To a rock shaped liked the face of an old fisherman Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of The Prophet (1933) رحم على الامة
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with yearsĪnd whose strongmen are yet in the cradle. Only to welcome another with trumpeting again. Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting, Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox,Īnd whose art is the art of patching and mimicking Pity the nation that raises not its voiceĪnd will rebel not save when its neck is laid Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream, Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero,Īnd that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful. Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave
NIZAR QABBANI OH JERUSALEM FULL
Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion. “She has became alone at night, alone with the night.” Fairuz was less brutsl but no less angry when she asks of her city: ‘how did its taste become the taste of fire and smoke. “We confess, he wrote,”that we were envious of you, that your beauty hurt us … that we offered you a dagger in place of flowers … that we hurt you and exhausted you, that we burned you and made you cry, that that we weighed you down with our sins”. In Arabic, the title can read O Beirut, Lady of the World, But figuratively, it could be seen to imply that the city was indeed the “mistress’ or prostitute of the Levant, used and abused by many outside powers. In it he eloquently and emotionally described the malign impact that the Arab world was having on Beirut, a beautiful and historic coastal city that for centuries has been a cultural and economic entrepôt between east and west. Ya Beirut, Ya Sit al Dunya was was published in 1978, three years into the fifteen year long Lebanese Civil War. It may say something about Arab culture, and it’s moralistic constraints, that Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish used his craft to navigate similar waters – although never have had the opportunity to have had an Israeli lover like his contemporary (the inspiration for oud master and jazz great’s Anouar Brahem in his excellent The Astounding Eyes of Rita.
He is considered one of the most revered contemporary poets in the Arab world and is acclaimed as Syria’s National Poet. His poetic style combined simplicity and elegance in exploring themes of religion and Arab nationalism, and controversially, in the Middle East, of love, eroticism and feminism.
Nizār Tawfīq Qabbānī was a Syrian diplomat, poet, writer and publisher. Īnd lo’, here was Qabbani’s poem Ya Beirut, Ya Sit al Dunya – O Beirut, Mistress of the World, a bitter soulmate of Fairuz’ Li Beirut. Meanwhile, the dead have been buried, the wounded will recover, limp on or succumb, and the psychological damage will endure. Caught up in the cogs of Lebanon’s crooked system, the search for the perpetrators, justice and closure will grind on for years. Lebanon’s people, already roiled by economic ruin and political paralysis, the trigger for months of civil unrest (see In That Howling Infinite’s Lebanon’s WhatsApp Intifada) and the chains of COVID19, blamed their corrupt and incompetent rulers and the archaic sectarian dispensation that kept them in power. Hundreds perished and thousands were injured, whilst the port and its adjacent neighbourhoods, a crowded inner-city of apartments and cafes, were devastated. Over two thousand tons of illegal, combustible, unstable, and almost forgotten ammonium nitrate, the stuff that brought down the Alfred C Murrah building in Oklahoma City in 1995 went up in a fireball that resembled an atomic blast. In August 2020, the largest man-made explosion since Hiroshima and Nagasaki ripped the heart out of Lebanon’s historic capital.
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