Damascus دِمَشْق - Nizar Qabbani
Publication Course - AUB
This is a poetry book by Nizar Qabbani. He was a Syrian poet who wrote love poems about Damascus, women, politics, and his family among other topics. For Qabbani, Damascus was his first and last love and was metaphorically an embodiment of his mother, thus he compiled all of his poems to Damascus in one book and called it دِمَشْق (Damascus). The aim was to design this book like a cycle, where it starts and ends in the same place which is Damascus. The first sentence in the book says بِكِ يَبْدَأ (it starts with you) and the last sentence says ويَنْتَهي التَّكْوين (and the end of creation is with you) meaning that everything in this world begins and ends with you Damascus. The same word is repeated for each poem - the word being Damascus دِمَشْق - because it is what is on the mind of the poet and is repeated in every poem all over the book; thus it was carved in linoleum in several different ways and printed making use of the Arabic type's unique properties such as the kashida, the diacritics, the dots, the ligatures, the counters, and the glyphs - as well as the play with the texture of the words using lino. The Arabic typeface used is the Arabic typewriter typeface, to go along with the lino printed words in keeping with the authenticity of the book.
Technique used: lino printing using linoleum.
Direction of reading and direction of pages: right to left.
The book starts with Nizar Qabbani's famous poem to Damascus. The next one is another poem to Damascus which was written when he was in exile, thus lines and kashidas were used to portray the connection. Foldings were used across the book to unfold the poems with the flow of the reading.
After moving away from his country, the next poems start portraying confusion, distance, and then length.
In these poems, the poet loses his father, and then his mother, thus losing his home and his words. Only diacritics are used with no letters, and then disconnected letters are used, and sometimes only the outlines of the words.
With these poems the poet starts to gain his letters and words back, and we can see the poems unfolding and flowing gradually and more easily than before.
With the same shape he started, the poet ends the book after returning back to his home Damascus.
