by the
very forces he was denouncing and still maintain his credibility? The fact was
Nizar was as much a product of the Arab ruling class as of the middle class,
and he kept true to this in-between status throughout his life. He never
dabbled in class politics and showed no interest whatsoever in such high
flying but divisive slogans as socialism and class struggle. The only position
he adopted and that came close to being extremist is his unrelenting push for
the liberation of women, and this he did, not so much out of a liberal or
Marxist ideology as from an esthetic and emotional attachment to female
beauty. His other long attachment, his romance with pan-Arabism, again did
not stem from an ideological conviction – Nizar never bothered with panArabism in his formative young years despite its currency at the time – but
from the emotional relationship he personally developed with the diverse Arab
readers as his popularity soared. Even his antagonism to the normative social
strictures of Islam was offset by his abiding admiration and invocation of
Islam’s Sufi motifs and tropes. It is these undogmatic pragmatic positions that
allowed Nizar to cut across political, class, gender, and sectarian divisions to
become the most popular Arab poet of all time.
The attacks on Nizar, however, only heightened his popularity, turning
him into a loud voice of rejection and revision. With the Arab regimes grudging
tolerance of him, Nizar soon set himself on explaining and expanding his
revisionist political views in poems critical of the political failures of Arab
societies. He basked in this new role of a political activist and in the intense
media interest it occasioned. So when some Arab intellectuals rallied together
to launch a new reformative journal, they could not choose more powerful
voice than that of Nizar for their opening salvo. Thus the first issue of
Mawaqef [stances] journal in 1968 opened with his poem “The Actors,” a
poem written in the same spirit of “Writings in the Margin” but with more
sarcasm. The poem presents the Arab society as a stage on which “the
actors” – the rulers and their chorus of writers and sycophants – keep
dissembling their obvious failures:
When an entire city turns to
a trap..
LYa|wj ¡]lj ag„e Jgc
}Ea SQLƒ ÇL†QEn ..¡]g„M
and people to mice.
When controlled newspapers become
obituaries covering the walls
Everything dies..
Everything dies..
water, plants, voices, and colors
Trees migrate from their roots
and place deserts itself
and we see the end of man
…
The theater is burnt all around
21
yet the actors are still acting..
ˆpVPrQE ]µEa™QE -t„en
}L{g_QEE qre xzs ŽECnI
..NxŒ “ƒ ~PrG
..NxŒ “ƒ ~PrG
}EPQDEn …~EP\DEn …~Lt†QEn …NLrQE
LYCnXV JM CL™ŒDE aVLpe
}L’rQE ŠsL’M JM `apG
}LUs¹E xp•†Gn
...
ŠsLƒCI JM vaUrQE Ža•cE
.. }Pl‡rrQE – ]zj – yrG FQn
Another poem which he wrote at the time was “The Questioning,” a
broadside against the religious right in Islam. The poem openly calls for revolt
against the traditional religious hierarchy in the Islamic society, a leadership
Nizar held partly responsible for Arab failures for its opposition to change, its
complacency toward social ills, and its collusion with oppressive rulers. The
poem is written in the manner of a confession of a pious law-abiding ordinary
Muslim who, after years of listening to and believing in his imam, kills him
after he realizes the imam’s decadence was behind much of his misery:
Your Honor,
With this dagger that you see
I stabbed him in the chest
In the neck
In his rotten mind
his termite-infested mind
I stabbed him in my name
And the name of the millions of sheep
…
By killing him I killed
All the crickets singing in the dark
All the tramps lounging on the sidewalks of
dreams
By killing him I killed
All the parasites in the garden of Islam
…
All those who for a thousand years
22
Have been fornicating with words…
:xeHL| LG
Šsnae uXQE EXY ua™†¬j
Št^aQEn WC]\ xh Š•†z›
Št‹¬QE “‡M CP¬†rQE Šlim xh Š•†z›
.. LsI xr|Lj Š•†z›
£L†žDE JM JgG±rQE F|En
...
Š•l•^ •[ yl•^
£±•QE xh ]‹†e x•QE ag\Ea„QE “ƒ
£±cDE ˆS\CI klm Jg_Ga•UrQEn
Š•l•^ •[ yl•^
£±|¹E ˆiG]c xh ~LglgS{QE “ƒ
...
£Lm RQI X†M JGXQE “ƒ
...£±’QLj }PsdG
The true significance of the poem, however, lies in the unintended fact
that it was perhaps the first text in modern Arabic literature to predict the
arrival of a new political actor to Arab politics: the rebellious Islamist foot
solider, whose profile would become entwined with the phenomenon of
terrorism in the next decades. Judging from the constant failures of the Arab
system of governance and the impact of these failures on the life and
convictions of the ordinary Muslim, Nizar foresaw a dangerous transformation
in Islamic politics. He impersonates here a new type of rebel, one who
confesses he is neither communist nor rightist, not even a state agent, but a
totally independent actor: one of the millions of ordinary God-fearing Muslims
who Nizar believed were on their way to alienation from the traditional
religious hierarchy. Nizar was no grand theorist or political scientist engaging
in analysis of new political trends; he was rather a poet sensitized to the
collective mood of his people who merely registered any changes in that
mood. And Nizar was detecting, then, signs that the average Arab had had it
with the sociopolitical system controlling him and was now about to take
matters into his own hands. His rebellion, however, will no longer be in the
name of the faltering pan-Arabist dream, but in the name of a resurgent Islam.
The poem also contains the more subtle implication that tampering with
Islamic beliefs could actually have unintended consequences. Following the
Arab defeat the previous year, the Nasser regime in Egypt started
encouraging people to embrace religion for solace and for deflecting some of
the blame for the defeat off its shoulders.23 Traditional Islamic doctrine often
rationalized defeat as either a punishment for straying off the true path of
Islam – to which Nasser was now returning! – or as merely a test for the
faithful who should now cling more to their faith. This rapprochement with
Islam under the banner of self-examination was being done through the
traditional Islamic establishment which was effectively controlled by the state.
Any inward-looking self-assessment, Nizar sensed, was bound to open up the
possibilities of revolt against that very establishment by otherwise unwitting
ordinary believers who would come to see its decadence and impotence.
Despite the sudden currency of spiritual revivalism and religious piety,
Nizar did not in the least pin any hopes on this new trend. Religion, especially
if officially sanctioned, was never his sanctuary. He regarded it as the
emotional domain of the naïve, superstitious, and weak of heart who made up
the majority of Arab masses – and thus a domain particularly susceptible to
religious quackery and official exploitation. He firmly believed that unless
Islam is cleansed of the legacy of centuries of superstition and manipulation,
religion would continue to be in conflict with the rationality of the modern age
persisting as a negative force in the life of the Arabs.24 It was this irrational
aspect of Islam that he renounced in his strongly-worded poem “The Legacy,”
where he spoke in his own voice foreswearing his father’s world:
I open the chest box of my father
I tear his legacy to pieces
…
I open my father’s history
My father’s days..
I see things unpleasant to see
Hymns… religious hypocrisies
Pots… medicinal herbs
Vials… for impotence
I look for knowledge to benefit me
I look for writings for this age
Or for me
I only see sands stretching all
around
And Ignorance.
…
I burn my family’s coat of arms
..xjI Žn]†\ -•hI
.Šg\PQE ŽªdMI
...
..xjI ¥GCLe -•hI
..xjI £LGI -•hI
•aºG ˜gQ uXQE •CI
Šg†GH -µE]M ...ˆgmHI
Šgt› ĵL‹c ...ˆgmnI
ŠgU†™QE ¡C]ilQ ..ˆGnHI
x†zS†e ˆhazM Jm ¿_jI
nI ..a„zQE EXY ¢¬e ˆjL•ƒ Jm ¿_jI
x†„¬e
ˆglYLVn ..“MC •P| xQPc •CI ±h
...
I burn my alphabet
And of Palestine, of her defiance
Of the bullets ringing on her plains
Of her wheat fields soaked in tears
Of her roses
25
I make an alphabet..
..x•G]™jI ŽacI ...xea|I F|C ŽacI
LYHPr\ JMn …Jg{Ulh JMn
LYHnaV xh CL†QE ~Lil› JM
LYHnCn JMn …©M]QLj ÇPr®rQE Lp_r^ JM
...ˆG]™jI ©†\I
As the last lines above indicate, Nizar was beginning to find solace in
the will to life and resistance that the Palestinian Arabs were showing. The
years that followed the 1967 Arab defeat saw the Palestinians break away
from Arab patronage to initiate an active resistance movement against Israeli
occupation relying largely on their own resources. Nizar felt both strong
sympathy and hope for this new resurgence. But again, his feelings came not
so much from an ideological camaraderie as from his personal experience of
the suffering of the Palestinian diaspora in Lebanon. For in Beirut Nizar
witnessed firsthand the subhuman conditions in which millions of Palestinians
led their miserable lives in squalid ramshackle ghettos for no fault other than
having been born in Palestine. Furthermore, by the late sixties, a new
generation of educated Palestinians was coming of age both in Palestine
proper and in the diaspora abroad. Among them were writers like Ghassan
Kanafani (gunned down in 1970 allegedly by Israeli agents), poets like
Mahmoud Darwish, and intellectuals like Hisham Sharabi (1927-2005). These
new dedicated activists would soon become the new voices of the Palestinian
cause, many of whom Nizar knew personally in Beirut.
The cultural energy of the Palestinians in Beirut and their successful
military commando operations against Israel – especially their surprising
performance in March 1969 alongside the Jordanian army in repelling the
Israeli incursion into the Karamah refugee camp in Jordan – all led Nizar to
embrace a triumphalist spirit despite his otherwise pessimistic view of Arab
politics. This triumphalism was clearly manifested in the poems he wrote
beginning in 1969 celebrating the Palestinian resistance – be it intellectual
resistance as in his poem “Poets of the Occupied Territories” or militant
resistance as in his long poem “Commando Posters on the Walls of Israel”.26
A more personal reason for Nizar’s triumphalist disposition was the
recent developments in his private life. Beirut’s liberal environment and its
busy dating scene meant Nizar suffered no shortage of young attractive
women to court. The Western spirit of the sexual revolution of the 1960’s was
much alive in the city’s social and cultural life whether in its active universities,
busy street cafés or wild nightlife. Yet despite the distractive joys of such life,
Nizar was now beginning to yearn for the stability and quietude of happy
married life – his past unhappy marriage a distant memory. His children
Hadba and Tawfiq were at AUB, and he was having much more time to
himself than he wished for.
For the past seven years, Nizar continued to correspond with Balqees
in Baghdad. Their letters, although intermittent at times, managed to keep
their interest in each other alive. Their passion, however, intensified of late as
Balqees refused to marry other suitors blessed by her family. Nizar decided to
make another attempt to sway her family in his favor, this time with the help of
his friends and connections. But before taking the daring step of confronting
her family publicly – a big taboo in Arab polite society – he had to make sure
she would be firmly on his side in this. This is when he wrote her his famous
rhythmic poem “Choose!” (The poem became a sensation in the 1990’s when
it was sung by the Iraqi singer Kazem al-Saher):
The choice is yours.. so choose
you either die on my chest
or you will die in my books
Choose either love.. or no love
Only cowards cannot choose..
No land exists between
The edge of Eden’s garden
27
And that Infernal pit.
uCL•TLh .. feagT xs[
uC]\ klm ~PrQE Jgj LM
uCLzŒI aeLhH ŽPh nI
ªœc±QE nI .. œ_QE uCL•TE
.. uCL•¬e Z }I Jt™h
k{|n ˆi{†M ]VPe Z
.. CL†QEn ˆ†™QE Jgj LM
Balqees chose to be with him. In late April 1969 he traveled to
Baghdad to take part in the 9th Poetry Festival held in the Iraqi capital. There
he read his “Testimony in the Court of Poetry,” a long poem of mediocre
quality hurriedly written in the old style of the hemstitch and in which he railed
against Arab fragmentation and inefficiency and defended himself against his
critics. But amidst the political posturing, Nizar took the occasion to air his
personal frustration with Balqees’ family:
Hello Iraq!.. I came singing
some singing is like crying
…
I had here a princess of love
then the princess disappeared
Where is that beautiful face in Baghdad
that fills the heavens with envy?
…
I have epochs of sorrow inside me
Could I find relief amongst you?
Deep in love I am, and yet
28
blue books and love do not suffice..
fg†žI y V .. ŽEam LG LtcaM
NL’j NL†®QE JM ºËzjn
...
«œc ¡agMI .. L†Y u]†m }Lƒ
NL†U_QE xeagMI ymLb F¤
½Plc ˆgr•mDE xh ½ŠVn JGI
NLrUQE Š†M CL®e …ŠeIC PQ
...
}d_QE JM ECP„m xlTEH xh }[
•NL™•QE ŽEazQE kQ[ xQ “ph
J’Qn ... agt’QE –ŒLzQE LsIn
NL^CdQE uaeLhH xS’e ˜gQ
The tactic worked. Although many friends of Nizar knew of his love
story with Balqees, this was the first time the poet suggested it in his poetry.
The complaint prompted several of his friends, among whom were Arab
ambassadors in Baghdad as well as Iraqi officials, including – it is said – Iraqi
president Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr, to intervene with the family to allow the
lovers marriage.29 The family relented, and Nizar was wedded to Balqees in
May 1969. The couple returned to Beirut where they were feted by the poet’s
many friends, then they traveled to Damascus where Balqees met Nizar’s
family. In October, Nizar flew with Balqees on a belated honeymoon trip to
Spain. Despite the age difference between the two, their marriage was the
epitome of happiness.
With this happy end to Nizar’s long romance with Balqees and with his
new-found voice as the undeclared spokesman for the Arab left, for the next
four years Nizar lived one of the happiest and most productive periods of his
literary life. His regular poetry readings in places like the Phoenicia Hotel and
the American University of Beirut often drew unmanageable crowds,
becoming high points of the cultural life of Beirut. This is the time when
Professor Muhammad Najm of AUB came to know Nizar up close; of this
stage in the life of the poet, Najm says:
In Beirut, Nizar had a peaceful reprieve, surrounded on all sides by friends
and lovers, eagerly sought after by universities and cultural associations at
whose podiums he stood tall and scintillating, always the center of admiration
and wonder. He was both the star and the nightingale of the social soirees he
attended where conversations often revolved around his poetry. Friendship
brought us close together, and we became inseparable like brothers. He was
a kind caring brother and a faithful good friend who charmed us with his fine
taste, high morals, refined manners, and elegance in speech and behavior. In
thirty years of our friendship not once did I hear him utter a vulgar word or
engage in backbiting; he would pick his words in conversation as if he was
picking pearls for a necklace.30
Back in Damascus, new political developments in the fall of 1970
ushered into power a new Baathist regime led by general Hafez Assad. Assad
finally managed to eliminate his Baathist rivals, most of which either ended in
prison or escaped to neighboring Iraq.31 Nizar saw nothing redeeming in the
new leader of Syria, and thus had no reason to be optimistic about political
life, or all life for that matter, in his homeland. If anything, the development
confirmed the wisdom in his opting to live in Beirut.
Since his Painting with Words collection, Nizar had so far published
only The Diary of a Blasé Woman, both written before his move to Beirut. Life
in Lebanon was no less inspiring to his muse, and the next year Nizar
published three collections: Wild Poems, The Book of Love, and One Hundred
Letters of Love. One Hundred Letters of Love, as the name suggests, is a
collection of pieces of poetry that Nizar culled from his final inventory of the
billets doux of his gallivanting years. As he notes in the introduction, the
pieces are a bric-a-brac of poetic writings of mixed quality. In publishing these
pieces, Nizar may have sought a fresh start with Balqees; but he might have
also sought to capitalize on his readers’ curiosity. In reality, the collection was
somewhat anticlimactic: it did not satisfy his readers’ nosiness, since he
conscientiously removed any biographical details that could identify his lovers.
Deprived from their context, the poems faltered stylistically and thematically
into a monotonous amorous pleading.
Nizar’s rich talent, however, came out clear in Wild Poems. The
collection featured Nizar’s winning myriad of disparate voices, his very own
voice in “Choose!”, a boastful male Arab in “To Two Conceited Breasts,” or
doting woman overtaken by love in “My Damascene Cat.” But what makes
this collection distinct is this remarkable feeling of tenderness that permeates
most of the poems, which seems to derive from the poet’s sense of belonging
and peacefulness in Beirut at the time. Arab artists and singers were quick to
jump on the abundant emotions and lyricism in poems like “The Cup Reader,”
and “A Letter from Under the Water.” When sung by Abdul Halim Hafez – a
tender Sinatra-like Egyptian pop idol, the latter two poems became instant hits
and catapulted Nizar to yet new highs of fame.
The Book of Love, however, took the tenderness into a new realm of
nostalgia and yearning that can only be found in Sufi poetry. Nizar was
already exploring Arabic’s rich Sufi tradition, and Sufi references pop up also
in Wild Poems as in the ending of “My Damascene Cat” where he invokes the
story of Rabi’a al-‘Adawaiyya, the Muslim Sufi saint. The very first piece of the
book’s fifty-two pieces contains strong Sufi symbols:
Green bird, so long you are my love
32
Then God is sure in heaven..
ÂNEa‰¬QE xeCPS„m LG yMH LM
x•tgtc
NLrUQE xh ”E }Ÿh .. }•[
God, Heaven, the beloved, the bird, and the color green – Islam’s color
– are all symbols that inhabit the Sufi universe – even the use of the
conditional. The three-way dialogue between the poet, the beloved, and the
reader as well as the slightly whimsical answer in the second piece are also
typical characteristics of the poetry of such Sufi poets as Hafez and Omar alKhayyam:
She asks me, my love
“What difference there is between the sky and
me?”
The difference, I reply
When you laugh, my love
33
I forget the sky..
:x•tgtc x†QwUe
•LrUQE Jgjn x†gj LM ŽaSQE LM
Lr’†gj LM ŽaSQE
x•tgtc LG y’_b }[ fsI
LrUQE kUsI
The thriving of Nizar’s publishing business with such publications was
also matched in the blossoming of his family life. In February 1970 Balqees
gave birth to a baby girl whom the couple gave the classic Arabic name of
Zainab; and in November the following year, a baby boy was born whom they
named Omar. The same year Hadba got married and moved with her
husband to work at Citibank in Dubai in the Arabian Gulf, at the time still a
sleepy fishing port town with an old souq and a cluster of buildings. Tawfiq
also moved to Cairo to continue his study of medicine at Cairo University.
Alone with Balqees, Nizar – now pushing fifty – found himself once again with
the responsibility of taking care of a wife and two young children. Although he
generally shouldered his responsibilities as a father, the poet in him felt
cornered and restless and he often leaned on Balqees to allow himself time
for his poetry. His friend Suheil Idriss writes in his memoirs how one day Nizar
took one of the children who was not feeling well to a well-known pediatrician,
who also happened to be Idriss’ uncle. Nizar was restless and was miffed that
the doctor did not acknowledge him for preferential treatment. When he tried
to argue with the doctor, the latter told him “You are a big-shot poet with
literary men like my nephew, but you ought to forget that when you step into
this clinic, because it is I who calls the shots here!” Nizar never accompanied
his children to him again, and Balqees had to do that alone.34
The restraints of marital life and issues of space and freedom cropped
up in Nizar’s new collection Poems against the Law, which he published in
1972. Balqees is present, directly or indirectly, in many of these poems – at
times hers is a pleasant inspiring presence as in “I Thank You;” some other
times it is an oppressive encircling presence as in “Adhesion.” Some of the
poems were obviously even written in the tense moments following some
family squabble:
Leave me.. so that I can think of you
Take two steps away.. so that I miss you
…
Replace me, please, replace me..
With a book, a friend, a date, if you
35
please..
fgh a’hI k•c .. x†gƒaeE
fgp•ŒI xƒ JgeP{T u]zjEn
...
«`L•ƒ uwj .. x†m x‰gz•|E
.. €PVCI …« ]mPM nI …–G]\ nI
Marriage seems also to have forced Nizar to visit his past, for several
poems dwell on incidents or characters of his past as in his sardonic poem
“To Her Highness, my Ex-beloved,” about an ex-girlfriend who gets married to
a wealthy Gulf Arab. Overall, one gets the impression in this collection that
Nizar was trying hard, one could say unsuccessfully, to strike a balance
between pursuing his own wild poetic urges and minding the feelings of his
watchful young wife. In the writing of his poetry so far, Nizar had relied on his
life experiences for inspiration; even when he unleashed his imagination,
there was always a nucleus of reality from which to start. With the realm of
experience now limited to and by marital life, Nizar had either to resurrect the
past or completely rely on his imagination. His growing reliance on
imagination rather than experience was now leading Nizar in a new poetic
direction.
Beirut 1973-82 The Nightmare
The worsening condition of Nizar’s son, Tawfiq, in the summer of 1973
was the first sign of the beginning of the end of the poet’s happy days in
Lebanon . Tawfiq, who was specializing in cardiology as if by premonition,
developed heart problems. His father was devastated and in an effort to save
his son’s life he took him to London for surgery, but there was not much that
could be done. Tawfiq died on the tenth of August 1973, at the age of twentythree. The event ushered Nizar into a new period of sorrow and depression
that taxed his own health. Nizar movingly lamented the death of his son in his
elegy “To the Damascene Prince, Tawfiq Qabbani,” a poem imbued with
heart-rending sorrow and filled with cherished memories of his son in Beirut
and Cairo:
I carry you, my son, on my back
a minaret broken in two..
Your hair a wheat field under the rain..
Your head is in my hands
A Damascene rose.. and the remains
36
of a moon..
uapK ŽPh …u]Qn LG …flgŒI
.. Jg•z{^ ~aUƒ ˆsX rƒ
.. a{rQE y_e -riQE JM “ic €azŒn
LGLijn .. ½ˆgi‹MH ¡HCn x•cEC xh f|ICn
Âar^
But the grieving father had little time to grieve. Two months after the
death of his son, Nizar found himself called upon for public service. On the six
of October 1973, Syria and Egypt launched a coordinated surprise attack
against Israel in an effort to retrieve their occupied lands and to restore
confidence in their ability to stand up to Israel. The war that followed
galvanized the Arabs everywhere, especially after the Egyptians managed to
cross the Suez Canal against military odds. In the heated passion of the time,
Nizar himself had to set his own personal sorrows aside and express support
for his people as was expected of him. Thus in the early stage of the war,
when the Arab armies seemed winning the battle, Nizar wrote his celebratory
poem “Notes in the Time of Love and War.” The poem was not exhortative;
rather it spoke to a female lover, noting the psychological transformation that
accompanied victory as a result of the poet’s feelings of restored dignity and
adequacy. Once again, Nizar captured a significant emotional moment in the
life of the Arabs:
Have you noticed..
How I’ve been freed from my guilt?
How this war returned to me all the
old features of my face?
I love you in the time of triumph..
Love cannot last long
37
In the shadow of defeat..
.. ²y•cZI
œsXQE ¡]im JM º~Ca_e Rgƒ
xpVn -M±M “ƒ `a_QE xQ ~HLmI Rgƒ
ˆrG]iQE
.. a„†QE JM‚ xh ²ftcI
±GP› ÄgzG Z •PpQE }[
.. ˆrGdpQE “•j
Never mind that the war did not eventually turn out as the Arabs
wished, when the Israelis, heartened by an American airlift, managed to push
back the Arab armies – for most Arabs, the lingering feeling of this war was
one of pride and entitlement. After all, the Syrians and the Egyptians
distinguished themselves in the battlefield, and when Western powers
coalesced against them, their Gulf brethren used oil as a weapon for the first
time in their history, creating chaos in Western economies and threatening to
widen the local conflict into a superpower confrontation. The United States,
through the famed “shuttle diplomacy” of the tireless Henry Kissinger moved
quickly to put an end to the conflict in a way somewhat agreeable to all
parties.
The war and its feisty atmosphere seemed to pull Nizar out of his
misery and thrust him headlong back into Arab politics – this time through
journalism. During and after the war, Nizar felt that poetry was no longer the
right medium to communicate his rediscovered confidence in revolutionary
change in the Arab world, so he began contributing articles to the widely read
Lebanese weekly al-Usboo’ al-Arabi (The Arab Week), a stint with the
magazine that would last for the next two years. As one critic noted, at that
time in his career Nizar became convinced that in order to pass his message
on to the greatest number of people quickly and effectively, he needed also to
speak to their intellects not only their emotions. At one point Nizar stated “that
the poetry of a poet expresses only about ten percent of his thought, the
remaining ninety percent can only be communicated through prose.”38
Quantitatively, his poetry suffered. His active work schedule, and his
busy public commitments slowed down his creative impulse, and his poetry
writing grew less frequent. In quality, however, Nizar’s poetry showed more
maturity away from experiential writing toward intensification of the poet’s
imaginative associations. Rather than creating his own myths or drawing upon
Western or ancient Near Eastern civilizations for symbols, as did Adonis for
example, Nizar delved ever deeper into the Arab Islamic heritage, especially
the Islamic Sufi tradition. This influence manifested itself not in the Sufi belief
system, but in the psychological dreamlike beatitudes associated with the Sufi
ways, a state of mind that unleashes the poetic imagination.39 Nizar illustrated
the poetic power of this serenity in his poem “Sufi Revelations”:
When green merges with black, with
blue, with olive, with pink in your
eyes, my lady..
I am then overcome with a rare
condition..
A state between waking and fainting,
Between signaling and revealing..
Between death and birth
Between paper thirsting for love..
40
and the words falling..
…ŽC‚DLj …HP|DLj …a‰TDE ¸d•rG LM]†m
xe]g| LG …fg†gm xh …uHCPQLj …x•GdQLj
.. ¡CHLs ˆQLc x†Ga•ze
xcPQE Jgj …NLrž¹En P_„QE Jgj xY
…NEa|¹En
…H±grQEn ~PrQE Jgj …NLrG¹En R‹’QE Jgj
.. ~Lrl’QEn .. œ_lQ ŽL•‹rQE ŽCPQE Jgj
The lines above also illustrate a state of “in-between-ness”, an inability
to cross over. This is true of his continued struggle with his style, but more
importantly with the central theme of his poetry, namely his woman. Nizar is
now approaching a new concept of femininity, a concept that fits all time and
place as he says in his beautiful poem “N.Q.’s Magnificent Contradictions”:
And between this love.. and that love
I fall in love with you..
Between the one who just left
and the one who will come..
I search for you.. here.. and there..
It is as if this immortal time..
is your time..
It is as if all promises made..
converge in your eyes..
41
your eyes alone..
.. ²ysI fªtcI .. «œcn «œc Jgj LMn
.. x†•mªHn «¡]cEn Jgj LMn
.. xewe ¦P| «¡]cEnn
.. €L†Yn .. L†Y ²f†m Ī•hI
.. ²ysI fsLM‚ ]gcPQE }LMdQE }wƒ
..²ysI fg†gzj ªœ„e HPmPQE ©grV }wƒ
As in Sufi lore, on one level Nizar could be understood to be declaring
his undivided love to Balqees, but on a secondary level, the poet is attempting
to reach a final understanding of womanhood, to try and define “the female”:
Amidst the beauties of every stripe and
color
Amidst the hundreds of faces, those
which convinced me, and those
which did not convince..
Between my search for a wound.. and
a wound’s search for me..
I think of your golden age..
the age of magnolia, candles, and
incense
I dream of your age, the greatest of all
times..
Could you name this feeling?
How do you explain this absent
²}PQn «˜†V “ƒ JM ~±gr™QE Jgjn
LMn .. x†•z†^I x•QE WPVPQE ~L M Jgjn
x†•z†^I
Ī•SG «vaVn …Š†m Ī•hI «vaV Jgj LMn
.. x†m
.. xtYXQE €a„m xh aª’hI
a„mn …—Pr‹QE a„mn …LgQPsLrQE a„mn
ÂCP¬tQE
ÂCP„zQE “ƒ F•mI }L’QE €a„m xh FlcIn
•CPz‹QE EXY JgªrUe E•Lrh
EXYn …`Lg®QE CP‰_QE EXY aUhI Rgƒn
ÂCP‰_QE `Lg®QE
presence, this presence of
absence?
How can I be here.. and be there?
How do they want me to see them..
when there is no woman on earth but
you?
CÂ P‰_QE `Lg®QE
•Â€L†Y }PƒIn .. L†Y }PƒI Rgƒn
.. FYECI }I x†sn]GaG Rgƒn
•Â€EP| k‡sI BCDE klm ˜gQn
Nizar is now more than ever aware of the conflicts bedeviling his mind,
his “contradictions”. The following quote from his poem “The Arab Rasputin,”
bring to the fore Nizar’s many contradictions and dualities, but, amazingly, the
only constants seen – in the first and either lines below – are his obsessive
commitments to womanhood and writing:
Totally biased to your breasts..
I am the modern and stoneaged..
I am the savage and civilized..
I am the sexual and spiritual..
I am the believer and idolater..
I am the killer and the killed..
I am the ever contradicted..
I am the one written in
calligraphy.. on lovers’
robes..
I am the clear and esoteric..
The seen and unseen..
The touched, the possessed, the
addict, and the whoring
42
saint..
.. fG]ps kQ[ ·Lglºƒ ‚L_†rQE LsI
.. ua™_QEn ua„zQEn
.. ªx™rpQEn Ìxs]rQEn
.. ªxU†™QEn ªxcnaQEn
.. ªxhP„QEn ªx†¤PQEn
.. ªu]jDE Ë^L†•rQEn
.. “eLiQEn º•P•irQEn
.. ŽLª‹zQE ¡NLtm ŽPh .. ªxhP’QLj `P•’rQE LsI
.. uªaUQEn ªx†lzQEn
.. ªxS¬rQEn xµarQEn
apz•rQEn …»Lª‹_QEn …`PlUrQEn …`nX™rQEn
.“bLSQE
On the technical level, two important results of the new development in
Nizar’s poetic imagination were the moderation of his lyricism and the
expansion of the his dictionary to include about any word in the Arabic
language. Yet despite this expansion, Nizar kept largely faithful to Arabic’s
metric system. On the other hand, the development, while enriching his
imagery and associations, did not complicate or burden his style because of
the reader’s inherent cultural familiarity with his/her own heritage – and hence
the poetry’s infamous resistance to translation. This new style would become
apparent in the poetry collection he would publish at the end of the decade. 43
Despite his active public involvement, in his moments of solitude
Nizar’s sorrow at the loss of his son was bottomless. Ultimately, this emotional
distress exacted a heavy toll on his health. Early in 1974, Nizar Qabbani
suffered a heart attack, and had to spend several weeks resting in hospital at
AUB’s Medical Center. A positive outcome, if ever there was any in a
sickness, was that it brought to the public eye the intensity of his suppressed
sorrows; the poet was soon engulfed by a rush of love and good wishes from
all corners of the Arab world: newspaper articles, personal letters, and
strangers who just showed up at the hospital to inquire about him. The
hospital had to restrict visits to him, even from family and friends. But the
outpour of love and sympathy buoyed up his spirits and comforted him. From
his bed in hospital, he wrote to Balqees:
Please please smile..
Oh proud palm of Iraq,
Oh nightly bird of Baghdad
A poet’s heart attack is never a
personal matter
Is it not enough that I left
A language for children after me?
44
And an alphabet for lovers after me?
..xrU•te }I €PVCI .. xrU•te }I €PVCI
ˆhL\aQE ¡CPS„m LG …ŽEazQE ˆl¬s LG
ŠªglglQE
Šg„¬Œ ·ˆg‰^ ·E]jI yUgQ amL‹QE ˆ_jXh
·ˆ®Q u]zj •LS›qQ yƒae x†sI xS’G ˜gQI
..ŠªG]™jI ŽLª‹zlQ yƒae x†sIn
For the rest of the year and well into 1975, Nizar continued to write in
al-Usboo’ al-Arabi magazine. His articles continued to be permeated by a
spirit of “revolutionary optimism”, a belief in a better future for the Arabs
through progress and defiance. He continued to live the Arab euphoria in the
wake of the October war which was also partly occasioned by the economic
boom of the mid-seventies. In that spirit, he turned, like many Arab
intellectuals, to focus on consolidating Arab unity and solidarity while resisting
foreign intervention. In articles like “Damascus Gets Married” and “His Legs
Became an Olive Tree” he celebrated pan-Arabist unity, whereas in other
articles like “The Will of a Lebanese Cider Tree” and “Yes, We Are Refractory”
he wrote approvingly of defiance against foreign control, especially American
manipulations of Syria and Egypt. Most of his writings were born out of the
spirit of the period – turning sometimes into commentaries on day-to-day
affairs of the region. These activist writings kept Nizar going and gave him a
sense of being part of, and directly contributing to, a progress being
achieved.45
This brief euphoric dream came down crashing in front of his eyes on
the streets of Beirut on April 13, 1975. He could not believe the intensity of
murderous hatred that left 26 people dead and scores injured in the street
fighting and ambushes on that day. The poet was dumfounded seeing his
haven of beauty and civility transformed overnight into a pit of ugliness and
savagery. Nizar who truly believed he was living in the paragon of Plato’s
blissful “republic” suddenly found himself in the midst of Conrad’s “heart of
darkness”. Yet the horror he saw was not fictional. In one act of terror after
another, the various Lebanese sects and militias, along with the Palestinian
refugees, unearthed their long-suppressed hatred of each other and spilled it
out into the streets of their beautiful country. The violence set off the vicious
cycles of a bloody civil war which would last for the next fifteen years, and
whose aftershocks continue to rock Lebanon until today.46
Adding to his woes were the news from Damascus of the passing away
of his mother. It seemed as if fact had coalesced against him to rob him of
those dearest to his heart. In the poem he wrote about his mother, he could
not escape linking her death with the dying of Beirut. With both he had an
irreplaceable relationship of comfort and protection that was now gone. But
whereas his mother’s death was quite and peaceful, Beirut’s was slow and
violent.
When Nizar came to the new reality around him, his first concern was
the safety of his wife and children. With the sectarian violence spiraling out of
hand, Nizar was anxious to move his family out of harm’s way. Damascus
was just a stone’s throw away, and his family there was urging him to move
back to his hometown, but Damascus was the last place he would consider.
Although he had made peace with Assad’s autocratic regime, he could barely
stand the farces of Syrian Baathist politics played in Damascus or the selfrighteous moralism of its people. Rather, Nizar sought refuge for his family in
Baghdad with Balqees’ family. Not that Iraq was ruled by a less obnoxious
Baathist faction, but Nizar was not a citizen of the country and the Iraqi regime
could therefore not expect homilies of allegiance from the poet.
Nizar spent a long year in Baghdad trying to come to terms with the
changes in his world. The poet was welcomed to Baghdad’s finest literary
circles, and there he connected with his old friend Jabra Ibrahim Jabra who
had long settled in Baghdad and was teaching at its university, and who by
sheer coincidence, had the year before written one of the most perceptive and
illuminating critical analyses of the poetry of Nizar Qabbani. Jabra, who
hitherto was reluctant to pass a verdict on Nizar’s poetry, declared in that
article that “much of the poetry of this age will be extinct, and many an
illustrious name will be forgotten, but one name we can be certain as to its
durability: Nizar Qabbani.”47 Despite such adulation, the poet still hankered
after his lost life in Beirut, and felt he had let the city down by deserting her at
the time she needed him most. As Jabra pointed out, Nizar’s ideal of the
feminine developed from an idyllic private presence in his early poetry into the
lively urban public presence in his poetry of the late sixties and early
seventies – the feminine ideal ultimately uniting with that of the city of Beirut.
By leaving Beirut, Nizar truly felt he had committed an act of betrayal. For six
months after the eruption of the Lebanese civil war, Nizar experienced a
strange block, as if he left his muse in Beirut. When he finally wrote, he wrote
about Beirut: the woman, the victim. The poems he wrote about this
tormented city contained both confessions of guilt and denunciations of
betrayal on the part of the Arabs. This is even clear from the first lines of the
first poem he wrote “Oh Beirut, Lady of the world”:
Oh Beirut, lady of the world..
Who sold your ruby-gemmed bracelets?
Who confiscated your magic ring?
And cut your golden braids?
Who slaughtered the sleeping joy in
your eyes of green?
Who slashed your face with a knife
And threw burning acid on your lovable
lips?
Who poisoned the sea water and
sprinkled hate on your rosy
beaches?
Here we come.. apologetic.. confessing..
That we shot you with tribal zest
And so killed “freedom”.. a woman with
48
your name..
... ~nagj LG Lgs]QE y| LG
•~P^LgQLj ˆQP®‹rQE €CnL|I —Lj JM
…ua_UQE freLT CHL\ JM
•ŠªgtYXQE €aµLSb ¢^n
fg†gm xh FµL†QE vaSQE -j• JM
•JGnEa‰¬QE
…Jg’UQLj fpVn œª{Œ JM
Jg•zµEaQE fg•SŒ klm CL†QE NLM kiQIn
klm ]i_QE ª»Cn …a_tQE NLM Fr| JM
•ˆGHCPQE }‘{‹QE
Jgha•zMn ..JGCX•zM ..L†geI J_s LY
.. Šªglt^ vnaj fglm CL†QE L†il›I LªsI
... "ˆGa_QE" km]e ysLƒ .. ¡IaME L†l•ih
As the last lines show, Nizar saw in the savageries of the Lebanese
Civil War yet another manifestation of the Arabs’ tribal spirit – one which was
lurking under a beguiling surface of civilization and modernity. “The tribe”, this
primeval spirit born of an entrenched patriarchal culture, was the same spirit
behind women’s subjugation and exploitation which he had been resisting for
the past two decades. Now the damaging effect of this tribal mentality was
extending to engulf all aspects of life in the Arab society. “The tribe” would go
on to become one of Nizar’s frequently invoked concepts and one of the most
loaded in meaning.
Nizar’s dramatic description of the violation of the feminine ideal as
represented in Beirut continued in several poems he wrote at the time, such
as “Beirut is Your Courtesan, Beirut is My Beloved”, poems which he
eventually published together in 1978 in his aptly-titled collection To Beirut the
Female, with Love, reflecting his poetic progress from his “transvestite state”
of the past two decades to a new state of absorption in feminine love and
exile.
For the time Nizar lived away form Beirut exposed him to the reality of
true exile. For the first time, Nizar had to live in real exile and to face its
implications for his poetry. The poet realized that exile went beyond the loss
of a home or a homeland, reaching a new understanding of his new condition.
In an introductory speech before a reading in one of his poetry evenings in the
summer of 1976, Nizar spoke of exile in his typical half-prose-half-poetry
language:
I carry my exile in my suitcases.. and travel to you..
When you cannot write, then you are exiled..
When a policeman stands on the very paper you are writing on, the you are
exiled..
…
When your tongue turns into a frozen fish in your throat, then you are exiled..
When your voice becomes a luxury item on which to pay customs tax, then
you are exiled..
When you cannot meow naturally like all the cats in the world, then you are
exiled..
When you cannot spit on the knife that is slaughtering you, then you are
exiled..
When freedom becomes an unlicensed prostitute, then you are exiled.49
With such understanding, life in any Arab country for Nizar was a
terrifying form of exile, one that suppressed his talent and strangled his
thought. The poet concluded, he was better off taking his chances in war-torn
Beirut than lose his voice in any Arab city.
I carry an urn with the ashes of Beirut.. and an urn of my ashes.. I carry the
maps of my childhood, the letters of my beloveds, the stairs of our old home
in Damascus, my mother’s prayer rug, my father’s cough, my school satchel,
and my first poetry notebook.. – and search for a corner of the vast Arab
lands the size of a writing paper.. I do not wish for more.. who can give me a
sky the size of a writing paper? Who can give me the writing?50
There were of course inherent risks in living in a city that was getting
addicted to self-destruction, but the poet must have seen some hope in the
fact that the Arab League, with the approval of the United States, had finally
moved to intervene in Lebanon by sending what came to be known as “Arab
Deterrence Forces,” an Arab euphemism for the Syrian Army.
Nizar had also another pressing reason to return to Beirut, and that is
to protect his publishing business. In the prevailing security conditions in
which the state had disintegrated into factional fiefdoms each with its own
fighting militia, Lebanon descended into a legal limbo. The state was no
longer able to oversee economic activity and business fell victim to mafia-type
exploitation and control. During the civil war, the Lebanese market, highly
developed and prosperous prior to the war, turned into a jungle. Shortly after
the breakdown of the Lebanese state, Nizar discovered that pirated copies of
his publications were flooding the market at reduced prices. The publishing
business was for Nizar a matter of livelihood and he decided to fight off the
sharking publishers by all his means. When he failed to dissuade them from
the lucrative steal, the poet took a step some considered controversial: he
enlisted the help of the Syrian Army to crack down on his opponents. The
Syrian officers he brought in to bear on the Lebanese publishers were more
than happy to come to the rescue of a fellow countryman. The Syrian army
confiscated thousands of the pirated copies, and Nizar was forthcoming in his
gratitude and praise for the Syrians:
The Syrian brothers considered that the aggression against my books was an
aggression against an Arab Syrian heritage, so they acted promptly to rescue
my poetical works from the claws of the pirates; they surrounded their dens,
printing stations, and warehouses; and confiscated pyramids of pirated
books; and forced the forgers to pay all the stolen copy rights. This was an
example of “cultural deterrence” that need to be mentioned […] as a model of
an authority which defends its culture and its intellectuals.51
For some of Nizar’s critics, this incident, like the Nasser appeal, was
yet another example of the poet using the very powers he had reviled, even
though he had the legal right to protect his intellectual property rights. It could
be noted however, that Nizar, along with many Lebanese and Arabs at the
time, looked positively at the role Syria was playing in light of the chaos and
inter-factional atrocities that marked the start of the civil war. Furthermore, the
Arab public opinion was highly polarized in support of “steadfast” Syria in the
face of Israel, in contrast with public disapproval of Egypt’s overtures of peace
to the “archenemy”. When it came to the Arab-Israeli conflict, Nizar was a
zealous Arab nationalist who rejected any concessions on Arab rights in
Palestine, and thus at the time he found himself on the same side as regimes
he otherwise did not approve of. The mid-seventies was the only period Nizar
would ever feel close to the government of his country.
The poet returned with his family to Beirut when many others were
leaving it, especially Western nationals who were ordered to evacuate from
the city after the bombing of the American embassy in June of 1976 claimed
scores of dead, including the ambassador. It was certainly a risky move, but
the poet still preferred the chaos of Beirut to the order in other Arab cities. His
celebrity status and his popularity with all Lebanese, rich and poor, Muslims
and Christians, gave him enough confidence that he could weather the storm.
Back in Beirut and amidst the civil strife, Nizar tried to resume his life
with some semblance of normalcy. He began writing for the influential
Lebanese magazine Al-Hawadeth [Events], from which he launched a searing
criticism of the internecine reality of Lebanese and Arab affairs. And from his
perch in that magazine, the poet, heaving along the infuriated Arab left,
denounced in sharp language the divisive visit of Egyptian President Anwar
Sadat’s to Israel in November 1977 and the peace treaty that followed. As an
Arab nationalist from the idealist old school, he could not see the visionary
pragmatism implied in Sadat’s recognition of Israel as a reality. Unlike Naguib
Mahfouz, the great Egyptian novelist who saw wisdom and courage in Sadat’s
move, Nizar was always a poet of the people and he was very good at
expressing their spontaneous feelings and reactions. And the Arab people,
even in Egypt itself, resoundingly rejected the historic development as
tantamount to treason.52 Egypt was ostracized in the Arab world, and Sadat –
who was viewed in the West as a man of vision and peace, and who would go
on to receive, with Israel’s Menachem Begin, the Nobel Prize for peace – fell
from grace in the Arab lands and eventually paid with his own blood for his
daring.
In 1978 Nizar published three collections of his poetry produced over
the past six years. To Beirut, the Female, with Love contained the poems he
wrote about the city’s predicament. As discussed earlier, in these poems
Beirut emerges as the perfect example of the victimization of womanhood in
the Arab world. The two other diwans: I Love You.. I Love You.. and More Yet
to Come, and Each Year that You Are My Beloved – show some of the
influences of his new direction, and reflect his struggles to define the female
ideal. In addition, an occupation with sea themes and imagery appears in the
latter, in such poems as “On Sea Love.” This fascination with the sea as a an
accessible primeval space is further developed, in an atmosphere of Sufi
enthrallment, in his next two collections. I Declare: There is No Woman But
You contains some of the most tender love poetry ever written in the Arabic
language. The first poem, which is the title poem, is a homage to the
faithfulness and love of his wife, Balqees:
I declare there is no other woman..
Played my game like you..
And for ten years bore my
indiscretions like you did..
And lived with my madness as you
.. ¡IaME Z }I ]pŒI
.. ysI Z[ ˆtzlQE y†ieI
.. ²ylr•cE Lrƒ £EPmI ¡a‹m x•^Lrc ylr•cEn
.. ~at{\E Lrl‡M xsP†V klm ~at{\En
did
…
Oh sea-eyed.. waxen-handed..
loving presence
Oh woman white as silver, clear as
crystal..
I declare there is no other woman..
On whose waist ages meet
And thousands of planets turn..
I declare there is no other woman
My love,
In whose hands nurtured the first
male..
53
And the last male..
...
.. JG]gQE ˆgzr‹QEn .. Jg†gzQE ˆGa_tQE Lp•GI
CP‰_QE ˆzµEaQEn
.. ÂCPlltQLƒ NLUlrQEn .. ˆ‰SQLƒ NL‰gtQE Lp•GI
.. ¡IaME Z }I ]pŒI
ÂCP„zQE ©r•™e LYa„T §g_M klm
.. ÂCn]G œƒPƒ RQI RQIn
x•tgtc LG €agž .. ¡IaME Z }I ]pŒI
.. CPƒXQE •nI kjae LpgmEC• klm
... CPƒXQE aT´n
As the lines suggest, the poet’s life with Balqees was not trouble-free;
Nizar had a difficult occupation, which he often likened to madness, and
needed special attention and much patience. It was not easy for Balqees to
swallow her pride as a woman and watch her man write love poetry to other
women, even figuratively. She was totally dedicated to him, and so as to give
him time and space at home to write she herself took up a job in the cultural
section of the Iraqi embassy in Beirut. In appreciation and recognition, and
maybe to alleviate some of her voiced worries as to her place in his life, Nizar
wrote this moving poem to her. But as if to underscore the fact that the poem
was just the exception, not the rule, a four line piece entitled “Dialogue” was
placed immediately afterwards, for the benefit of his female readers,
maintaining the poet’s ambiguity and ambivalence.
If they ask me: Who’s your love?
I would say: I wish I know her
face
For twenty centuries now
I’ve been loving her
Yet still.. do not know her
54
name..
•x•tgtc }P’e JM :xsPQw| E•[
Lpr|C flMI ygQ LG :FpQ •P^I
.. LptcI Lsa^ JGa‹m JM xsŸh
.. Lpr|E ¦amI Z .. }oE k•c yQ‚ LMn
Yet, Nizar achieves a new high of emotional tenderness and serenity in
such poems as “The Play,” “Say I Love You,” and “The Rain”. Some are very
short and remind the reader of Omar Khayyam’s stories at the tavern:
I went to the coffee shop today
Intending to forget our love
And bury all my sorrows
But when I asked for a cup of
coffee
You came out like a white rose
55
From the bottom of my cup.
.. kpirlQ £PgQE ylTH
L†•^±m kUsI }I yrr\ ]^n
xsEdcI “ƒ JhHIn
WPpiQE JM LsL™†h ytl› Jgcn
.. NL‰gj «¡HCPƒ ²yVaT
.. xsL™†h ŽLrmI JM
But it is in his diwan Thus I Write the History of Women, which he
published in 1981, that Nizar perfects his vision of the feminine. The
multiplicity of voices totally disappears, and the dialogue is now directed
solely from the poet to his female ideal. In an opening poem to the collection,
he defines this ideal in a trinity of poetry, the sea, and the breast, his most
powerful symbols:
In the beginning there were poems
And I suppose
that the exception then was flat bald prose
First of all there was the deep wide sea
dry land exception then appeared to be
First the breast’s abundant curve and all
the plainer contours were exceptional
And first of all was you and only you
56
then afterwards were other women too.
N L†‡•|E PY a‡†QEn …az‹QE }Lƒ N]tQE xh
ÂNL†‡•|E PY atQEn …a_tQE }Lƒ N]tQE xh
ÂNL†‡•|E PY -SUQEn …]p†QE }Lƒ N]tQE xh
NLU†QE y¼sLƒ F¤ ..ysI y†ƒ N]tQE xh
In the poems that follow Nizar consummates his gift of conjuring a
world of Sufi rapture around feminine beauty and love. An atmosphere of
resignation, peace, and pleasance permeates all the poems of this collection,
and from now on, all his love poetry. Nizar reaches the apex of his
achievement in his poem “A Very Private Picture of Mrs. M,” a hallucinatory
composition that weds the sensual to the spiritual to produce the ultimate
poetic experience.57
In perfecting his poetry, in style and vision, Nizar traveled inward,
increasingly insulating himself from the turbulence that was gripping Beirut
and the Arab world. By the end of the seventies, the Middle East was seeing
new politics and new realities. Arab nationalism was finally giving way to
Islamic fundamentalism. Islamic movements that were put down during the
fifties and sixties were now experiencing a resurgence, boosted by the fall of
the Shah of Iran and the proclamation of the first Islamic republic in history by
Ayatollah Khomeini. President Anwar Sadat, the man who dared give the
Shah asylum, was then shot dead in October 1981 by enraged Islamic
fundamentalists.
In a poem called “Maybe” from his last collection, Nizar wrote, as if
addressing his wife:
I have not loved you so far.. but maybe..
A flood will hit my shores
And the sea will come from all
directions..
Maybe a hurricane will deluge me
tomorrow
Or after tomorrow
58
Maybe.. in months… or years..
.. LrjC J’Q .. }oE k•c fi‹mI FQ LsI
xeLgc }‘{Œ }LhP{QE `a‰G
.. ~Lp™QE “ƒ JM a_tQE š™Gn
«]ž £PG xh CL„m¹E x†cL•™G LrjC
«]ž ]zj LrjC
.. ~EP†| nI «apŒI xh LrjC
The poet did not have to wait too long. The encompassing disaster hit
on the morning of the fifteen of December, 1981. That morning, Beirut’s mad
violence engulfed his own family: Balqees was killed in a bombing that
targeted the Iraqi embassy were she was working. The horror of this event in
Nizar’s life was unspeakable. For Balqees to die was an unthinkable tragedy
for him, but for her to die such a violent death pushed the limits of his grief
beyond imagination. “The tribe”, as he often referred to Arab politics, finally
exacted a monstrous revenge on him in the killing of the only woman he
chose to be his wife.
Nizar’s family and many friends were quick to rally around him in his
difficult hours. The Arab Islamic rites of morning call for immediate burial,
generally on the same day of death, and for a morning function that lasts for
three days in which the public are received. Such denial of privacy generally
helps the bereaved cope with the impact of their loss. Balqees’ death was a
public event which drew an uproar of condemnation from the Arab world and
which occasioned a flood of sympathy with the poet. This compassion helped
him live through the first difficult days after the tragedy.
But the poet’s grief was multiple and heart-rending. He was a husband
who lost a loving wife in the prime of her life. He was also a father who had to
tend to the grief of his two children who could not fully understand why their
mother was killed. Nizar’s conflicting emotions of grief, anger, and
bewilderment were soon voiced in a long moving elegy. “Balqees” was written
in the emotionally charged days following the death, registering an emotional
outpour that exceeded anything he wrote before. The poem was both an
indictment of the culture that led to the murder and a sad but beautiful
remembrance of an admirable woman:
Thank you ..
Thank you ..
My beloved was murdered
Now you may
.. F’Q Ea’Œ
.. F’Q Ea’Œ
ÂF’z|Pj CL\n yl•º¼^ x•tgt_h
Have a toast on the grave of the martyred
My poem was assassinated ..
By God, is there on earth any nation
59
Except us, who commit such assassination?
¡]gp‹QE at^ klm L|wƒ EPja‹e }I
.. ylg•žE xe]g„^n
.. BCDE xh ˆMI JM “Yn
• ¡]g„iQE •L•®e …J_s Z[
There was such Arab demand to reading the poem that when it was
published in the February 1982 issue of al-Mustaqbal, an Arabic magazine
publishing from Paris, the magazine experienced “a zero residual,” the only
time it ever did according to its owner.60
“Balqees” is an unstructured poem – as fragmented as the poet’s state
of mind at the time. In it Nizar wrestles with emotions of yearning, loss, and
bewilderment, while oscillating between feelings of guilt at bringing her to the
madness of Beirut and vague raging indictments of her killers. As customary
in Lebanese terrorist attacks, the perpetrators were never identified, but were
somehow inferred. The Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein, which the year
before launched an American-sponsored war against Iran, was also involved
in a proxy war in Lebanon backing the Lebanese Christians against the
Muslims allied with Iran and Syria. Thus the bombing of the Iraqi embassy
was likely the work of the latter camp. It is safe to say that Balqees was not
herself a target, but – like most of the 150,000 people who would ultimately
die in the Lebanese civil war – she was a victim “burnt amidst the warring
tribes.”61
Barely a month after the Balqees tragedy, the poet’s heart condition
worsened and had to be hospitalized. His doctors recommended a bypass
surgery. This he chose to undergo in Washington in the United States. The
operation was successful and he slowly began to emerge from the crisis that
engulfed his life.
The last straw was added by the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in June
1982 in which Beirut was all but destroyed. There was nothing left for Nizar of
the Beirut he loved. It was now a golden memory in a time of abject ugliness.
He had no choice but leave. A broken man with a broken heart.
Notes
!-t†e J{†ŒEn xªlTn !-j•E !-j•E
CHAPTER V
EUROPEAN EXILE
1982-98
GENEVA AND LONDON
Restless Places 1982-85 Restless Times
Beirut in rubble behind him, Nizar was not sure where to go. He did not
wish to return to Damascus after all these alienating years. Besides, Syria
was also experiencing troubles of her own, convulsing with the violent clashes
between the ruling Baathists and a diehard fundamentalist insurgency seeking
to establish an Islamist state. The climax came in February 1982 when the
government forces destroyed the old quarters of the city of Hama and
massacred thousands suppressing a rebellion there. Human Rights Watch
estimates that more than 10,000 people were killed in the onslaught.1 The
violence cast a macabre shadow on life in the country. In the wake of such
atrocities, the land was riveted with fear and horror, hardly a fitting home for a
poet of love. Of the Arab cities he considered, Cairo seemed the most
promising place in which to anchor his tired sails. Despite his voiced
opposition to the Camp-David peace accords between Israel and Egypt, he
still felt that Cairo was big-hearted enough to absorb his differences. He had
bought an apartment in the city years before, just in case, and its availability
facilitated his move – which he completed in the summer.
In Cairo, Nizar enjoyed the company of many of his old Egyptian
friends like Abdul Wahhab and journalist Ahmad Bahaa al-Deen. He was also
able to quickly make new friends among the city’s new literati like the
friendship he struck with the poet and writer Farouq Shousha. But his leftist
views did not endear him to the ruling establishment which he accused of
having cheapened Egyptian life through its adoption of open-door
consumerism, and on whose account he entered into frays with some of
Egypt’s leading intellectuals, such as his row with Anees Mansour, a popular
journalist. Nor did the poet’s continuing advocacy of women rights ever bring
him any closer to the Islamist-leaning intelligentsia, who despite the fact that
their political parties were officially banned, still held sway over a great swath
of Egyptian intellectual life.
Nizar’s hopes for a fresh start in Egypt all but evaporated, and he found
in travel to Europe a comforting escape. This time, however, he did not travel
alone, but in the company of Arab royalty, a segment of Arab society to which
he had shown nothing but disdain before. That fall, a friendship developed
between Nizar and princess Suad Al-Sabah, a high-ranking member of the
Kuwaiti ruling family and an established poetess of middling accomplishment.
Suad’s true credentials lay in her education and career: she was the first
woman in her country to earn a doctorate in political economy from the United
Kingdom in 1975, and was highly involved in cultural and educational projects
across the Arab world. Yet her passion was poetry, and Nizar, whom she
grew up reading, was her idol.
Princess Suad met Nizar for the first time about a month before the
death of Balqees when he was attending a book fair in Kuwait in November
1981. It was the first time he visited Kuwait – ten years after his libel case with
the royal family. The princess, who was almost forty years by the time, was
long married to a sheikh from the ruling family and had children. Still, she cut
an attractive figure: tall, slender, and well-spoken. An air of elegance mixed
with a sense of worthiness added to her allure. She was well aware of her
status, but kept true to her inbred Arab modesty. In short, she was the
epitome of Arab courtliness.
When Suad appeared in the life of Nizar in the winter of 1982, she
could not have come at a more opportune time. Nizar was single again, his
health had improved significantly, and he was looking to move on with his life.
During the spring following Balqees’ death, he wrote little poetry other than his
“25 Roses in the Hair of Balqees,” a long elegy he composed in April, a series
of hushed and deeply personal reminisces of his relationship with his late
wife. Suad, by inviting him to join her in her European travels, offered him a
chance to change both scenery and mood, and pull away from the
depressiveness of death back to his normal life-loving self. And who could do
that better than an attractive and affluent princess?
In December, the two traveled to a secret getaway in Marlow-onThames, a time-forgotten rural village thirty miles from London. They stayed in
one of the town’s quaint hotels overlooking the Thames. With its medieval air
and well-preserved English inns and dwellings, many dating back to the
Georgian period, the town was as if made for poets, and indeed it has a long
history with many of them, including Percy Bysshe Shelley and T. S. Elliot.
Coincidentally, but meaningfully perhaps, Marlow is where Shelley spent
months writing his poem “Revolt of Islam,” and where, more famously, his wife
Mary wrote her Frankenstein. Elliot, who took refuge in the town from the blitz
during World War II, seems to have been present in Nizar’s mind, at least his
famous opening lines of “The Waste Land”:
April is the cruelest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
2
Dull roots with spring rain.
Reversing the mood, Nizar chose December to project his happy
feelings in his poem “Fatima in the English Countryside”:
December is a marvelous month…
December is a marvelous month in
London this year, marvelous
There love struck me
To the ground, weakened like a street
3
lamp
...©µEC atrUGH apŒ
©µEC …£LzQE EXY …}]†Q xh ©µEC atrUGH apŒ
..œ_QE x†rVLY Šth
—CEP‹QE -gjL„rƒ L_GaV xsLiQIn
“Fatima” was the anonym Nizar gave to Suad; it is the quintessential
Arabic name, one loaded with Arab history and motifs. Suad struck Nizar as
quintessentially Arab, from the color of the hair, the eyes, the attitude, down to
her taste in food, clothes, and jewelry. She offered him a sharp contrast
between herself and the European surroundings of their escapes. And he
loved to dwell on the contrast in his poetry. As the meetings and trysts
increased, so did the poems: “With Fatima on Madness Train,” “Fatima in la
Place de la Concord,” “With Her in Paris” and “The Decision.” The latter poem
was written in March the following year and in it Nizar seems to offer a
defense of his affair with the married princess:
I fell in love and took my decision
Why should I make apologies?
No power in love is above my power
The thought is mine, the choice my choice
…
Like a crime I’ve committed you,
premeditatedly
If you are a shame to me,
uCEa^ ~X¬eEn f•i‹m xs[
uCEXmI – •ae LG – £]^I Jrlh
x•{l| Plze .. œ_QE xh ·ˆ{l| Z
uCLgT CLg¬QEn .. xGIC uIaQLh
...
E]rz•M E]MLm .. f•ha•^E xs[
uCLm ˆmnaQ LG .. ·ECLm ²y†ƒ }[
What a lovely shame you are!
4
These poems and others eventually appeared in his diwan Love Stops
Not at the Red Light which he published in 1985. The title poem was placed at
the end of the collection; in it the poet mixed the defense of his right to fall in
love again with a denunciation of Arab taboos. His anger culminates in a
depiction of the miserable status of the Arab expatriate in the West, his
feelings of uprootedness and inadequacy:
Do not travel on an Arab passport ..
And wait like a rat in all airports,
Because the light is red ..
Do not say in Classical Arabic:
My name is Marwan ..
Or Adnan ..
Or Sahban
To the blonde seller at Harrods
The name means nothing to her ..
And your history – dear sir
5
Is nothing but forgery ..
.. xjam ‚EP™j ahLUe Z
…~ECL{rQE “ƒ xh •a™QLƒ a••sEn
.. arcI NP‰QE }Ÿh
.. k_„SQE ˆ®lQLj “ie Z
.. }EnaM LsI
.. }Ls]m nI
}Lt_| nI
"‚HnCLY" xh NEai‹QE ˆzµLtlQ
.. L gŒ LpQ x†zG Z F|ZE }[
.. CªndM ¥GCLe – uZPM LG – f¬GCLen
In the poem above, he was speaking from personal experience. Nizar
acquired Lebanese citizenship at the end of the seventies, and thus traveled
on a Lebanese passport. With Lebanon becoming a haven for militant groups
linked to several hijackings and kidnappings, the passport became more of a
liability and the poet was sometimes subjected to extra scrutiny at airports, a
treatment he understandably found humiliating.
Such experiences in the West, and his continued frustrations in the
Arab world only added to his pessimism and bitterness. After decades of
campaigning for love, freedom, and progress, he could only see negative
outcomes: Arab nationalism is now a spent force, the movement he once
believed in managed only to breed petty dictatorships, defeats, poverty, and
intolerance across the Arab region. Moreover, poetry – once the vehicle for
change, modernism, and passion – seems now besieged, irrelevant and
useless. In a speech pointedly entitled “I am Nizar Qabbani, Not Carlos” – the
international terrorist hotly pursued at the time – which he delivered in
November 1983 at a reading, the poet vented his frustrations:
Poetry today is in a quandary. It is surrounded from the east and west, north
and south, and no one is willing to lift this siege. It is as if all have agreed that
poetry is no longer needed in our lives – a mosquito carrying malaria… an
appendix better to be removed. […] The Arab age of poetry is over. Now
begins the tin age – one in which if you conceive a poem, they would force
you to miscarry in your fifth month… and if you publish a new collection, they
would declare it a bastard and take it to the orphanage. In this Draconian,
Fascist, fundamentalist, historicist climate we practice the hobby of dying on
our papers… and walk like Spanish bulls to our red-colored fate.6
When the Israelis finally pulled out of Beirut, after Yasser Arafat and his
Palestinian forces were largely ejected from Lebanon, there were promising
signs that the civil conflict was on its way to resolution. Nizar, against his
better judgment, like an incurable lover who could not but delude himself,
moved from Cairo back to Beirut in the summer of 1983 trying to find life again
in the war-torn city in some of the harshest living conditions. As much as he
liked Europe, still he did not know if he would be himself in Western exile. Yet
although he would endure two more wild years in the divided city’s topsy-turvy
life, Beirut was now more of a base than permanent residence. The poet was
constantly on the road; sometimes traveling with Suad, sometimes on his
own, reading his poetry wherever he was invited.
His poetry of the period reflects this restless itinerant way of life. There
is a bewildering constant change of scenery and people: foreign names,
hotels, airports, bags, and rich motifs of loss, movement, and aimlessness.
There is also that air of promiscuity that goes with it, of one-night stands, real
or imagined, with foreign women in foreign lands, although these could merely
be decoys to protect the privacy of Suad. “The Last Tango on a Red Tulip
Field” is one such poem describing a sensuous December night in the Swiss
Alps with a woman addressed as “Mary”. Another is his poem “To a Cyprus
Fish Named Tamara…” which he wrote in Limassol in Cyprus in March 1984.
The final section from “The Last Tango…” perfectly registers this state of
motion, instability, and precariousness:
Cognac has burnt my nerves…
I see lighting in your eyes, thunder, and
rain
Sails… and probabilities of departing
I was not sure what exactly was
happening
But the land was shaking under us
As did the walls, the doors, the cups,
and paintings
And the trees and the leaves were flying
I could hear nothing but the distant bell
of the village night
Nothing but the thud of feet on the snow
And the female scream that sets
7
the freezing heart aglow.
..xjL„mI €LgsP’QE ŽacI
Âa{Mn .. ½HPmCn .. ½Žaj fg†gm xhn
ÂaS| ~ZLr•cEn ..½—Pl^n
.. LMLre ua™G LM €CHI JƒI FQ
..Ìd•pe L†•_e ysLƒ BCDE }I agž
…`EPƒDEn …`EPjDEn …}EC]™QEn
…~LcPlQEn
Âag{e -GaQE xh ŽECnDEn …CL™ŒDEn
…²“glQE xh ˆGaiQE ÇaV Z[ ©r|I JƒI FQ
…² ¶l‡QE klm «£E]^I ©^n Z[n
œlij CL†QE “z‹e x•QE k‡sDE ˆTa\ Z[n
ÂaGapMdQE
Beside these variables engendered in the kaleidoscopic maddening
change of place, the female ideal remained the one and only constant in the
poet’s life. With a growing sense of exile from homeland and kin, the female
ideal, often envisioned in the most sublime reservoirs of life like the sea or the
forest, has now replaced the homeland. His poem “Flying over the Roof of the
World” written at the time contains many motifs of travel and placelessness,
but most of all it signifies a desire to fully detach from patriarchy in favor of
female beauty, from Arab masculinity to Western femininity:
I have finally resolved
To hang on to any cloud
Fleeing with her children toward the
sea
I have no homeland for refuge
But the shores of your hands..
You are the last homeland remaining
8
On freedom’s chart.
..LgµLps ~Ca^
ˆjL_| ˆGwj –lzeI }I
a_tQE WL™eLj LpQLS›I ©M ˆjCLY
..ŠgQ[ š™•QI J›n xQ ]zG Flh
..fG]G “cEP| •P|
ˆ{GaT klm x^LtQE agTDE J›PQE ysI
ŠGa_QE
Nizar and Suad continued to see each other, mostly in Europe. The
many prying eyes following them and Arab disapproval of such liaisons forced
them to be more discrete in their relationship. There was less of “Fatima” in
his poetry now, but he still continued to write poetry to her in such poems as
“A Dialogue with Two Aristocratic Hands” and “A Night at the Gold Mines.” His
association with Arab royalty, however, did not save the kings and princes of
the Arab Gulf from his criticism. His ire against oil-rich Arabs no longer
emanated from their crassness of degenerate conduct in Western red-light
districts which he lambasted in the late fifties. After his honeymoon with the oil
tycoons in the mid-seventies when they stood up to Western support of Israel,
Nizar now fell out with them again for what he saw as their desertion of
Lebanon and their succumbing to American manipulation, in both the political
and cultural arenas. These sentiments came out loud and clear in his poem
“Oil Assailed Us Like a Wolf”:
Oil assailed us like a wolf
And we fell dead on its shoes
We quit praying.. now believing
That a rich man’s glory is in his balls
America keeps lashing us
And pulls the strong from his ears
…
America is a god, and a thousand
cowards
9
Among us are on their knees.
L†glm œµ• “‡M §S†QE F™Y
²Šglzs klm kl•^ L†greCLh
L†z†•^En L†e±\ L†z{^n
²Šg•g„T xh ªx†®QE ]™M }I
L†gh OPUQE `a™e L’GaMI
²Šgs•I JM agt’QE ]‹en
...
«}LtV RQIn ½`C L’GaMI
²Šg•tƒC klm ©ƒEC …L††gj
Amidst the humiliation and deafening silence of Arab regimes against
Israeli heavy handed ventures in Lebanon, Nizar saw a glimmer of hope in the
emboldened Lebanese resistance to Israeli occupation of the country’s south,.
He celebrated the resistance’s courage and defiance in such poems as his
poem “The Fifth Southern Symphony.” Such poems won him more popularity
with the average Arab, and although Nizar drew on religious symbolism,
especially the Shiite emotional, one would say masochist, jubilation of
martyrdom as exemplified in the killing of Hussein, the grandson of prophet
Muhammad – by no means did Nizar express any support for the politicization
of Islam. The poet was merely moved by the will of the poor in the south of
Lebanon to challenge far superior forces in defense of their land, a sentiment
shared by most Arabs.
With the writing of his poem “Top Secret Report from “Somtherland”! ”,
his bleak view of the Arab reality engulfed the entire region, kings and
presidents, oil sheiks and buffed-up officers, rulers and ruled. At the end of
the poem he declares rebellion, something he did before; this time, however,
he decides to rebel by fleeing to the West. Although he promises to continue
to speak for the Arab people, in his heart he reached a point of no return. This
sense of the conscious decision to go into Western exile permeates some of
the last poems he wrote in Beirut, as in his poem “The Last Bird to Leave
Granada” – Granada being the dream which turned into a nightmare.
Geneva 1985-90 Bitter Sweet Old Desires
His choice for exile fell on Geneva in Switzerland; a city ideally located
in the center of Europe, quiet and peaceful, and yet cosmopolitan with a
vibrant expatriate Arab community, many of whom were exiles and refugees
from the violent politics of the Arab world. He moved to Geneva in the
summer of 1985 and took residence at 14 Avenue de Budé. There he settled
to a quiet life of reading and writing. Life in exile was not easy after all those
years in Beirut. In moments of loneliness and yearning, he would call the
telephone number of his empty apartment in Beirut, hopelessly wishing to
hear life on the other end.
On the brighter side, Geneva gave him more privacy with the princess,
who visited him frequently and accompanied him to literary conferences, such
as the one held to honor Lebanese poet Yusuf al-Khal in London in 1986. As
Nizar began to show his characteristic boredom and caginess with the grip
Suad had on his life, the princess grew even more possessive and jealous
over him. These feelings of frustration with her soon surfaced in his poetry in
such poems as “Love on a Tape Recorder” and “Love in Subzero
Temperature”:
Mountains of salt stand between us..
How can I break this ice?
How can I walk this distance
Between the lips wanting to kill me..
And a bed detaining me..
And the iron shackles of a braid of
10
hair?
..f†gjn x†gj “„Se ..-lrQE JM •LtV
•]gl™QE EXY aUƒw| Rgƒ
]Gae «WLSŒ Jgj ˆhLUrQE uXY ©{^w| Rgƒn
..xQLg•žE
..xQLi•mE ]GaG aGa| Jgjn
•]G]_QLj x†lªt’e azŒ ¡agSb Jgjn
Despite the distance separating him from his readers, Nizar continued
to be actively involved in discussing the political or cultural difficulties facing
the Arabs. He contributed regularly to Arab journals, mostly those with a wider
margin of freedom like al-Naqed Magazine, which was published in the West
and distributed in the Arab world. When the Palestinian people began their
first uprising against occupation in 1987, which became known as The
Intifada, Nizar came out squarely in their support, dedicating some of his
poetry to the cause of the demonstrators , as in his famous poem “Children
Bearing Rocks” which lionized the children throwing stones at the armor of the
Israeli army:
They stunned the world..
With only stones in their hands..
They lit lanterns, and came like good
omens
They resisted.. exploded.. and were
martyred
And we remained.. polar bears
11
Heavily-armored against feelings..
..Lgs]QE Enapj
.. WCL™_QE Z[ FY]G xh LMn
..¡CL‹tQLƒ EnÈLVn…“GHL†iQLƒ EnÈLbIn
..En]p‹•|En ..Ena™SsEn ..EPMnL^
ˆgt{^ LtjH L†gijn
...¡CEa_QE ]b LYHLUVI y_ªSº\
Nizar wrote prolifically in Geneva, using his access to Arab journalism
abroad to vent out his frustration with Arab regimes in ever more stinging
criticism. His poetry became too painful to stand that the Syrian regime
decided to try and frighten him into silence. In mid October, 1987 Nizar came
home one night to find his apartment was broken into and ravaged in a clear
message of intimidation. The Syrian intelligence was active in Europe in the
eighties, and had indeed targeted Syrian opposition figures, including the
killing of Salah al-Din al-Bitar, the co-founder of the Baath Party, in Paris in
1982. Rather than intimidate him, the threat enraged the poet who
immediately penned a poem specifically about the episode with the title
“Words under the Fangs of Security Agents,” declaring his defiance.
It must be noted, however, that Nizar never overstepped a certain
boundary in his criticism of the Syrian regime, or any Arab regime for that
matter. He kept his grumblings rather general and ambiguous, and just as he
stayed away from panegyrizing individuals in his poetry, he refrained from
naming names in his denunciations. Although he amplified the tempo of his
indirect denunciation of the authoritarianism and repression in Syria, he
avoided a full frontal confrontation by not specifically condemning the regime’s
transgressions – in Hama for example. The accusations of brutality,
backwardness, corruption, treason, etc., were more or less normally traded
among the Arab regimes themselves, and without specificity, the Syrian
regime felt Nizar’s attacks were collective enough to pass for others. In doing
so, the poet fell somewhat in line with all Syrian writers at home and abroad
who participated in a terror-induced silence regarding the human rights
violations of their government.12
Not only did Nizar never address himself to Assad directly, he seems
also to have dropped out the word “assad” (meaning “lion” in Arabic) from his
poetic dictionary. This highly emotive word, a symbol of power and courage, is
notably absent from his poetry despite the high occurrence of similar words
like hisan (horse, 43 times); thi’b (wolf, 38 times); nasr (eagle, 7 times); nimr
(tiger, 4 times); etc.13 Even labwa (lioness) occurs twice, but never the word
“assad”. The omission of any direct criticism of the Assad regime was just
another small paradox for a rebel poet who decided to take on the corrupt
Arab hierarchy. Having been at one time part of the Syrian official
establishment, Nizar never entirely or irrevocably condemned it, always
leaving some doors open. This is in no small part due to the fact that the
available alternative to Assad, i.e. an Islamist rule, was far worse an option in
his eyes.
Despite these pragmatic considerations, and against this backdrop of
intimidation, Nizar made a visit to his homeland in late September 1988. He
was welcomed first by the security services, who, not daring to cause him any
trouble under the watchful eyes of his many influential friends inside and
outside Syria, decided to show their interest by taking him for a “friendly visit”
to have coffee with their top officers. Unfazed, and surrounded by the love of
his family and friends, Nizar later read his poetry to a packed auditorium at the
National Library in Damascus. Loudspeakers were set up outside on the
library grounds, and the streets were jammed with people who came to listen
to him. That evening, he read one of his boldest poems, “The Autobiography
of an Arab Executioner,” a biting, thinly-veiled lampoon of Arab rulers, which,
considering the venue, was taken by all listeners to be none other than Assad
himself.
I am the One..
The Eternal.. among all creatures
I am the memory stored in apple
seeds,
I am the flute, I am the songs
Put up my pictures on city squares
And cover me with clouds of words..
And betroth me the youngest wives..
I do not age..
..]cEPQE x†s[
~L†µL’QE ©grV Jgj LM ..]QL¬QEn
…vLS•QE ¡aƒE• xh }nd¬rQE LsIn
~Lg†žDE ŽC‚n …uL†QEn
uaGnL„e JGHLgrQE ŽPh EPzhC[
..~Lrl’QE Fg®j xsPª{žn
..L†| ~LVndQE a®\I xQ EPt{TEn
..¥gŒI yUQ Lswh
My body does not age..
My prisons do not age
My machines of oppression never
14
age…
..¥g‹G ˜gQ u]UV
..¥g‹e Z xsP™|n
...¥g‹G ˜gQ x•’lrM xh ©riQE ‚LpVn
Apart from few visits abroad, the old poet had more time to himself to
write, and he made good use of it, writing almost nightly. Thus in Geneva,
Nizar produced several collections: Love Will Remain My Master (1987), The
Secret Papers of a Qurmuti Lover (1988), No Other Winner But Love (1990),
and two political verse collections: Married to Freedom (1988), and The Match
is in My Hand, And Your Mini-states Are Made of Paper (1989). The latter
diwan included such notorious poems as “Abu Jahl Buys Fleet Street”, which
he wrote in October 1989 lambasting the hostile takeover of Arab independent
newspapers abroad by Saudi ventures.
London 1990-98 Rebel to the End
Although Nizar was living comfortably in Geneva, his being alone at his
age and with his precarious health was a source of constant worry for his
children. Suad was attending to him occasionally, but her dominion over his
life was sometimes a cause for friction rather than comfort. Hadba, now
divorced and living in London, kept urging her father to come live close to her
in London where she could afford him more care. Finally, toward the end of
1990 Nizar moved to London, taking residence at a flat in Herbert Mansion,
35 Sloan Street in the Knightsbridge area of the city.
Nizar made his move further West as the Arab world was going
through one of its worst crises in its modern history. For on the second of
August that year, Saddam Hussein, the megalomaniac dictator of Iraq,
invaded and annexed neighboring Kuwait making it the country’s nineteenth
province, and triggering an international crisis that threatened to destabilize
the entire region. After eight years of a costly war with Iran, Iraq which
claimed the war in the name of all Arabs was heavily indebted to the oil-rich
kingdoms of the Gulf, especially Kuwait. With the latter unwilling to forego its
debt, the Iraqi leader seized the opportunity to realize his expansionist
dreams, reviving an old Iraqi claim of sovereignty over the sheikhdom. Few in
the Arab street were sympathetic to the plight of the Kuwaitis, seen for the
most part as undeservedly rich playboys. Indeed, most of the Arab public,
poor and misinformed, welcomed the invasion as the final solution to their
own economic troubles, this being, in their view, the first step on the road to
Arab unity.
The crisis weighed heavily on the poet’s mind. On the one hand, he
saw through the injustice and aggression explicit in the invasion, not least
because it directly touched the life of princess Suad who suddenly found
herself along with her entire family in exile in London; on the other hand, he
could sense the feelings of the Arab street, which he never opposed in his life,
and could not bring himself to take the side of the American-led alliance which
ultimately ousted Hussein from Kuwait. Thus he preferred to stay at the
sidelines throughout the crisis. But the disgraceful outcome of the war forced
Nizar to speak: when for all their blowing and blustering about “the mother of
all battles,” the Iraqis suffered a crushing humiliating defeat, Nizar came out
with an angry sarcastic poem directed at the Iraqi leader and other Arab
regimes. Reflecting his mixed feelings at the war, and referring to the piles of
shoes left by the Iraqi dead, he wrote:
I am crying.. I am laughing.. at this battle of
the Gulf
The swords did not meet the swords..
Nor did the men duel the men
Not once did we see..
The great walls of Babylon
They left nothing to history..
15
But piles after piles of their shoes..
¶gl¬QE ˆƒazM ˆg’tM ˆ’_‰M
…•L„†QE klm ~aU’sE •L„†QE ±h
•LVaQE EPQ‚Ls •LVaQE Zn
..¡aM L†GIC Zn
•LtgsLj CEP|I
..¥GCL•QE R_•rQ ..kite LM “’h
!!•Lz†QE JM £EaYI
He gave this poem the suggestive title of “Writings in the Margins of the
Book of Defeat,” playing on the name of his previous post-1967-war poem
“Writings in the Margins of the Book of Setback,” as if telling the Arabs that
there was no need to mince words anymore. For the double benefit of his
readers, he published both poems, along with other political poems, the same
year in a collection he called “Margins to the Margins.”
Unlike many Arab thinkers who saw the war as an expression of
foreign domination and intervention, Nizar saw it as a product of the
dilapidated Arab state of affairs. He maintained his view, that if anyone is to
be held responsible, it is the Arabs themselves. In the poem above, he asked:
Is the regime, in essence, murderous
Or is it us
Who make the regime?
…
Arab daggers crisscrossed in our flesh
16
And Islam is now fighting Islam..
º“eL^ …ÇL|DE xh …£L•†QE “Y
}PQP UM J_s £I
•£L•†QE ˆmL†\ Jm
...
ŠjnazQE aVL†T L†r_Q xh yz›Lie
.. £±|¹Lj £±|¹E ft•ŒEn
For just as he predicted in the late sixties, over the seventies and
eighties Islam became politicized and was dragged into the merciless world of
politics. Nizar saw this firsthand when he was invited by the Algerian ministry
of higher education to visit Algeria two years before. During his visit, and as a
tribute of sorts to his influence, the Islamist opposition organized a rally in
protest against his planned poetry evening in Wahran, the stronghold of the
Jama Islamia (Islamic Group). As an eye witness attested: “People marched
in the streets when they knew of Nizar’s evening, carrying placards and
loudspeakers and saying such things as “Fear God Nizar… you are just two
steps from Hell!”17 A man even lunged at him at one of the city’s coffee shops,
and were it not for his company and police escort, the poet would have been
hurt (in a similar incident, three years later, Naguib Mahfouz was less
fortunate when he was knifed by enraged Islamists). The evening was
cancelled in Wahran, but, again as a sign of the divided loyalties of the
Algerian masses, Nizar’s evening in the capital had to be cancelled when the
intended hall was overwhelmed with the number of people wanting to listen to
him. Consequently, and probably for safety concerns as well, attendance was
restricted to invitations, of which only a thousand were issued for his poetry
recital.18 No other Arab poet could claim to agitate the Arab public to rally for
or against him in such numbers.
The events surrounding his poetry readings in the early nineties were
not as provocative as in Algeria, but no less spectacular. In January 1990 he
visited the United States by invitation from the Arab-American AntiDiscrimination Committee, reading his poetry in Los Angeles to a packed
audience. His evening at the Arab world Institute in Paris in March 1992 was
studded with the Arab intellectuals of the diaspora. About this evening he
faxed his old friend Idriss telling him, “I gathered in this evening all the
persecuted on earth.. and discovered that poetry can, in the absence of real
homelands, be a substitute homeland.. and that the word still has an authority
greater than all official authorities.”19
In December, the poet made the trek back to Beirut, which had
emerged from the civil war and was healing its wounds. There he read his
poetry to huge crowds, young and old, at the American University of Beirut.
The next year, he made peace with the Arab Gulf, traveling to Dubai and
Oman. As an Omani poet remembers, Nizar’s first visit to Muscat – a sleepy
seaside town half hidden in its palm canopies – occasioned the first traffic jam
in the history of the country!20
In Dubai in 1993, Nizar made the acquaintance of Sheikh Sultan alUweis, a wealthy mogul and an arts sponsor, famous for the annual
achievement prize that carries his name. The story how the two men met
sheds some light on Nizar’s relationship with Arab aristocracy, a relationship
that was questioned by several of his critics. A Lebanese mutual friend
remembers Sultan al-Uweis telling him one day that he learned that Nizar was
in Dubai visiting his son and that he wished he could get to know him. AlUweis, who was himself a poet, even told this friend that he considered Nizar
superior to Ahmad Shawqi in Arabic poetry. Without telling al-Uweis, his friend
contacted Nizar and told him about the sheikh. Nizar, in his characteristic
affability, went along with his Lebanese friend’s plan for an unannounced visit
to al-Uweis, and the sheikh was pleasantly surprised to meet Nizar in his own
home. Next year, on March 24, at a ceremony and a poetry reading, Nizar
was awarded al-Uweis Prize for literary achievement, which also carried a
cash payment of $100,000 dollars. The news caused some grumblings
among some Gulf Arabs who objected to rewarding a poet who had lacerated
them for decades.
Nizar’s relationship with money was always the source of whispers and
accusations. He was sometimes painted as greedy or tight-fisted by his rivals.
Some even interpreted in this light his involvement in manual labor when he
launched his publishing house in the late sixties, as if supervising the printing
process or mingling with the press workers was beneath a poet.21 Nizar relied
on his poetry for livelihood, and thus he jealously guarded his intellectual
rights, which sometimes got on the nerves of some publishers and singers
who dealt with him. The concept of intellectual property and royalties has yet
to take root in the Arab psyche; Arab literary works are frequently and openly
pirated with little consequences to the offenders. In conformity with his highlyorganized and meticulous nature, Nizar often took people, including his
friends, to task when it came to his intellectual rights, trying always to maintain
a rigorous position. When MBC (the Middle East Broadcasting Corporation)
requested an exclusive interview with him in 1994, Nizar agreed but asked to
be paid a set fee. When he received the check, he immediately donated it to a
charity.22 And when one of his admirers, a wealthy Arab tycoon, tried secretly
through a third party to give Nizar a gift, “an astronomical dollar amount”, the
poet refused adamantly to accept the money, saying to the messenger
“Please thank him for his love and say to him that Nizar is fine so long as
people love him, that Nizar did not and will not, ever, accept such gifts or
presents.”23
Nizar’s affair with Suad slowed down after he moved to London, but
their friendship continued, albeit with less frequent encounters. All women
have now receded in his life to the realm of friendship, as is clear in his
collection Do You Hear the Neighing of My Sorrows? which he published in
1991. Such poems like “With a Woman Friend in a Diaspora’s Café”, and
“Fatima Buys the Bird of Sorrow” set the tone for his poetic style in his English
exile. His poetry took on a brooding Yeatsian intensity: subdued, deeply
melancholic, lonesome, despairing, and obsessed with aging and with life and
death in exile. Exile itself acquired a new sense for the poet, for beside the
displacement from place, it now had a time dimension as well. The exile in
time affected the concept of love; the erotic lost its life-giving vivacity that had
powered most of Nizar’s poetry to become a painful reminder of loss and
displacement:
My violet, do not embarrass me
Your almond tree is now beyond my reach
I cannot afford your peaches..
I have nothing to give
To love..
24
Except the neighing of my sorrows..
x•™US†j LG x†gVa_e Z
LpQ •P\n Z €‚PQ CL™ŒI
.xsL’M[ ŽPh ..fTPT CLr¤n
ŠM]^I LM u]†m –tG FQ
..œ_lQ
..xsEdcI “gp\ agž
Yet poetry sustained his life, and poetry recreated the feminine in his
life with an amazing intensity. This is even clear from a mere review of some
of the titles of the poems in his last three collections, I Am One Man, and You,
My Love, Are a Tribe of Women (1993) ; Fifty Years in the Praise of Women
(1994); and Nizari Variations on the Note of Love (1996) – titles like: “Twenty
Attempts to Form a Woman”, “Maker of Women” and “The Diary of a
Sculptor,” “If Not for Poetry, You Would Never Be,” “Is the Origin of the
Woman a Poem?” etc.
Despite his age and his distance from the Arab world, the poet
continued to spark controversy in the same spirit he did half a century before.
Two poems he wrote caused quite a stir, in the first, “When Do They Declare
the Death of the Arabs?” he lambasted the Arabs for their civic and
democratic failures; in the second, “The Capitulators”, published October 2,
1995, he lambasted the Oslo Peace Accords between the Palestinians and
the Israelis as deficient and humiliating:
Finally we married without love
The female who one day ate our
children..
..œc ±j L†Vnden ...
..LsHZnI ylƒI £PG ~E• x•QE k‡sDE JM
children..
Chewed our hearts..
And we took her on a honeymoon..
And drank.. and danced..
And recited all that we knew of ghazal..
And then begot, unluckily, retarded kids
Who looked like frogs..
So we roamed the streets of sorrow,
No land to hug
25
No child!
..LsHLtƒI y®‰M
..“UzQE apŒ kQ[ LYLsXTIn
..L†„^Cn ..Lsa’|n
..•d®QE azŒ JM Š•S_s LM “ƒ Ls]z•|En
Jg^LzM EHZnI …¾_QE NPUQ …L†t™sI F¤
..—HLS‰QE “’Œ FpQ
…}d_QE ˆS\CI klm LsHa‹en
..Š†‰_s ]lj JM ±h
!!]Qn JM nI
The poem brought in an answer from Naguib Mahfouz in an article
published in the same newspaper criticizing Nizar for expecting too much from
his people and for raising the problems but not offering solutions. Nizar
defended himself, rather politely in deference to Mahfouz which he revered,
by saying that as a poet it was not his job to find solutions but only to point to
the problems. Other writers and intellectuals soon weighed in on the debate.
Nizar’s nostalgia to his hometown of Damascus became intense in
these last years manifested in the now ubiquitous references to Damascene
motifs such the city’s jasmine, saints, mosques, or even its street cats. Yet
Nizar’s Damascus was more of the product of his poetic imagination than real
life. The city that continued to exist was the same city that treated him coldly
and unkindly. Yet in his poems a new timeless Damascus appears, a city both
kind and welcoming.
As in many aspects in his life, Nizar was also conflicted in how he
looked at his exile in the West. Sometimes he saw the positive energy in it,
the safety and the beauty, as one see in his poems “You Are Beautiful Like
Exile” and “Good Morning Exile!” In the latter, he approached exile as both
enabling and beautiful:
Thanks to my beautiful exile
It gave me a civilization.. maps.. and
harbors..
26
It gave me poems.. and rhymes..
ŠsŸh ..“gr™QE uLS†rQ Ea’Œ
..L sEPMn ..L{µEaTn ..¡CL‰c ªkQ[ •]YI
..LghEP^n ..E]µL„^n
But he also was increasingly feeling himself out of place and out of
time. Even in the West he knew in the fifties was not the West he now lived in.
In several poems, he expresses this disappointment with how Western
civilization has changed. This change he associated with the ascendance of
America and American values at the expense of both the old East and the old
West. These emotions were best expressed in the poem, “Who Am I in
America?” which he wrote and delivered in Washington, DC, in May 1994:
Who am I
In time of robots and computers..
In time of artificial hearts.. and the music
of Madonna
Who am I in a time in which
They manufacture love in medical
27
clinics..?
..LsI JM
..~PjnaQEn ..`P|L_QE JM‚ xh
•LsnHLM kig|PMn ..xmL†„QE œliQEn
JM‚ xh LsI JM
•..NLt›DE ~EHLgm xh Šgh œ_QE }Pz†„G
Not long after that, Nizar began to experience difficulty in writing
poetry. One of the last poems he wrote was “The Last Proclamation of King
Shahrayar” and in it he wrote:
The Nizari age you lived in has come to
an end
Love as we know it has come to an end
And we entered the age of selfishness..
Lovers’ memories have dried out…
The great lovers of history cannot recall
28
The names of their beloveds..
Š²¼ea\Lm uXQE uCEd†QE a„zQE kp•sE
Šhazs Lrƒ œ_QE kp•sEn
..ˆgUVa†QE }LM‚ xh L†lTHn
k•c ..ŽL‹zQE ¡aƒE• yUtG
˜g^ aƒXG ]zG FQ
..ŠGaMLzQE klgQ F|E
Not long after these lines, Nizar stopped writing poetry, and frequently
complained to his friends that he could no longer write, that the poet in him
had died. Nizar the man would go on living and suffering for another year or
so. In 1997 he fell in an elevator and broke his hips, a sad accident that added
to his woes. Early in 1998, he was hospitalized after suffering a seizure. On
April 30, 1998, Nizar passed away.
The Arabs mourned no other poet in their history the way they
mourned Nizar Qabbani.
Notes
REFERENCES