No, my keyboard hasn't blown a chip, but if the name of the most
universally celebrated Arab poet strikes you like a pair of randomly
generated nonsense words, consider where the problem might lie,
especially since he's also the most celebrated Arab champion of
women's rights.
Alas, except for the immortality his work confers, I use the wrong
tense here: Nizar Qabbani died in London on May 1st, but no one in
the media thought to notify you. Here is some of what the Palestinian
writer and translator Salma Khadra Jayyusi has to say about him:
Qabbani was not embracing fashionable causes when he began his
concentrated attack on the way women were induced, through a narrow
conservative education, to deny their own humanity. He began his
campaign long before feminism in the Arab world became a fashionable
pursuit. It was through his erotic verse that Qabbani first
discovered, for himself and others, the full meaning of freedom,
the fact that genuine freedom is not divisible, and cannot be sought
except in its totality. Political freedom has been championed by
every poet who mattered in the Arab world. In fact, it is virtually
impossible for any Arab poet to win esteem among the audience of
poetry without first championing the cause of freedom and political
liberty. The Arab world is full of poets and other creative writers
who are refugees from their own governments because of their audacity
in facing up to injustice and repression. This kind of struggle
against internal coercion, waged constantly by generation after
generation of Arab creative writers, particularly the poets, has long
been their privilege and choice, making itself felt before political
thinkers begin to wage war through intellectual reasoning and
didactic argument.
Qabbani's superior achievement, however, is that he not only attacked
political coercion, but aimed his well-honed pen at the most
sacrosanct taboos in Arab traditional culture: the sexual. He called
for the liberation of both body and soul from the repressive
injunctions imposed upon them throughout the centuries, awakening
women to a new awareness of their bodies and their sexuality,
wrenching them away from the taboos of society, and making them aware
of its discriminatory treatment of the sexes, of its inherent cruelty.
Aroused consciousness is irreversible, except through delusion.
Fanatical counterattacks, made in the name of religion, honor, or any
of the great absolutes, can warp meaning already gained and re-encode
its signals, but they cannot obliterate knowledge already acquired.
Something will abide: if not full conviction, at least a question,
a lingering doubt. The Qabbani baptism is like a tatoo on the spirit.
It cannot be removed.
And here is some of what Qabbani has to say for himself.
The Trial
The East receives my songs, some praise, some curse
To each of them my gratitude I bear
For I've avenged the blood of each slain woman
and haven offered her who is in fear.
Woman's rebellious heart I have supported
ready to pay the prize - content to die
if love should slay me, for I am love's champion
and if I ceased, then I would not be I.
Language
When a man is in love
how can he use old words?
Should a woman
desiring her lover
lie down with
grammarians and linguists?
I said nothing
to the woman I loved
but gathered
love's adjectives into a suitcase
and fled from all languages.
Fatima
Fatima refuses all texts whose authenticity is suspect
and begins from the first line
she tears up all the manuscripts written by males
and begins from the alphabet of her womanhood.
She throws away all her school books
and reads in the book of my lips.
Migrates from the cities of dust
and follows me barefoot to the cities of water.
Leaps out from the train of antiquity
and speaks with me the language of the sea
breaks her desert watch
and takes me with her outside all of time.
Diary of an Indifferent Woman (first three and final stanzas)
I am a woman
I am a woman
The day I came into this world
I found my extermination was decreed
But I never saw the doors of law courts
nor the faces of my judges.
The hands of the clock
are like the jaws of a whale, ready to swallow me
- hands like two snakes on the wall
like a guillotine, like a noose
like a knife that rips me apart
like a thief with quick footsteps
following me, following me
Why shouldn't I smash it?
when every one of its minutes smashes me?
I am a woman in whose heart
the pulse of time has stopped
I do not know spring flowers
nor does April know me.
Why does my father play the tyrant with me
and wear me down with his authority?
Why does he look upon me as an object,
as a line of print in his newspaper?
Why is he so anxious that I should remain his only
as if I were just part of his property,
something ALWAYS THERE
LIKE A CHAIR IN HIS ROOM?
Is it just good enough to be his daughter?
I reject my father's wealth
his pearls and silver
My father never once noticed
my body and its rebellion
Selfish
sick in his love,
sick in his fanaticism
sick in his domineering
He is enraged if he sees my breasts
have become fuller and more rounded;
he is enraged if he sees a man
approach that garden
But my father can never prevent the apples
completing their circle
A thousand birds will come
and rob his orchard.
.........................
I'll speak of my girl companions
I see my own story
in that of each of them
and the same tragedy
I'll write about my girl companions
about the prison that saps their lives
about the time wasted in reading women's magazines
about the never-opened doors
about desires nipped in the bud
about the nipples screaming out beneath the silk
about the great prison cell
and its black walls
about the thousands and thousands of martyred girls
buried in nameless graves in the cemetery of tradition
These friends of mine are like dolls swathed in cotton
inside a locked museum
like coins, minted by history, that can neither be spent
nor given away
shoals of fish suffocated in their ponds
crystal bottles with dead butterflies in them
I shall write about my friends fearlessly
about the blood-stained fetters on the feet of beautiful
girls
about their hallucinations, their nausea and about nights
of entreaty to God
about desires stifled in the pillows
about going round and round in the void
about the death of fleeting moments
My friends are slaves bought and sold in superstition's
market
captives in an Eastern harem, dead without being dead
they live and die like mushrooms under glass
My friends
birds who perish in caves without a single sound.
Qabbani took on other aspects of his people's criticism,
as is mentioned above by his translator. The following piece,
inspired by the Intifada, ends this appreciation.
Children Bearing Rocks
With mere rocks in their hands,
they stun the world
and they come to us like good tidings.
Bursting with love and anger,
they defy, and topple,
while we remain a herd of polar bears
bundled against weather.
Like mussels we sit in cafes,
one hunts for a business venture,
one for another billion
a fourth wife
breasts polished by civilization.
One stalks London for a lofty mansion
one traffics in arms
one seeks revenge in nightclubs
one plots for a throne, a private army,
a princedom.
Ah, generation of betrayal,
of surrogate, indecent men,
generation of leftovers,
we'll be swept away -
never mind the slow pace of history -
by children bearing rocks.
The Syrian government, never eager to have the living Nizar Qabbani
around the Damascus where he was born in 1923, was quick to dispatch
a plane for his inoffensive corpse.
