#Nizar qabbani and balqees how to
Neither my ministers nor advisers said no they taught me how to see myself as a God and to look down on the people as sand from my window. Since I came to power as a young man, nobody has ever said no to me. In a 1989 poem, entitled “Dailies of an Arab Executioner” Nizar wrote: “I am the omnipotent, the most wise and beautiful. Twenty years have passed and we are living in marble-made coffins, pledging allegiance to any general who seizes power and licking the shoes of any regime!” In another popular poem, eulogised after the Arab Spring, Nizar wrote: “Twenty years have gone by, while civilisations have passed right over over our heads. Those were among the thousands of verses that young Arabs printed on their secret pamphlets in 2011, calling for street demonstrations throughout Arab capitals.
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“The theatre has collapsed over your heads and the audience is cussing and spitting at you.” “When will you go away” wrote Nizar back in 1967, addressing Arab kings and presidents. Thirteen years after his death, during the early stages of the Arab Spring, his revolutionary poetry inspired millions of young people in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and then in his native Damascus. He was outspokenly critical of Anwar Al Sadat of Egypt and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for their respective peace deals with Israel, only praising one Arab leader by name, being Jamal Abdul Nasser. His 1990 masterpiece "Abu Jahl (the Father of Ignorance) Buys Fleet Street" appealed to many Arab journalists who were helplessly enslaved by petro- dollars in the hands of illiterate conservative paymasters.Today marks the 20th anniversary of the passing of legendary Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, who died at a London hospital, aged 75, back in 1998.Īn Arab nationalist at heart and a Nasserist, he was always critical of military dictatorships and firmly opposed to any peace with Israel.ĭuring a prolific career that started in 1943 and lasted until his death, he often made indirect reference to Arab presidents and kings in his poetic verse, mocking their incompetence, corruption, and submissiveness to the United States. In 1995 he caused another uproar by declaring the death of the Arabs as a nation: He named Nasser "the last of the prophets", in a poem lamenting his death in 1970 and defaming Arab leaders who He was later taken with Nasser's romantic vague idea of one Arab nation - which never worked since citizens of Arabic-speaking nations often don't understand one another. He was impressed by Nasser's anti-British stance during the ill-fated Suez campaign. He worshipped the populist leader Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, who eradicated pluralist liberal democracy from Egypt. His later poetry attacked the tyranny and corruption of Arab regimes yet he supported the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. (The word bosom in Arabic relates only to a naked female in an erotic way.) His Wild Poems, also published in 1948, was about eroticism and gay love.
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Its provocative title The Childhood of a Bosom caused a scandal in the conservative Damascus of 1948. Again, he always remembered his illiterate mother selling her jewellery to raise the money to publish his first anthology. His sister's suicide, when she was forbidden to marry the man she loved, had deeply affected him as a teenager.