It seems fitting, given the date but also the times, to dive into some poetry that deals in the many and hybrid types of love described above, for women, memories, nations, cultures, and of course, for one’s own self. In addition to pairing himself with his beloved, Qabbani marries his Christian, Arab, and more trans-regionally Middle Eastern identities and experiences in these pieces: we find references to church bells and heaven-sent manna alongside allusions to the erstwhile courtyard of the Sasanian sovereign Khosroes (the iwān kisrā) in Ctesiphon and the Thousand and One Nights.
BETWEEN US NIZAR QABBANI FREE
With respect to imagery, this is a very back-to-basics, classicizing approach to depicting a lover, though encased in the modern structure of free verse rather than the old-school ghazal, or metered love poem. In the spirit of rediscovering old chestnuts anew, he tells the reader in “Ode to Sadness” (the title of which is itself a throwback to the traditional qaṣīda with its opening refrain of love lost and its peripatetic, camel-mounted middle section) that his lover teaches him to act like a child, to read stories of knighthood and gallantry, and to think of women in terms of all the visually delighting but timeworn tropes that the canon has to offer reading across the two poems, we find a woman whose lips are like pomegranates and whose eyes are like gulf water - she is redolent with fragrance and her eyes are kohl-rimmed. In contrast, one of the great joys of these verses is that Qabbani consciously relishes looking backward through the centuries and across a more extensive regional terrain, revivifying the clichés of classical Arabic love poetry. Indeed, it is through these ambivalent depictions of contemporary locales and the socioeconomic realities that they intimate that the poet fashions some of the most poignant portions of the poems. In the second poem, the narrator laments that he is unable to give a woman all that she dreams of because he is “A laborer from Damascus - poor,” who “soak morning loaf in blood/ hair in spit.” Wrapped up in the complications of love are the complexities of the poet’s relationship with these classed geographies, lending credence to Darwish’s point that Qabbani viewed the health of the nation and the free expression of sexuality as intertwined his humble Damascene roots are thus both a source of pride and anxiety during courtship, while his lurid portrayal of Beirut goes hand in hand with learning the art of sadness from a practiced, female teacher. In the first poem, we are told that his lover has taught him “how to see Beirut” (to which he migrated after ending his government career) as a harlot on promenade, bedecked with beautiful robes but also divulging pain. There is also a hope in these poems that the landscapes the poet has traversed - the cities and communities that he has had occasion to inhabit and speak on behalf of throughout his life - might meld with, accommodate, or elucidate his love for another human being.
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In the plain speech of the two poems presented in translation below (an “Ode to Sadness,” or, Qaṣīdat al-Ḥuzn, and “You Want,” or Turīdīna), one may detect a sort of plaintive hope laced with a countervailing, often tongue-in-cheek cynicism: there is a hope that the narrator can be enough for the woman he adulates, that his words can satisfy, and that she can fulfill him in turn. Much of the way in which Qabbani achieved this was by using the language of the everyday, stripped of pretense and elitism.
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In his obituary to the celebrated Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani, published a few days after his death in May 1998, Adel Darwish writes that “for Qabbani, national liberation was meaningless without sexual liberation.” Qabbani, who had spent much of his life as a diplomat and ardent Arab nationalist, also spent much of his life as a romantic in more conventional terms, and through verse he brought his world and its muses into vivid, living color.