Arab culture, like many others, regards poetry as the highest form of literary production, but instead of a small and elite clique, its audience is that elusive ‘Arab street’ – where people are more likely to be able to name 10 poets, and even quote them, than to recognise the names of 10 novelists.

While some, like Egyptian poet Faruk Shusha in The Culture Of Crossed Wires, find the contemporary poetry scene to be frivolous in its concern with the media and competitions, it is undeniable that Arab poetry, as an originally oral form is much more effective heard than read; and so modern technology, far from replacing the traditional has given it a new lease of life, allowing the poetry readings to be heard not by the handful who attend but by the millions who listen to bootlegged cassette recordings in the car, download audio and video files from the net, and email poems into a viral phenomena.

Poetry recitations and festivals have always been staple fare on radio and television, but recently Abu Dhabi TV was the first to adapt the glitzy talent show format to liven up poetry competitions – Souq Uqath, live on air. ‘The Poet of The Million’, which has just started its second season, was restricted to Bedouin, and specifically Nabati, poetry. Its success led the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage to launch ‘Prince of Poets: the biggest competition in classical poetry’, which became an unexpected phenomena across the region – off the scale ratings and a flood of SMS messages voting means the show has spawned a number of copycats and even channels dedicated to poetry.

While the official ‘Prince of Poets’ for 2007 was the Emarati Karim Ma’tuq, an internet search for the phrase ‘Ameer AlShuara’ in Arabic brings up results on Tamim Barghouti, who came in fifth place.

Whatever the reason for Barghouti’s taking the last prize in the competition, it was clear that he’d won the greatest reward – a connection to the audience. The enthusiastic clapping of the live studio audience interrupting him every few lines was an indication of the mass appeal of his politically engaged poetry. Before taking part in the competition he was already getting quite a lot of attention, both from the critics and on forums, chatrooms and blogs, having published four collections of poetry which interweave the literary, the political and the personal.

In this poet’s case it’s not that the personal is political, but that the political is personal. His father is the Palestinian poet Murid Barghouti, whose memoir ‘I saw Ramallah’ won the Naguib Mahfouz Award for Literature, has gone through five editions in Arabic in ten years, and was translated into many languages, becoming something of an international bestseller.

The Barghouti family’s trip to Palestine during the Oslo years which was the inspiration for Murid’s book also influenced Tamim to write ‘in Jerusalem’, an epic structured around a report of a (failed) attempt to visit the Aqsa mosque. It was the biggest hit with the audience and judges in the competition, and has been the most widely circulated poem since.

Not that it wasn’t known before, it had been published in several newspapers, as had ‘They asked me: do you love Egypt?’ which was written after his deportation from Cairo for taking part in the students’ anti-war demonstrations. His answer to the title question is “I don’t know…but I do know that I am the son of Radwa Ashour,” referring to his mother the Egyptian novelist whose “hair grayed in her twenties, and then in mine” as first her husband and then, two decades later, her son had to leave the country.

Watching the fall of Baghdad from Amman, Tamim Barghouti began to write Maqam Iraq (published 2005) a book-length poem which uses “a traditional Iraqi form which alternates between folk and classical poetry and prose narrative. The book consists of seven sections, each revolving around a central figure or object whose significance is related to Iraq in the Arab imagination”. He reworks the poetry of Almutanabi and Bashar ibn Burd; presents the testimonies of the moon and the palm tree; and tells of the Lady Zeinab bint Ali, Alhallaj, and the calligrapher Ibn Muqla “who slept among the graves” to avoid Hulagu’s forces, but then returned to his devastated city to look after the living, because “the moon must stay up to watch over Baghdad, even if it is full of Mongols”.

During the ‘shock and awe’ air strikes on Baghdad the adhan and takbir from mosques could be heard between explosions, a surreal combination which Tamim Barghouti uses to great effect in ‘Maqam Iraq’, which describes the minarets beneath assault as providing peace and dignity amid the terror and the flames, the chants weaving ropes to hold up the sky, like a thousand and one seamen struggling with their sails in a storm.

Baghdad and Beirut are linked at the beginning of ‘Prince of the Faithful’, a poem on the 33 day war which reminds me of Nizar Qabbani’s Southern Symphony, also written in praise of resistance to Israel in the Lebanese South. While many things have changed between the 1980s and 2006, both poets employ symbols appropriate to the region to create a kind of mythic order in the face of chaos, and exploit the successes of popular resistance to critique the failures of Arab regimes.

Barghouti’s message is that of a pessoptimist, he reveals the full bitterness of the current situation but also provides hope, ‘my people, you ask me: will I survive? You asked the same thing a thousand years ago – that is the answer to your question’. He gives powerful poetic expression to the ‘the feeling on the Arab street’, and seems to be doing for his generation what Nizar Qabbani and Sheikh Imam did for theirs. These poets become literary historians, recording an imaginative response to the political events shaping their audience’s world, and Tamim Barghouti seems to be doing something of the same for those whose political awakening began with the second intifada.

By Dunia, originally published at her blog and the Tripoli Post