At the beginning of March 1994, I was a guest at the Al Owais Award at the Sharjah Hilton Hotel, when it was awarded to the poet Nizar Qabbani. He turned up with his daughter Zainab, while I was having breakfast with some friends in the hotel restaurant. I hesitated to greet him, then minutes later, he surprised me by coming to my table, thus I ran up to him, greeting and hugging him. Once he introduced me to his daughter, Zainab, from his Iraqi wife, Balqis, whom the Iraqi President Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr proposed to marrying her to Nizar in 1969, he said reproachfully:
“Hey, Reda, you have become a star with your program on MBC. I thought you would leave your seat and come to greet me, not the other way round.”
I answered immediately:
“If it is proper to refer to someone as a star among Arab writers and poets, it would be appropriate only for you, you are the bright star who has become a mass phenomenon where all men and women, old and young, educated and illiterate, know you. Today, you are almost alone entitled to this glory, as your poetry has been read by millions across a wide Arab region and a remarkable generational difference, whoever has not read your poetry has heard it sung by Umm Kulthum, Abdel Halim Hafez, Nagat El-Sagheera, Fairuz, Majida Al-Roumi, and Kadim Al Sahir.
This compliment impressed the narcissistic poet, according to the thesis of the Lebanese academic Dr. Hristo Najim, Literary Psychology, he replied:
“I will have breakfast with Zainab, don’t you know her? She is the only daughter besides Omar I have from my wife Balqis. How about we meet this evening here at the hotel? Are you occupied with any dates or appointments?”
I answered that even if I were, I would make myself available for you. Am I a fool to miss an open invitation from the most prominent Arab poet?!
In the evening, he knocked on my door, came in and we had a nice talk till midnight, we were two entities and poetry was the third. The conversation centered around Nizar, who hardly strayed from his poetic nature!
My personal acquaintance with Nizar Qabbani goes back to the end of February 1975, as I was one of the first visitors to the Hajj Muhammad Madbouli Bookshop in Cairo, when it was transformed from a small kiosk that sold newspapers, magazines, and some books, into a prominent bookshop located in the middle of Talaat Harb Square, to the left of the famous Groppi Café.
One evening, while I was checking out the latest Egyptian and Lebanese publications in the bookshop, a man with exhausted features and a weak physical structure entered. Hajj Madbouli had no choice but to leave his customers, greeting him with the utmost warmth, then he introduced me to him as “a young writer from Saudi Arabia.”
I greeted him, introducing my name, and I was greatly amazed by the way he squeezed my hand greeting me back, thanking me for my article that I had published in Al-Riyadh newspaper about one of his collections published at the time.
I was speechless with astonishment.
He is, therefore, Nizar Qabbani, what a surprise. When he noticed the amazement on my face, he said:
“The article you wrote was sent to me by Abdullah Al- Al-ohali, the owner of Dar Al-Uloom”, who was so fascinated by Nizar’s poetry that it prompted him to make a room for his collections and display it in his library. Adding that, just like my article, he hopes the siege on his collections, which were banned from entering the Kingdom since he published his famous poem Love and Oil (الحب والبترول) in 1958, will break.
I sincerely expressed my gratitude to him for his warm welcome and kindness, praying to Allah to grant him good health and wellness. At that time, Nizar had gone through his first heart attack, and he was admitted to the American University Hospital in Beirut, to undergo open-heart surgery, as a result of the psychological trauma he had been exposed to in 1973, after the death of his eldest son, Prince Tawfiq of Damascus, from a sudden heart attack, while he was studying medicine at Cairo University. He eulogized him in the Arab Week magazine writing the famous tearful poem, some of which:
“I will carry you, my son, on my back
Like a minaret broken into two pieces
Your hair is a field of wheat bathed in the rain
And your head in my palm, resembling a Damascus rose and a remnant of the moon
Alone, I face your death
And alone, I collect all your clothes
I kiss your fragrant shirts
And your passport’s picture
like the insane, I scream alone
Ignorant are the faces before me
And all the eyes are stone
How can I fight the sword of time?
When my sword is broken.”
He showed his gratitude to me in turn, and before leaving the library, he invited me to listen to his eulogistic poem for Dr. Taha Hussein, who died on one of the days of the 1973 October War, which required the Egyptian state to postpone his eulogy and perform it at a global celebration. The celebration was held as a memorial to his death in the Great Meeting Hall of the League of Arab States between February 26-28, 1975, in the presence of a large number of Arab orientalists, thinkers, and poets.
This is how my relationship with Nizar Qabbani began.
Here I am, with admiration, entering the hall that had a magical effect on our Arab souls, as we watched the gathering of the Arab kings and presidents in this hall during the major Arab events on television and read about it in the newspapers.
The celebration began with a speech by President Anwar Sadat, delivered on his behalf by Dr. Abdulaziz Kamel, Deputy Prime Minister for Religious Affairs, followed with another speech by Youssef Al-Sibai, Minister of Culture, greeting the elite of the sons of Arabism and Islam to celebrate the dean of Arabic literature and his role in the Arab cultural renaissance. Dr. Suhair Al-Qalamawi, the beloved student of Taha, confirmed her professor’s call “to be freed from intellectual stagnation and to invent modern scientific methods, as he learned it from the greats of his time, Durkheim and Liveriol in the sciences of philosophy and sociology, and Casanova’s lessons on the Holy Qur’an at the Collège de France. He read to an enormous group of Greek and modern philosophers. Absorbing all of this against a broad background of religious sciences, language, and Arabic literature.”
After that, a sequence of orientalists, thinkers, and poets stood on the podium, glorifying the dean’s life, his struggle, his writings, and his translations, in the presence of his French wife, Suzanne, with her daughter, Amina, and her son, Munis. The ceremony was opened by His Excellency the Prime Minister of Jordan, the poet Abdel Moneim Al-Rifai, with a poem in which he said:
“Defeater of days, the bitter days have passed
You who squandered pain with hopes
The stormy years fell as if
they ended up with you for a few nights
Wings of time seems to be broken
When you appeared on your glorious day
From a mute darkness and a sadness vision
Like a light, you shone in a beauty sky
Missed by the lights, thus it opened
Jewels and pearls in your youngest”
Another poet is now advancing to the podium, with a blushed face and fizzy hair. He stood for a moment, looking right and left, as if he were a knight preparing to engage in battle! Attracting the attention towards him, then, in a roaring voice he narrated the poem, which was inconsistent with the beauty of his lyrics. He delivered the poem with blatant narcissistic boasting, moving his hand, head and tongue:
“Your memory is wandering in the minds, chant it
Imagination roamed with anger that ignites the clouds
Were it not for the feathers of your quill to embrace it
You would have been like the night, covering the place with detest
Like that, your eyes threw their night
As a burden on the East, yet it returned ablaze
No, you did not say “wake up”, rather, creative were
Your hands that your eyelids looked as of a child
Whoever reads “the Days” has become confused
With goodness, and this goodness prophesies a day that there is no prophetic.”
Despite the beauty of Said Akl’s poem, the uniqueness of his imagery, and the ingenuity of his compositions, his tension and the way he delivered the condescending performance distracted the attention of the elite audience. His poem did not receive the applause he expected. At that moment, I did not notice the reaction of Nizar Qabbani, who was accused by some critics to drawing from this Lebanese spring flowing with imaginations and imagery, and the creativity of similes and metaphors in his poetry.
I was busy examining the faces of the great orientalists, including the famous British orientalist R. B. Sargent, who began to recall his memories with Taha Hussein, when he received him warmly at the University of Cambridge in 1949, to lecture its students. The German Orientalist Peter Bachmann also delivered his speech about the role of the dean in introducing Arabic literature to German universities, and the Italian Orientalist Ritz Yanalo Oberto, whereas both Father Gaumier, Rogues Arnolds and Enael, the French Orientalists delivered a speech. Moreover, Mouloud Mammeri, the Algerian Amazigh novelist, also delivered his speech in French, just like them! While the Tunisian writer Al-Bashir Ben Salamah delivered his speech in classical Arabic, and Dr. Abd al-Razzaq Mohi al-Din, a member of the Iraqi Academy of Sciences, recited a poem whose preamble was Najafi. Afterwards, it was the turn of the two prominent students of Taha Hussein, Dr. Nasser Al-Din Al-Assad from Jordan and Dr. Shukri Faisal from Syria. As the Yemeni poet Dr. Abdulaziz Al-Maqaleh has an exceptional participation, breaking his Aviophobia!
All of these colleagues and students of the dean, students of his literary criticism, historical thought, and cultural enlightenment, stopped at his social and political role when he implemented his call for free education (like water and air), when he became Minister of Education, in the last Wafdid government, before its overthrow during the revolution of July 23, 1953.
This is what the poet Amal Donqul centered his poem on, which he wrote in the Khalili style, yet it was characterized by a bright prose tone, breaking his angry, interactive poetic approach, with his creative spark flying through his collections, in which he said:
“Are you crying over for who’s dead, to
Reclaim the banner of negative thought
He died to engraved in every budding
Heart, the letter of Arabism
And for the child to embrace a bag
In order for the youth to feed themselves with knowledge.”
Amal’s poem did not receive any chance of applause, as he stood in front of the giants of vertical qarid poetry, who were accustomed to great poetic recitation on the podium. Amal seemed weak in expression and lackluster in presence, as if he was being dragged to the podium, participating as a courtesy for Youssef Al-Sibai, Minister of Culture and President of the Union of Afro-Asian Writers. Amal and some of his colleagues were young leftist writers, who became employees there without work! Youssef Al-Sibai felt sorry for their miserable living, thus he granted them symbolic jobs in the union.
Therefore, I found myself teasing Amal after finishing his vulgar poem, provoking him when he had changed his poetic skin on this occasion! He even replaced his suit with a simple shirt and pants! Trying to fight him back in our conflicts in the Rish Café, which reached its peak later in the restaurant of the Union of Writers, one stormy day, and my friend, the Egyptian novelist Gamal El-Ghitani, was celebrating with his fiancée, Magda El-Gendy, a journalist for (Sabah Al-Khair) magazine, at a romantic lunch. I believe Amal and I spoiled the splendor of that day!
On the last day of the ceremony, Nizar Qabbani came to the recital podium, exhausted by his heart surgery. He appeared weak and pale-faced, but quickly regained his strength, and his captivating protest voice rang out within the luxurious hall from the first verse:
“Is it the light of your eyes or are they two stars?
They all do not see, yet you see me,
I don’t know where to start with my confession,
The tree of tears has grown old in my eyelids,
Love, my beloved, is written on us,
It made you cry just as it did to me,
The lifespan of my wound is a million years and a year,
Can you see the wound through the smoke?
Love engraved in the notebooks of my heart
all its names, but it did not give me a name.”
An essence wandered in the hall, it is similar to a Sufi hymn, rising one level after another, and suddenly the audience of the crowded hall that day, with its old men before its youth, its women before its men, its orientalists before its Arabs, its prose writers before its poets, all taken by Nizar to the heavens of his creativity and the manifestations of his imagery, on a romantic date with poetry and beauty:
“The beautiful date has come true, at last,
Oh, my beloved, and the beloved of the statement,
What is wrong if we sit in a corner
Opened the bags of sorrows
And read for Abu Al-Ala a little
The Epistle of Forgiveness,
I am in the presence of all ages,
For the time of a writer, is all of time,
The light of your eyes or the dialogue of mirrors
Or are they two burning birds?
Are the eyes of a writer a river of flame?
Or are they a river of songs?
Oh, sir, you who made the night
A day, and the earth is like a festival.”
I saw the dean’s wife, Suzanne, move for the first time in the last three days of this magnificent party, as she remained reserved and silent! It is as if she just heard something she understood! She is occupied by her French self, despite her lifelong experience with the Arabic language and its melody. Listening to her blind husband’s voice, who recites Arabic at night and at the end of the day, influenced by the verses of the Holy Qur’an, and he intones it in her presence, dictating letters and books to his secretary Farid Shehata, and while he delivers lectures on the university terraces, or in forums inside and outside Egypt with her. However, Suzanne remained holding onto her Frenchness, as if she was afraid of her identity dissolving in the choppy Arabian sea, and her husband was nothing but a powerful wave among its waves, full of rhetorical gems and stylistic turquoise.
Nizar Qabbani represented Taha Hussein’s long experience, as he struggled with the obstacles of life, the traditionalism of education, and the conservatism of his small community in his hometown (Maghagha) and his large community in Cairo since he came under the blanket of deprivation and poverty, studying in the Al-Azhar Mosque, motivated by a rebellious critical spirit, and interacting with its national movement.
Thus, Nizar started addressing his blind eyes with his black glasses:
“The light of your eyes or the dialogue of mirrors
Or are they two burning birds?
Are the eyes of a writer a river of flame?
Or are they a river of songs?
Oh, sir, you who made the night
A day, and the earth like a festival
Throw away your glasses, you are not blind
Rather we are a choir of the blind.”
As birds fly overhead, silence dominates the audience in the hall, out of respect for the dean’s position, and in admiration for Nizar’s poetry. Suddenly, Suzanne breaks out of her exalted silence, drawn by his poem she stands up from her seat, moving towards Nizar, as if she wants to fly to him before he reaches her greeting with a bow, which he mastered due to his extensive diplomatic experience in a number of countries around the world.
The reader, who is a connoisseur or critic of Nizar’s poetry, will hardly find any difficulty to be involved in his text. From the time his tongue spoke of poetry for the first time on his sea trip to Italy, until the last text he wrote before his departure, he is in direct contact with the readers, whether they agree with his poetry or disagree, they understand it at first sight!
He was not ambiguous in showing feelings like the romantics, and he was not as straightforward as some of the modernists. Nizar was a middle stage, between the aesthetics of Badawi al-Jabal and the artistry of Omar Abu Risha in the school of vertical poetry, and Mahmoud Darwish, Muhammad Ali Shams al-Din, and Ghazi al-Gosaibi in the school of free poetry. However, Nizar Qabbani is distinguished among them, with a realistic aesthetic that combined the eloquence of the Arabic language with the colloquial popular dialect and its new words, expressing his Damascene environment in a – Nizari – language, which smelled of the Damascene house, the spices of Al-Buzuriyah Souq, and the smells of Levantine sweets in Al-Hamidiyah Souq. He spent his childhood, youth, and adolescence in his father house, Tawfiq (the sweets maker), in Minaret Al-Shahm neighborhood, and traveled by night thinking of his childhood time on a fruitful orange tree, with a grape vine in the middle of the house surrounded by a lilac – as he expresses it in his collection of poetry book Damascus by Nizar Qabbani – with the green and red roses under his feet, the flocks of swallows are above his head, and the twenty plates of Arabian jasmine in the middle of the house are all of his mother’s wealth.
This beautiful Damascene house, which, with the blink of an eye, Nizar can count the nails of its windows and read the verses of the Holy Qur’an written on the wood of its doors.
He was fascinated by the house, until he lost his enthusiasm to go out into the alley, resting in his mother’s arms and enjoying her pampering, among all his brothers and his sister, who committed suicide out of love! Where there is rain and humidity, while his father sits in the middle of the house, with a cup of coffee, his ashtray and a box of tobacco in front of him, reading the newspaper and interacting with the events of the national revolution against the French occupier, jasmine flowers fall.
The French philosopher and critic Gaston Bachelard, who was interested in the aesthetics of the imagery, as an objective equivalence for things, says in his interesting book The Poetics of Space:
“When we dream of the house we were born in, in the utmost depths of revery, we participate in this original warmth, in this well-tempered matter of the material paradise. This is the environment in which the protective beings live… And the poet knows that the house holds childhood motionless “in its arms”.”
This is the poetic key to Nizar Qabbani’s world, as he says in his book My Story with Poetry: an Autobiography. Nevertheless, he was not spared from the conservatives of his Damascene city, who threw stones, tomatoes, and rotten eggs at him, after he rebelled against its conservative traditions in his open flirtation with women, since his collection of poems, The Brunette Told Me, In 1944, until he wrote his poem Bread, Hashish and Moon. He was just like his grandfather (Abu Khalil al-Qabbani), the founder of modern theater between Damascus and Cairo, as he inherited from him the confrontation of the traditionalists, with the white weapon, the weapon of art and poetry.
On one of my frequent visits to Nizar, in his elegant apartment in Knightsbridge neighborhood, London, I asked him about his brilliant argument with Maroun Abboud, who criticized one of Nizar’s collections and praised, in the same article, his new imagery, in his first four collections. Was he afraid of the master of the Lebanese critics’ gentle prose response, while he thanked him for his attention to his youthful poetry, describing it as “the oak tree,” on whose huge trunk the little birds pecked their beaks. He answered me:
“No, Reda, it is not out of fear but out of respect. Maroun Abboud and his generation in Lebanon, Munir Al-Ajlani and his generation and contemporaries in Syria, and Anwar Al-Maadawi and his companions in Cairo were truly and deservedly masters, not like the writers and poets nowadays. He poured out his anger on the Arab modernist poets, those with their vague poems shattered the taste of the Arab recipient.”
In another session, he was insulted by his niece, Dr. Rana Qabbani, and felt uncomfortable with her conversation with me on my program This Is It, and her offence to her ex-husband, the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who called Nizar upset by that interview. Nizar considered Mahmoud Darwish one of the poets arising from following his poetic style. This is clear to those who contemplate Mahmoud’s first collections, just as the influence of Adonis is clear in his latest collections.
During a session with him in the same London apartment, I blamed him for his insults to the people of the Gulf, which began with his poem Love and Oil. He explained the occasion of a certain non-Saudi personality, a Syrian attractive woman from a well-known family, who accompanied him to receptions and Diwan poetry. He added: The Kingdom did not settle any score with him. In fact, it welcomed his brother, Dr. Rashid, to work as a doctor in one of Riyadh’s hospitals for many years, without taking any political stands against him, owing to what Nizar wrote in his political poetry, which he addressed after the defeat of June 5, 1967. Indeed, in another session, he expressed to me his feelings of satisfaction and admiration for the development plans achieved in the Kingdom, and he was astonished by the amazing architecture of the Two Holy Mosques, while he watched Tarawih prayers in mosques throughout Ramadan, broadcast live on the MBC channel. In the same context, he expressed to me his bitterness over Dr. Ghazi Al-Gosaibi, whom he considers one of the students at his poetry school, how to avoid meeting or visiting him in his apartment, as he became the Kingdom’s ambassador in London. Later when I conveyed his reproach to Dr. Ghazi, he sent him a bouquet, and when Nizar suffered his last heart attack a few weeks before his death, Ghazi visited him. Al-Gosaibi stated in his book House (بيت), page 71:
“I visited Nizar Qabbani, may he rest in peace, in his apartment in London. He had just come out of the hospital after a coma that lasted a few weeks. He was physically exhausted, but his psychological exhaustion was greater. He was sad because he could no longer write poetry, as he told me that the end of poetry is a sure forerunner of the end of life itself. He walked out with difficulty to say goodbye to me, leaning on a medical crutch. When we reached the door of the apartment, I stopped, looked at him, and said “Throw away your crutches!” His face lit up as he immediately realized that I was referring to his lovely poem concerning Taha Hussein. I recited the first verses of the poem that begin with, “Is it the light of your eyes or are they two stars”, I was reciting the poem and saw a medical miracle happening in front of me. The pink color returned to the pale cheek, the crutch fell, and the wrinkles disappeared from the face that had suddenly returned to its youth. When I finished, he whispered as he hugged me: “Did you see how beautiful these verses are? How beautiful is it, how relatable is it?”
Thus, the miraculous moment ended.
T1686
