By Nouri Al-Jarrah
Twenty years ago, in days like these, Nizar Qabbani left our world after spending his last twenty years in London, far from his Damascus, which he had immortalized in his poetry as a legendary place adorned with garlands of jasmine and moons of love staying up late on balconies, with butterflies flitting in the morning sun behind clotheslines.
In our London exile, under its bleak clouds, Nizar was a distinctive figure among us, the new, angry poets. We disagreed with him, and he lampooned us in his poetry, labeling us as “modernists disconnected from our roots.” Yet, what we would reject from any other poet in terms of criticism of new Arabic poetry, we accepted from Nizar, as he held a special place in our hearts.
I always felt that no matter how far Nizar wandered, Damascus remained the most present city in his poetry, and his name as a poet would always evoke thoughts of this great city.
I
A few months before his passing, I wrote an article titled “Nizar Qabbani as a Modernist,” which earned me criticism from several Arab poets who are considered modernists. They thought I was exaggerating and made me feel that this was one of my mistakes. In that piece, I wrote, “Nizar Qabbani is not only the most famous living Arab poet, but he is also one of the prominent faces of Arab poetic modernism, which he himself often criticized—a paradox that is more suitable for deep critical reflection than for journalistic use.”
It can be understood that Nizar was a sharp-tempered poetic figure, and his critical discourse parallel to his poetry—at first distinct and later intertwined with it—was lofty, emotional, revolutionary, and marked by a harsh tone. This discourse resonated strongly with angry readers and those who wanted to be angry. Perhaps it was this taut poetic nerve, his revolutionary nature, and the almost spontaneous flow of fiery, everyday words that Nizar chose that kept him beloved by the widest audience of readers, despite the fading glow of his later poetry.
Is it permissible for me to compare him to light reaching the earth from a distant star that died long ago? Perhaps. But the Arabs, whose intellectual elites disagreed on this poet and his role in liberating poetry from its inherited loftiness, will take pride in Nizar’s poetry more and more, and future criticism will reconsider his work, exploring the relationship between his poems and modernity.
While Nizar’s poetry appealed to a wide audience of Arab readers, his language unconsciously influenced many subsequent poets. In the most critical phase of life, when aesthetic senses are shaped through language, it became difficult for emerging poets to resist the allure of Nizar’s poetry. One of Nizar’s most prominent poetic “sons” is Mahmoud Darwish, who admitted this several times, while others prefer to deny or remain silent about this “fatherhood.”
If the topic were to explore Nizar’s modernism, perhaps its most evident feature lies in his tone and voice, his language, which stands at the midpoint of all modern poetic “languages,” with smooth relations, elegant structures, and unique aesthetics that are fully integrated into modern poetry.
This was not achieved all at once but through stages, the most prominent of which was the 1960s, where Nizar presented his most distinguished and well-known poetic works. Perhaps it is enough to say that Nizar, who filled his poetry with contradictions, still maintained a coherence in his expressions, unmatched in modern poetry. He is the Arab poet who founded the concept of “woman” in poetry, establishing a new representation of the feminine voice and image—a midpoint between the male and female voices, liberating the poetic discourse on women from the ambiguity with which poetry traditionally shrouded it.
Nizar’s poetry did not entirely sever ties with conventional societal views on women. However, he filled the empty space in the language with women’s things: her hairpins, her letters, her imagined calendar. The value of this, in my opinion, lies not always in its artistic truth but in its vitality and its ability to create an illusion. That is to say, its value is precisely in its playfulness with words and its emotional exploration.
Despite his modern outlook, Nizar remained a poet of contradictions. He represented masculinity while criticizing it, liberating women while guarding the door to their room. He was the image of the lover whose inherited power of love crumbled in the face of the new formulations that modern life proposed to women seeking a contemporary partner—the modern man.
II
If Damascus is known for its jasmine, then Nizar Qabbani’s poems carried it to every inch of the Arab world, from Damascus to Nouakchott, from Cairo to Zanzibar. Those who did not read his poetry in books heard it on recordings or sang along with the singer Abdel Halim Hafez, who sang Nizar’s poetry and deeply touched the hearts of heartbroken lovers, adding a new dimension to his image as a singer.
Nizar was the only Arab poet to…
Let me know if you’d like me to translate the rest.Nizar, then, is the code name for poetry, and to contemporary people, the poet is Nizar.
No poet has caused as much agreement and disagreement among Arabs as Nizar Qabbani, whose poetry blends simplicity, sweetness, boldness in expression, wit, and novelty. He is the poet who brought the poem down from the lofty horse of Al-Mutanabbi and made it walk on two feet in a crowded contemporary Arab street filled with pedestrians and carts.
III
Two ideologies have fought against Nizar since he published his first collection “The Brunette Said to Me” in 1944. These ideologies opposed his radical poetic approach to love poetry and later to political expression—especially after the June 5th catastrophe, when Nizar turned to writing fierce political poems with satirical and sometimes caustic tones.
The first ideology is represented by traditional conservatism, which saw Nizar’s imagery, ideas, and views calling for women’s liberation and for society to move beyond the past and rebel against the present as a direct threat to the values it upheld. The second ideology is represented by a one-sided, elitist “Bedouin modernity” that could not grasp the idea that poetry could be both popular and modern at the same time. It also struggled to reconcile the fact that a major poetic experience like Nizar’s could be built on contradictory elements and opposing visions, which presented a confusing challenge to its simplistic worldview, based on a dualistic struggle of opposites.
From the dialectical nature of his poetic experience and the battle with this opposing duality of “tradition vs. modernity,” Nizar carved out an independent position for himself that no other Arab poet in the 20th century could achieve. His innovative work was always overshadowed by immense contradictions, which became a hallmark of his poetic discourse. His work evolved, from the deeper layers of his text to the surfaces represented in the provocative titles of his books, reflecting his remarkable ability to build a strong, warm connection with the reader. This allowed his poetic ego to consistently dominate this relationship, and for his image to flaunt itself with pride. The wide dissemination of his poetry—one of his collections was distributed in over 100,000 copies, and one book alone, “Poems”, was printed in around 30 editions—played a role in reinforcing the narcissistic dimension of his work. His poetic self became the focal point of his poetry, and Nizar’s poetic dialogue with women transformed into a dialogue between the poet and the women of his nation. He became a “legend of love” and a “legend of poetry,” and modern Arab critics cannot continue to ignore this unprecedented poetic reality. If the question were asked, “Who is the most famous poet of this century?” that poet would not be Al-Jawahiri, for example, nor Badawi Al-Jabal, nor Omar Abu Risha, nor Said Aql, nor other classical poets who had their moments of glory. It would be Nizar, the most famous poet among the people, whose fame was earned by poems that found a place among them, addressing their most deeply emotional and spiritual concerns. Regardless of whether his popularity is said to have waned or grown, this is a poet who lived his poetic glory for more than half a century. Arab critics must study his poetry, his poetic personality, and his relationship with the people’s poetry through his experience, with great objectivity and honesty, setting aside biases. The contemporary Arab home library may lack a collection of Al-Mutanabbi’s poems, but it cannot be without at least one collection of Nizar Qabbani’s work.
IV
In the early 1950s, when the Arab world was witnessing national liberation movements and a broad intellectual debate between nationalism and Marxism—and between both and religious thought—Nizar wrote his poem “Bread, Hashish, and Moon”. The bold poem caused a major stir in cultural and social circles in Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo. While the ideological struggle between these different ideas was, in part, abstract, Nizar was carving out his own ideology, laying the firm foundations of his poetic discourse in a simple, warm, and fresh language—most importantly, an innovative one. His language possessed an unprecedented aesthetic and expressive allure.
Although the movement to renew Arab poetry began in Iraq with poets like Nazik Al-Malaika and Badr Shakir Al-Sayyab, Nizar, who was still writing traditional verse, soon joined this movement. It was not surprising: his poetry was revolutionary in essence and traditional in its artistic form, quickly achieving harmony as it embraced the new form.
Perhaps some of those who attacked Nizar from the ranks of the ideologues of “modernity” and “contemporaneity” were those who could not deconstruct the contradiction upon which his poetry was built. These contradictions included “voice” and “speaking pronouns,” tempting them to overlook the difference between the poet’s face and his artistic masks. There was the projection of his voice from the “voices of society” and the “voices of history,” such as the voice of the “Caliph” and his desires, and the voice of “Shahryar” and his all-encompassing, domineering male self demanding submission from women as power does. There was also the “voice of the poet” and the “feminine representations” in this voice, where the identities of women merged into the poet’s voice. Nizar relieved himself of his masculinity through the artistic game of representation and the aesthetic illusion of speaking on their behalf. In his poetry, there is a dialogue of voices, a dialogue of “selves,” involving multiple and contradictory elements from diverse sources. Sometimes, Nizar’s poetic work arises from the ground of the artist/man, but in many instances, the work emerges and is realized on a third ground—a ground innovatively created in art, representing a shared space between man and woman. It is a free space where the artist liberates himself from the weight of society and the past, becoming lighter and more agile, and thus more prepared to relinquish the privileges society grants him, such as near-absolute authority ultimately used to subdue women as the “different other.” Nizar, in one aspect of his poetic structure, views women as stronger than men—not only because they give birth and bring life into the world in a much more tangible way than men do, but also because they embody both beauty and power together.
V
From that third space, or third ground, Nizar built his unique position in Arab poetry. This is why his poetic experience did not respond to mainstream criticism, which divides the world into two opposing ideologies—rigid conservatism and elitist modernity
