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.
