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 Nazik
Al Malaika
Biography:
Renowned Arab poet Nazik al-Malaika was born in
Baghdad, Iraq in 1923, oldest among her four sisters and two brothers.
She got her baccalaureate in 1939. In her early teens she showed
great love for the Arabic language, history and music. In 1944,
she graduated from the Baghdad faculty of letters, Arabic department
with honors. Um Nizar, Nazik's mother, was herself a poet, and her
father was a teacher of Arabic grammar in Baghdad secondary schools.
He left a twenty volume encyclopedia on Arabic grammar and literature.
Nazik 's readings in philosophy helped her acquire
a dialectical thinking and ideology.
At an early age, she showed inclination to modern
Arabic poetry written by Muhammad Hassan Ismael, Badawi al-Jabal
Besharael - Khouri, Omar Abu Resheh and many others. For Nazik,
the year 1941 was to mark the beginning of her social and spiritual
maturity. Added to these it was a year of great national revolt
for the Iraqis when the national revolution led by Rasheed al-Kilani
was launched.
In 1947 Nazik published her first collection of
poems under the title "Night's Lover." For poet Nazik
"night" was the symbol of poetry, imagination and dreams,
beauty of the stars, wonder of moon lights and the glimmering of
the Tigris river under light. She was fascinated by the songs of
Egyptian singers Um Kalthoum and Abdul Wahab.
On Friday January 27, 1947, she got up in the morning
to hear on the radio a report on the number of Cholera deaths reported
each day in Egypt. One thousand deaths of cholera per day made the
poet write her well-known poem "The Cholera." It reads
"Night came to a standstill listen to the echoes of wails in
the dark of night, under silence and on corpses death, death, death
humanity laments."
In 1949 Nazik published her second collection, entitled
"sparks of ashes" prefacing it with a theory of new poetry
metrics.
Two years later, the poet had won fame outside Iraq.
She read English literature and the French literature as well. She
studied Latin and leant by heart long poems of well-known ancient
Greek poets. In 1951 she traveled to the US where she studied literary
criticism and in 1954 she also went back again to the US to study
"comparative literature."
Her third collection,
entitled "Bottom of the Wave" was published in 1957. The
July 14, 1958 revolution was a great source of inspiration not only
to the Iraqi people but also to the poet when in a poem she expressed
the people 's happiness saying: The happiness of children when,
embraced by parents is like the happiness of a thirsty man when
drinking water. The happiness of July when flirting with cold winds
is like the happiness of night when it gives to the stars and the
birth of the Republic.
In 1962, the poet published her first book on literary
criticism entitled "Issues of Contemporary Poetry." He
fourth collection of poems under the title "Tree of the Moon"
was published by the beginning of 1968.
In 1970 she wrote a long poem under the title "The
Tragedy of Life and a Song for Man."
Her poems written
in 1973 published under the title "For Prayer and Revolution"
and poems written in 1974 were published under the title "The
Sea Changes its Colors."
The poet resided
in Iraq and traveled to the US frequently.
She is currently
living in Cairo, Egypt where she has lived in self-imposed exile
since 1990.
When
the sea changed its colors, Youghiyar Alouanah Al-Bahr, Nazik Al-Malaika,
Cairo: Afaq Al-Kitaba (Writing Horizons) series of the Cultural
Palaces Organisation.
Recent celebrations
in Egypt of the career of the Iraqi poet Nazik Al-Malaika, on of
the pioneers of free verse, have drawn attention to the poet's connection
to the country, such as her decision to live in Egypt during a period
of convalescence last year. On this occasion Al-Malaika, for reasons
best known to herself, put up a barrier against the press, which
few journalists were able to penetrate. This meant that Al-Malaika's
presence in the country, went largely unmarked. However with the
publication of this book this situation has changed, and we now
have available a selection of Al-Malaika's work that justly represents
her fame.
Al-Malaika herself chose the contents of the selection, and the
bulk of the poems she has chosen were written 25 years ago in 1974.
Yet, as is the case with all real, sincere poetry, they have kept
their direct appeal: 'My love/My rapture was a sea/Which changed
its colours, the sockets of its eyes turning black and green/It
threw its waves ahead, forged pearls/Flowed into springs, landed
on shores/Created tides, made islands/Scattered, across the blue
of the gulf, a blond archipelago.' Besides the poetry, the book
also includes a fascinating autobiographical sketch, in which Al-Malaika
reveals various aspects of her life.
Born in 1923
in Baghdad, Nazik Al-Malaika completed her secondary education in
1939, before proceeding to earn a BA degree in literature from Baghdad
Education College. Her attachment to poetry, however, had begun
many years before her years of formal study, and she tells us in
her autobiography that she composed her first poetry in Classical
Arabic at the age of 10 under the tutelage of her father, who was
himself a poet. Her family was very important to her in her early
years and later, and it was her father who gave her a secure foundation
in the Arabic language. Concerned by the presence of grammatical
errors in his daughter's early work, he undertook her education
himself, something which he had every qualification to do, since
in addition to his own poetry he was also the editor of a 20-volume
encyclopedia. He, however, was not the only writer of talent in
the family since Al-Malaika's mother, who wrote under the pseudonym
Omm Nizar Al-Malaika, was also a poet. The young Nazik thus grew
up in an intensely literary environment.
"My father
laid out a wonderful smooth path before me," she writes here,
"when he provided me with books containing the principles of
grammar and the classics of our literature. Thus it was only natural
for me to be the only student in the Arabic department to choose
the various schools of grammar as a topic for my dissertation. My
supervisor was a great professor, the late Mustapha Jawad, and he
had a profound effect on my intellectual life. The manuscript of
my dissertation is still in the college building and carries the
corrections that he made on it in red ink."
In her autobiographical
sketch Al-Malaika also recounts the influence that the modern poetry
of Mahmoud Hassan Ismail, Badawi Al-Jabal, Amjad Al-Tarabolsi, Omar
Abu Risha and Bishara Khouri initially exerted on her. She participated
at college meetings, where she would read aloud her work that was
already being published by newspapers and magazines. Since then,
however, like many another poet, she has largely disowned these
early works and has not included them in later books and collections.
However one memory of this period remains vivid to her, and that
is of sitting alone for hours in her parents' back garden, playing
the oud and singing the songs of Omm Kulthoum and Mohamed Abdel-Wahab.
In 1947, Nazik
Al-Malaika published her first collection of poetry, A'shiqat Al-Layl
(Lover of the Night). A few months later news of the cholera epidemic
that was then sweeping Egypt arrived in Iraq, and this had a great
emotional effect on the young poet. Later she wrote of this time
in her autobiography, and specifically remembered events on Friday
27 October, 1947. "I woke up," she writes, "and lay
in bed listening to the broadcaster on the radio, who said that
the number of the dead in Egypt had reached 1,000. I was overwhelmed
by a profound sadness and deep distress. I jumped out of bed, took
out a pen and paper, left the house, which was always noisy and
busy on a Friday, and went to a construction site close by. Since
it was a holiday, the whole place was deserted, and I sat on a low
fence and began to compose 'Cholera', a poem that has subsequently
become well-known. I had heard that the corpses of dead people in
the Egyptian countryside were being carried crammed together on
horse-drawn carts, so as I wrote I imagined something of the sounds
of these horses: 'The night is silent/Listen to the effect of groans/In
the depth of darkness, below the silence, on the dead.'"
It was under
these circumstances that Arabic poetry was first freed from the
rigid strictures of traditional rhythmic forms and rhyme schemes.
Only the tafila, a looser, more flexible metric division, was retained.
Nazik Al-Malaika must take much of the credit for this emancipation
and, for her part, from that day on she wrote only what she called
'free' verse, rather in the manner of that written by other earlier
experimenters in certain European traditions. In 1949 in her introduction
to her second volume of poems, Shazaiya wa Ramad (Shrapnel and Ash),
she explained the new theory of metre which she had introduced into
Arabic poetry and her own practice of free verse. The essay gave
rise to a series of attacks on Al-Malaika by proponents of the older
poetics, however Al-Malaika, who was not only a poet but was also
a theorist, grammarian and musician, defended herself ably. Her
years of study and early foundations in the Arabic language meant
that she was able eloquently to defend the new practice.
Throughout her
life Al-Malaika exhibited a seemingly unquenchable thirst for knowledge
of all kinds. As a student she registered in the oud department
of the Fine Arts Institute, attended classes in the acting department
and took Latin, while she was still a second-year undergraduate
at university. To this day, she tells us here, she still plays her
oud and sings the songs of Mohamed Abdel-Wahab, Omm Kulthoum, Fairouz,
Abdel-Halim Hafez and Nagat. She studied French with her younger
brother without the aid of a teacher, and her love of English literature
allowed her to earn a scholarship to study at Princeton University,
New Jersey, which was then a predominantly male institution in which
Al-Malaika was one of the very few female students.
In 1954 Nazik
Al-Malaika travelled again to the United States, this time to earn
a Masters degree in Comparative Literature. Besides her studies,
it was at this time that Al-Malaika began to write an autobiographical
account of her life. In 1961 she married her colleague in the Arabic
department at the Education College in Baghdad, Abdel-Hadi Mahbouba,
who was himself a graduate of Cairo University.
Reviewed
by Mahmoud El-Wardani
►► Some
of the artist's articles
►► Arabic
biography and some of the artist's arabic poems
Contact: editorial@onefineart.com
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