Reconciling poetry and the people

By Mahmoud Darwish

Nizar Qabbani is the only Arab poet in the latter half of this century to manage, through his overwhelming presence, to effect a reconciliation between poetry and "the people". The real challenge a poet faces is to reach as many people as possible. And Qabbani was a man of consensus; a part of him will remain in each of us and in future generations.

Indeed, he was the poet most present in the collective heart of the Arabs, the man who wrote the most-listened-to poem, a poem that incited anger, love and respect for beauty. Qabbani's words are irresistibly echoed in our first love letters and memoirs...

He was obsessed with freedom to the point of anarchy and destruction. He was obsessed with women. Their shores were for him ports at which he arrived to a humiliated, threatened Arab land. The completion of his poetic journey coincided with the failure of another journey, the collective journey to a promised liberation of body and soul, one that would leave the tribal desert behind in order to arrive at the city, but which, instead, found itself back in the desert. The poet who had incited people to rebel screamed and, instead of singing, he began to curse: "When will they announce the death of the Arabs?" He did not need a new poetic idiom to curse; he could dish out the words from the Qabbani lexicon, one which had become hackneyed through overuse.

And this is why Nizar Qabbani must not be read poem by poem. An intelligent reading of Qabbani is a reading of his exceptional impact on the language of Arabic poetry. Before him, Arabic poetry was formal and grand. He inserted it into the language of everyday, modern life, thus making poetry a common property. His poetry accompanied kitchen utensils and became a fluid expression of the normal, the familiar and the simple in life, politics and sentiment. The reconciliation he effected was between poetry, on the one hand, and young students, housewives, clerks, professionals and heads of state, on the other.

He never paid attention to criticism. He broke away from the conventional and traditional structures of Arabic poetry without paying the least attention to what a modernist poet should aim to be or to related intellectual questions. He was heedless of the critical furor and controversy stirred up by the hooves of the wild horses he set free. He was accused of self-flagellation and male chauvinism, but he never paid any attention to such charges because he trusted his heart. He knew that he had loved women, that he did not use them for selfish purposes but, rather, made something of them. No poet before him had acknowledged the right of women to express freely and directly the secrets and ideas inhabiting their minds and bodies. He was not, however, a poet for women only; he was a poet for all.