Praise: Open Democracy Remembers Nazik Al-Mala'ika

It's been eight years since "Iraq's uncrowned queen of poetry," Nazik Al-Mala'ika, died. Back in 2011, we observed Google's glorious tribute to Al-Mala'ika on her 88th birthday, via Feministing. This week, Open Democracy lauds Al-Mala'ika: a notoriously shy, deeply brilliant poet. From Open Democracy:

Yesterday marked eight years since the death of one of the most celebrated figures in Arabic literary history, Nazik Al-Mala'ika, best known for her free verse transformation of the Arabic poetic canon. Her symphonic and sensuous poetry, with overtones of melancholy, weaves together themes of love, death, feminism, nationalism and Islam.

A breathing legacy
She departed the world aged 83 in Cairo, the city in which her corporeal life ended, and that which closed the doors on her cherished native Iraq. The Mala'ika family fled their homeland and resettled in Egypt after the Ba'ath party's ascendance to power, in search of a more stable future.

Mala'ika is famed not only for her artistry of language, but also her unparalleled contributions to literary theory, which have kept her spirit alive until the present day. Her first book on literary criticism, Issues in contemporary poetry (Qadaya al-shi'r al-mu'asir), published in 1962, examines the linguistic responsibilities of writers and identifies common linguistic inaccuracies across Arabic literature. Even half a century on, her timeless theories inform present generations, and perhaps those to come, about the distinctiveness of Arabic and its various poetic forms.

Transformed, not transcended
As an early exponent and theorist of al-shi’r al-hurr (free verse), Nazik rose to literary acclaim for defying age-old poetic norms, to the dissatisfaction of many traditionalists. Her intervention remains largely misunderstood however. She pioneered a new form of poetry, seeking not to discontinue the literary traditions of classical Arabic, but to reform and thus advance the art of Arab poetry. As Dorothy Benson notes, al-shi’r al-hurr "uses some classical metres but allows for complete freedom in length of line and rhyme and relies for its musicality on repetition and parallelism." [...]

Read on at Open Democracy.