Playlist: La Bel Haki By Adonis.

/Art by Tania Al Kayyali/

Adonis is a great poet, but it is also a name of a great (not so) little Lebanese band. Like it is captured by Now Lebanon, “the five boys from Adonis produce songs that are, at times, achingly gorgeous, charming, whimsical and enchantingly Lebanese.”

Time Out Beirut suggests: “If the rambling back alleys, low-slung electricity cables and small, dusty, bustling neighborhoods of Beirut had a soundtrack, this would be it.”

You can listen to one of their new songs, beautiful La Bel Haki, on You Tube.

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Previous Playlist:

Suhaiymah Manzoor Khan

PJ Harvey & Ramy Essam

Basel Rajoub

Crystalline (Omar Souleyman Remix)

Playlist: I Was Born For Poetry (Adonis).

/photo via Ninar Esber/

This time, something a little different in the Playlist session. It’s not a song, but it plays out like a song. Listen to the great Syrian poet Adonis – talking about his childhood, the way poetry gave him life and he gave life to it, the role of the poet as a thinker…

Adonis talks about everything – how an original poem written for the Syrian president sent him to school, how he got the name Adonis, revolutionized Arabic poetry and lives in the exile of being – in continuous beginnings.

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Previous Playlist:

The Partisan

Rojava Women

The Melody of our Alienation (Yemen)

Ruba Shamshoum

The Book To Read: Victims Of A Map.

/photo © Khaled Jarrar/

Victims of a Map is a beautiful bilingual anthology of Arabic poetry, including works of Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al Qasim and Adonis. The three of them are absolute stars in the world of (Arabic) poetry.

Alongside the original Arabic, this book includes thirteen poems by Darwish and a long work by Adonis written during the Beirut siege in 1982 – never before published. It’s really a labour of love and you can feel it in every page (lovely translation by Abudllah al-Udhari).

In The Desert (Diary of Beirut siege), great Syrian poet Adonis writes:

“My era tells me bluntly

you do not belong

I answer bluntly

I do not belong

I try to understand you

Now I am a shadow

Lost in the forest

Of a skull”

Most of the poetry by Adonis and Darwish and al-Qasim particularly, is written in a simple, everday language, but it speaks of the things greater than life – the hollowness of isolation, inevitability of “destiny”, solidity of “roots”, overwhelming hopelessness and permanent yearning for freedom.

In We are Entitled to Love the End of Autumn Darwish writes:

“We are entitled to love the end of autumn and ask:

Is there room for another autumn in the field to rest our bodies like coal?

An autumn lowering its leaves like gold. I wish we were fig leaves

I wish we were an abandoned plant

To witness the change of seasons. I wish we didn’t say goodbye

To the south of the eye so as to ask what

Our fathers had asked when they flew on the tip of the spear”

As it is written in the introduction of this book, the poems in Victims of a Map express not only the fate of Arabs, Syrians or Palestinians, but also of the humanity itself, trapped in a contemporary tragedy. The resistance poetry by Darwish, al-Qasim and Adonis, raises a local tragedy to a level of a universal one.

Just think about it – how many people are today, and in how many ways – victims of a map? In The Story of a City, al-Qasim writes:

“A blue city

dreamt of tourists

shopping day after day.

A dark city

hates tourists

scanning cafes with rifles.”

Read this beautiful little anthology! Like it is often the case with great poetry books – you’ll never finish reading it and it is worth all of your time.

• • •

Previous The Book To Read:

War Works Hard

Desert Songs Of The Night

In The Country Of Men

After Zionism