Cultural festivals, especially poetic ones, and literary forums related to the novel and literary criticism reveal to us the magnitude of the realist tragedy in Arab culture, due to the absence of symbols of Arab poetry, and also, the absence of great Arab novelists, and professor critics of literature: poetry, short story, and novel..
Look around you now and count the dozens: Mahmoud Darwish, Ahmed Dahbour, Abd al-Latif Akl, Samih al-Qasim, Joseph Harb, Saeed Akl, Muhammad Ali Shams al-Din, Onsi al-Hajj, Shawqi Baghdadi, Mamdouh Adwan, Ali al-Jundi, Amal Dunqul, Muhammad Afifi Matar, Abd Al-Wahhab Al-Bayati, Bland Al-Haidari, Nazik Al-Malaika, Habib Al-Zeyoudi, Ahmed Al-Musleh, Rizk Abu Zina, Edward Haddad, Muhammad Al-Qaisi, Jihad Hudeib, Amin Shannar, Ghazi Al-Qusaibi, Muhammad Al-Thubaiti, Habib Al-Sayegh, Ahmed Rashid Thani, Muhammad bin Hader, Abdullah Al-Bardouni, Muhammad Al-Fitouri, Muhammad Al-Tobi, Muhammad Al-Harthy, Sargon Boulos, Youssef Al-Sayegh.. This is in poetry…
In the novel: Ghaleb Halasa, Jamal al-Ghitani, Abd al-Rahman Munif, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Ghassan Kanafani, Tayseer Saboul (novel and poetry), Rasmi Abu Ali (story and poetry), Tayeb Salih, Emile Habibi, and others.
In literary criticism: Ihsan Abbas, Salma al-Khadra al-Jayyousi, and other critics and thinkers who also worked in literary criticism and cultural criticism.
Of course, there are other absentees besides this constellation that is now sleeping in eternity.. Painters, playwrights, cartoonists, musicians, singers, and filmmakers were the aesthetic, literary, and cultural stars of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and these great artists were friends of poets, novelists, thinkers, and critics, and of course these friendships extended. To media professionals, journalists, and daily or weekly opinion writers in the Arab press, which was a beacon of light and enlightenment in the seventies and eighties of the last century..
This Arab cultural situation, artistic, critical, literary, and journalistic, has now completely ended with the absence of the makers of this situation, which has not been repeated until now, just as no one expects it to recur. More than half a century ago…
We see this truly tragic picture.. whenever we go back to the memory of what is called the beautiful Arab time..
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