أمير الشعراء ~ Prince of Poets

I first read about the satellite TV show أمير الشعراء (Prince of Poets) a couple weeks ago in this article.

I often find myself loving Arab TV, and here is a good reason why. The concept is simple: its American Idol (or Superstar, if you prefer the Arab version) but instead of music and singing, the competition is about poetry and recitation. Poets from all over the Arab world come together to compete by reciting their original poems in front of a panel of 5 expert judges and enthusiastic studio audience.

This is a great illustration, for the uninitiated, of the weight that the spoken word carries in Arab societies, from at least 15 centuries ago until today. Could such a thing ever fly in the U.S.? Of course not. [For another good description of this difference in the importance of poetry, read the introduction of Steven Caton's "Peaks of Yemen I Summon"].

Now of course there is some TV-produced gimmick-ness to all of this. The stage-set with columns and dramatic lighting, the reverb on the mic... Yes, it can seem a little cheesy or over-the-top, but the local appeal and cultural relevance of this shouldn't be dismissed. I asked a Syrian friend of mine (not someone especially interested in poetry) about it and she said that she has liked the show when she saw it, and her father is obsessed with it. When I asked my Arabic professor, he said that of course he knows it, and that one of the panel judges is an old friend of his from university in Jordan. Also, you can see from numerous videos on YouTube just how much the audience loves this.

The winner, the one who gets to carry the title Prince of Poets, was declared to be عبد الكريم المعتوق Abd al-Karim al-Ma3tooq, but there is strong evidence that he is not actually the best poet: I did a YouTube search for أمير الشعراء (Prince of Poets) and then sorted them by most views, thus. ُ Abd al-Karim al-Ma3tooq's name does not appear once on the page of the first 20, while the name of the 5th place winner تميم البرغوثي Tamim al-Barghouthy is featured on all but 2 of the videos from the show. Commentator Saifedean Ammous also describes how one of Al-Barghouti's poems from the show, القدس (Jerusalem), has become enormously popular among Palestinians everywhere. The video of this poem is by far the most viewed YouTube video that comes up with a search for أمير الشعراء (Prince of Poets), going on 200,000 views.



Note especially how the audience interrupts him multiple times with their enthusiastic applause, barely letting him continue. Not only did the audience like it, but the judges are apparently also enamored of Tamim's poetry. Towards the end of this video not one of them holds back in showering praise upon his poetry, marveling at how he's mastered the traditional metered Arabic poetry (as opposed to free verse) at such a young age.



[Side note, in regards to my obsession with Arabic and its dialects: notice that although the poems are in فصحى (Fus-ha, formal arabic) Tamim uses the عامية (Aamiyya, colloquial language) to explain his choice to use this formal language in his poetry. Even some of the judges offer their praise with a language that mixes the formal and the informal. And this, a TV show about poetry written in the Fus-ha language, common across all the Arab world, is just the type of thing that most Aamiya-haters point to as a good reason for foreigners to only learn Fus-ha. But they would be wrong: you need Aamiya for everything, or at least that's my opinion, he said a little snootily...]

So why, if he was so great and the audience loved him so much, didn't Tameem al-Barghouty win? Ammous, whose article I linked above, points to politics as the reason: Barghouty's poems are political, while the topics in the anointed "prince's" poems are apparently about love and other innocuous issues. The Gulf countries (it's an Abu Dhabi show) are known for their avoidance of political issues, so it doesn't surprise Ammous one bit that Barghouty was offered just 5th place. There must be some reason, if YouTube and the judges' praise is any measure, for Barghouty not to have won, and this wouldn't surprise me.

In this particular case, I don't know enough to get deep into these wider issues of politics, Palestine, and potential censorship brought up by "Prince of Poets". I may write later about my current academic project, a study of Arabic Rap, which touches on all of these things. For now, however, I'm still getting a kick out of the fact that up on the TV sceen there's a crowd of cheering fans, a panel of poetry experts, and a camera-boom swooping down over them all to focus in on one young man reciting his own poetry. That is a beautiful thing.

More Awesomeness from Providence, RI

I'm honored to know at least one of the people involved with this performance/installation art project that was just discovered in the Providence Place Mall: Artists build apartment inside the mall and live there on an off for years.

Amazing. Here is a meaty Providence Journal article which has good quotes from Police and mall owners. Also check out this opinion piece.

This event has also led me to check out other work by these people. You can check out the main site for Tape Art, as well as the incredibly documented The Eleventh of September project, an example of people using the internet to its fullest powers.

Ahmedinejad at Columbia

Hi.

This is a funny thing to start with. I'm trying to clean up my room, and have this newspaper clipping lying around, I want to throw it away, but I also want to save it.

It's now a little out of date (not right on time, as things in blog-o-land mostly are) but I read this letter in the NYTimes about Ahmadinejad's visit to Columbia -- it expressed some of my thoughts:

NYTimes Letters 9/26/2007

To the Editor:

Columbia University's treatment of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is appalling. It would have been understandable had Columbia simply condemned Mr. Ahmadinejad's ideas or remarks in a debate or discussion forum.

However, not only did the university set the tone for the forum by launching ad hominem attacks, but the school then asserts that the forum was intended for the ideal of open discussion of ideas -- a discussion that Columbia aborted in its infancy.

In doing so, Columbia has demonstrated again the temptation of Orientalism: for us to humiliate and caricature a feared Other, put it on open display, and then pat ourselves on the back for being enlightened enough to make the display case.

Columbia needs to either fully exclude or fully include Mr. Ahmadinejad in its discussions of him. Setting him up as a simple straw man to be knocked down does a disservice to academic discourse. Michael Chen

Mount Prospect, Ill., Sept. 25, 2007

Ahmadinejad said it best himself, as quoted in the NYTimes front-page article of the day after the speech.

''In Iran, tradition requires when you invite a person to be a speaker, we actually respect our students enough to allow them to make their own judgment, and don't think it's necessary before the speech is even given to come in with a series of complaints to provide vaccination to the students and faculty.''

He added, to some cheers, ''Nonetheless, I shall not begin by being affected by this unfriendly treatment.''

And this is not to defend the man. If you actually read the speech, you will find that much (though not all) of it is meandering and senseless.

All in all, not worth making a war over.