![when will they declare the deaths of arabs nizar qabbani when will they declare the deaths of arabs nizar qabbani](https://i1.wp.com/arablit.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/qabbani.jpg)
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.
![when will they declare the deaths of arabs nizar qabbani when will they declare the deaths of arabs nizar qabbani](https://64.media.tumblr.com/9e48d7af1533572accef7772c6501645/tumblr_ovhc3tmKyV1rkotdvo1_1280.jpg)
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.