Gulf | Yemen
Anti-war researcher and poet reaches out
An anti-war researcher and poet called upon all good people throughout the world to do their best for stopping or at least reducing the wars for stopping sufferings of the human beings in this world.
- By Nasser Arrabyee, Correspondent
- Published: 18:35 June 14, 2008
Sana'a: An anti-war researcher and poet called upon all good people throughout the world to do their best for stopping or at least reducing the wars for stopping sufferings of the human beings in this world.
"The war against anyone by anyone in the world must be condemned by all human beings," the Yemeni anti-war poet, Abdul Wahab Al Awdi, told Gulf News on Saturday.
Al Awdi, researcher and poet at the Yemeni Ministry of Culture, has been collecting the most important anti-war poems from famous Arab poets since the war in Iraq in 2003 with the purpose of putting them in one book which he called 'Encyclopaedia of the Contemporary Anti-War Arabic Poetry'.
With financial support from the UAE Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum Foundation, the (Write Programme), the book will be ready for readers in the market by the end of this year.
"The aim of my work is to show the ugliness, atrocities, agonies, and sufferings of the war in one book," said Al Awdi in hope his book will be a good contribution against the wars.
The book will contain about 400-500 poems written by well-known Arab poets from almost all Arab countries.
The wars in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, and many others, were the source of inspiration of these poems which were written during the period from 2000-2008, he said.
The book, he added, will be translated into English and French, to show our friends in Europe and United States and the other world, that Arabs hate wars and that the image they are "savages and terrorists" is not right or should not be right.
The idea of the book came from the western poets, who influenced the English literature graduate, Al Awdi.
"The hatred of war is a univeral idea," he said.
"I was affected by the miseries of wars depicted by western poets such Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas and other modern poets, who have written outstanding poems about the spiritual decay of mankind, especially T.S. Eliot's pathbreaking poem 'The Waste Land'.
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