Damascus-SANA
Among the dozens of Arab poets who wrote for young children and whose poems filled the pages of their school books, the texts of one creator that were handed down through the generations were imprinted in their memory. He is the great poet Suleiman Al-Issa.
And because children are always the most honest people who speak in the language of peoples, their innocent demeanor and spontaneous emotions crowned Al-Issa with a poet of childhood. As for adults, some of them considered him (the greatest Arab poet), as described by the Yemeni poet Abdul Aziz Al-Maqaleh. He wrote for struggle, oases and sand.
Going back to the biography of the late Al-Issa, we find that he is one of the many Syrian creators who saw the light in the Iskenderun Al-Saleeb Brigade, such as Haidar Yazigi, Walid Ikhlasi, Adham and Sidqi Ismail. His last book, “Al-Na’iriya, My Village” with its tales, birdsong, chirping, his brick house, fig and mulberry trees, under the shadow of which he wrote his first poems.
The father of our poet was a sheikh and a clergyman named Ahmad Al-Issa. He received on his hands the principles of reading and writing in the village book, and he obtained a distinguished educational formation according to the prevailing traditional culture, so he memorized the Holy Qur’an, the Diwan of Al-Mutanabbi and dozens of Arab poetry eyes, then he involved him in teaching the book and because of this care that enriched the genius of the boy He composed poetry at the age of ten.
The Al-Issa family lived in a state closer to poverty, as it had no resources except what the father received from the wages of the book and some of what a piece of land yielded to create in the child’s soul the roots of the land and the toilers, as he will write this later in the anthem “You Arab youth, come on.”
When Al-Issa the father decided to send his son to learn at the primary school in the city of Antioch, the school director tested him and then put him in the fourth grade directly.
And fates wanted Al-Issa to shock the nation with the conspiracies and dangers facing the nation when the French occupation sought to strip Alexandretta from the body of the motherland and give it to the Turks. .
Al-Issa continued his secondary studies in Hama, Lattakia and Damascus and participated in the national struggle against the occupation and was imprisoned more than once, where he expressed his anger at the occupier and his aspiration for independence in several poems he wrote at the time.
During his studies at the High School of Processing in Damascus, Jawdat Al-Hashemi was currently attracted by the ideas of the Arab Socialist Baath Party at the hands of his teacher, Zaki Al-Arsuzi, because he found principles that intersect with his idea of anti-colonialism, standing with the hard-working, and calling for Arab unity to remain a carrier of these ideas throughout his life. Iraq, during his studies at the Higher Teachers’ College in Baghdad, in which he met students who would later become great writers, such as Abdul Wahhab Al-Bayati, Badr Shaker Al-Sayyab and Lamia Abbas.
Upon his return from Iraq in 1947, Al-Issa settled in the city of Aleppo to work in the teaching profession and to have a unique journalistic experience with his friend, the late writer Sidqi Ismail, when they founded a critical humorous newspaper entitled The Dog with the participation of a group of creative writers from Najat Qassab Hassan, Abdel Salam Al-Ajili and Mansour Al-Rahbani.
In 1952, Al-Issa issued his first collection, Al-Fajr, in which he broadcast selfish and flirty feelings and a lesser presence of national issues, during which he complained about the complicity of Arab regimes in the loss of Palestine in 1948.
But the national concern with creativity will identify more with Al-Issa and become more involved in the issues of the nation, which made the Algerian writer and diplomat Othman Saadi in his book (The Algerian Revolution in Syrian Poetry) see that Al-Issa played a very influential role in mobilizing support and support for the Algerian revolution against the French occupation.
And between 1952 and 1960, Al-Issa issued 6 collections of poetry, including Arabic poems and a prayer for the land of the revolution, which he singled out for the Algerian revolution and Thaer from Ghaffar. His poetry became a national message directed to the masses with an interest in change. His struggle poetry included the concerns of the Arab nation from the ocean to the Gulf and for that His poems inflamed the souls and affected an entire generation of Arab youth across the countries.
However, the incident of separation that occurred in the state of unity between Syria and Egypt and then the setback of June 1967 took the poetic experience of Al-Issa to different periods, so two books appeared to him: waves without a beach and flowers for loss. It was like a review of the past and a pause on the causes of setbacks.
Al-Issa, who retired from his work as an Arabic language instructor in the Ministry of Education in 1967 and contributed to the founding of the Arab Writers Union in Syria in 1969, moved to Yemen in 1980 by virtue of his late literary wife Malakah Abyad’s work as a professor at Sana’a University. With the Yemeni cultural center and touched literary and popular celebration of it.
And when Al-Issa was writing for the martyrs of the October Liberation War, his poem “The Immortals” in which he says
(When the martyr met God and humans), he was starting the biggest turning point in his life, and he found that the nation’s confrontation of challenges is not direct and rhetorical, but rather by building the human being from within and raising the new generations on the authentic character and involving them in thinking and planning to make So his poetic output for adults began to decrease and replace by writing songs and poetic plays for children, who were searching for their future in their eyes.
Al-Issa’s writing about children was not arbitrary, but according to a theory he developed, which sums it up that the children’s poet must present them with a poem that maintains its artistic level and serves the purposes of purposeful and sound education, and he is keen to have in his poetry the beautiful poetic image, the graceful, suggestive word, the noble and good idea, the light, graceful musical weight and blending. Between two worlds, sensory reality, dream and imagination, trying to simplify concepts and bring them closer to sensory images.
An Emirati poet and critic, Saif Muhammad Al-Marri, found that what Al-Issa presented in the field of writing for children is the most beautiful heritage that he presents for building the Arab nation and enriches its library with a door that is most needed.
After Al-Issa returned to Damascus at the end of his seventies, he began to spend his time between the house and some friends and in the meetings of the Arabic Language Academy, of which he became a member, and despite everything, he held on to hope despite the difficult situation of the nation, which he described as an emergency. He said in his last press interview with him “Never despair, try to get up after every stumble, and to open a window when a door closes in front of you.”
On the ninth of August 2013, the letters of Al-Issa stopped for the last time, and his poems became the rule of history, but he is alive and remains on the Sunnah of children and for every believer in the dawn of the nation.
Al-Issa’s faith in his nation was manifested in his person and his literature. For this reason, the Algerian researcher Bou Issa Masoud described him as a poetic national phenomenon, a nationalist, a loyal Arabist, and an honest fighter.
Al-Issa has more than seventy books written and Arabized between poetry, story, theater and study for adults and children. He has won many awards, the most important of which are the Syrian Order of Merit of the Excellent Class, the Lotus Prize for Poetry from the Union of Asian and African Writers, the Arab Organization for Education, Science and Culture (Al-Koso) prize for children’s literature and the poetic creativity prize of Al-Babtain Foundation .
Samer Alshghari