Reading the poems as an American in 2019, it’s almost easy to miss the fuss. The magazine then tore into the verse itself for its depictions of “fornication, injury, and the depiction of the experienced, impudent and shameless prostitute.”ĭespite the conservative outcry (even his own father bemoaned that his son was “full of illusions will never be of any use, either to himself or the world”), Qabbani’s family contacts in the government allowed What the Brunette Told Me to be reprinted several times. An Egyptian magazine noted with derision that each book was also tied with a red string akin to those that the French required to be wrapped around the waists of Syrian prostitutes for easier access. He paid for the publication (a trend that would continue for most of his works) and wrapped each of the 300 copies in the same paper that was used in his father’s chocolate factory. “And were they to avenge her death from a society that rejects love and chases it with axes and guns?” In the same memoir, Qabbani would later describe the act of “penetrating” the fortress of Arabic poetry as “an act of madness rather than an act of sacrilege and blasphemy… linguistic terrorism and historical, rhetorical, grammatical, moral and religious terror as well.”Īt roughly the same time that my grandmother broke through as the first in her family to go to college, Qabbani broke through the “fortress” and published his first poetry collection, What the Brunette Told Me. “Were my writings about love the natural substitute for everything that my sister was deprived of,” Qabbani would later ask of himself in My Story with Poetry.
In the wake of that loss, which he describes in characteristic plainspoken style in My Story with Poetry, Qabbani began to question love and lust and how they related to beliefs that had thrived for centuries in Arabic culture. This dichotomy hit home when the 15-year-old Nizar lost his sister Wisal to suicide after she wasn’t allowed to marry the man she loved. In an era of rapid westernization due, in no small part, to colonial influence, Qabbani’s Syria was keeping up appearances, but struggling to come to terms with its long-held traditions and taboos, especially around women’s equality. And, like my grandmother, he also lost his eldest sister, albeit to a different form of violence inherent to the land.
Like my grandmother, Syria’s national poet Nizar Qabbani was born in the era of the French Mandate (to an upper-middle-class Muslim family in Damascus). My great-grandfather’s response was that his daughter could do as she damn well pleased. With the Orthodox priest in tow, they made the case that allowing her to have an education would turn her into a fājira-a loose woman. Half a world and 16 years later, my grandmother was sitting on her parents’ bed in Rhode Island, ear pressed to the bedroom door as her father and extended family convened to discuss what they considered to be another desperate situation: My grandmother was accepted to college. So they gave my grandmother the name Mary, and kept their place on the list. This could have meant disaster for the family, but by coincidence Mary died in an attack on their farm shortly before my grandmother was born. If there were any changes to the names on the list, they would need to start the process over.Īnd then my great-grandmother became pregnant for a third time. At the time, my grandmother’s parents had been on a waiting list to get out of the country with their two daughters, Mary and Ossin. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was one of the many sites where Ottoman forces were killing Christians en masse. A mountain town roughly 20 miles north of Damascus, Saidnaya is one of the Christian-majority areas of the country (many biblical scholars consider it to be the site where Cain killed Abel). When my grandmother’s sister was killed, my grandmother inherited her sister’s identity.īorn in Saidnaya, Syria, in 1926, my grandmother entered the world three years after the French Mandate-the period of French rule after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire with World War I-went into effect. Your death and committed suicide Scheherazade. We washed our hands and when we discovered. Be a friend, and I was truthful, I Our Father. Arbabina pledge allegiance in the morning. Vienna and traveled to the land of innocence. The assassination of the prophet and parents.
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