		Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 7 - 13 May, 1998 Issue No.376
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875		Current issue \| Previous issue \| Site map

Blessed be the quest

By Saadi Youssef

Nizar Qabbani's early collection of poems Qasaid (Poems) remains my favorite. It is a collection which is both a quest for poetry and a question about the nature of poetry. In this collection he had his eyes wide open in selecting his material and choosing the angle through which to deal with this material. In other words, he was looking for poetry in what could become poetry, skillfully distinguishing between what is rubble and what is essence. Reading the collection, one cannot but appreciate his brilliance in selecting his topics. It is a varied and wide selection, one in which the poet and the personae inhabiting and moving through his texts attempt to understand the meaning of life. Man, in this collection, is not an abstraction or a general category, a mere means to a conceptual end, as would become the case in some of his later works.

Nizar Qabbani was also a liberation poet, and I mean this in the sociological rather than the political sense, where liberation is related to all phenomenon of social development in the Arab world. Qabbani's main concern was women's liberation. He began by first addressing women as a man, indeed as a man talking to a woman, and ended by adopting a feminine poetic persona.

Poetry before Nizar Qabbani was never that close to women or that concerned with women's issues. Perhaps in the history of Arabic poetry Umar Ibn Abi Rabia is the exception. But those women to whom the poetry of Abi Rabia addressed are very different from the women Qabbani addresses. Qabbani was the poet of the rebellious woman par excellence. In the city hall of Qairawan in Tunisia I saw those women. They flocked to the city hall from the suburbs and other cities. They ranged from teenagers to women in their late 50s, but they all shared the same excitement listening to Qabbani.

Qabbani once said that he would stop writing political poems and would return to writing poetry for women. I was glad to hear that, and I waited, but in vain. I am not too fond of Qabbani's political poems. They oscillate between destructive nihilism and uncontrolled generalisation -- with very little poetry in them. I have no doubt that the bitterness behind these poems is genuine, from the heart, but politics, like anything else in poetry, must be dealt with aesthetically. In poetry, we must not allow ourselves to fall victim to politics the way we do in everyday life. The destruction caused by the mindless politicisation of everything must not extend to art for art is our last refuge.

So what was Nizar Qabbani's impact on modern Arabic poetry? Was he a school to be followed by younger poets? I do not think so. Qabbanism is not a house big enough to accommodate anyone other than Qabbani himself. And when we celebrate his memory, we celebrate the memory of a poet who is a fighter and a liberator, a friend and a fellow traveller on a difficult journey, the young man from Damascus who gave us the joy of the song and who entered our battles to emerge with pride. His house was built sometimes with effort, sometimes with joy, sometimes with anger, but whether daring or bitter, he was always the poet who loved play. If poetry is to be blessed, then blessed be the quest.