The Palestinian poet Zuhair Abu Shayeb said at the ceremony of awarding the Al-Arkanah International Poetry Award that he feels honored and proud of this coronation alongside his poet friends: Ghassan Zaqtan, Taher Riyad and Youssef Abdel Aziz, “from whom and with whom he learned what poetry is and how a Palestinian should write it without giving up beauty over beauty, and without giving up beauty over wound, my friends whom my poems and my meaning were keen on,” especially since this award linked them to the name of Palestine and Morocco. Saints, considering that the award of the Arkanah
“It is not just a prize for poetry, it is a compass for reconsidering the trends of modern poetry, and a reminder for poets not to forget that Palestine is an aesthetic question that is necessarily completely connected with poetry.”
At the ceremony hosted by the Mohammed VI Museum in Rabat yesterday evening (April 25), poet Taher Riad received his award, noting the importance of the event by saying: “In a time when the forces of darkness and arrogance prevail, the drums of war are beating and peoples are being exterminated, Morocco insists, through this award, on celebrating the poetic adventurers who blow upon the darkness to restore the meaning of man.”
Poetry is an act of resistance
Poet Taher Riad asked at this concert, which poet Ghassan Zaqtan was absent due to his health illness, is poetry still necessary? Is poetry still possible? These are the questions that were previously asked by the great poet Mahmoud Darwish, who was present and absent at the ceremony of this award, which he had previously won in his lifetime in 2008.
Riad replied that poetry is necessary because poetry and the arts are all “a need that our souls cannot be complete without meeting it, and poetry is possible not only because it is a skillful expression, but because it is the highest and most profound contemplation of life and existence, and a test of the ability of art to comprehend the hidden in both.”
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He explained that those crowned with this award do not represent all spectrums of Palestinian poetry. There are many Palestinian poets who deserve attention to their achievements that bear the features of their artistic and stylistic experiences, which extend and continue in the Arab world and internationally to confirm that this people, despite their long suffering in their homeland and in exile, is resistant to denial or forgetting.
He quoted passages from the words of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, in which he says, “The Palestinian is not a profession or a slogan. He is, first and foremost, a human being who loves life and is captivated by the almond blossom and feels goosebumps from the first light rain. He makes love in response to the natural lust of the body and not to another call. Poetry’s assimilation of the intuitive life force within us is an act of resistance, by which we resist ugliness with beauty.”
“The Palestinian is not a profession or a slogan. He is, first and foremost, a human being who loves life, is seduced by the almond blossom, and feels goosebumps from the first light rain.” Mahmoud Darwish
Scene poem
As for the poet Youssef Abdel Aziz, he recalled his poetic experience and spoke about the first time he wrote poetry in 1970, and about the first verse he wrote about his home in Jerusalem, where he was trying through poetry to restore the features of that house. His first poems were full of the picturesque Palestinian nature in West Jerusalem, known for its legendary formation. After that, he was impressed by the poem of resistance that poets led by Mahmoud Darwish, Samih Al-Qasim, and Tawfiq Ziad, so he was inspired to His poems are the spirit of resistance.
After 1982, he paid attention to developing the structure of the poem he was writing, so he turned to writing the “scene poem,” relying on visual references from cinema, theater, and visual art, following the approach of the poet Mahmoud Darwish, who used to say, “Every beautiful poem we write is a poem of resistance.”
He recited a group of poems in which he mixes spectacle with special surrealism, including the poem “Black Laughter,” which deals with a painting by the Spanish artist Salvador Dali, which represents the body of a woman with drawers, in which he says:
“I opened the first drawer/and from it/a huge cloud of bed flew out/and filled the room/from the second drawer/white rabbits jumped/… In the penultimate drawer/there were vials filled with blood/and a brush/and a shirt from which fire oozed/and shadows/I opened the last drawer/and let out a loud scream/.”
The coronation of a poet, not a poet
Regarding the specificity of the award of this session of the Al-Argana International Poetry Award, organized this year in partnership with the Ministry of Youth, Culture and Communication and the partnership of the “Bayt Mal Al-Quds Al-Sharif Agency”, the Moroccan poet Wafa Al-Omrani, head of the jury for the 18th session of the Al-Argana International Poetry Award, said in a statement to Al-Jazeera Net that this year the committee considered several poetic nominations, but searched for something exceptional in the geographical remotests that parallels the uniqueness of this Moroccan award, so in this session it departed from the stereotype of crowning a poet. One, so she chose a poet and not a poet, and hence the decision came to “celebrate Palestinian poetry that has imposed itself with its diversity and distinction.”
The jury for the Al-Argana International Poetry Award, whose 18th session this year was chaired by poet Wafaa Al-Omrani, consisted of members: academic Abdel Rahman Tankoul, plastic artist Ahmed Jared, academic Jamal Eddine Benhayoun, poet and translator Nour El-Din Al-Zwaitni, and poet Hassan Najmi, Secretary-General of this award.
A shift in the philosophy of the award
For his part, the poet Murad Al-Qadiri, head of the House of Poetry in Morocco, said that the Al-Arkanah International Poetry Award’s coronation of Palestinian poetry in its 18th session marks a new birth for it, and reveals “a profound shift in its path, as it cannot be viewed as an organizational detail or a passing exceptional measure, but rather is a significant turning point in the philosophy of this award and its aesthetic and cultural standards.”
Al-Qadri added that granting the award to four Palestinian poets reveals “a new vision that undermines the single perception of the award, replacing it with a new perception based on creative pluralism and celebrating the juxtaposition of voices and the diversity of references and artistic and aesthetic sensibilities within Palestinian poetry itself, which deepens the symbolic intensity and moral value of the International Arkanah Award.”
Al-Qadri explained that the distinction achieved for Palestinian poetry is not only due to its connection to an existential issue that affects man, the land, identity and memory, but also because its poets have been able over the years to raise their cause through poetry to the heavens of metaphor and the paradise of dreams, giving to everyone who has the right to exist and create a cause against the deception of history and the falsity of geography.
Thus, Palestine is no longer a “political issue” as much as it has become a cultural and poetic issue, and a symbol that inhabits letters and voices calling for truth, freedom, and justice throughout the world. There is no surprise in that, as he said:
“Lessons always come to us from Palestine, and only Palestinian genius can force us to change the compass of things and organize them according to a new, different and different logic.”
The Al Arkanah International Poetry Award crowned international and Arab poets across its sessions, at the forefront of which were: the Chinese poet Pei Dao, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, the Lebanese poet Wadih Saadeh, the Italian poet Giuseppe Conte, and the Bahraini poet Qasim Haddad.
