The Music behind the Words Kinan Azmeh’s Songs for Days to Come
Shirley Apthor p
In Syria, says Kinan Azmeh, you will not get your school graduation certificate unless you pass your classes in Arabic literature. In any other subject, a fail is permissible. But if you don’t know your poetry, you’re out. Ordinary people on the street will be able to quote long poems by heart; when he was growing up in Damascus, Azmeh says, poetry was the only art form that could fill an arena. “This is a very, very old phenomenon. The town of Ukaz, close to Mecca, was known for its market and poetry fair in pre-Islamic times. In the Arab world, poetry has always been incredibly present.” Perhaps because it was so all-pervasive, Azmeh took no particular interest in poetry as a child. He learned his school poems by rote, but it was with mathematics and physics that his true passion lay. When he joined a rock band as a teenager, he was drawn into in the sound and structure of songs, but even then, he says, the lyrics did not strike him as significant. “We used to do cover songs, and our lead singer used to recite them phonetically. I don’t think he understood them any more than I did, and they only made sense for other people who also didn’t understand the words.” It was only after the Syrian Uprising of 2011 that Azmeh began to pay attention to the poetry of his compatriots: “I felt that suddenly Syrians were writing about things that mattered more. People were more courageous about writing down how they felt on topics that were considered taboo before. There was poetry discussing politics, the human condition, religious freedom—even God or the lack of a God—things that had not been talked about before in public life. 15
