Kabbani married again, this time to an Iraqi schoolteacher, Balqis al-Rawi. He was posted in Egypt, Turkey, Britain, Lebanon, Spain, and China before he resigned in 1966 and moved to Beirut, where he established his own publishing company.įrom a brief early marriage in Syria, he had two children, one of whom died in a car accident as a young man Kabbani eulogized him in poetry. Kabbani graduated from the University of Damascus with a law degree in 1945 and joined Syria’s diplomatic corps. He also wrote strident poems against Israeli and American policies toward Arabs, such as the poem “I Am a Terrorist” in which he says that Arab men are labeled terrorists by the Western media for defending their homes and their people’s dignity. His most scathing poetic attacks, such as “Scribblings in the Margins of the Notebook of Defeat,” are aimed at repressive Arab governments that curtail the human rights of the Arab peoples. His poetry conveys deep Arab pride as well as sharp criticism of many aspects of Arab life and culture, such as the sexual double standard for men and women. In the 1980s, Kabbani wrote three volumes of poetry, titled “Trilogy of the Children of the Rocks” (1988), celebrating the teenage rebels of the Palestinian intifadah. He saw himself as a champion of women’s liberation and sexual freedom. In 1954, the Syrian parliament considered demoting him from his diplomatic post for the disrespect to religion some found in his poem, “Bread, Hashish, and the Moon,” but the motion failed.Īt the height of his literary career, from the 1950s to the 1970s, Kabbani, often writing in a female voice, expressed the joys of love and eros for a generation of men and especially women.
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Kab-bani’s poetry often incites rebellion against what he saw as repressive political and social mores. He immediately gained fame for his bad-boy erotic daring and his “hip” language that expressed Arabic youth culture. Born in Damascus, Syria, to a respected middle-class Muslim family, Kabbani published his first volume of poetry in 1944.