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Nizzar Qabbani: The Poet who challenged Arab Taboos
by adel Darwish
When Nizzar Qabbani, one of the contemporary Arab World's most celebrated
poets, died in London at age 72 on 30 April 1998, leaving a rich but contentious
legacy. Qabbani's poetry was romantic, political, erotic, bold and above
all controversial. People hated it or loved it.
Events following his demise certainly proved this last point. Some fundamentalist
Muslims occupied London Central mosque to prevent his family and friends
holding an Islamic memorial service, branding him a "Zendique"
(atheist).
A few days later another furious row developed between two producers at
a London-based Arab satellite television service, this time over Qabbani's
first anthology (Tofoulat Nahd) or "Childhood of a Bosom." The
book caused a scandal when it was first published in conservative Damascus
in 1947. But the quarrel of 1998 encapsulated the controversy that Qabbani's
poems caused in the Arab world. It was a battle between the sexes, between
the liberal and the traditional, and--most important--between a self-censoring
inner tyranny of the mind and that of the freedom to explore.
The two protagonists were entrenched in their beliefs. The senior, producer
was a Palestinian woman in her forties who was infuriated by a proposal
to censor the poem "Childhood of a Bosom" out of a two-hour
live program dedicated to Qabbani. The male producer, also a Palestinian
and in his thirties, argued that "the erotic nature of the verse
might offend the sensibilities of conservative Arab sheikhs," in
the audience or among the station's sponsors.
Finally the woman producer won he day, albeit by the decision of the male
managing director who accepted her argument that it would be better to
concentrate the discussion during the live transmission on love poetry
rather than risking discussing Qabbani's political poetry, where traditional
Arab rulers seldom appear in a favorable light.
The resulting broadcast mirrored the Arab intelligentsia's ambivalent
attitude towards Nizar Qabbani. Everyone did, however agree on one thing:
Many ordinary men and women, as well as writers and poets were grieving
the loss of the master of love, defamation and lament verse who expressed
their aspirations and frustrations.
Many scholars believe that in 1947 the young Qabbani had deliberately
chosen a provocative title for his poem and anticipated the fury. Controversy
had often gone hand-in-hand with the publication of his new work. But,
as his later poetry showed, Qabbani was not merely trying to provoke,
as he went on to challenge well-established taboos.
By the 1970s, Qabbani's verse ridiculed and decried "Dhuniyat al-Thareem"
(from the Arabic word harram, meaning unholy, blasphemous and anti-Islamic,
thus a forbiddance mentality). This phrase had been coined by Arab modernists
in reaction to Iran's fatwa against British author Salman Rushdie for
writing the novel The Satanic Verses.
Several times Qabbani hinted that such taboos were merely tools deployed
and encouraged by a patriarchy tyrannical establishment to bar the Arab
mind from breaking free from their despotism. These had to be abandoned
if the mind was to generate independent and creative interpretation of
religious and cultural heritage.
Conservative and authoritarian Arab regimes disliked and often banned
his poetry as it embodied assaults on social and sexual taboos. His poetry
alerted readers, and listeners--since many celebrated singers like Abdel
Halim Hafez, Nagat el-Saghira, Firuz, and Um Kolthoom sang his poetry--with
a clarion call declaring that national and social liberation was meaningless
without sexual liberation.
His political poetry, on the other hand was nationalistic and glorified
violence, placing the abstract idea of armed struggle, killing and martyrdom,
before peace and love of life. This often meant exalting dictators who
fitted his image of a mythical Arab hero.
Qabbani fiercely resisted the idea of normalization with Israel. He published
works like "Why I sing for Armed Struggle" and a poem (later
a song) "Now I have a rifle, show me the way to Jerusalem."
He styled other poems on the early Bolshevik verse glorifying the revolution
and the sacrifices of the masses.
Many of his poems were also not welcomed in Syria by the Ba'th regime.
But after his death, Syrian President Hafiz al-Assad sent a plane to fly
the dead poet home for burial in Damascus, where a street was named after
him in 1997.
Qabbani was born in Damascus on 21 March 1923 to a respected but not wealthy
family. His great uncle was Abu Khalil el-Qabbani, a 19th-century pioneer
of Arab theater. His niece is the London- based feminist writer Ranna
Qabbani.
He joined the Syrian diplomatic service after graduating law school in
1945. His 1954 poem "Bread, Hashish and a Moon" so offended
the sensibilities of Syrian parliament members that they demanded his
firing and trial. But Qabbani survived this crisis, serving in Cairo,
Ankara, London, Madrid, Beijing and Beirut, which he made his home after
quitting the diplomatic service in 1966. He was still in Beirut when he
met the love of his life, the Iraqi teacher Balquis al-Rawi, during a
poetry festival in Baghdad.
Their love gave new power to his talent. After he divorced his first wife
Zahra Aqbiq, a Syrian by whom he had two children, Balquis moved to Beirut
as a cultural attache in the Iraqi embassy to be near him. He confessed
that she inspired his love poetry "like no other woman did."
They married in 1973 and stayed most of the time in Beirut during its
turbulent years.
Eroticism, love, lament, political satire, a heavy sense of history, anger,
violence and death could all be found in one verse of his works of the
period. His eldest son, from his first wife Zahra, died in an accident
in Beirut in 1973. Balquis was killed in 1981 when pro-Iranian terrorists
blew up the Iraqi embassy in Beirut where she worked.
He entitled an anthology "To Beirut, the female." Many verses
in that book illustrated how he mastered his craftsmanship of preserving
the image of the woman he tenderly loved with the herbs of lament, political--often
sad--awareness and history. His excellence in expressing the way the Arab
female experienced love made Arab women the largest market for his anthologies.
His sister's suicide when she was forbidden from marrying the man she
loved, had deeply affected him as a teenager. Another impression was left
by his illiterate mother selling her jewelry to raise the cash to publish
his first works "Childhood of a Bosom," in 1947. "Wild
poems," published later in the same year was about eroticism and
gay love, a subject still barred from Arab media of today.
His later poetry reflected the contradictions of contemporary intellectual
Arabs. He attacked the tyranny and corruption of Arab regimes yet supported
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and participated in many poetry festivals
sponsored and attended by him. In 1991 he published "Writings on
the Margins of the Books of Defeat," portraying the Gulf War which
pushed Saddam's occupying forces out of Kuwait as "a catastrophic
defeat for all Arabs." He worshipped the late populist leader Gamal
Abdel Nasser, who eradicated pluralist liberal democracy from Egypt.
He was impressed by Colonel Nasser's anti-British stance during the 1956
Suez crisis. Then he became obsessed with his romantic idea of one Arab
Nation. He established a wider pan-Arab audience with his poem "Attachments
to the Book of Naksa"--Naksa was the name given by Nasser and others
to their defeat in the 1967 war. The poem was banned from the state-controlled
Egyptian media for satirizing autocracy and shaming Arab armies as:
The Sultan's guards,
Who fiercely face student demonstrations,
And turn into ostriches when facing the enemy.
He became awash with guilt when Nasser died of a heart attack in 1970.
He called Nasser "the last of the prophets," in a poem lamenting
his death, entitled "We Murdered the Prophet," while defaming
other Arab leaders as:
The assassins who,
Stabbed the Imam,
During his night prayer.
In the same poem, he portrayed an image of Arab rulers:
Walking behind the prophet's coffin,
Holding their blooded daggers under their mourning cloaks.'
In 1995 the poet of love caused another uproar by declaring the death
of the Arabs as a nation:
A horrifying chain of degenerations,
Swiftly soaked us into the age of senility,
His 1990 masterpiece '' Abu Jahl (the father of ignorance) buys Fleet
Street'' became a classic reference to the bankruptcy of Arab journalism
as it aired the frustration of many Arab journalists who escaped to London
and Paris only to become helplessly enslaved by petrodollars in the hands
of illiterate conservative paymasters choking their words. The closing
stanza was a satirical and bitter attack concealed as an appeal to an
unnamed conservative Arab ruler.
O long lived one,
We vow never to seek a share of your rule.
O long lived one,
We vow never even as to look at your throne,
O long lived one,
Go on lashing, as many of the people as you wish
And killing as many of your subjects as you wish,
And fuck as many of your slave girls as you wish,
We only have one wish:
Spare us the words, and spare us the letters.
By the time of his death, his 1990 prophecy was fulfilled: not one single
Arab media organization in Europe was left independent to report freely
on Arab or international affairs.