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Ahmad Dahbour

Personal Info

  • Country of residence: Palestine
  • Gender: Male
  • Born in: 1946
  • Age: 77
  • Curriculum vitae :

Information

Ahmad Khader Dahbour (born April 21, 1946 in Haifa - April 8, 2017) is a Palestinian poet who grew up and studied in the Neirab camp for Palestinian refugees in the city of Homs after his family emigrated to Lebanon in 1948 and then to Syria. Dahbour did not receive a sufficient basic education, but he was an avid reader, so he honed his poetic talent by reading the eyes of ancient and modern Arabic poetry, and his works reflected and expressed the Palestinian experience. He worked as editor-in-chief of Lotus magazine until 1988, as general director of the Department of Culture in the Palestine Liberation Organization, and a member of the Union of Palestinian Writers and Journalists. He won the Tawfiq Ziyad Prize in Poetry in 1998. He wrote many poems for the group Songs of the Lovers. The poet Ghassan Zaqtan described him as “one of the most important founders of the Palestinian scene in the field of modern poetry.”

 

his life

Dahbour was born on Sunday, April 21, 1946, in Haifa, Palestine. He says about his early life: “My family did not light two candles for me to celebrate my birthday, but rather they carried me and fled with me as refugees from Haifa to the unknown, and the unknown at that time was initially Lebanon, then a Syrian village inhabited by Circassians called Ain Zaat (Ayn Al-Esr), before we moved to Homs. Where I lived the rest of my life there, except for my youth.”

 

Dahbour returned to the Palestinian territories after the signing of the Oslo Accords.

 

his career

Dahbour published his early poems in the Lebanese magazine Al-Adab. He published his first poetry collection, "The Predators and Eyes of Children" in 1964, then in 1971 he released his second collection, "The Palestinian Boy's Tale", which showed his political bias towards the Palestinian revolution, and embodied the suffering of Palestinians in refugee camps. Dahbour joined the Palestinian revolution early, worked as a military journalist, and was writing a weekly literary article entitled "Wednesday's Feast" in Al-Hayat newspaper.

 

Dahbour worked as a political editor for Wafa Agency, the Syria branch, and as a literary editor. He was the editor-in-chief of Lotus magazine until 1988. He was also appointed director general of the PLO's Culture Department, and editor-in-chief of Bayader magazine, which was issued by the department. After his return to Palestine, Dahbour worked as an undersecretary of the Ministry of Culture until his retirement in 2007.

 

his style

Dahbour's poetry is distinguished by its continuous reproduction of semantics, assuming them new meanings, and critic Ibrahim Khalil expresses this in his article "Ahmed Dahbour: A contradictory language and a liberating signifier". In his poems, there were features expressing his many movements in his life between Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Tunisia, “especially in the symbols that the poet pleads, from the desert to the trees to the greenery and the sea and other features of different geography that he expressed, capturing all its details, and making of those details his own Palestine.” . According to the Tunisian writer Mohamed Nasser Al-Maulhi, Dahbour’s poetic achievement is dominated by the “Tableh” poem, but he believes that he was distinguished in it by a special rhythm, which he calls “the strong rhythm, which stands in an area between vertical poetry and free poetry, where its sentence is characterized by a solid casting charged with a passive emotion, which is the poet’s emotion.” Aspiring to liberation, his liberation and the liberation of his country and people.” According to the writer Khalil Sweileh, in reviewing his long poetic experience, he notices his exceptional care for the importance of rhythm in furnishing the poetic image with a dramatic and rhetorical charge at the same time, and placing it in another position, based on his conviction that “poetry is the enemy of tranquility.”

 

his works

Al-Dhawari and Children's Eyes - Poetry - Homs 1964.

The Story of the Palestinian Boy - Poetry - Beirut 1971.

Tayyir al-Wahdat - Poetry - Beirut 1973.

Without this I came - poetry - Beirut 1977.

The Mixing of Night and Day - Poetry - Beirut 1979.

Twenty-one seas - poetry - Beirut 1981.

Testimony with the Five Fingers - Poetry - Beirut 1983.

Diwan Ahmad Dahbour - Poetry - Beirut 1983.

capillary fractions - hair

Thus - the poetry of Dar Al-Adab Beirut 1990

here there. - Poetry - Dar Al-Shorouk Amman 1997

Sacrifice Mountain - Poetry - 1999

his death

He died on April 8, 2017, in Ramallah, at the age of 71, due to kidney failure. And the Palestinian Ministry of Culture called him in a statement: “With Dahbour’s departure, Palestine lost not only one of the giants of Palestinian literature and creativity, but a compass that until the last moments pointed to Palestine, and an icon that has always inspired many of our people in their various places of residence, and in various national historical joints.” . A large number of intellectuals and artists also mourned him, including the Egyptian poet Zine El Abidine Fouad, the Syrian poet Muhammad Alaa El Din Abdel Mawla, the Jordanian writer Maan Al Bayari, the Egyptian novelist Waheed Al Tawila and the Palestinian photographer Ahmed Al Mahsiri, as did Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

 

 

Achievements and Awards

Awards

Tawfiq Ziyad Prize in Poetry 1998

source

 

 

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