3/17/2024 0 Comments Nizar qabbani unemploymed![]() ![]() 4 Too much had gone wrong to sustain exclamation points of awakening and defiance they were replaced by a question mark of doubt. ![]() “Are we Arabs one big lie?” This line ends a poem of anguish written in the midst of the 1991 Gulf crisis by Nizar Qabbani, the most widely read contemporary Arab poet and critic. In the century that separated these two lines, millions of people gradually awakened and arose, insisting before the world and one another that they be written down as Arabs. 3 The poem immediately entered the Arab nationalist canon, to be recited from memory by a generation of schoolchildren. 2 “Write down, I am an Arab!” begins the renowned poem of resistance by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, written in 1963 to assert an Arab identity denied by Israel and the West. 1 George Antonius deployed the line as the epigraph of his influential book of 1938, The Arab Awakening, as the first utterance of a nascent Arab desire for independence from Ottoman rule. “Awake, O Arabs, and arise!” begins the famous ode of Ibrahim al-Yaziji, penned in 1868 in Lebanon. T HREE LINES OF POETRY plot the trajectory of Arab national consciousness. ![]()
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