From
Arabian Love Poems by Nizar Kabbani, translated by Bassam K. Frangieh
and Clementina R. Brown. Copyright (c) 1999 by Bassam K. Frangieh
and Clementina R. Brown. Used with permission of Lynne Rienner Publishers,
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Introduction - Continue...
Bassam K. Frangieh
A year after the controversial collection was published, Kabbani
joined the Syrian diplomatic corps, subsequently serving in Cairo,
Ankara, London, Madrid, Beijing, and Beirut. This experience played
an important role in his life and his art, for his ever more complex
and allusive style seems to reflect his long immersion in foreign
cultures. Nevertheless, he continued to publish poems in which he
described his deepening feelings about women and his sympathies
for their deprivations and unequal treatment.
By 1948, he published his second collection, Tufulat Nahd (Young
Breast), another important achievement. The relative openness of
Cairo, his first post, had further liberated the artist in him and
refined his poetic language, introducing sensuous images within
a complex aesthetic framework and symbolic expressions. In his collection
Qasa’id (Poems), published in 1956, Kabbani further explored
the inner world of women and established new trends in feelings
and thought. Here, for the first time, he expressed himself in the
first-person feminine. This is an important aspect of his poetry,
through which the reader experiences the hidden world of women and
hears their bitter words against men and society. In a sense, he
was doing what his artistic uncle had done—using male voices
to speak for the generations of silenced women.
Kabbani said it better in the introduction to his collection Yawmiyyat
Imra’a La-Mubaliya (Diary of an Indifferent Woman), 1968,
where he elaborated further on the societal pressures on Arab women:
“This is the book of every woman. . .sentenced and executed
before she could open her mouth. The East needs a man like me to
put on the clothes of a woman and to borrow her bracelets and eyelashes
in order to write about her. Is it not an irony that I cry out with
a woman’s voice while women cannot speak up on their own?”
From the very beginning of his poetic career, Kabbani held Arab
men and the society they dominated responsible for the wrongs done
to women. He early understood the problems of women, and his position
on the issue of women’s rights remained unchanged. His poetry,
early and late, with its social and aesthetic dimensions, made a
difference. Kabbani, allying himself through his art with liberal
forces at work in the Arab world, courageously produced vivid verses
that created an atmosphere encouraging women to abandon the veil,
to choose their marriage partners, and to gain a modest level of
independence.
In the spring of 1966, Kabbani left the diplomatic service to devote
himself entirely to his poetry. He remained in Beirut, his last
post, and founded the publishing house Manshurat Nizar Kabbani to
produce his works. Kabbani wrote: “When I sat behind the desk
and lit the first cigarette in my Beirut office, I felt like a king
with real authority.” The concept of love that Kabbani developed
in his 1966 publication “Painting with Words” was one
result of his twenty years of emotional, social, and poetic experience
outside of Syria.
In his 1972 collection, Ash’ar Kharija ‘ala al-Qanun
(Poems Outside the Law), the reader finds symbolism intermixed with
romanticism. It is a sharp and sensitive collection in which each
poem changes into a symbol. The beautiful poem “Tanwi’at
Musiqiyah ‘an Imra’ah Mutajarridah” (Musical Variations
of a Naked Woman), for example, is a creative and innovative work
depicting the feelings of a poet before two naked breasts. His feelings
expand to include visions and images transferring the movements
of the breasts into voices, smells, tastes, flames, and colors.
The poem is an artistic mixture of images, thoughts, and feelings,
rich in details:
Two beautiful roosters
Crow on your chest
And sleep.
I remained sleepless.
The hand-embroidered sheet
Was covered with birds,
Roses and palm trees.
The fields of Ceylon,
The forests of spices,
And the coconuts
Call me,
Keeping me from sleep.
My nerves are pieces of straw,
My face a newspaper clipping.
I am not a killer,
But the jumping shark
In the gulf of your wild breasts
Seduced me into committing a crime.
Your half-open red gown
Revealing two firm breasts
Sliced my wound open.
I dreamt of you in your bath,
The iridescent bubbles
Floated by the chandelier, flicked my skin,
Broke me on the ground into pieces.
Your breasts were two baby lambs
Nuzzling on the grass of my chest,
Cashmere fleeced my face, my shirt.
I, shattered, glittered on the floor like beads . . .
Drinking coffee,
And your gown
Roused me,
Millions of gifts you offered.
Your breasts were two unbridled horses
Drinking water from the bottom of mirrors. . . .
Kabbani rejected the silencing of love, just as he opposed societal
values based on repression. Many of his verses sought to incite
women to liberate themselves from constricting society.
Love me and say it out loud,
I refuse that you love me mutely
There is no poem by Kabbani that is free of a female presence, and
there is nothing about women that Kabbani could not transform as
an inspiration for his verse.
I become ugly when I don’t love
And I become ugly when I don’t write
The supreme importance of women to Kabbani is indicated in the following
verse, which depicts women as a source of protection, salvation,
and supernatural power in the face of death:
Nothing protects us from death
Except woman and writing
The poet paid a great deal of attention to the emotional lives of
women and was fond of the “little things” that shape
how they think and feel. In his poem “Shu’un Saghirah”
(Little Things), he speaks in a woman’s voice to reveal the
way she feels when she is in love, describing the details and inner
world that fill her life and enrich her imagination, and conveying
her passion, warmth, and innocence:
Little things
Which mean the world to me
Pass by you
Without making an impression.
From these things
I build palaces,
Live on them for months
And spin many tales from them,
One thousand skies,
And one thousand islands,
But these little things
Mean nothing to you.
When the telephone rings in our house
I run to it
With the joy of a small child,
I embrace the emotionless machine
And squeeze
Its cold wires
And I wait
For your warm, full voice to come to me
Like the music of falling stars
And the sound of tumbling jewels.
I cry
Because you have thought of me
And have called me
From the invisible world.
When I return to my room in the evening
And take off my dress,
I feel your hands
Mercifully wrapping around my arms.
Although you are not in my room
I worship
The place where your warm hands
Held the sleeve of my blue dress
And cry.
Kabbani played an important role in bringing poetic language closer
to the language used in everyday life. Poet Salma Jayyusi argues
that Kabbani did more than any other contemporary Arab poet to unite
the language of poetry with contemporary language, both written
and vernacular. In much of his erotic and sociopolitical verse,
he managed to approximate the rhythms of common speech. His poetry
produces an instant effect on the audience. His contemporary voice
is heard not only in the use of the single word, but also, and this
is most important, in his style, his word arrangement, and the very
spirit of the language.
Leading critic Ihsan Abbas has argued that, if not for Nizar Kabbani
and some of the poetry of Salah Abdul Sabour, love would not have
taken the form of an independent poetic theme in the Arab world.
Before these two poets, love had been mixed and blended with other
themes. Kabbani gave the theme of love distinct dimensions that
guaranteed its independent existence, and as a result, he was named
the poet of love. Kabbani made love one part of an equation between
two great powers: women and poetry.
Kabbani also addressed problems facing women from a psychological
or sociological point of view. The reaction of a woman to an unfaithful
husband is examined in “Risalah Min Sayyidah Haqidah”
(Letter from an Angry Woman). The problem of a pregnant woman whose
lover turns his back on her is the subject of “Hubla”
(Pregnant). How a woman might express her sexual hunger when the
man close to her does not satisfy her is the theme of “Aw’iyat
al-Sadid” (Vessels of Pus). And how this same woman then ceases
from making love to men and begins to make love with women is the
subject of “Al-Qasidah al-Shirirah” (The Evil Poem).
Kabbani’s poetry was not inspired by a single love or a single
woman; it was the product of multiple relationships and much experience.
His love had a universal tone and universal dimensions—a lover
for the entire world. He felt that he was part of the land, society,
culture, and history, and that each word a poet puts on paper carries
within it an entire humanity. “Woman for me is a continent
that I travelled to, but she is certainly not the entire world.
Love for me embraces the entire universe. It exists in the soil
and water and in the night; in the wounds of fighters and in the
eyes of children; in the revolutions of students and in the furor
of angry men. Woman is a seaport among many seaports that provided
me with bread, water, silk, and incense, but the rest of the ports
continue calling to my ship.
Kabbani saw in women a revolution and a means of liberation for
both men and women. He linked women’s rights with the war
for social liberation in the Arab world, maintaining: “Unless
we stop considering women as sex objects, there will be no liberation.
Sexual repression is the biggest problem in the Arab World.”
He called for an end to the game of love behind closed doors: “I
have moved my bed to the open air and I have written my love poems
on trees in public parks . . . to put an end to secretive and marshal
laws imposed on the body of the Arab woman and make love legitimate.”
“People who are possessed with sex, he wrote, “cannot
write, think, or undertake any civilized achievement.” Thus,
he was convinced that sexual repression is one reason behind the
economic backwardness of the Arab world, and that any revolution
concerned solely with an individual’s thoughts and not with
his or her body is only half a revolution.
Kabbani believed that, ideally, art should be able to lift the veil
from tragedy without seeking solutions. He touched upon his subject
with the tenderness and delicacy of a butterfly, like a painter
using his brush. His skillful and hidden techniques require careful
study.
Poetic language is the real key to Kabbani’s work and was
his most important achievement. “I departed from the dictionary
and dealt with vocabulary that everyone used. I included words that
are hot, fresh, and mixed with the flesh of human beings and the
incidents in their daily lives.” As he saw it, his task as
a poet was to take poetry from the lips of individuals and return
it to them. His words were always warm and directed to innocent,
simple people, to those who “could not find clothes to wear
so they wore a poem.” He portrayed the reality of his audience.
Kabbani also was an indisputable master of poetry readings. His
readings were exceptional cultural events, and millions of Arabs
gathered to listen to him in person, on television, or on the radio,
affirming the importance of poetry in the lives of Arabs and in
the molding of their consciousness. In Sudan, ten thousand people
attended one of his open-air readings. During the Arab League’s
1980 poetry festival in Tunis, he read his powerful poem “Ana
Ya Sadiqati Mut’abun Bi’urubati” (My Friend, I
am Tired of My Arabism), which was broadcast on Tunisian National
Television; it is said that the broadcast was watched by everyone
in the country who had access to a television, and by the next day
the poem had spread throughout the Middle East, where its verses
can be found to this day framed on walls in homes.
More than those of any other contemporary Arab poet, Kabbani’s
poems have been set to music and recorded. Since popular music in
the Arab world has a massive audience, these recordings have broadened
Kabbani’s appeal even further, capturing the hearts of millios
of listeners and flowing from many lips. His verses serve as a bridge
between popular music and modern poetry, and they have enriched
popular Arabic music with poetic rhythms and nuances.
Although Kabbani mixed romanticism and symbolism with realism, his
work is difficult to classify into one school or movement of poetic
thought. He himself was well aware of this fact. In his 1990 volume
Hal Tasma’in Sahil Ahzani? (Do You Hear the Neigh of My Sadness?),
for example, he wrote: “Don’t bother to classify me.
I’m a poet outside classification, description and specifications.
I’m not a traditionalist, a modernist, classicist, neoclassicist,
romantic, nor a futurist, an impressionist, or surrealist. I’m
a mixture that no laboratory can analyze. I’m a mixture of
freedom. This is the word that I have been seeking for fifty years
and I only found it this moment.”
It was in 1954 that Kabbani added another taboo to his poetry: politics.
In that year he published “Khubz wa Hashish wa Qamar”
(Bread, Hashish, and Moon), in which he harshly criticized the mistakes
of the Arabs, attacking all Arab leaders in his demand for radical
change. More than a decade later, after the Arab defeat in the Six
Day War, he announced his commitment to political poetry:
O my sad homeland
You have changed me
In a single moment
From the poet writing of love and longing
To a poet writing with a knife
“Woman has been my beloved for fifty years and still is,”
he wrote, “but I added to her a second wife; her name is Homeland.”
Kabbani’s growing commitment to political poetry was not a
surprise. The first poem he wrote had a nationalist theme, and he
kept touching on other political and social themes. His love and
compassion for his country and his longing for his land were always
strong, reflecting his family’s deep roots in the national
and social struggles in the Arab world. Traveling in Andalusia,
he was swept by a storm of yearning for his homeland:
In the narrow streets of Cordova
I reached into my pockets more than once
To pull out the keys
To our house in Damascus
In 1956, he wrote “The Story of Rachel Schwartzenberg,”
in which he summarized in poetic verses the story of the Zionist
movement and the miserable situation of Palestinians living and
struggling in the diaspora. Also in 1956, during the aggression
of Britain, France, and Israel against Egypt, he wrote “Letter
from a Soldier on the Suez Front,” denouncing the attackers
and depicting the heroism of the Egyptians as they defended their
land. In 1961 he wrote “Jamila Buhayred,” in which he
described that woman’s bravery and her prominent role in the
Algerian struggle against the French.
“Bread, Hashish, and Moon” (1954), however, was perhaps
his most famous sociopolitical poem. In it he shook the foundations
of Arab society by revealing a collapsing social system and calling
for immediate change. The poet described in clear words the miserable
situation of the masses who live in poverty, superstition, and backwardness:
When the moon is born in the east,
The white roofs sleep
Beneath the heaps of light,
People leave their shops and depart in groups
To meet the moon,
Carrying their bread and songs to the mountaintop,
And their drugs,
Where they buy and sell fantasies
And images,
And die if the moon comes to life.
What does that luminous disc
Do to my land,
To the land of the prophets,
To the land of the simple,
The chewers of tobacco and dealers of narcotics,
What does the moon do to us,
That we lose our pride
And live only to beg from heaven?
What does heaven have
For the lazy and the weak? . . .
They spread out their fine and elegant carpets
And console themselves with an opium
Called destiny and fate
In this land, the land of the simple.
After the poem was published, the Syrian parliament met to discuss
its implications, and some members of parliament demanded that its
author be expelled from the Syrian foreign service.
The poem “Hawamish ‘ala Daftar al-Naksah” (Marginal
Notes on the Book of Defeat), which Kabbani wrote immediately after
the 1967 Arab defeat, contained harsh criticism for the political,
psychological, and strategic mistakes of the Arabs. This poem resulted
in pitting both the right and the left against him because he attacked
all Arab leaders without exception, calling for democracy, freedom,
and justice:
It is not surprising that we have lost the war.
For we fought it
With all the East’s rhetorical talents
And empty heroism.
The secret of our tragedy:
Our cries are more powerful than our voices,
Our swords taller than our men.
Our skins are numbed.
Our souls bankrupt,
Our days wasted in witchcraft, chess and sleep.
O Sultan, O my lord,
Because I came close to your deaf walls,
Trying to reveal my sadness and my misfortune,
I was beaten with shoes.
Your soldiers forced me to eat out of my shoes.
O Sultan, O my lord,
You have lost the war twice
Because half of us has no tongue
What value are people with no voice?
The poem found a large audience among the many Arabs who read in
it what they had wanted to say but were not able to put into words.
As happens to many artists of courage and vision, Kabbani paid a
high price for writing political poetry. At one time or another,
most of the Arab regimes have censored his books. In Egypt, after
the publication of “Marginal Notes on the Book of Defeat,”
all of Kabbani’s poetry, including his verses set to music,
was banned; he was not allowed to enter the country, and there were
calls for a trial. Eventually, however, after a personal appeal
to Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Naser, Kabbani was given permission
to travel in Egypt and his music and poetry were available again.
Kabbani’s message is clear and consistent: the political and
social structures in the Arab world must change to better represent
the people. He vowed publicly to maintain his vigil on Arab governments
and societies until real change took place, and he held to his course.
Beirut, the city where Kabbani settled after his diplomatic career,
was to be a site of deep personal tragedy for the poet. He lost
his second wife there in 1981, when she was an innocent victim in
a bomb blast during the Lebanese Civil War. Eight years earlier,
he had lost his twenty-five-year-old son, a medical student, to
a heart ailment. This double tragedy left a deep mark on his life.
His moving poem “Balqis,” about his murdered wife, is
a lengthy and powerful attack on all parties in the Lebanese Civil
War who had abandoned major problems in the Arab world in order
to fight each other. In “Balqis” he came close to naming
those whom he believed had planted the bomb that killed his wife.
Although he vowed in this poem never to write again, the prolific
writer did not keep his pledge. He left Beirut after her death to
reside in France and Switzerland, and finally settled in England
where he lived until his death in May 1998.
There is a close harmony between Kabbani the man, his poetry, and
his beliefs. This harmony produced a special musicality in his poetry
that is more important than rhyme and meter. He also wrote from
the heart—“I felt something, so I created something”
—and the qualities of innocence, truthfulness, and simplicity
permeate his work. Perhaps the most important praise of any writer
is the excitement and anticipation with which his or her followers
wait for new work. The Arab world always anxiously awaited Kabbani’s
next poem, whatever the subject matter. It is still difficult to
accept that there will not be one.
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